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From Model T To 4G: How Connectivity Is Revolutionising The Car | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | The car industry is on the verge of its biggest transformation in over a century. Connected cars are set to revolutionise the car as we know it, with the overall number of vehicles with built-in connectivity expected to make up 90 per cent of the total market by 2020. Not since the Model T Ford became the first mass-produced car in 1908 has the automotive industry been faced with such a seismic shift in the way cars are manufactured, sold, and consumed. Until now, the term ‘connected car’ has largely been an industry buzzword, but it looks as though we’re finally at a point of inflection. Recent research suggests consumers are more than ready to embrace the connected car revolution too, with 80 per cent of consumers believing in-car connectivity will provide the same kind of connected experience they are currently used to at home or on their smartphone. So if consumers are open to the possibility of a connected car experience, what features can drivers realistically expect to see in the next couple of years, and what possibilities do technological advances offer further into the future? Although it may not strike you as the most exciting feature connected technology could deliver, research has shown that increasing safety is a paramount concern for drivers, with 73 per cent citing it as the most important feature they’d look for in a connected car. It is also something car manufacturers are likely to focus on in the immediate future. In the European Union the , requiring all new vehicles to have pre-installed devices that will automatically dial emergency services in the event of an accident, will come into effect in 2015. The device will send vital data such as the time and location of an incident to the rescue services, meaning drivers will be closer to help, no matter where they are in the EU. It’s expected to improve emergency response times by up to 50 per cent. Diagnostic features are also likely to have a major role to play in the connected car revolution, and will help to improve safety. Imagine an app that allows you to check the condition of your car from your smartphone or tablet, before you’ve even stepped into your car. Rather than discovering you’ve got a problem mid-journey, you can take your car to a mechanic to get it fixed before it becomes an issue. It’s a great example of how connectivity can empower people, and something car manufacturers are already working on. A significant by-product of the connected car is the large amount of data generated – a single vehicle can produce terabytes worth of rich data. predicts the annual mobile data usage generated by connected cars is expected to grow almost 188 per cent in the next five years. Car companies will be able to use the data to make incremental improvements to services. Dealer networks, for example, generate most of their profits from servicing rather than sales but once a vehicle is out of warranty, customers tend to go elsewhere. Car manufacturers can change this mindset by using data generated by connected diagnostic services in the car to allow dealerships to contact drivers proactively and flag issues with the vehicle. Looking further into the future, the possibilities opened up as wireless and vehicle technologies converge are almost limitless. In-vehicle connectivity could have a dramatic effect on the way emergency services operate, for example. In a wirelessly enabled ambulance, paramedics could use video calling to digitally share images of the vehicle incident with a consultant back at the hospital and receive guidance. This has the potential to extend the ‘golden hour’ – the period of time where medical treatment will most likely prevent severe or fatal result – to a ‘golden hour-and-a-half’, which would unquestionably save many lives. Meanwhile, when autonomous cars finally become a reality there will be an opportunity to use in-car connectivity in entirely different ways. The car will become an extension of the office or the living room. People will be able to stream movies or video conference with friends or colleagues, while their car takes them to their destination. The culmination of these technologies could manifest itself in the ‘self-learning car’ – a vehicle that combines real-time updates, personal information and contextual data to create a highly personalised driving experience. This car would host an artificial intelligence system on board that will constantly learn from the user’s daily behaviour, and is able to adapt the ‘experience’ accordingly. No longer would you need to program the navigation system to guide you to your favourite restaurant – it already knows you’re likely to go there and proactively suggests it. Admittedly all of this may be some time away, but it gives you a sense of how the car could feasibly become a ‘user’ focused experience like never before, bringing the new age opportunities of connectivity to the proud tradition of the car. |
I Just Used Nimbl To Get 40 Bucks Delivered To The AOL Office | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | And now there’s an Uber for cash. I first became aware earlier this afternoon, when I saw some about it on Twitter. The idea, basically, is that you can use the app to call a Nimbl “runner”, who will bring cash to your location. The idea might seem a little silly at first, like the latest startup catering to lazy techies — techies who, in this case, can’t be bothered to find an ATM. On the other hand, I can definitely think of multiple instances in the past couple of months when I needed cash, and there were no ATMs nearby. A lot of other people have been in similar situations, at least judging from the handful of folks (inside and outside TechCrunch) who I’ve discussed this with. Almost all of them immediately said, “I would totally use that!” (They were less enthusiastic about the $5 fee, which is supposed to take effect after a user’s first few deliveries.) Naturally, I wanted to try it out for myself, so I ordered a delivery of $40 to the AOL office in Manhattan. (That’s where TC New York has a few desks, because AOL owns TechCrunch.) Someone from Nymbl was at our doorstep about 20 minutes later, with an envelope containing two twenties. I showed him my order in the app, and after some fiddling with Venmo, paid him $40. Then he handed over the cash and we were good to go. One thing that became clear in that process: Couriers aren’t driving (or walking or biking) around the city with your cash. As explained to me by Jim Luo, CEO at GreenOps (the self-funded startup that created Nimbl), the runners withdraw money from the company bank account — and they’re only taking as much as they need to fill the order, so they’re not traveling around with enormous sums of cash, either. Then when you pay via Venmo, or another service like PayPal, you’re paying the company. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the runners themselves, they’re background-checked contractors who work with Nimbl — Luo compared them to the people who do deliveries for services like WunWun and Postmates. Luo also said that this is definitely solving a problem he’s faced himself, since “I literally never carry cash anymore,” turning him into “that guy in my circle of friends”, the guy who always has to ask his friends to spot him in cash-only situations. And while delivering cash might not seem as intuitive as delivering food, Luo noted that cash actually has some advantages on this front, because it’s “purely a commodity.” That means Nimbl doesn’t have to worry about people getting mad if every little thing about their order isn’t just right— as long as you get your cash in a reasonable period of time, you’re probably going to be happy. Looking ahead, he added that he hopes to work more closely with businesses. A cash-only bar, for example, might be willing to refer customers to Nimbl rather than sending them out to look for an ATM (and maybe find another bar in the process). The bar could also open a tab for them once the bartenders knows the money is on its way. Luo also suggested that businesses could use Nimbl if they themselves need more cash on-hand. Nimbl is currently available in San Francisco and New York as , with an Android app planned, too. Luo emphasized that the service is very much in beta testing, and that he expects to work out many of the early kinks in the service over the next few weeks. |
SF Housing Interests Unite Against Proposed Airbnb Legislation | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | A broad group of protesters representing various San Francisco housing interests met on the steps of City Hall today to express their opposition of proposed legislation that would allow residents to rent out their homes on a short-term basis. “Raise of hands, who here has shared their home?” asked Fernando Marti, the co-director at Council of Community Housing Organizations (CCHO). “This is a city of home sharers. Today we have a piece of legislation about home sharing that is destroying our city and home sharing,” he boomed on the steps in the sweltering October heat. The proposal, which is sometimes called the “Airbnb law” due to the company’s platform for renting out homes on a short-term basis, would give residents a 90 day cap on rentals when no host is present. The coalition believes this proposal would only serve to legitimize a platform they believe would make housing even more scarce and further drive up costs. An earlier this year found property owners had turned two-thirds of the nearly 5000 homes listed on Airbnb into year round hotels rather than offering them to permanent residents. President David Chiu and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors met a few weeks back to tweak some of the proposed legislation but those tweaks still don’t cut it for the coalition. “We do not support the legislation in its current form. The very profitable industry of short-term rentals presents the very real risk of continuing to erode the City’s housing stock for permanent residents and continuing to drive up housing prices,” says a combined letter being sent to Chiu and the Board of Supervisors. The letter recommends three core changes: The letter is signed by 21 different housing entities in San Francisco, including tenant organizers and landlords, affordable housing advocates, neighborhood associations, labor unions, hotel interests, housing attorneys, residents and advocates for seniors and the disabled. The next meeting for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will be this Tues, Oct 7. There will not be a chance for any resident hearings at the meeting, but the coalition encourages those concerned to make their voices heard via email to their neighborhood supervisor. |
When Anna Met Jony | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | The fashion industry is secretly sick of being underestimated and under-intellectualized. There’s a pivotal scene in “The Devil Wears Prada” where Meryl Streep gives her assistant Andy a talking-to about the hypocrisy inherent in her disdain for fashion — as it’s given life to the blue drab sweater she is wearing. And it is industry. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blindly unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic “casual corner” where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.” Thus far, the fashion elite has been wary to give their blessing to the wearables scene, as the nerds developing these things have all thought themselves too erudite, too ascetic to kiss the ring. Turns out that’s not so smart. In a world where wearing white Birkenstocks can lead to of that item, and a resurgence of the Birkenstock brand, you need to know where your bread is buttered or a more fashion apropo metaphor. Where your are tied? There are legions that wait for the blessing of Moss or Cara Delevingne or Alexa Chung or Karl Lagerfeld or Anna Wintour herself before they buy an item. Formerly CEO of Burberry, Apple’s , understands this more than any other executive in technology. Thus, Apple reserved seats for fashion bloggers at its last launch event, and model Lily Cole was in attendance. Word is that Wintour brought her whole Senior Editorial staff to Cupertino. But Apple didn’t stop there. Jony Ive to Paris Fashion week last week, to win sartorially minded friends and influence stylish people. If Sir Jony doesn’t think he’s too cool to genuflect to Anna and Karl, what’s your problem, Jawbone? For lovers of both tech and fashion, is like watching two of your closest friends fall in love with each other. It was inevitable. All of a sudden Ive is wearing powder blue on powder blue. Lagerfeld is wearing a watch on each wrist! Everyone who’s ever been to the in Paris is wishing they were at Colette right now. After all, what is more “wearable” than a shirt? Okay, it’s not all Champagne and roses. Fashion bellwether Chung Watch — “It’s kind of dorky” she said. Unlike the adult overalls she’s known to wear. A brigade of other fashion people were on hand to thumb their noses at the device and give press ready quotes to For what it’s worth, Vogue turned into The Verge when writing about the gadget, You’ve got to respect the hustle, even if it’s down a runway. Apple is doing what every other wearables company should have done, and what very few could have done because they are not Apple: They are making a peace offering to fashion. And lest you think this extends only to the Apple Watch, as it only counts as fashion because you wear it on your body, remember that you display your phone, your laptop and your tablet as much as any item of clothing. And, I’m talking to you concert Snapchatter, this applies to software as well as hardware. “As technology becomes pervasive it moved from functional, to beautiful, to — at some point in the near future — almost… superficial” one person familiar with Apple opined. In a world where trophy wives wave their iPhone 6 around like it’s a Chanel purse, tech is fashion. The same emotions and status anxiety drives the buys of Celine bags and sexy tablets. I just got a shipment of iPad, iPhone and Macbook cases from Best Buy (#OnlyAtBestBuy), with the tagline, “Who is your iPhone wearing this fall?” This misses the point. I don’t want my iPhone or iPad or iMac to wear designs by Anna Sui, Nanette Lepore or Isaac Mizrahi or any other fashion designer. I want it to a good design in and of itself. The Watch, by Jony Ive. Spring/Summer ’15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzu-RgorcSo |
CrunchWeek: Windows 10, Reddit Raises A Fat Round, And Netflix Backs Adam Sandler | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | It’s that time of the week again: we’re back with a whole new episode of CrunchWeek, filmed right here at TechCrunch HQ in San Francisco. With our unique combination of awesome senses of humor and insight into the world of tech, we’re here to keep you entertained informed. This week, , Reddit raised a huge round (and ), and . and were joined by TechCrunch editor , who managed to make it sound like Netflix isn’t simply giving in to the lowest common denominator. We’ll be back next week with more antics, but there’s no reason to be bored until then: |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 10.03.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | – Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. |
Airbnb Lifestyle: The Rise Of The Hipster Nomad | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | For the past year, I’ve lived exclusively in temporary housing I’ve found on sites like Airbnb. I didn’t set out with this goal in mind, but it just sort of happened. And now that it’s happened, I’m starting to wonder whether I really want to go back to a pre-Airbnb life. It all started about a year ago, when my husband and I got struck by a serious bout of travel lust and decided to step out of the Silicon Valley rat race for a while to wander the globe and explore what it was like to live in different parts of the world. Over the past year, we have lived, for weeks or months at a time, in Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, India, and Crete. And all of this living has occurred in temp housing we found via the sharing economy. The only possessions we’ve had with us during this time have fit in a suitcase and a couple of carry-on bags. Everything else – housing, furniture, cars, pots and pans – has been rented as and when it was needed. Before we left for our vagabond adventure, my husband and I packed all of what we considered to be possessions we couldn’t live without into an embarrassingly large storage unit, which has cost us $160 per month. Possessions like a salvaged-wood dining table, an L-shaped sectional, fancy speakers and a projector screen, a hefty mattress, and a wide assortment of God only knows what else. But we’ve found that we haven’t missed a single one of those possessions since we left. We simply haven’t needed them. As our year of travels draws to an end, and I think about settling back down again, I can’t help but wonder – why settle down at all? Why not just continue living in temp rentals from Airbnb, and get up and go again when we want? If I could “borrow” most of my material possessions, leaving myself free to wander at will, I would do it in a heartbeat. And I think this sharing-economy-driven nomadic lifestyle has a decent chance of becoming the dominant mode for younger generations. Here are some trends that I believe will make the Airbnb lifestyle more common in Gen Y: 1. Ownership is a pain. I honestly can’t imagine ever wanting to own a house. Because I can’t stand the thought of having to deal with all the crap that comes with owning such a large and expensive thing. Renting is so much more convenient, and the fact is, I’m willing to pay for that convenience. 2. FOMO. Likewise, everyone knows Gen Y is allergic to commitment. I find the idea of committing to a specific place to live for years at a time depressing. 3. Freelancers are kings. Freelancing is becoming a way of life, too. I’ve been hearing from a lot of highly talented engineers, designers and product managers recently who are going freelance by choice. Work is becoming much more fluid, and workers have increasing control over when and where they work. This makes them less tied down. 4. The royal we. Families are getting smaller. Many of us may never have kids or get married at all. As family sizes shrink, there’s less incentive to settle down. 5. Democratization of style. There is a convergence happening in aesthetic style. We all basically like the same things, at approximately the same time. But, what we like changes relatively quickly, according to the latest hipster fashions. Ergo, borrowing is better for us than owning. Odds are that I won’t become a permanent nomad just yet, though, because it’s still tough for me to find things that sufficiently match my tastes on existing “sharing economy” sites. This is because the sharing economy has mostly been thought of, up to this point, as a peer-to-peer rental economy, focused on allowing individual owners to monetize excess capacity on things they own. As the Airbnb lifestyle becomes pervasive, however, the sharing economy will start to outgrow itself. Renting will start replacing buying across the board, which means there will no longer be enough owners to support peer-to-peer lending, and, in many cases, businesses will step in to pick up the slack. We can see the very beginnings of this today, with startups like and , where you can borrow clothes, and , where you can borrow high-end electronics. It’s still early, though, and it seems likely that I’ll end up owning more than I’d like for a few more years to come. But for me, at least, living an Airbnb lifestyle for the past year has led to a palpable change in my relationship with stuff. I am slowly beginning to think about material goods not in terms of possession, but in terms of my time. |
Fly Or Die: Apple iPhone 6 Plus | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | There is quite a bit of controversy surrounding the new . It’s the new of Apple’s product line, bigger, thinner and more beautiful than ever. However, the size may just be detrimental to people who have smaller hands and can’t easily handle the large, slippery iPhone. And then there was all the , which turned out to be . The iPhone 6 Plus has a 5.5-inch 1080p display with 401 ppi and 1300:1 contrast. It is the most beautiful iPhone display to date. Under the hood, you’ll find an A8 processor, notably faster wifi and LTE connectivity, and options for 16GB, 64GB or 128GB of internal storage. And beyond that, the iPhone 6 Plus is home to Apple’s best mobile camera, with optical image stabilization and great performance around low-light shooting and autofocus. It’s a great phone, and even as someone who has never been excited about the trend towards bigger phones, I have enjoyed using the iPhone 6 Plus when I sit around at home or in bed or while I watch TV. It’s amazing for games, viewing videos, and getting things done faster. Would I switch over to the 6 Plus exclusively? I’m having a hard enough time adjusting to the smooth and slippery iPhone 6, so no. But John is already fully integrated with the 6 Plus as his primary device, and I can’t imagine him going back. |
11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Anna Escher | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | From the Windows 10 launch to genetically modified babies and Elon Musk tweeting about his “D,” we give you our top articles from this week (9/27-10/3). You don’t want to miss these. 1. was revealed at an event in San Francisco, and you bet we were there. Yes, you heard that right: Microsoft is calling their new OS Windows 10. The operating system will differentiate itself with a tailored user experience between different screen sizes; to put it bluntly, the company is . 2. leaving many chuckling and scratching their heads. And it’s not what you’d think. with a wicked amount of power. 3. , and wants to give back 10 percent of the round’s equity to the site’s users. in which the company will redistribute shares back to Redditors via a unique cryptocurrency. 4. We reported that . PayPal will branch off to become a publicly traded company of its own. Both companies will , with eBay Marketplaces President Devin Wenig taking over at eBay, and PayPal President Dan Schulman presiding at PayPal. 5. The — deciding that the two are “not close competitors.” We gave you the coverage and the for other players in the space. 6. There was a lot of news concerning Facebook this week. Firstly, the social network giant , which could prove to be a real game changer. It also launched a to ensure that it will colonize everyone’s apps, on the News Feed, setting up a on its users. The platform also , promising to change the real names policy. 7. Gilles Raymond, Founder and CEO of News Republic, wrote a piece about . He mentions a few foreigners who founded highly successful U.S. companies, and offers some insight into the resilient qualities that many immigrants possess that make them successful entrepreneurs. 8. Leslie Hitchcock charmed us with a story that recounts what its like for a small-handed person to use the new larger iPhone model as a small-handed person. The solution? How about an iPhone 6 Minus. 9. , a step-by-step hand-holding layer atop the Raspberry Pi single-board microcomputer to make hacking around with code and learning about computational thinking child’s play. The product was fueled largely by Kickstarter, and the first 18,000 have shipped. 10. Tadhg Kelly, creator of the leading design blog What Games Are, wrote a story called in which he describes the disconnect between clients and game designers, and clarifies exactly what it is game designers can do for studios. 11. Sarah Buhr sparked an ethics debate about genetically modified humans in her story, In other news, Korean owners of the new Samsung Galaxy Note 4 noticed a gap between the bezel and the screen of their devices prompting and the GoPro launched the . Kim-Mai Cutler gave us an analysis of how . Oh, and . |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Gapgate, Garmin, And Jamstik | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | We’re off and running this week with the latest TC Gadgets podcast. Garmin announced a new smart watch called the . We take a look at that, as well as Garmin’s earlier smart watch offering, the VivoFit. We’re also curious about what’s going on with , on the Galaxy Note 4 smartphones. Meanwhile, the is finally shipping. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
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Yahoo Acquires Mobile Messaging App MessageMe | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | Yahoo has acquired mobile messaging application , a Whatsapp-like service with $11.9 million in reported outside funding. The deal, we’re hearing from multiple sources, is a talent acquisition falling into the “single-digit” millions. [ : We’re hearing now that the deal may actually better than this. Word is the deal is actually in the double-digit millions, and has been structured to be favorable to investors and employees alike.] Yahoo is announcing the acquisition internally today, and the MessageMe team begins work Monday. MessageMe raised early in 2013, in a round led by ex-Mozilla CEO John Lilly of Greylock Partners. Other investors in the startup include a number of high-profile VCs, including True Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, and Social+Capital Partnership, and other angels – many of whom also financed a prior in March 2013. The company was largely able to raise such funds on the and what appeared to be ever-quickening growth. Co-founders Arjun Sethi and Justin Rosenthal had extensive experience in social gaming prior to founding MessageMe. Sethi used to run an early social gaming company called LOLApps, before it merged with a publisher 6Waves. The belief was that their backgrounds would help them to better understand how to grow a product quickly and virally. MessageMe reached its first 1 million users and closed on seed funding – a sort of no-brainer for investors looking for the next breakout hit in mobile messaging. By May 2013, it only 2.5 months after it debuted. But that growth was not sustainable, as it turned out. The deal will see MessageMe’s small team of 8 joining Yahoo. While we don’t know what terms made the deal favorable to employees, specifically, we’re hearing that it’s not a “fire sale,” so to speak. MessageMe still had money in the bank at the time of the deal. Despite from its Alibaba stake, Yahoo’s acquisition pipeline has slowed down, we’ve also heard, so this buy doesn’t necessary signal that Yahoo is about to start picking up a large number of startups yet again. It’s possible that MessageMe’s team will be assigned to work on a mobile messaging app that Yahoo is building internally, which we’ve heard is being referred to as “Yahoo Instant.” The project has been in the works for years now, but has suffered from delays. It’s unclear if Yahoo will ever launch this app, which features Yahoo’s modern design language (similar to what’s found in Yahoo Weather), or if now MessageMe will somehow continued to be developed under Yahoo’s own brand. Yahoo, of course, currently has its own mobile messaging client on the market with Yahoo Messenger. But this product is a holdover from an earlier era of messaging – basically a port of its desktop IM client to mobile. The app is popular overseas in markets like Asia and India, where cell phone plans don’t include the same sorts of unlimited messaging plans that are found here in the U.S. Yahoo Messenger isn’t popular at all in the U.S., where it’s currently ranked #566 Overall on iTunes, according to App Annie. That leaves Yahoo with a need to get its foot back in the mobile messaging market – something the MessageMe deal could aid. |
500 Startups Promotes Bedy Yang And Khailee Ng To Managing Partner | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | Seed-stage investment firm is announcing today the promotion of two members of its investment team from partner to managing partner. By promoting Bedy Yang and Khailee Ng, the firm is also showing its commitment to investing in startups in Latin America and Southeast Asia. 500 Startups has always talked about the diversity of its portfolio companies, and how it has invested in an outsized number of female and international founders. The firm has backed more than 200 companies from outside the U.S. since , and claims about 30 percent of startups it’s invested in have at least one female founder. The firm extends that same commitment to diversity in its hiring, and that’s shown in the makeup of its . Its staff touts more than 35 team members in 10 countries around the world who speak 20-some languages. By promoting Yang and Ng, 500 is bringing even more of an international focus to the managing team. Yang has been with 500 for about two-and-a-half years, having joined while the firm was . Since then, she’s cemented herself as 500’s representative in Latin America and particularly Brazil, where’s she’s made about half of her 50 investments to date. 500 Startups founding partner Christine Tsai says Yang has become the leading seed investor in Brazil by bringing companies into the firm’s portfolio and accelerator program. Ng to lead the firm’s investments in the Southeast Asia region through the firm’s 500 Durians microfund. Since joining, he’s made more than 30 investments across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. More importantly, Tsai says Ng has helped raise capital both for the 500 Durians fund as well as the firm’s main fund. For 500, the promotions come as the firm ramps up its accelerator program — which now runs year-round, with four classes of about 30 companies each. It’s also , seeking $100 million to invest in evermore early-stage startups, both here and abroad.. |
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Robocoin Announces A New Wallet Service To Meld The Physical With The Virtual | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | Robocoin, maker of ATMs, has announced a new service called Robocoin Wallet. The service, which acts as a bitcoin wallet directly connected to the company’s public ATMs, allows you to store your BTC and send and receive cash via the Internet or directly through their service. The wallet essentially removes the final step needed for most common bitcoin buys. At the ATM, users are usually required to have a wallet into which they can move their purchased bitcoins. This was usually done through competing services – Blockchain.info or , for example. Now, with this homegrown solution the team has closed the loop. In the beginning, the company saw Robocoin users struggling with wallet software. “We saw people buy and sell for the first time and quickly understood that the solution we built was limited by dependencies – customers needed bitcoin wallets and operators needed Bitcoin exchange uptime. We had to improve that,” said CEO Jordan Kelley. “This could only be done by removing dependencies from the existing bitcoin ATM infrastructure – external wallets, blockchain parsers, exchanges, etc. Now anyone can walk up and instantly convert their cash into bitcoin; that bitcoin is ready and waiting for them in their Robocoin Wallet.” The wallet, in other words allowed customers to have a place to put their bitcoin immediately. “Before the Robocoin Wallet, customers would buy their bitcoin with cash and either scan their existing wallet or they would generate a receipt – which prints out a paper wallet with a QR code, a public address and a private key,” said Kelley. “You can’t imagine how many people took that paper wallet, walked over to the counter of the coffee shop and tried to buy coffee with it.” The wallets are available at . Interestingly, the company is addressing these tools to the underbanked who can deposit their cash into Robocoin ATMs for storage and then pull it out or pay with BTC as needed. Obviously the volatility of bitcoin is a slight concern for these users. Kelley disagrees. “I would argue that Bitcoin is incredibly stable. As a platform and as a technology, the stability is incredible. There are millions of transactions happening every day and the blockchain keeps going,” he said. “We don’t focus too much on the price of bitcoin because we are still in the infancy of the infrastructure stage. There is so much activity in bitcoin, so many companies tackling huge challenges.” “Give it time,” he said. |
Microsoft Launches New Office 365 Subscription Plans For Small And Midsize Businesses | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | Microsoft is new for companies with fewer than 250 employees that will slowly replace the company’s existing plans for small and midsize businesses. The company had already outlined some of these changes , so this week’s announcement doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Here is what these new plans look like: Companies that sign up for Office 365 will now get access to these plans. Businesses that already subscribed to Microsoft’s SMB plans before will have to wait until their subscriptions are up for renewal to switch to the new plans (and they can still stay on their existing plans for longer, too). The older Small Business and Small Business Premium plans were also capped at 25 employees, which meant midsized companies had to subscribe to Microsoft’s costlier enterprise plans if they wanted to use Office 365 and didn’t need all the features of the old Midsize Business plan (the equivalent of the new Business Premium offering). Overall, Microsoft clearly priced these new plans to be highly attractive to small enterprises. Google offers $5/user/month and $10/user/month plans for its service, but many companies still prefer to use the more familiar (and arguably more powerful) Office apps instead. |
Narrative’s Clip-On Camera | One Lap | Rob Coneybeer | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | In this week’s episode of One Lap, Martin Källström of Narrative joined me at Thunderhill Raceway. I met Martin earlier this year while he was visiting San Francisco from Sweden. During our meeting he asked me for suggestions on how to spend a Saturday in the Bay Area. I immediately suggested that he join me at Thunderhill the next day. I neglected to mention that Thunderhill had just opened a brand-new section – extending a 3 mile track into a 5 mile track – which created a wild environment as every driver figured out the new racing lines. I’m an active investor in hardware companies, and I’ve always been intrigued by how entrepreneurs are coming up with exciting new ways to build unobtrusive devices that change the way we view the world. Martin’s company, Narrative, has created and brought to market a small wearable camera that captures your daily routine with photos taken every 30 seconds all day long. The magic in Narrative is how the hardware and software work together – the device captures images unobtrusively, and then software and backend services identify and highlight the most interesting moments of your day, which are otherwise easily forgotten. During our interview, Martin covered a lot of ground: their user growth, how he came up with the idea, his thoughts on the privacy implications of a wearable camera, surprises in creating hardware, and what it’s like building a company in Sweden. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as we enjoyed taping it. |
Estify Raises $1.5 Million To Roll Out Insurance Software For Auto Repair | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | After spending two years developing a product to automate the integration of car insurance damage estimate data for repairs between insurance companies and body shops, has raised $1.5 million to bring its technology to market. There’s a rift between insurance companies and repair shops, explains Jordan Furniss, one of Estify’s co-founders. “[Insurers] write up a preliminary estimate for what a repair should cost and then repair shops have to duplicate that estimate into their systems.” Estify began as a project that Furniss and his co-founders first thought about tackling while still in college in 2012. “We were young enough and naive enough to try and solve this. So we went to the shops and we spent a lot of time with these body shops; observing their behavior and how managers work and how owners work,” Furniss recalls. After spending a few months thinking about the industry’s biggest pain points, the company decided to focus on the integration of insurance estimates. Estify tested its service through the end of 2013 and launched the service in the beginning of the year. For Furniss, it’s a huge roll of the dice. He dropped out of school with only a semester left to participate in the AmplifyLA accelerator in the summer of 2012 and start the company. The company raised a seed financing from Romulus Capital and ff Venture Capital, and now the two firms have come back to invest another $1.5 million in Estify. Estify has two offices with 30 employees, one in California and one in Utah, and then outsourced work centers in India and Peru. “Our international offices are where the grunt work is being done,” says Furniss. “We have about 10 people in Peru and 5 currently over in India.” The company operates off of a monthly subscription business, where shops typically pay $299 per month. The company is in 400 shops now, and according to Furniss, it’s the fastest adoption of any web-based service in the industry. “It’s kind of like a drug,” says Furniss. “They get hooked on it.” |
Childish Gambino Name-Drops A Bunch Of Techies In His New Mixtape | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | Rapper (also known as Donald Glover, former cast member of cult sitcom “Community”) just dropped an 18-song mixtape, his first big release since last year’s hit album “Because The Internet.” That wouldn’t generally be something we write about, but at the end of tape Glover name-drops seven members of the tech community after making the appropriate shout-outs to the DJs and radio producers who provided support throughout the mixtape’s creation. The techies Glover mentions at the end of the track “Go DJ” run the gamut from founders to VCs. Glover mentions StyleSeat CEO , Redpoint partner , Brainard Capital CEO , Automattic CEO , Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and NewME Accelerator CEO . Glover isn’t just calling out these techies out of nowhere — he’s been involved with the tech community for years, something that’s had a direct impact on his musical career. Back in March, Glover opened his “Because The Internet” tour with a VIP concert for Automattic employees where he revealed an app that let tour attendees post messages and drawings to a screen behind Glover on-stage, built by Glover and his team with support from WordPress. Between Apple’s purchase of Beats, Intel’s partnership with 50 Cent’s SMS Audio, and Nas’ activity in the world of VC (he also curated ), it seems that this year, the rap and tech worlds are colliding more than ever. Still, this collision is going to lead to some awkwardness. Here’s an excerpt from the for “Go DJ” — it seems that Gambino fans aren’t very familiar with his techie friends: Personally, I can’t wait for Dre to drop the inevitable single about being the first billionaire still in the game. You can listen to the track in the embedded playlist below:
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Little Moe Is A Robot That Hunts And Kills Ebola | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | A San Antonio-based company called has risen to media prominence recently thanks to their ultraviolet pulse robot called Little Moe. The robot can enter and clean a hospital room in five minutes and destroy the virus by fusing its DNA. You can watch the cute local news piece about the below. The technology isn’t particularly new. It works by flashing surfaces with ultraviolet light which in turn damages viral DNA. It uses a particularly bright type of xenon lamp that can “can penetrate and damage organisms in unique ways.”
Sadly the robot doesn’t move itself through the hospital like a virus-destroying Roomba. Instead, you place the robot in a room, set up the room type and number, and arm the robot. It then raises its pulsing and starts firing UV light into the room. Medical robotics is a big business and it is changing daily. While telemedicine and the like get all the ink, robots like Little Moe are important because they do one thing and they do it very well, in this case room disinfection. And if a cute name and an Ebola scare are what it takes to move medical science forward, I’m all for it.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vj9R6HhsI] |
Instagram Cuts Off Kevin Rose’s Photo App Tiiny From Its Social Graph | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | This is how social graph politics works. Building community on a new social app is tough because you need your users to be able connect with their friends. Some apps cross-reference your phone’s contacts, but others piggyback on APIs of top social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram so you can find your friends based on who you know on those services. But if a big dog thinks an upstart is a potential competitor or bad actor, they don’t always want to offer their social graphs to be used against them. So sometimes they cut off their “find friends” API access. That’s exactly what happened to , for sharing thumbnail-sized photos and silent videos. , which let Tiiny suggest people you should follow based on how you follow on Instagram. Tiiny complied. Instagram gave me a “no comment” and Tiiny didn’t want to discuss the situation, but did tell me it’s seen 200,000 posts and 250,000 Likes of posts. Those are vanity metrics that say little about how many people have joined or are still using Tiiny. But Rose says “our engaged users are opening the app four times a day”, so those who enjoy it are using it frequently. Kevin Rose’s new photo app Tiiny Tiiny might still be small, but so was Instagram once. Soon enough, Facebook had to shell out $715 million to buy Instagram. Looks like Instagram doesn’t want to give Tiiny any assistance with growth. Tiiny doesn’t have any way to export or share your mini photos out to other places, so Instagram might have felt it was taking more than it was contributing. Facebook in the past has said that it without to its News Feed. It’s previously cut off , , and . Curiously, Tiiny still has Facebook Find Friends access, despite Facebook owning Instagram. Perhaps Facebook sees Tiiny as a competitor to Instagram but not its own juggernaut social network that does much more than photo sharing. Tiiny can still pull from your Twitter social graph. It’s quite possible that Tiiny would have fizzled out either way, as the photo sharing space is insanely crowded and it got a late start. If so, it’s no sweat off Rose’s back, as his is built on the idea of until it finds something that blows up. But if was destined to stick around, this won’t help. Platform policy is complicated diplomacy. Platforms like Instagram want to spawn an ecosystem of apps that drive content and return visits for their product. But offering open APIs for things as valuable as the social graph means there are opportunities for other companies to harness those resources against them. Startups are just trying to do whatever they can to grow. They often take an “ask for forgiveness, not permission” approach, though, and exploiting a platform’s offering to compete with it puts them in a slightly conniving position. Everyone calls each other “partners” while looking out for themselves. |
A Few Thoughts On Windows 10 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | Microsoft’s must patch the consumer-facing flaws present in Windows 8.x, and also into the modern era of computing. Couple that to the larger Windows trend of platform unification that Windows 10 will be the apparent culmination of, and you have what must be one of the most audacious software projects ever attempted. That’s not to say that Microsoft will pull it off, but I like their guts. The first Windows 10 preview is, as the company has stressed repeatedly, is a small, and tailored set of new code. There is more coming. What we have in this release are desktop-focused features for business customers. A consumer preview will launch in January. But that is later and the current preview is here, so let’s get into it. If you aren’t familiar with the granular preview components of the operating system, . If you want to download it, . Windows 10 is not Windows 8 goes Windows 7, and it also isn’t Windows 7 goes 8. It’s instead a desktop-focused Windows build that contains much that is traditional, but in an updated fashion, while placing power-user tools next to consumer-apps and services. If you can better boil that down, leave a comment. The preview isn’t final code, so let’s not be unkind, but it does currently have a mixed set of user interface elements. When I first fired up the preview, my Start Menu had live tiles next to a static Notepad icon, resting next to an File Explorer icon, both under a Metro PC Settings icon, and all three under a Pictures icon which might be sourced from Vista. The preview feels like that quite often: A blend of old, old, and new. And, surprisingly, it somewhat works. (Again, it’s a preview). Though there are moments, like this, when you aren’t sure what decade it is: But I am not sure you can keep the interface elements that enterprise customers demand due to their familiarity, and what consumers need in perfect harmony. There is plenty that works, like metro apps and desktop apps sharing space in the zoomed out modes There are two: Traditional Alt Tabbing, and Task view. Here we find more tension: If you click on the Task view button, you see icons for open apps, similar to Alt Tab, and, below, your multiple desktops. And if you hit Windows Tab, you get the same thing. But if you hit Alt Tab, you get just the icons, and no virtual desktops. Why have two separate but similar interface elements, and why have three ways to access them? I can understand having one for touch, and one for keyboard, but three is confusing. There were three things I was most excited about playing with in the preview: The Start Menu, metro apps on the desktop, and how Microsoft would fuse the Start Screen with the new user interface pieces. The , however, was on me, because Microsoft forces you to choose either Start Menu or Start Screen in the preview. You can in fact turn off the Start Menu, if you are willing to log out. But once you have selected the Start Screen, you can’t access the Start Menu. Recall that we are dealing with an interface in flux. Apropos of nothing. The downside is that the goo that will link the Start Screen, and the desktop environment is occluded. So we can’t see from this preview how well the Start Menu will integrate with the Start Screen itself. And thus we can only judge what we have from a desktop perspective . It’s almost as if Microsoft planned it that way. I will say that the Start Menu is competent, and in keeping with my expectations. As are metro apps on the desktop. And the Start Menu appears to be the same, so I suppose I am content there as well. It’s going to be a very busy 250 to 300 days in the Windows world. |
Why We Should Treat Teachers Like Software Engineers | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | America is widely considered a global leader in economics, business, and culture. But when it comes to education, the U.S. seems to be falling behind. In the 2012 PISA results, we 27th in math, 17th in reading, and 20th in science. Our high school graduation rates are ranked internationally. A month ago, I had the pleasure of spending two weeks in Korea and Japan, meeting with leading education, technology, and telecommunications companies, as well as a ministry of education interested in Knewton adaptive learning technology. I couldn’t help but compare the education systems in these countries to that in the United States. Globally, Korea and Japan have some of the highest rates of academic achievement. In the , Korea was ranked fifth in math and reading and seventh in science; Japan was ranked seventh in math and fourth in reading and science. Japan has the second highest internationally, with Korea in fifth place. It’s obvious that Korea and Japan both value education enormously. But so does the United States. We regard education as a basic human right. So what’s driving this huge discrepancy? Some say it’s cultural. In America, we prize exceptionalism; in Korea and Japan, the focus is on raising the mean. Others point to socioeconomic inequality; schools can’t fix poverty. American K-12 education is controlled at the local level, making it difficult to implement programs widely. We’re paralyzed by politicized debates over standards, testing, and budgets. But I think there’s something more important at play here: the way we treat teachers. In Korea and Japan, teachers are revered and paid accordingly. Top students aspire to the profession. We need to start treating teachers with the respect they deserve. Imagine if Apple, Google, Facebook, and the country’s top tech companies tried to recruit employees without offering them great pay, perks, top-of-the-line technology, development opportunities, and smart colleagues. It would be unthinkable.These companies have spent the time and investment to figure out exactly what it takes to get top people to want to work for them — and, once they’re there, to stay. Could improving outcomes be as simple as treating teachers like software engineers? I say yes. In Korea and Japan, teachers are paid in accordance with their stature in society. found a correlation between higher teacher pay and improved student outcomes. Korea and Japan were at the top of the spectrum for both.The study concluded that a mere “10 percent increase in teachers’ pay would produce a 5–10 percent increase in student performance.” Teachers in America are committed to their work low compensation. Paying these teachers 100 percent more would increase the desirability of the profession and improve retention. The pay increase would have a much-needed ripple effect. Districts and states would have to figure out a way to provide top talent with great work environments — including benefits, facilities, superb colleagues, and technology (broadband, software, devices, and cloud infrastructure). Schools should also have career advancement opportunities for exceptional teachers. We need to offer teachers opportunities for professional growth within the classroom. As a recent points out, it’s common for teachers in Japan to practice instructing in front of an audience of educators and university observers — providing less experienced teachers with valuable feedback on how best to engage students and stimulate learning. By creating roles for master teachers — senior educators with strong pedagogy, interpersonal skills, and curriculum understanding — to observe and mentor newer teachers, U.S. schools would both increase retention and also improve learning experiences for today’s students. U.S. teachers also need more time to prepare for class lessons — to grade assignments, learn from colleagues, speak with stakeholders in their students’ educations, and familiarize themselves with new technology. No CEO would give a presentation to the board of directors without preparation. The same should be true for educators. Teachers in the U.S., Japan, and Korea all spend roughly the same amount of time . But while teachers in Korea and Japan have plenty of time for preparation, nearly all of American teachers’ time is spent instructing. Japanese secondary teachers spend just 500 of 1,899 total hours in the classroom — compared to 1,051 out of 1,998 hours for U.S. teachers. Preparing students for competitive careers in a constantly evolving workplace isn’t just about changing the curriculum or better engaging students. Teachers are education’s greatest asset. We need to place the same value on them as tech companies do on software engineers. The first step is providing teachers with the support they need: competitive compensation, growth opportunities, well-equipped schools, and enough time. Today, leave the classroom within their first five years of teaching. No industry can endure that kind of turnover and not suffer from it. Treating teachers like star programmers will help us attract and retain the best and brightest to education. These teachers will have a lasting impact on generations of students to come. |
Bowflex Max Trainer M5 Review: Connected, Intense Exercise In A Relatively Compact Package | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | A blogger’s life is not the most active lifestyle possible for a human; tech bloggers probably get the most exercise walking to and from the post office to retrieve packages they missed at home or to ship things back out. If you don’t have a standing desk, you probably barely even rise out of your seat at a job where the Internet is your main medium, source and subject. The chance to review the was, therefore, both tantalizing and terrifying in equal measure. Bowflex has gone high-tech with its home gym line, and the Max Trainer M5 boasts smartphone and heart rate monitor connectivity that use Bluetooth LE to communicate with your device, so that you can ditch the pencil and paper to keep track of your progress (or lack thereof). The M5 is the top-of-the-line MAX trainer, too so it also packs a fancy display, heart rate target zone monitoring, and its own contact heart-rate monitor in the box, in addition to the company’s unique exercise action, which is low-impact like ellipticals for an easier overall time for your joints, while also providing more efficiency for a higher caloric burn rate over the same period of time in use. The Max M5 has a high-end pricetag to match its feature list – it’s available for $1,599 right now direct from the manufacturer. But it has a lot of advantages vs., for example, a gym membership, especially for the soft-bodied bloggers out there like myself. The first is that it’s remarkably small in terms of its overall footprint, which is is surprising if you check it out online and even when you see the pictures of it installe din a space. My review unit was delivered by two friendly guys who doubted it could make it through my very narrow entrance hallway (which is split between my place and my upstairs neighbor), but it managed to navigate the corridor without much effort. [gallery ids="1065899,1065900,1065901,1065902,1065903,1065904"] It also takes up just a small corner of my office, leaving plenty of room for two desks and a modest home entertainment unit. It’s smaller than a treadmill, and most of the space it does take up is vertical. Plus, it doesn’t suffer from the kind of footfall impact that can make using treadmills in apartments or second-floor dwellings a major no-no. Which is all well and good, but how well does it actually work? As with any exercise product, it’s hard to tell the hype from the reality with Bowflex, and years of infomercials of toned 50-somethings doesn’t help. But practically speaking, having switched from a daily 5K running routine to a daily Bowflex MAX Trainer workout, I’ve noticed no significant change in weight (maintenance was my goal) and if anything, more toned musculature, especially through the core. The action is reminiscent of an elliptical machine, but feels also somewhat like a stair-climber, and wore me out surprisingly quickly, with ample variation between low- and high-intensity settings. The M5 gets your upper body involved in the workout, as you can generate a lot of force with your arms, chest and core through the handles in addition to the steps. I could definitely feel the effects, but I was really surprised by how much my legs felt weak after each workout, which was a good thing. My body is likely accustomed to running, but generally all I feel now after my daily outing around the local outdoor track is joint pain, whereas the M5 resulted in the kind of post-workout burn and general weakness that indicates actual progress. for tracking your history and viewing your workout progress isn’t the best thing in the world, and it’s clear they were focused on providing an interface that resembled the on-device workout gauge more than anything else. But it works, and it captures your workout results via seamless syncing in my experience after a painless initial setup process. It’s nice that it can sync workout data back to MyFitnessPal, but I’d like to see the company go further and build a way to output this data to Health and other apps via HealthKit, but I’m not holding my breath, as the connected aspect of this hardware seems like a nice-to-have add-on, rather than a core feature. Overall, though, Bowflex has built a workout machine that’s well-built and designed with potentially tight spaces in mind. It’s a workout that won’t necessarily replace a whole home gym, but will provide you with some much-needed cardio in the cold winter months, or if you prefer preserving your knees, hips and ankles from frequent runs. $1,600 is a lot to pay for a piece of equipment, but it almost pays for itself after a year of use compared to a gym membership in a metro area, if you’re just after a demanding physical activity that gets you out of the office chair or off the sofa for a few minutes each day. Given the usual vigors of the blogger lifestyle, that’s a service that could prove life-saving over the long-term. |
Redbox To Kill Off Its Streaming Service Next Week | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | Well, that didn’t last long. 18 months after opening its doors to the public, Redbox Instant (the online streaming arm of those Redbox kiosks you see in grocery stores around the country) is shutting down. The service will officially hit the lights and kill the servers on October 7th. News of the shutdown comes by way of a notice posted on the : Thank you for being a part of Redbox Instant by Verizon. Please be aware that the service will be shut down on Tuesday, October 7, 2014, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. Information on applicable refunds will be emailed to current customers and posted here on October 10. In the meantime, you may continue to stream movies and use your Redbox kiosk credits until Tuesday, October 7 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. We apologize for any inconvenience and we thank you for the opportunity to entertain you. The idea behind Redbox Instant wasn’t a terrible one: for $6 a month, you got access to their online streaming catalog four DVDs a month from their physical kiosks. In theory, this allowed customers to access newer movies than streaming alone would allow. Alas, it really just never caught on. While Netflix’s catalog may have some gaps, Redbox’s paled in comparison. As , the company’s execs to being disappointed by the subscription numbers back in August. Add in the fact that Redbox has been unable to sign up new customers for due to suspicions that credit card thieves were using the sign-up system to test stolen cards, and the whole thing sort of just fell apart. I used the service for about a week during a free trial, but found myself back on Netflix before the week was out. Will anyone out there miss this one? |
Online Native Ads Are Held To Higher Standards Than Those On TV | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | National news programs have garnered news of their own recently for adopting native advertising as a source of income. “Good Morning America” recently aired interviews with the new Under Armour spokespeople, Lindsay Vonn and Gisele Bundchen, but only those who waited until the very end of the segment witnessed the “brought to you by” disclaimer. Though some social media pundits called out “GMA” for not making this disclaimer apparent enough, it was actually a big step forward in television disclosure overall. Most TV disclaimers don’t appear (if at all) until the end credits; virtually insuring that no one will see them. Indeed, shows who don’t disclose sponsorship until the credits roll are doing nothing wrong. FTC requirements mandate television programs to merely mention all sponsors in the end credits at the conclusion of a show, in comparison to the FTC’s online requirements of placing disclaimers several times throughout a sponsored post on an online site. The FTC is tasked with prevention of fraudulent, deceptive and unfair business practices in the marketplace, yet different platforms seem to be held to different standards when it comes to revealing sponsored content. As the owner of an influencer management agency, I see how hard our team works with our bloggers to ensure that each online post is FTC-compliant. Our Community team educates influencers on current requirements and then our Quality Assurance team reviews all sponsored content to guarantee FTC online guidelines are met (and only releases payment to influencers once that is confirmed.) This level of transparency is important to us as an industry. The reality is that quality content publishers have nothing to hide. The influencers we work with aren’t interested in generating a sponsored post about a brand they don’t already like and support, and they work hard to create content that is readable and entertaining, whether that content is sponsored or not. The FTC guidelines for online content were created for the “reasonable consumer,” defined as someone who may not read an entire piece or scroll to the end of an online article. This begs the question; are the more relaxed guidelines for television disclosure also created for that reasonable consumer? I’d give that an emphatic, “No.” Perhaps the FTC is stricter with online publishers because this stance generates more buzz for them. It is somehow a lot sexier to criticize online venues for taking on sponsored work than it is to criticize a show like “Pawn Stars” that openly shills its sponsors’ products (Ooma and Subway to name just two), with nary a disclosure to be seen (indeed, my DVR always manages to cut off that show before the credits). It is TV sponsorships like these that are yielding the shows hundreds of thousands of dollars. In comparison, if our bloggers take on a sponsored post (typically for $150 to $5,000, depending on the reach and influence of that blogger), disclosure is everywhere. It is at the top of the post. It is at the bottom of the post. It is present in all amplification on Twitter and Facebook. Why the double standard? While native advertising is a new term, the concept isn’t new at all. We can all remember watching Jerry Seinfeld grab a Snapple out of his fridge on his show. Yet, with the evolution of television consumption, including an influx of channels, on-demand viewing and DVR capabilities, quite frequently viewers are flipping channels, skipping ads and binge watching entire seasons in one sitting. It can be argued that this “reasonable consumer,” may not stick around to watch an entire episode and with so many other options looming, would be hard pressed to stay for an episode’s end credits to witness the fleeting moment of sponsorship disclosure. The broad reach of television leaves room for more clearly labeled sponsored content, similar to the FTC regulations placed upon sponsored online content, in order to provide all viewers appropriate disclaimers. The current system places online sponsored content at a disadvantage; one in which the extreme level to which we are required to disclose makes us look like we are taking on more sponsored work than other mediums. It is only reasonable that all marketing channels should be held to the same disclosure guidelines and I applaud the FTC for recently taking a second look at television advertisers and demanding clearer disclosure practices. |
As The Valley Burns Up, Boston Readies Its Next Act | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | You wouldn’t think that you could fix the bicycle. It’s just two wheels, a seat, and a set of pedals, plus or minus some fancy materials and high-quality tuning. But for the engineers and designers at Cambridge-based Superpedestrian, that base is just the start for what they hope will be the next generation of urban transit. Reinventing the bike may be good business, but it is also a parable for the change that has come over Boston the last few years. If San Francisco today is the land of sundry apps and , then Boston is the city poised to answer “how do we solve what really matters?” For Superpedestrian, it is making the commute simpler and greener. Its product, , is an integrated motor and mobile app that actively assists a cyclist with acceleration and maintaining speed. Unlike traditional electric bikes, the technology is designed to adapt to the user’s style of cycling without any direct intervention. Installation is a breeze as well, and it can be added on nearly any bike in just a couple of minutes. Despite the European inspiration for the name, the company’s founding is a quintessential Boston story. The founder, Assaf Biderman, invented the wheel while at the , which develops technologies for the real-time city. Now, the company is based just a few minutes from MIT in a quiet part of Cambridge, with a growing staff ready to see the product go into full production shortly. But what’s interesting about reinventing the bicycle is that Superpedestrian isn’t the only Boston-based company I met in the last month trying to improve bicycles for commuting. Another is , which is developing a new set of anti-theft bike lights that can be easily recharged using micro-USB. Tivan Amour, the founder of the company, has a particular passion for the area of bike lights. “I started the company because a friend got hit by a car because his light was stolen,” he tells me. “Our goal is to get everyone on bikes and without fear. Safety and nuisance is the problem.” If Superpedestrian is solving the nuisance of physically riding a bike, then Fortified wants to be the one solving its safety. If these problems are solved, “We think we can get more people on the road.” Reinvention is certainly ingrained into Boston’s fabric. This region of the United States was the epicenter of the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, and a century later, Boston and the corridor along Route 128 became the capital of America’s technology enterprise. Companies like Digital Equipment Corporation, BBN Technologies, and Raytheon were world-leaders in computing, networking, and electronics. As everyone now knows, the internet took off in the 1990s, and then ecommerce, social, big data, mobile, and cloud startups grew in quick succession over the past two decades. Many expected Silicon Valley to disappear in the early 1990s due to competition from Austin as well as Asia, but it managed to place itself at the center of this new transformation of the economy. Entrepreneurship shifted decisively to the West, and today Boston is regularly ranked third on many measures of internet startups, behind Silicon Valley and New York City. But as the Valley begins to overheat (or is completely engulfed in flames, depending on your perspective), there are many here in Boston who believe that the region’s best times remain in its future, and that there is an opportunity to reinvent the city around deep, engineered technologies. The highway office parks that were once the epitome of the region’s past have now been replaced with open floor plan spaces in the heart of Boston as well as the burgeoning new South Boston Innovation District. Good news has also helped the city. Just this week, a local startup, Wayfair, went public, and is now a $3 billion company. Far more important are the people that are now engaging with the ecosystem. I spent an afternoon at TechStars Boston, which has begun its own reinvention this year with a whole new staff led by Semyon Dukach, a prolific angel investor and serial entrepreneur who also played on the MIT blackjack team popularized in the movie . The former directors of the program, Katie Rae and Reed Sturtevant, left earlier this year to begin their own venture firm, Project 11. Dukach loved the idea of being an angel, since it matches his philosophy of how to build great companies. “Do lots of stuff in parallel, look for opportunities to have disproportionate impact, and focus on people you can help rather than thinking as much about returns.” Through his work in angel investing, “I became very active, and found myself spending more time at TechStars … and investing in a lot of TechStars companies.” That proximity and engagement is ultimately what convinced him to join the accelerator and become its managing director. There were some immediate learnings for the entrepreneur – like how to be an employee. “It’s only the second time I have been an employee since delivering pizzas many years ago,” Dukach told me with a laugh. “Otherwise, I was always the CEO,” and due to his focus on revenue growth, “never had boards to report to.” Now, he reports to the wider TechStars organization, although each of the chapters has significant autonomy to experiment. Part of energizing the Boston ecosystem is encouraging the community to zero in on its core strengths as it tries to navigate the rise of the New York City and Los Angeles startup ecosystems as well as the San Francisco boom. It’s perhaps not surprising then that TechStars’ current batch only has one pure mobile app company: Spitfire, a company that back when it was located in, of course, San Francisco. Instead, the accelerator has looked to support a diversity of different types of startups. “Almost half of the companies are hardware. Almost half are international. Half have had traction and funding. We’re also trying to get more gender diversity as well,” Dukach says. His ultimate goal is to bring together founders that can help one another and create a community that lasts past the rapid 13-week program. One area that the accelerator has attempted to address is the overwhelming abundance of resources for startup CEOs, and the complete lack of resources for other senior managers of startups – . TechStars recently introduced a CTO meetup with this current class to assist those on the technical side of startups to improve their skills. Flo Motlik, who is a cofounder of Codeship and a TechStars alum, was just one of several CTOs present at the series. “What we have seen is that the role changes a lot from a very technical role of coding all day to managing people,” he says, and yet few people really help engineers manage that transition. One of the sessions he helped design was around “what do investors and CEOs expect from the CTO during fundraising?” For all of the strengths building in the region, there remain significant headwinds that can complicate Boston’s hope to reclaim the mantle of innovation. Venture capitalists here continue to be “conservative” as one TechStars founder put it to me. Another founder unrelated to the program and who recently raised capital said that he had never even considered raising locally, instead choosing to fly to San Francisco for partner meetings until he got term sheets. While investment is one challenge, it’s retaining people that is perhaps hardest. Boston has an enviable array of universities, but its graduates have a tendency to strike out for New York or California. Also troubling is Massachusetts’ enforcement of no-compete clauses in employment contracts, preventing the kind of frenetic labor environment that is at the heart of an entrepreneurial region. That issue is a , but the legislature . These policy debates, though, shouldn’t diminish the great work taking place here in Boston today. With large successes and a wide landscape of internet and services startups underway, the investors and policymakers will come around and do their part. In a few years, you might just be able to easily and safely bike from one partner meeting to another – while avoiding Sand Hill traffic entirely. |
Gillmor Gang: Good Vibrations II | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, October 3, 2014. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Rep. Waxman Proposes A Third Approach To Net Neutrality | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | , the net neutrality debate continues. Out Friday was a letter from that would lean on both proposed sources of governmental authority to enforce an open Internet. Rep. Waxman wants to use both Title II, and Section 706. At issue is the fact that there exists tension between advocates of net neutrality in terms how to achieve their goals. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, when proposing his net neutrality notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), leaned on Section 706 authority. Most net neutrality diehards in the public sector favor use of Title II. ISPs are vividly opposed to reclassification under Title II. Rep. Waxman has an interesting proposal: Reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service under Title II, forbear the parts of Title II that have ISPs rattled, and then use expanded Section 706 authority to enforce net neutrality. You want to know how using Title II to reclassify would help the FCC better use Section 706? Here’s the Congressman: Now, there will be any number of opinions, and readings of the above strategy — it may even be challenged directly in terms of its legality, let alone its practicability. But there is a certain flow to it that I find attractive. What net neutrality rules does Rep. Waxman want? No blocking, no throttling, and no paid prioritization. Rep. Waxman also wants net neutrality protections to expand to wireless connections, and not merely wireline broadband. The FCC has quite a lot to think about. |
Five Things Startups Need To Do To Attract Advertising Pounds, Dollars And Euros | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | There is a culture in Silicon Valley and its offshoots around the world that says if you build it they will come. That if your tech is smart enough then consumers, brands, fame, fortune and ultimately millions and billions will come your way. To put it simply, once you’ve got VC backing, every other industry will just fall into place. Sorry folks, that’s not the case if you want to forge long-term partnerships and advertising dollars from some of the world’s biggest brands. Great vision and great engineering are undoubtedly a must-have for the next Facebook, the next Instagram, the next Snapchat or the next Videology. But if you want to engage with the ad industry, either as an ad-tech player helping us automate brand messages across PCs, tablets, mobile, connected TV and beyond, or as a consumer play seeking advertisers to fund the experience, then it’s not enough. Too many startups come looking for advertisers without understanding how our industry works. Even some of the established ad-tech giants, who should know better by now, don’t deliver everything we need. MediaCom is part of WPP and we see a stream of startups, usually after they have successfully secured VC funding, who want to talk to us and our clients. These are not just ad-tech brands but also innovators creating great experiences and tools for consumers. Next month, for example, our UK team is hosting a Technology Innovation day, with 10 disruptive technology companies getting ten minutes to tell us what they do and how they have the ability to change/disrupt/automate the way we currently work. We want to meet technology innovators to see if we can use their platforms to build powerful campaigns for our clients. In the last couple of years, our global team has worked closely with a host of VC-backed start ups in the ad tech space including the likes of Celtra and Medialets to help them scale their business and work in partnership to develop their proposition to support the world’s biggest advertisers. We’ve done it not because we have equity in them, but because having conducted appropriate due diligence (by looking at their methodology/technology and ultimately testing) we believe they will help us drive innovation and consistency for our clients and reduce our challenges in delivering communications across digital and mobile platforms. This experience has helped identify five key things startups need to do to attract ad spend from agencies and the brands, whether they’re targeting ad-tech opportunities or are more consumer focused. Firstly, you need to learn to speak our language. A lot of the start ups we see do not have someone who’s worked for a brand or an agency in their teams. They need help in telling their story without resorting to engineering speak littered with acronyms. Ultimately, if we don’t understand what you do then and you can’t communicate this, how do we move forward and delve deeper into your proposition? Second, there is a real short-termism amongst business looking no further ahead than the next sales quarter. You might have potential to rule the world in five years time but we’ll want to know what you can do for us now, this year. If you can help us now then we can help build V1 of your platform and give you the base from which to build the all-conquering V2, V3 or V4. The key question you need to be able to answer is how can you solve our business pain points now, be it your ability to frequency cap messaging/content cross device to ensure that we don’t serve the same message to the same people as consumer continue to switch from smartphone to tablet to desktop, or provide an enterprise software solution that truly enables us to deliver end to end consumer marketing, from CRM to Point of Sale and beyond. What we don’t want is another siloed solution that will take us six months to integrate into our systems. Thirdly, think global. I work in the global team and head up mobile, so I want scalable “mobile first” solutions that we can utilize in more than one country. Of course, there are local nuances to factor in and the execution/end result may differ market to market. But your platform/ad-tech should be enable us to deliver consistency for our brands and enable us to access the inventory we require in multiple countries. This is something that MediaCom can help with, both bringing to the table our own partners but also our clients’ existing partners and data. Fourthly, you need to be clear about your USP. What can you do that the likes of Facebook, Google, AppNexus can’t? Don’t claim to do 10 things if what you really do is one thing really well. We’d rather work with you on what you can do than be disappointed by what you can’t. Over-claiming hits your credibility and, just as you only get a limited number of opportunities with potential VC backers, the same applies to the advertising industry. Before you come to speak to us you need to learn to hone your story and identify what you do that’s unique. Finally, you need to think about how you work with us. Most tech start-ups think that creating a self-service platform is enough. But actually what we often need is more direct help. You might consider a service-based model where one of your experts works in our office two days a week, training our staff to use your system and ensuring we really maximize its potential. Such expert help will make sure that we get the most out of your platform/opportunity and encourage us to scale our relationship that much faster. It’s not just about having a great idea and a great platform. It’s about selling it to us in the right way. Tell us your story, show us why we need you and we’ll help you grow your business. Ultimately, if you can make us look good to our clients then we’d love to help you look good to your VC backers. |
The Bitcoin Selloff Continues | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | Bitcoin, the best-known cryptocurrency, recently slipped under the $400 mark, a former price floor that some viewed as a bulwark against further price pressure. Currently , bitcoin is down $29.06 in the past 24 hours, or around 7.9 percent. From its all-time highs, bitcoin is down around 70 percent. For historical context, here’s the chart, with the current price correlated, roughly, to the last time that bitcoin was this cheap. Or put, another way, bitcoin has burned off nearly all of its former heights: What is driving bitcoin’s price down? Some blend of , negative price pressure created by , , I’d hazard. A better question might be what could cause the current bitcoin slide to reverse course. It isn’t just the folks who held onto their bitcoin that are hurting, however. The revenue of bitcoin miners, who have invested heavily around the world to build infrastructure that powers the bitcoin network, have seen their incomes greatly decline. According to Blockchain.info, is down from a high of more than $5 million per day, to under $1.5 million today. And that on the back of the fact that ‘mining’ itself is . So call it a bitcoin trough. Good news? There appears to be a recent trend towards across bitcoin, which could imply growing global interest in the cryptocurrency. We’ll see. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 3 | null |
Us vs. Them: What’s Wrong With You People? | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | Internet, we need to talk. In a nuanced, thoughtful, intelligent way. I don’t want this to turn into some kind of knee-jerk confrontation. But it will, won’t it? You’ll end up while frothing at the mouth, won’t you? That’s what you do. Every. Single. Time. What’s with you, Internet? Why can’t we just agree to disagree? By which I mean, of course, agree that you’re an idiot. There’s incensed Internet drama everywhere I look these days. . . . Oh, . I’ve tried to make sense of you, I really have, but every attempt drives me back to : “Gentlemen,” we said amid the stunned silence, “do you realize that if what they’re saying is true, then this is still the most pointless fucking bullshit anyone has ever forced us to read?” I love you, Internet, but sometimes it seems like you’re mostly an outrage factory. A hate-inducing tweet or blog post appears, and everyone in its target audience attacks like a school of piranha, erupting into vituperative geysers of rage and scorn — usually without ever clicking through to the primary sources, which often tell a rather more nuanced tale. This is even true when the subject in question is objectively morally meaningless. Don’t even get me started on the petulant conniptions thrown in the comments whenever TechCrunch writes about either Android or iOS with anything less than worshipful obeisance. Why do so many people treat their preferred smartphone OS with the fervent loyalty of religious fanatics? Jesus, there, I fixed your freaking fanboy smartphone comparisons! — Matteo Lallone (@iGriever) Why are you so prone to this endless seething miasma of stupid fury, Internet? (To be clear, I am not at all calling on people to be nicer. I’m calling on them to be smarter.) Is the fault in ourselves, our stars, or the architecture of our social media? I think it’s fair to say that social media exacerbate certain cognitive biases in ways extremely deleterious to meaningful conversation. . . . And, especially, — ie, people involved in Internet drama are almost invariably outliers, because most people can’t be bothered with that crap. (Adam Savage says “the Internet hates women,” but I think/hope that’s slightly unfair; the Internet just to have a special hate for women, because angry misogynist losers are disproportionately represented.) Add those all together, and we have a piquant recipe for today’s endless series of empty online trainwrecks. But I think that’s too simple, too low-level. There’s something larger going on here. Is it like the for allergies, in that modern Western life is so devoid of any struggle that people have to seek it out online to feel alive? Or is it the polar opposite: so many people are so ground down by the day-to-day inhuman bureaucratic brutalities of modern life, barely hanging on amid debt and endemic inequality and the jagged wreckage of their broken dreams, that they turn to the Internet as the only outlet for their transferred, repurposed rage, since there’s little-to-nothing they can do about it in meatspace? I realize this sounds paradoxical, but: I suspect it’s some combination of the two. We all want to believe we’re right, and we all need struggle in our lives. What’s more, most people are indeed a member of one or more systematically oppressed or marginalized groups , and fighting whatever structural persecution your in-groups are subject to seems like a pretty meaningful and important thing to do, right? Absolutely! With you so far. But on some level everyone to feel oppressed — it bestows a sense of righteousness, and justifies all their failures — so virtually everyone winds up participating in the online Persecution Olympics, to the extent that even “traditional gamers” try to present themselves as a kind of online nation victimized by a systemic conspiracy of persecution and oppression. (Yes, yes, Not All Gamers. I know.) Meanwhile, paying attention to oppression that only affects your in-groups means ignoring all the oppression that affects virtually everyone. . . (Of course left-wingers will deny the latter are such a big problem, in favor of attacking right-wingers, while right-wingers will deny the former really matters, while attacking left-wingers.) Oh, yes, and , too, the fuel on which all social media runs. I don’t blame you, Internet. On the contrary. In most circumstances, you’re an enormously powerful force for good. You’ve just brought out two worrying facts endemic to humanity: we automatically adopt us-and-them mindsets, and it’s always more instinctive to fight for your in-group(s) than for everyone. But spare a thought for actually constructive actions, and/or more universal struggles, next time you’re tempted to join in on some kind of online Pavlovian persecution pile-on, the vast majority of which is only ever seen by the choir of your personal filter bubble, and accomplishes nothing but an ephemeral hit of emotional validation. Or better yet, step out of that perpetual vicious circle for a moment: https://twitter.com/thereaIbanksy/status/517086344716517376 …and go for a walk in the woods instead. Who knows, you may come home inspired with a way to actually make a real difference, rather than indulging in dumb, tedious, meaningless online venting. I speak as someone who actually isn’t; straight white Canadian men have never been systematically oppressed by anyone, ever. |
Square Closes $150 Million Round At $6 Billion Valuation | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 5 | Square just closed the Series E round it had been raising. showed the e-commerce payments company was set to raise at least $100 million, but the deal wasn’t done just yet. Now a Square spokesman has confirmed the raises to , led by new investor the (GIC). This puts Square at A $6 billion valuation. Goldman Sachs and Rizvi Traverse Management also participated in the round, according to the same source. This last round is right on the heels of Apple’s new payments reveal and between payment rival Paypal and eBay. There were earlier rumors that Apple and Square were in acquisition talks but that Square walked away. As we a few weeks back when the filings first popped up, Square’s valuation has fallen behind its payment processing rate. Square is expected to process $30 billion this year. It reportedly totaled $20 in 2013. The valuation at the time was at $5 billion. The card payment processing realm may get even tighter in the next little bit. Amazon has also with its own version of a card reader this year called Local Register. Eventbrite also has and app but says it plans to stick to just venue payments for now. That could change in the future. |
Everything You Need To Know About iOS 8 Keyboard Permissions (But Were Afraid To Ask) | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 10 | 4 | most exciting thing about iOS 8 — — is the side-door it opens into Apple’s walled garden to allow keyboard app makers to come on in for the first time. No longer is it true that outlandish Qwertys with a twist are barred from Apple’s kingdom. If you want a , well now you can. Or one that auto predicts emoji so you don’t have to flick through all that emoji art looking for the right combination of chips + burger + pizza + beer + beer + beer + milkshake + spew face. . Sure, the native iOS keyboard hasn’t gone away. In fact it’s had some TLC of its own (with a new predictive layer sitting atop the keys, called Quick Type). But the iOS user can now finally choose to play away from home when it comes to typing — as, of course, Android users have always been able to. It’s worth flagging up that Apple has a slightly different permissions structure when it comes to third party keyboards than Android. So read on for the lowdown on the exact keyboard permissions you are granting when you enable third party keyboards on your iOS 8 device. But first, a quick re-cap on how to get started with adding a new keyboard to your iOS 8 device… So how do you get a new keyboard on iOS 8? First you need to find a keyboard you like on the App Store. There are plenty to choose from. Here’s a by-no-means-exhaustive I prepared earlier, for example. Once you’ve hit on something you like and downloaded it, you’ll need to add the keyboard to your device within the mainline iOS settings interface. The path to follow here is Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards > Add New Keyboard… You’ll then be shown a list which should include the keyboard app you just downloaded. Hit that to add it to your active keyboards. If another arrow is displayed next to the name of the added keyboard you will be able to tap on it again to reach another settings screen where you can ‘Allow Full Access’. This enables an app’s full feature-set — but more of that below, in the permissions section. It’s not necessary to allow Full Access to add a new keyboard, but the functionality you get may be truncated if you don’t. Given the various menu layers involved in adding third party keyboards to iOS 8 this is undoubtedly a rather convoluted process. It’s almost as if Apple is trying to bury the option to play away from the native keyboard. But, in their defense, it’s probably not the sort of setting that should be too easy to toggle, given how core the keyboard is to the overall experience. Having less techie iOS users accidentally switching on a new keyboard and not knowing how to get back to the familiar native Qwerty is a scenario Apple is obviously keen to avoid. To switch between keyboards when typing something you generally tap the globe icon at the lower left of the keyboard layout. Some keyboard makers combine this key with other function keys so you may need to hold down a key to access the toggle. Tapping on the globe on Apple’s native keyboard will switch to the next keyboard you have enabled. Or holding the globe key down will bring up a menu overview of all your keyboards so you can tap once to choose the one you want to use. At this early stage, the keyboard toggling interface can still be a bit glitchy. Sometimes keyboards appear to cycle by themselves so you might find that enabling fewer keyboards at a time is more manageable. Now, not all third party iOS 8 keyboards are equal in terms of the permissions they require to function. Some can function purely within the isolated sandbox of the keyboard interface itself, while others ask to be able to reach outside that sandbox — and this is where the ‘Allow Full Access’ setting, mentioned above, comes in. The reason a keyboard app might be asking for Full Access is either to connect to the Internet — for instance to enable a cloud service feature within the app — or to talk to another app on the device, such as its own container app. Apple’s guidelines for developers of keyboard software implies their app should offer basic functions (what it terms “normal duties”) without requiring Full Access. Apple goes on to stress that Full Access brings increased “responsibilities” to the developer when it comes to user trust. This is because a networked keyboard can technically be used to capture keystroke data. Which poses a clear privacy threat to the user. So, to be clear, if you provide Full Access to a third party keyboard you are technically giving that app the ability to capture and transmit your keystroke data (aka the stuff you type) elsewhere. Although reputable keyboard apps will either avoid capturing this data at all, or have clear privacy policies setting out exactly what they are doing with any captured data (perhaps using it to improve the product experience, for instance), and how they are safeguarding your privacy if they are capturing data — by, for instance, anonymizing and aggregating data if they are sharing it, and actively avoiding capturing data from sensitive fields such as password boxes or credit card data forms. If you don’t like the sound of any keystroke data being captured you can avoid this scenario altogether by not granting Full Access. Although it’s worth noting that if you do later toggle this setting on, the app may be able to send retrospective data, so it’s not a very fine grained control mechanism. Still, it’s a neat feature of iOS 8 is that it does allows users to choose whether to grant third party keyboard makers networked permission at all — albeit, denying a keyboard app Full Access may well truncate its functionality (notably the SwiftKey keyboard offers limited functionality if Full Access is denied, for example). But at least the user has the means to manage third party keyboards via this master switch. If you do not allow Full Access a third party keyboard app can still — and should — offer basic keyboard functions but will remain sandboxed on your device and can’t, therefore, be keylogging what you are typing. Another thing to note about Apple’s implementation of third party keyboards on iOS 8 is the number of user warnings it throws up around the type of data keyboards can capture. Underneath the list of third party keyboards Apple provides the following warning: “When using one of these keyboards, the keyboard can access all the data you type”. It also links to a far longer explanation page detailing “Third-Party Keyboards & Privacy”. On this page Apple goes on to warn: “If you enable Full Access, developers are permitted to access, collect and transmit the data you type. In addition, if the third-party keyboard has your permission to access location, photos, or other personal data, the keyboard can also collect and transmit that information to the keyboard developers’ servers. If you disable Full Access the keyboard’s developer may be able to access, collect and transmit what was typed while the network access was disabled.” And if you choose to toggle ‘Full Access’ on for an individual keyboard you will be shown a pop-up warning pertaining to that keyboard which reiterates the warning about the app being able to transmit what you type and what you have previously typed — adding that: “This could include sensitive information such as your credit card number or street address.” What’s going on here — in essence — is Apple both covering its ass on the security front, trying to ensure the user is fully aware of the privacy implications of their choices. Given that it is indeed technically true that a networked iOS keyboard can record your keystroke data (i.e. what you are typing) then the user who grants Full Access to third party keyboards is potentially putting a lot of very private information in the hands of a third party. So the onus is on the user to assess whether they trust an app developer before giving that entity the keys to their Qwerty kingdom. Now Apple’s keyboard-related warnings are generic — as indeed they have to be — so some keyboard developers have complained they are misleading. For instance SwiftKey argues it has systems in place to prevent it capturing sensitive date like passwords and credit cards, so dislikes the warning referring to credit card data capture. (See the section below for more details on the level of permissions being requested by a selection of iOS keyboard apps.) Apple is probably right to warn users in this way, given the potential risks when they grant Full Access to a keyboard app, although the emphasis of its most visible pop-up warnings is on the potential risks, without tempering that with encouragement to review the app maker’s privacy policy before making a decision on trustworthiness. Another issue is that generic warnings will probably lose their impact over time, once the user gets used to seeing and dismissing the same warning. So you still want to add a third party keyboard to your iOS 8 device, eh? The choice of which keyboard — or keyboards — to add extends beyond considerations of functionality. As noted above, you need to consider how trustworthy the keyboard developer is. Because, for all and its App Store review process, it can’t guarantee a developer isn’t doing something that impinges on your privacy. It’s therefore up to you to make a call on how much trust to place in a keyboard app — given that, with Full Access granted, this type of app has the technical ability to record everything you type. A selection of keyboard app makers who have already built apps for iOS 8 are detailed below, with a summary of what these specific developers require Full Access for, along with key details from their privacy policies. : Free : Requires Full Access for all functionality beyond very basic typing, including its word prediction technology and SwiftKey Flow input method. Its cloud back-up and profile sync product also clearly require Full Access From the developer’s explaining why it asks users to enable Full Access: “Allowing ‘full access’ means the keyboard part of the app can communicate with the ‘container app’ part — the icon you see on your homescreen. elements of ’s technology are stored in the container app (rather than the keyboard itself), such as keyboard settings like quick period, autocorrect and auto capitalise, and getting corrections, completions or predictions from any language model. This decision also enables us to scale in future, for instance we can add more languages (our no. 1 user request) without requiring a manual update of the app.” Why else might SwiftKey need to communicate with its container app? Likely it’s setting itself up to support a system of in-app payments in future — bringing its free iOS app in line with its freemium Android app, which includes a store where users can purchase different themes. : SwiftKey does capture keystroke data but says its system is designed to avoid capturing sensitive data such as credit card numbers and passwords. Its notes that it anonymizes captured keystroke data. It says this type of anonymized, aggregated data can be shared with third parties : $0.99 : The initial version of the app did not ask for Full Access. But Swype has sinced updated the app with a version where Full Access can be enabled. It says it uses this purely for a Guided Access accessibility mode Commenting on the app and iOS permissions, Aaron Sheedy, vice president of mobile solutions within Nuance’s mobile division, said: “The features we were most focused on for our launch of Swype on iOS 8 were speed and accuracy… Swype for iOS 8 currently stores personal language models on the device — getting smarter as people use it to predict the words and phrases they use the most. “If desired, users do have the option to delete both their personal language model (including any words they added to their Swype dictionary).” : it stores all collected keystroke data locally, on the device. It specifies that no additional data is collected if you enable Full Access : $0.99 : Requires Full Access to associate a user’s social accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Gmail etc) to improve accuracy by personalizing predictions. Downloading additional language packs also requires Full Access “Fleksy actually does NOT need any network access for basic functionality,” says founder Ioannis Verdelis, adding that typing and auto-correcting, emoji, changing themes and changing keyboard sizes can be done without granting full access. “By granting Full Access, a keyboard (technically at least) log keystrokes and send them to a server for processing. This is why, Apple asks that basic functionality of a keyboard should need network access. That doesn’t mean that if you grant Full Access a keyboard will be logging keystrokes (we don’t in any case log your keystrokes). It just means that as a user, you have the choice of making it for a keyboard to do this. This is unique to iOS and I believe a very solid feature that I wish Android provided too,” he adds. : Fleksy’s specifies that it does not log data entered into sensitive fields such as password boxes. If you enable Full Access it can capture the content of what you type but its privacy policy specifies that it only collects language modeling data when a user opts in and specifically for the purpose of improving the product. It says it does not share this data with third parties : $0.99 : Only currently requires Full Access for audio, and to remember user keyboard customization preferences CEO Will Walmsley tells TechCrunch: “Minuum’s core functionality works completely without full access enabled. Full access is currently only required for Minuum to read and write to the disk (which allows us to remember your keyboard customization preferences) and for Minuum to play sounds. “The skepticism around full access is that it also enables network access, which in theory could be used to obtain sensitive information. We avoid this entirely by not ever transmitting what you type over the network; we take users’ privacy very seriously.” : Minuum’s says it actively avoids storing data entered into sensitive fields such as password boxes. It says anonymized, aggregated keystroke data can be shared by the company with third parties |
Bitcoin Falls Under $300 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 5 | $300, it’s the new $400. managed to push the price of bitcoin below the $300 mark this morning, around two weeks after the cryptocurrency . Here’s a screenshot from from earlier today: A chart of the decline: (In the ensuing bit, bitcoin has managed to re-crest the $300 level, a price range that it has largely kept to. Current price: $300.51, but a minute ago it was less. Keep your eyes .) The next question is whether the $300 price level will represent a new floor for bitcoin. That’s to say it’s will be interesting to see if $300 is the price point under which bitcoin will not sink, but may bounce off of a few times. Or, on the bear side, if bitcoin’s recent, steep price declines will continue. There is a certain irony to the negative price momentum that bitcoin is currently enduring: It has seen increasing support from retailers, precisely the sort of network growth that its acolytes have hoped it could muster. However, such support — — are not driving its price upward. This could be an argument that short-term increases in the volume of bitcoin transactions do not drive up its per-unit price. |
Digital Dark Matter: The Unseen Forces That Influence Innovation | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 5 | Around AD 150, the Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy compiled a model of the universe that accurately predicted the movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. It was a remarkable achievement, diminished only by the fact that it happened to be entirely wrong. Rather than a relatively simple heliocentric model where planets revolved around a stationary sun, Ptolemy appealed to convoluted constructs to design a celestial Rube Goldberg Machine that kept the earth at the center of the cosmos where everyone felt it belonged. And yet, it worked. In fact, it worked so well that it remained the predominant cosmological model for roughly 1,500 years. Even now, projectors in planetariums are essentially inverted mechanical implementations of the Ptolemaic System. Ptolemy s geocentric model was indeed a brilliant achievement, though in retrospect, its brilliance obviously had nothing to do with its veracity. Its real genius lay in its ability to satisfy two seemingly incompatible requirements: the accurate prediction of the position and movement of celestial bodies, and the need for humans to feel that they were at the center of everything they could see. In other words, while the Ptolemaic System was objectively incorrect, it was very much right for its time. All of this unexpectedly came to mind while discussing self-driving cars. The virtues of autonomous cars, I was told, were that they increased productivity because they allowed passengers to engage in tasks other than driving; they were safer than manually operated vehicles; and with properly optimized algorithms, they were certain to reduce traffic congestion. Admittedly, they weren’t practical today, but in ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, tops — once the technology was ready, the necessary laws established, and our cultural biases overcome — driverless cars would not only be commonplace, they might even be mandated by law. The future, my conversation partner concluded, would finally be here. While I didn’t disagree with any of these hypotheses, just for fun, I pointed out that all of these advantages could easily be achieved right now. In fact, they could have been achieved several decades ago with nothing more than a well designed and executed public transportation system. Not only does good public transportation provide the same benefits as autonomous cars, but it helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions, releases us from the financial and logistical burdens of owning our own vehicles, creates new jobs, promotes better health, requires no new laws or technologies, and is accessible to nearly every demographic. In terms of results, commuter trains, buses and good old fashioned walking are probably far superior to technology that is likely decades away in almost every respect but one: driverless cars are probably doable whereas a comprehensive, country-wide public transit system (such as those enjoyed by many other countries around the world) is almost certainly economically and politically infeasible. Driverless cars are the Ptolemaic Systems of transportation. They’re an over-engineered solution to a relatively simple problem., but because they are compatible with things like existing infrastructure, cultural expectations, and well-established economic and political power structures, they probably have a much better chance of success in areas where public transportation hasn’t already taken hold. Public transit, in stark contrast to autonomous vehicles, isn’t very sexy. It threatens our individuality, requires short-term investment for long-term gain, and many consider it uninspired and even unsightly. If that wasn’t enough, large-scale investment in public infrastructure presents tax burdens in most municipalities versus a massive economic opportunity for private industry with driverless cars. As symbols of the future, bullet trains, maglevs, and monorails are almost quaintly anachronistic; best relegated to secluded and dusty dioramas at Disney s Tomorrowland; reminders — along with flying cars, video phones, and housekeeping robots — of what the future used to be. The term “ ” refers to a hypothesized form of that cannot be detected, and is therefore inferred by observing its gravitational influence. Its equally mysterious counterpart, energy, is a hypothetical form of energy that appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. Combined, and energy constitute about 95.1% of all the mass-energy of the known universe which means that we can only directly observe and account for a mere 4.9% of what s out there. Despite all we think we know about the nature of the universe, the overwhelming majority of the cosmos lies outside our current powers of observation, yet it profoundly affects everything. s Law are only the most obvious components . Cultural expectations, politics, and economic incentives are all equally influential, but far more difficult to detect and quantify. Now let s consider a technology that s more accessible and familiar to many of us: the fitness tracker. Without getting into a public health debate, it s safe to say that Americans have reached a point where we are looking far more critically at our health and how our physiology affects the overall quality of our lives. It’s also safe to say that various forms of technology are major contributing factors to our less healthy lifestyle. Not only are we spending far more time in sedentary positions, looking at screens of various sizes, but food science also has increased the convenience and appeal of our meals without increasing their nutritional content. While there are plenty of exceptions, I don t think it s unfair to say that the more technology we introduce into our lives (cars, overnight and even same-day delivery, instant meals, etc.), the less healthy many of us become. Yet rather than attempting to improve our health by reducing our dependency on technology, some of us are turning to technology to solve the very problem it helped create. Part of what makes fitness trackers economically viable is that devices like smartphones, tablets, and video games — the very innovations that often encourage a more sedentary lifestyle — have driven down the costs of components like multi-axis accelerometers, Bluetooth radios, and LCD screens. This is only one example of how technology has a tendency to self-propagate; to use humans as a vector to create copies and mutations and derivatives of itself; to recursively generate demand for itself in order to not only ensure its own survival, but its constant and even exponential proliferation. The relationship between humans and technology is becoming increasingly enmeshed, and in some cases, even ambiguous. I m not proposing that technology is behaving consciously, nor do I believe that our increasing dependency on technology is a bad thing. I m a huge fan of fitness trackers, and I experiment with just about every new technology to hit the market (though admittedly, I find the majority of it to be little more than a diversion). The extent to which humanity adapts its needs to its environment and adapts its environment to its needs, is one of the most amazing things about our species. It’s something to be celebrated and fostered. But having a clear idea of the invisible forces that influence our technology is critical to maximizing its benefits, and ultimately establishing our control over it. While fitness trackers may be emblematic of technology heavily influenced by well-obscured forces, they may not be the most enduring examples. Most technology pundits and consumer electronics insiders agree that devices like health bands are probably only temporary solutions — stopgap measures until dedicated exercise and wellness technology is absorbed into other devices. This time, rather than convergence around a single form factor (the smartphone), many futurists are predicting the exact opposite. The distribution of functionality will occur across swarms of connected devices: referred to as wearable devices (when attached to our bodies) or the Internet of Things (when dispersed throughout our environment). There are tremendous advantages to making everything from our appliances to our clothing to our fashion accessories connected and more intelligent, but the extent to which connected devices become assimilated into our daily lives also depends on overcoming a pretty substantial list of challenges. Among them are cross-device interoperability, robust data synchronization, practical battery life, persistent and dependable connectivity, the creation and adoption of all kinds of new user interface paradigms, aesthetics, and, of course, affordability. The one thing all of these problems have in common is that there are huge amounts of resources being devoted to solving them. But connected devices also have one major challenge ahead of them where there are at least as many forces working against the problem: security. Consider all the hacking, spying, and social engineering that we hear about. Now imagine how much of it goes on that we either; haven t found out about yet, will never find out about, or that occurs on a scale too small to merit a headline. There are several reasons why hacking is becoming prevalent, but one of the most important is that the overall attack surface is getting larger. Devices and personal data have already proliferated to the point where our security and privacy are under constant threat from black-hat hackers, foreign governments, and even our own government, and if the Internet of Things becomes a reality, the problem might get worse by several orders of magnitude. Technology is inherently intent-agnostic. Just as cloud computing enables us to quickly and cheaply spin up massive amounts of computing resources for things like gene sequencing or the analysis of radio telescope data, it can also be used to brute-force passwords or decrypt sensitive personal information. While “ ” solutions enable us to mine historical records for the purposes of uncovering previously obscured connections, it can just as easily be used for warrantless tracking, profiling, and spying. And while increasingly affordable storage means never having to delete data, it also means data never getting deleted. It s obvious that technology will continue to play an increasingly important role in almost every aspect of our lives. But it might also be true that we are entering a time when the wisdom of surrounding ourselves with yet more computers, cameras, and sensors is legitimately called into question — when the risks of going from a handful of connected devices to dozens, then hundreds, and maybe even thousands could easily outweigh the benefits. It s undeniable that there are forces encouraging the proliferation of connected devices, but before we declare their unfettered and exponential growth to be preordained, it s important to recognize that there are also plenty of valid forces working to achieve a much more conservative and practical equilibrium. As a science fiction writer, gadget addict, and software developer, I have no intention of cautioning anyone against the potential dangers of scientific advancement and technological innovation. Humans have been dependent on technology of one kind or another for many thousands of years, and it s probably inevitable that our dependency will not only continue, but dramatically increase. In my mind, becoming more aware of the obscure forces that guide, define, and influence the ways in which we shape our world is not about avoiding the perils of the future, but about helping to ensure that we are able to achieve our full potential. |
Google Plans To Hire Security Guards As Employees, Not Contractors | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 5 | Google plans to hire more than 200 security guards, making them full- and part-time employees of the company, and therefore eligible for company benefits. Previously, Google’s guards were provided by an outside contractor called Security Industry Specialists. The news was reported Friday in and . A company spokesperson confirmed the plans via email and sent me the following statement: Building an in-house security team is something we are excited to do. A year ago we in-sourced the Google security operations center and we are looking forward to making these valued positions both full- and part-time Google employees. Earlier this year, union protests and sought to draw attention to tech companies’ relationships with their guards, with a focus on low pay and lack of benefits. However, neither Google nor SIS actually said that they’re responding to those protests. The security contractor told the Journal that the decision “was made by SIS as part of its normal business operations and then conveyed to Google.” In addition, Google says that it will continue working with SIS during the transition period. |
‘Gamification’ Is Dead, Long Live Games For Learning | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 5 | When I entered the games for learning business a little over two years ago, there was one word everyone wanted to talk about: “Gamification.” I was asked about gamification by top philanthropists, accosted at the Game Developers Conference about the subject, and even had to drive by a gamification billboard every evening on my Silicon Valley commute. The “gamification” concept goes something like this: Take an existing set of activities – say banking, or exercise, or rote schoolwork (the more mundane the better, apparently) – apply a set of “game rewards” in the form of points (or leveling, or badges), and as if by magic the world will become more fun, workers more efficient, and learning more effective. As a game designer of more than twenty years, this idea rubbed me wrong. Like, really wrong. Most people understand that wearing the right baseball glove will not magically allow them to throw pinpoint fastballs, and they get that listening to K-Pop will not suddenly teach them to speak Korean. Yet as a game designer, it was painful to listen to the education world talk about gamification as if it was a special sauce that can be applied to any existing task in order to improve performance. As a practitioner of game design, I know that this special sauce just does not exist, especially when it comes to K-12 learning. Though this frustrating craze led to a proliferation of interactive drill games that incorporate gamification-style scoring and reward systems, we need to move beyond this, to a better definition and understanding of how digital games can impact student learning. Rather than looking at “gamification of learning” as a process that’s applied to curricula to make school more interesting, we should recognize that learning at its best already has game-like elements that are latent and waiting to be unlocked. Great teachers already bring to the classroom that kind of interactive, discovery-based learning that works so well, and for their students learning already starts to look an awful lot like a game. As an industry, our objective should not be to “gamify” learning at all. Our task is to show how learning is already very much like a game and to draw out those gamelike qualities. Indeed, as famed game developer Raph Koster wrote in his book “That’s what games are, in the end … Fun is just another word for learning.” After successfully launching SimCityEDU, a classroom version of the wildly popular consumer game, we at GlassLab set a mandate for our second game, . It was based on this philosophy of finding the game in learning: The core of the game would be the same activity as the core of the competency we were tackling. And for good measure, we took on one of the trickiest competencies shared with us by our GlassLab Teacher Network: The English Language Arts skill of . If we were going to prove the possibility of uniting good game mechanics and learning of a common core subject, this would be it. After doing extensive research on the fundamentals of argumentation, our game designer Erin Hoffman and learning and assessment designer Seth Corrigan locked themselves in a room for hours on end, drawing loop diagrams, sketching dialogue, and eventually discovering how a Pokemon-style battle/adventure game could be a clean, precise fit for the key activities of and The crux of the design asks players to gather evidence by exploring a fictional future Mars city that we constructed in collaboration with NASA. The game asks players to structure that evidence into coherent arguments using an “argument core generator” and then to use that argument core to power their “argument robots” in exciting battles that decide important questions for the colony. It’s not a piece of software that ‘gamifies’ argumentation…. It’s not even a “game about argumentation.” It’s a When learners engage in battle to decide key decisions (like ‘what protein should we eat on Mars?’ or ‘what should we do with a robot gone rogue?’), little do they know they are exercising philosopher Stephen Toulmin’s method of reasoning through argument. But they are. And the game is as engaging and entertaining as the best of commercial entertainment software. The kids themselves tell us so. We’re starting to see this new philosophy of digital games in education finally take foot. The White House recently hosted “Game Jam” inviting more than 100 of the world’s best designers to get together to create educational games. Given a mere 48 hours and some very challenging prompts, more than two dozen teams of game developers and educational software developers put together some terrific examples of integrated learning and game mechanics. A team from Disney made “Gloobal Doomination,” which required players to make thoughtful decisions to foster biodiversity, to save their cute “gloobs” from extinction events. A team of precocious students from UNC-Charlotte made a terrific game that made the physics concepts of acceleration and velocity not only visible, but playable. GlassLab’s own team tackled the Electoral College, a notoriously tricky subject for social studies teachers (and television pundits) by inviting players to go head-to-head, James Carville and Mary Matalin style, to win the ‘ground game’ of an election. All these games demonstrated unlocking the games in learning… and Richard Culatta, the director of the White House’s Office of Educational Technology, has challenged game makers to “make fun and learning indistinguishable.” Just a scant couple years from the gamification craze, such enlightened perspective harkens a bright future. At GlassLab, we have a slogan that we refer back to at the beginning, at the end, and throughout our design process: “Love Games, Love Learning.” We believe these two things can, and will, be one and the same. Image via |
Hacked Screenshots Show Friend-To-Friend Payments Feature Hidden In Facebook Messenger | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 5 | Facebook Messenger is all set up to allow friends to send each other money. All Facebook has to do is turn on the feature, and video taken using iOS app exploration developer tool Cycript by Stanford computer science student . Messenger’s payment option lets users send money in a message similar to how they can send a photo. Users can add a debit card in Messenger, or use one they already have on file with Facebook. An in-app pincode also exists for added security around payments. It’s unclear whether Facebook will monetize Messenger by charging a small fee for money transfers, or offer the functionality for free to drive usage of its standalone chat app. That will be up to . Why Facebook chose to poach Marcus is now obvious: Facebook Messenger payments could compete with Venmo, PayPal, Square Cash, and other peer-to-peer money transfer apps. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company’s that “over time there will be some overlap between [Messenger] and payments. […] The payments piece will be a part of what will help drive the overall success and help people share with each other and interact with businesses.” However, he urged Wall Street not to get too foamy at the mouth because it may be awhile since “there’s so much groundwork for us to do.” He urged analysts and investors to revise their estimates of Facebook’s revenue if they expected this to come quickly. “To the extent that your models or anything reflect that we might be doing that, I strongly encourage you to adjust that, because we’re not going to. We’re going to take the time to do this in the way that is going to be right over multiple years” Zuckerberg concluded. The presence of payments code in Messenger was by security researcher last month. Aude tells me he used Cycrypt to dig into the Messenger for iOS code on his jailbroken iPhone and turn on the payments feature to nab the screenshots and video. I contacted the company to inquire about Messenger payments. Facebook declined to comment. Aude played around the with feature and its code. He tells me you simply hit a button to initiate a payment, enter the amount you want to send, and send it. Facebook keeps the transaction private and doesn’t publish anything about it to the News Feed.
In the version Aude investigated, Messenger payments only worked with debit cards, not credit cards or bank accounts. That’s likely because money transfers are cheaper to process when they come from debit cards and don’t require approvals or numbers some people don’t know off-hand like connecting a bank account. Aude speculates that “based on my understanding of the debit interchange rates, each transaction will cost Facebook roughly $0.40 to $0.50 (Durbin swipe fee + ACH fee). The app didn’t mention a fee to send, so it’s probably free, at least initially. Over time they might add a $1 fee.” This can’t be confirmed, though. Aude didn’t see PayPal as a payment option in Messenger, though there are notes about PayPal in the code unearthed by Aude. Facebook automatically lists payment methods you’ve set up in its main app to pay for games or ads. As for how the money is actually transferred, Aude tells me that “The mechanism it uses is to debit one account, and then use some magical means to lookup the bank account number of the recipient and ACH [Automated Clearing House] deposit it, Identical to Square Cash.” For now, payments will be one person to one person, but Messenger will eventually support group payments according a note in the code that explains “In the short term, we will only support single payment attachment. Multiple payment attachments will be supported in the future.” Aude tells me he thinks Facebook will enable the feature in the US in the next few months, and then eventually in other parts of the world, though this code might be just for the early stages of internal testing of the payments feature. It could be a while before the public gets access. One day, however, Facebook might be able to challenge the remittance industry that charges foreign workers exorbitant fees sometimes in the 10% to 20% range to send money home to their families. There’s a global battle for messaging going on right now between Facebook/WhatsApp, Apple iMessage, Tencent’s WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk, Google Hangouts, Kik, Rakuten’s Viber, and others. Each is trying to differentiate itself, sometimes with stickers, games, commerce, or social networking. If Messenger payments is a success, it could create a whole new reason to choose Facebook’s chat app over everyone else’s. Paying friends might be something you only do a few times a month or less, so having a standalone app for it might not make sense. Facebook clearly hopes bundling it into an app people use everyday could help it beat dedicated apps like Venmo. Plus, beyond peer-to peer-payments, the feature could build Facebook’s collection of debit card numbers and other payment methods. Those could be very useful, as Facebook’s also working on a . |
Tesla Motors Just Invited Press To Come Look At Its New D | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | Tesla Motors just sent out invites to a press event on October 9th in Los Angeles, presumably to unveil the new ‘D’ car that founder Elon Musk . Now, we officially have an event, to be held at Hawthorne Airport. The D is rumored to be a new vehicle in Tesla’s lineup, with the on a (D)ual motor all wheel drive version of its Model S sedan. Musk also said that they would show off ‘something else’ at the event, which some are saying could be a souped up version of the Model S. There is also a possibility that the D stands for Driver Assistance, something people have seen references to in newer Tesla software. Tesla has already made a P85 (performance) version of its 85W Model S, but an , which could be a new P85D. This could be a new version of the Model S with two smaller motors on board. The Dual-Motor AWD was originally announced for the Model-X SUV, but a tipster told TechCrunch that it could come to the Model S next week. The ‘something else’, the tipster says, is a Model S rated at 600hp with a top speed of 155mph — also using the new Dual-Motor AWD. We haven’t been able to verify those tips, so take it with a grain of salt. Expect such a car to run well over $100-$150k. Our own Matt Burns about whether that might come to pass earlier today: A ultra-high performance Model S would likely satisfy a niche market of buyers and fans alike. The Tesla Roadster is long gone and the Model S is getting a bit stale. As countless car makers before it, Tesla could extend the Model S’ shelf life by simply offering more exclusive editions. Tesla could stuff an additional motor into the front boot of the Model S. I suspect Tesla would employ two of its smaller Model S engines in favor of less weight. Still, even with two of Tesla’s smallest motors, the output would be north of 600 hp. Additional batteries would likely be added to compensate for increased power draw. Either way, we’ll be there to check out the new stuff. |
How A Trillion-Dollar Market Remains Hidden In Plain Sight | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 5 | Remember the ? Someone was hiding money all over cities, leaving people to find it on their own. It got a lot of attention early on and got me thinking that there is a lot more out there than random $50 bills and whatnot. As an investor, we look for huge markets that either have remained hidden or are just starting to be explored. Financial marketplaces is one of these. The first efforts in this space were called peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, and rightly so. It was literally individuals posting descriptions of things they needed loans for (a new deck, cosmetic surgery) and other individuals offering to loan them the money for those things, at various rates. With no banks involved, it was truly disintermediated lending. There was no underwriting rigor – because there was no underwriting, period. It was the Wild West, and about half of those loans failed. Today, more sophisticated, more professional operations have grown up, and these lenders are not truly peer-to-peer, because the money used to fund their loans comes from a diversified set of investors, not just individuals. They’re not truly disintermediated either because the best platforms provide some form of intermediation (like scoring borrower quality). That’s why I’ve taken to calling them “marketplace lenders.” These new platforms are able to create a marketplace where lenders and borrowers can find one another and agree to terms, all without the involvement of retail banks or credit card companies. Why does this matter? Because by removing traditional banks as the middleman, marketplace lenders can use their spread advantage to offer lower rates to borrowers and better returns to lenders. Borrowers on marketplace platforms pay closer to 10% interest, a third less than the average of what is paid to banks or credit card companies. And instead of receiving 1% interest for keeping their money in a CD, active lenders on marketplace platforms receive, on average, an 8% return on their investments. I believe marketplace lending will increasingly encroach upon – and take market share from – traditional banking. But the first domino to fall is one that’s already falling, and that’s consumer loans. Earlier this year my whitepaper on marketplace lending forecast that the sector has the potential to originate $1T in loans globally by 2025. What does that mean? At 5% of originations, marketplace lending would create $50B in annual revenues and create $75B in consumer surplus for marketplace lenders and borrowers (money that would otherwise go to Too Big to Fail Banks). That’s about 0.3% of GDP back to consumers in the form of better rates and service. And all this is made possible by the online marketplace – the same catalyst that fueled the rise of Internet marketplace pioneers like eBay, and more recent marketplace business models like Uber and Airbnb. The marketplace lenders who succeed – and who ultimately remake the banking industry – will be the ones that create robust, two-sided marketplaces. Creating those marketplaces won’t be easy, but there are several companies that are already well on their way. Finding them, too, hardly takes a scavenger hunt – unlike your bank’s loan officer, they’re just a click away. |
Nobody Can Win The Cloud Pricing Wars | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | Earlier this week, cloud platform . The cost is getting so low, it’s almost trivial for anyone to absorb the costs of running infrastructure in the cloud, but you have to wonder as the cloud pricing wars continue, how low can they go and if it’s a war anyone can win. The end game is obviously zero, but these companies have overhead and while the Big Three cloud computing companies –Google, Amazon and Microsoft –run their Infrastructure as a Service as a side business, chances are their stock holders don’t want to see them giving it away for nothing, a point we seem to be approaching quickly. Just this week, Oracle shocked the world (or at least me) when it announced it would lower its Database as a Service pricing . This is Oracle we’re talking about, a company known for its high prices joining the pricing wars. It’s one thing for the Big Three to engage in this type of activity, but for a traditional enterprise software (and hardware) company used to high profits, it’s startling. It shows the state of cloud pricing these days. While most Software as a Service vendors like Salesforce, Box, Zendesk and Workday don’t appear to be engaged in this type of price slashing, the infrastructure players are all in on the price cutting game and as the downward pressure continues, you have to wonder what if anything will cause them to pull out. In spite of the low prices, there are still plenty of companies talking about the cloud with disdain and fear, but the fact is how long can CIOs ignore pricing as it goes this low? It doesn’t make good business sense, and whatever risks a large enterprise believe they might face with cloud services, it has to be offset by the plunging costs. The devil is always in the details of course. You move some infrastructure to The Big Three with the intro pricing and it’s like that first year with your cable company. It looks really good and then the introductory period ends, and when you’re all comfortable with your services –Bam! –they deliver the new higher pricing plan. There is no indication of course, that the cloud vendors intend to do that. In fact, right now, they can’t afford to do it because one can’t raise prices, while the others keep them low because you’ll just switch services. That’s where it gets tricky for the vendors. The competition has reached the point that they keep cutting prices until we are looking at percentages of pennies. It’s important to note that computing power isn’t fixed of course. The reason they can continue to cut prices is because the target continues to move. The price of computing plunges with the prices offered to consumers, but no matter how low the cost of the hardware, it will never be zero –and the Big Three infrastructure players have to decide at some point if they can continue to play this increasingly dangerous game. |
Design Firm Adaptive Path Acquired By Capital One | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | , a San Francisco-based design and user experience consultancy, has been acquired by financial firm Capital One. That’s not the most obvious acquirer, but , Adaptive Path co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Jesse James Garrett said that after talking to a number of potential acquirers in the years since it was founded in 2001, Capital One was first one to seem like a good fit: You can see where this is going, right? Somebody came along who finally, truly, seemed to get it. A company with a great culture that shares and values our intellectual curiosity and design sensibilities, that wants us to continue doing great work inside their organization, but also continue helping others do great work too, by fostering dialogue and teaching what we have learned. And that somebody, remarkably, turned out to be Capital One. Garrett also said that the Adaptive Path team will stay together, and that it will continue to organize events and post on the Adaptive Path site. What it won’t be doing, however, is providing any more outside design consulting — all of that will now be directed towards “solving experience design problems for Capital One.” Adaptive Path also seems noteworthy for its founding team of Garrett, Lane Becker, Janice Fraser, Mike Kuniavsky, Peter Merholz, Jeffrey Veen, and Indi Young — many of whom went on to start other companies. (I was amused to learn that .) Oh, and by the way, if you’re still skeptical about whether the two companies are a good fit, yesterday, which TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez described as “surprisingly well-designed for an app coming from a traditional financial institution.” So there’s that. |
Lynxsy Launches A Mobile Recruitment App For Job Hunters | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | With planned layoffs and , the job market in America seems to have finally crawled back from the darkest days of the Great Recession. And as the jobs market heats up, a whole host of apps have launched with new ways to help recent grads and current employees find the perfect job. One tool that recently launched from the Accelerator program in New York is , which aims to connect recent college graduates with companies in part-time positions so that job-seekers and employers can try before they commit to applicants for a full-time position. This try-before-you-buy model is appealing to both job seekers and employers, because it lets candidates get a sense of office culture and their role at a company, before having to commit for a full-time position. Hiring managers post jobs to Lynxsy’s talent network and candidates apply from their mobile phones. When a candidate gets a gig, Lynxsy then manages the payroll process with a third-party provider. Right now, the company focuses on non-technical roles such as customer service, sales and operations. So far, Lynxsy has 100 companies and 5,000 candidates on its platform. The New York-based service has partnered with 15 universities in the Northeast including schools like New York University, The University of Pennsylvania, Bentley College, Cornell University, Vanderbilt University, Georgetown University and more. Typically, trial periods for candidates last from one to three months, during which the candidate is working through a third-party payroll provider. “We are specifically focused on high-growth companies,” says chief executive Susan Zheng. “We curate the companies on the candidate side so that they know that they’ve been vetted.” Lynxsy focuses on non-technical positions at these companies and has so far placed over 70 candidates. “There’s been such high unemployment rate among recent grads,” says Zheng. And while the service isn’t much different from temporary staffing agencies, Zheng argues that there’s a group of new graduates that doesn’t know about those kinds of services. “There are people who don’t know about them or don’t find them appealing in terms of the types of jobs they offer,” says Zheng. “The platform is not about a temporary job. It’s really for candidates to get their foot in the door.” Through her vision, Zheng and her co-founder have been able to attract $800,000 in financing from investors including , , , and . |
GoPro Drops Following News That Its Founders Will Move 5.8M Shares To Charitable Group | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | GoPro’s stock is down dramatically today, off more than 6 percent, after it was announced that its founding team will move more than 5.8 million shares to a charitable group. Immediate punditry a way around the normal lock-up period that prevents insiders from selling shares in newly public companies for a set period of time. The rules are in place to prevent pump-and-dump schemes with freshly floated firms. GoPro is up massively since its initial public offering. However, today is not its first large, single-day decline: After its first public earnings report, GoPro fell heavily. As : For the second quarter, had revenue of $244.6 million, up 38.1 percent year-over-year, and earnings per share of $0.08 on a non-GAAP basis. Analysts had expected GoPro to earn $0.06 per share (non-GAAP) on revenue of $237.73 million. […] Using normal accounting methods, GoPro lost $19.8 million in the quarter, or $0.24 per diluted share. By comparison, GoPro was profitable on a GAAP basis in its first quarter of 2014. In its year-ago quarter, the company also lost money, with a GAAP net loss of $5.1 million, or $0.06. The move of the founders to shift shares doesn’t change the core business, but it does, in they eyes of some, indicate that the team is looking to take some near-term profits. That’s slightly ironic, but correct. GoPro is among a larger cadre of technology, and technology-adjacent companies that recently went public, and have since performed strongly. Zendesk is kin, along with MobileIron. Some companies, however, like King Digital have struggled. GoPro remains a public company without too much of a public record, amplifying the impact of insider sales and transfers. The company is worth nearly $11 billion, following the selloff. |
Back To The Magic With The Formlabs Form 1+ | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | 3D printers has been the Formlabs . Using a unique technology in home printing, stereolithography, the Formlabs folks have created a usable, fun, and surprisingly versatile home 3D printer that produces pro-quality pats. Now that printer has gotten better. First, a bit of explanation that I added to my original . The $3,299 Form 1+ is a stereolithography machine and not a fused deposition modeling (FDM) machine and this is an important distinction to make. We are probably all familiar with machines like the Makerbot. These machines use FDM to extrude a small bead of metal or plastic to “draw” one slice of the shape you’re building over and over again until the object is built. The Form 1+ shines a laser onto a metal surface through a layer of resin. Using a process of photopolymerization, the slices are laid down one after the other creating a solid object that lifts out of the resin as it is built. Think of the Makerbot as a stalagmite maker — the material is laid down on a platform — while the Form 1 is a stalactite maker where the object hangs from the platform that slowly moves up. Because we are using laser light to “draw” each later, the details can be as fine as 300 microns and layers are as thin as 25 microns. The Makerbot maxes out at 100 microns. In actual quality this means that Form 1+ objects are perfectly smooth, like injection molded objects. FDM objects are terraced with little lines where each layer was laid down. While both methods are excellent for prototyping, the Form 1+ is slightly better for smooth mold-making and for getting a finer, more detailed final product. Think of it as a Rolls Royce vs. a Dodge Viper. Both of them get you there but Formlabs is focused on quality while FDM printers are focused on Viper-like speed. The new model, called the Form 1+, looks almost exactly like the original Form 1. It is a brushed metal beauty, a piece of art that looks great on the desk, and the machinery is completely hidden inside the bottom case. An orange hood covers a tray of resin and a build plate, and the machine is quiet (not silent) and has a footprint of about one square foot. It looks like a 3D printer is supposed to look, that is to say very much like something out of Star Trek. How does it perform? As you’ll recall, the original Form 1 took about four hours to print a test model, a stylized rook with a hollow core and clever winding staircase. The new model could print the same thing in about two hours, a considerable difference. I’m also impressed with the improvement in quality. Because of an improved laser and mirror system, the prints have finer details and better integrity. The new test model they offer, the Twisted Rook, offers some amazing little details including raised lettering on the top and clever textural tricks. And, like the original Form 1, the printed pieces look – and are – completely solid. Below you can see the original rook print on the Form 1 (next to a Makerbot print) and next you see the Twisted Rook on the Form 1+. Also improved is the support system used by Formlabs’ software, PreForm. The software now uses far less material to produce the necessary struts and supports and the points of contact with the models are much smaller. Whereas I had to cut off the supports on Form 1 prints, Form 1+ supports just snap off. Now for the bad news. The resin Formlabs uses – which comes in clear, black, and gray – is messy stuff. The printed object rises from a tub of resin like the Swamp Thing and is usually covered in it when you pull it off the base using a scraper. This means you should wear gloves at all times while handling the uncured model. Then, after bathing the object in alcohol for 10w minutes you have to pull it out for another alcohol bath. This is definitely not a printer for grade schoolers and things can get messy fast for users who aren’t careful. [gallery ids="1065382,1065381,1065379"] That, in short, is the primary issue with SLA. It’s an amazing technology but it’s still messy. Whereas FDM is a straightforward process – print, pull off, rejoice – the Form 1+ adds a few steps. This is by no means a deal breaker, just a consideration. For example, you might want a separate, clear worktable to manage your SLA prints, whereas FDM machines just need the space on which they sit. The printer also requires a light touch. Because of the unique nature of SLA printing you’ll find that sometimes the prints should be produced diagonally and held up by supports and at other times directly on the build plate. The new software reduces many of these questions but it can be frustrating to have a long print fail because of minor glitches during printing. I have performed a number of test prints using this device including a difficult “hole and peg” test that came out a mess. I can’t fault the printer, however, because with a bit of tweaking I’m sure they’d work. Be aware of this before embarking on your prints and you’ll be fine. [gallery ids="1065384,1065383,1065385"] Who is this for? It’s for designers and engineers who want to build a cohesive plastic part without much fuss. It is not a large format printer – it makes things about 4.9×4.9×6.5 inches – but the things it makes are amazing. Despite the issues I have curing the SLA, however, the Form 1+ is the way to go if you’re looking to move up from FDM. The quality is peerless and the print time is vastly improved. It is a designer’s dream machine, a device that can produce objects in full resolution and in surprising detail. At $3,299 it is very expensive. This is not a hobbyist’s printer. And, because the resin isn’t rated for lost wax casting, the utility beyond prototyping is limited. However, if you want a perfect product, perfectly printed, this is the way to go. |
Platforms Triumphed While Content Wasn’t Even Looking | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | Microsoft is buying Mojang (makers of Minecraft) for . That’s really impressive when you consider that Mojang has been around for only a few years. The deal is one more step in a recent triumph of platform companies – a triumph of recognizing that what people really want is to contribute and participate, not merely consume. YouTube. Twitter. Facebook. Now Minecraft. All platforms. All worth billions. And what better way to put this platform triumph into perspective than to show that it’s a trend that has emerged (across more than interactive media) over more than forty years. Roll back the clock to the 1960s when a little company called LEGO imagined a “platform” toy based on the LEGO brick. There were other platform toys in existence, including Erector sets and Lincoln Logs. But the LEGO platform was superior in many ways. It capitalized on the new technology of plastic and injection molding. The LEGO brick (and more importantly, the LEGO snap and form factor) ultimately provided a platform that allowed a much broader range of play and modeling, and endless possibilities for creativity. You could construct characters, buildings, ships, vehicles, and trees. Erector and other building toys could not match the breadth. And when LEGO eventually introduced LEGO Technic, they also captured highly technical and mechanical types of modeling. Compare the growth of LEGO to that of other toy companies, such as Hasbro and Mattel. Their business is based on a wide variety of toys. In effect, they are content publishers and franchise owners – not platforms. Within their businesses, there are “platforms” (really franchises) such as Barbie, Hot Wheels, and licenses such as Transformers. But none of these is as broad as the LEGO platform. Every year, LEGO tunes and improves its platform while other toy companies try to figure out new and exciting hits. LEGO manufactures its own hits like Ninjago; it has become its own cultural phenomenon with . And on top of it all, 15 years ago LEGO embraced outside licenses, strengthening their platform with hits like Star Wars and Harry Potter. Fast forward to last week, and we now see how the emergence and dominance of platforms has triumphed in the toy industry. LEGO is now the largest toy manufacturer in the world based on revenue and profitability. And it shows no sign of slowing down. We are at the beginning of this platform explosion in the gaming space. Minecraft is really a platform. The first time user gets a great crafting/zombie/survival game. But ultimately all Minecraft players migrate to become creators and engineers of the Minecraft platform. They play user-created mods on user-hosted servers. They use the platform to build their own content. The Minecraft platform is their medium and they are the artists, creating and sharing. This platform play is what has given Minecraft such enormous stickiness and viral growth. Like LEGO, or ROBLOX – the primary work at Mojang is to improve the platform, not to come up with a new and exciting game (or extend the franchise for yet one more season). And unlike the traditional gaming market, this improvement is continuous and measured in the scale of weeks and months. Franchises have long been dominant in the gaming world. EA’s Madden Football has generated more than $4 billion in revenue over its 25-year run. Activision’s Call of Duty has reaped more than $5 billion. Both those franchises require constant effort and enormous investment to keep their momentum. Witness the recent launch of Activision’s anticipated Destiny. Sure, its launch sales were somewhere around $500 million… and so were the costs of developing and marketing it. (And it’s far too early to say whether Destiny will even rise to franchise status.) By comparison, once a platform is in motion, the effort invested continuously accelerates quality, and as a result, growth. There is enormous technical leverage in a platform – you are constantly increasing the quality and performance of a single product rather than inventing and reinventing a new game with each iteration of a franchise. And market leverage? Even more enormous. Neither Minecraft nor ROBLOX invests hundreds (or even tens) of millions of dollars in marketing; when you have a platform, your participants become the engine of your growth – word of mouth is more powerful than anything a franchise company can create for itself. Further, consider the position of a Mojang or ROBLOX to Zynga or Take Two Interactive. Zynga tries to have some aspects of a platform with their “Ville” brand. But they are a publisher just like Mattel or Hasbro is in the toy business. And every new “Ville” game may leverage some brand affinity to FarmVille. But Zynga users are not putting together their own Ville games. And Zynga users are not using pieces from FarmVille in CastleVille. And Zynga users are definitely not pasting versions of their personal Clumsy Ninja into their FarmVille world. Investors realize this, and this is why, even with a lot more revenue, Zynga is also valued at roughly $2.5 billion – the same as Mojang. And Take Two Interactive, publishers of Grand Theft Auto? It’s a lucrative – albeit expensive to maintain — franchise. GTA V, released to great fanfare recently, took in $800 million on its first day. And yet, the market values Take Two Interactive at LESS than the value of Mojang ($1.9 billion). LEGO was an early platform play in an industry that has grown slowly over decades. We will of course see more and more platforms emerging as entertainment moves from the physical to internet world. It’s already happening, and much faster than with the world of traditional toys. Facebook, iTunes, eBay, Google, and Amazon are all examples of emergent internet platform plays… and none of them is more than a couple of decades old (and most are far younger). In the gaming space, we are VERY early in the platform explosion. Think about the size of the Minecraft platform relative to the fidelity of what users are building in Minecraft. With some simple one-sized voxels, Mojang was able to create a $2.5B platform with tens of millions of participants. Compare this to what will eventually be possible, and you can see the boundless future available to game platform plays. To understand the beauty and scope of gaming platforms that will emerge over the next five to ten years, just watch a PIXAR movie. Gaming platforms will ultimately look and feel like today’s top CGI feature films. Ultimately, we expect top gaming platforms to command market valuations on par with other mega-platforms like Facebook. Minecraft is only the first shot – the platform wars have officially begun. |
Netflix’s Exclusive Content Push Continues With A Foray Into Film | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | Over the last few days, Netflix has announced a couple of deals that will bring a series of films to its streaming video platform over the coming years. The partnerships represent a new form of “exclusive” content for Netflix, and what could be seen as a new outlet for film production studios. But they probably won’t change the industry as a whole, at least not in the short term. The first of the two deals, which was announced with the Weinstein Company, will on Netflix at the same time the film hits theaters. And the second will . For the studios, those deals will remove some of the risks associated with producing and marketing a film. In an age where theaters are seeing a gradual decrease in the number of attendees, hedging their bets through non-traditional licensing deals, video-on-demand sales, and international ticket sales is becoming increasingly important. In the case of Crouching Tiger, the Weinsteins get a guaranteed paycheck no matter how well — or poorly — the film does in theaters. That’s important for a film with an uncertain audience. While the original was critically acclaimed and did incredibly well at the box office, both in the U.S. and abroad, that was nearly 15 years ago. There’s no guarantee a new generation of viewers even remembers that film, let alone will flock to a sequel lacking the original cast or director Ang Lee. As for Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions, the production house won’t have to worry about creating any more money-losing films. Sandler’s movies are some of the most popular on Netflix, but at the box office they can be hit-or-miss. For every hit like Grown Ups, there seems to be one or two films that doesn’t make up its budget at the box office. It’s probably worth noting that the big hits are becoming less frequent, while recent box office flops seem to be increasing. Whether that’s because today’s viewers find Sandler’s particular brand of comedy less funny than they did a decade ago, or simply that comedy films are less appealing in general is unclear. The fact is, Sandler’s comedy continues to do well in DVD and video-on-demand suggests that more viewers are skipping the movie-theater experience and deciding to watch comedies at home. And that plays very well with Netflix’s core demographic. Netflix is essentially de-risking the cost of making and marketing a film — paying the production studio upfront for the budget of whatever Sandler ends up making. For a studio that has bombed on the big screen but still has a rabid small-screen audience, that’s good news. For Netflix, these films will end up as a kind of brand-building marketing collateral. Just as it did with House Of Cards, Orange Is The New Black, and Arrested Development, being the only place where viewers can watch a certain piece of content could lead to new subscribers. Or at the very least lead existing subscribers to stay on the service. No doubt Netflix will keep tabs on its viewership and has some internal metrics that will decide whether a certain film was worth purchasing or not — and it will likely use those metrics to improve licensing decisions in the future. But really, the only metric that matters is subscribers, and whether or not Sandler and Crouching Tiger will result in that metric rising up and to the right. |
Expert Witness For Silk Road Suggests FBI Lied About How They Accessed Back-End Servers | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | According to a court document released today, expert witness Joshua J. Horowitz, a , believes the FBI is not telling the whole truth when it comes to how In the document, reproduced below, Horowitz says that his “practice is concentrated on criminal defense matters that require expertise in technology and computer software” and that he has extensive experience in Linux and open source server software – arguably a rare skill for those in the legal profession. Horowitz writes: In short, Horowitz believes that the FBI could not have accessed the server remotely because it was separated from the front end a firewall that refused external connections. In other words, the front end was easily visible but the back end would have been impossible to access from the outside world. It is, to be fair, a convincing argument. The crux of the argument is here: There was, Horowitz says, a wall between the front end and the back end. Is Horowitz correct? His assertions, while nuanced, are still going up against the scrutiny of an Internet full of sysadmins. “At this point aren’t we lead to believe that [Ulbricht] showed multiple cases of mismanagement. From this can we not call bullshit on the very definitive declaration by the defense that the webserver was explicitly configured to deny external connections?” wrote one . In any case, the jury is still out.
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Will Tesla Finally Unveil An Insane Model S Supercar? | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | What would happen if Tesla added a second powertrain to the Model S? If the car had two electric motors and the batteries needed to power everything properly? If the drag coefficient was improved, making the already sleek Model S even more slippery? If the chassis was tuned for improved performance and sticky tires added? Tesla would have a supercar on its hands. A person can dream, but Tesla could be on the verge of announcing such a Model S with a wicked amount of power. We hear it’s the vehicle Elon Musk and image (above) Wednesday afternoon. The bones are already there. The Model S is already surprisingly fast thanks to the nature of electric power. The Signature Performance Model S variant can do 0-60 in 4.2 seconds. Tesla has long been rumored to release such a beast along with a more pedestrian version of the Model S with AWD. The company had to develop an AWD for the upcoming Model X AWD SUV so it was always highly likely Tesla would bring the goods to its sedan as well. A ultra-high performance Model S would likely satisfy a niche market of buyers and fans alike. The Tesla Roadster is long gone and the Model S is getting a bit stale. As countless car makers before it, Tesla could extend the Model S’ shelf life by simply offering more exclusive editions. Tesla could stuff an additional motor into the front boot of the Model S. I suspect Tesla would employ two of its smaller Model S engines in favor of less weight. Still, even with two of Tesla’s smallest motors, the output would be north of 600 hp. Additional batteries would likely be added to compensate for increased power draw. Tesla then could look to others for additional modifications. Saleen recently announced its tuned version of the Model S. Along with some body mods, the company essentially left the vehicle alone but tuned the powertrain’s gear ratio, allowing it to sprint to 60 MPH a bit quicker. The tuning company also improved the cooling system and, thankfully, added a cup holder. Tesla would likely employ similar enhancements. However, adding a second motor and additional batteries would add weight to the vehicle. The Model S is already a heavy car — it’s about 300 lbs heavier than a BMW M5. But adding an additional motor would significantly increase its power to weight ratio, more than compensating for the added heft. The Model S’s electric motor weighs about 350 lbs. If we assume everything else weighs the same on the so-called super Model S, and just an additional motor was added, the power to weight ratio of 11.4 decrease to 7.85, which is on par with the BMW M5’s 7.78 horsepower to 1 lb ratio. It’s a significant jump in power moving it to supercar performance territory. Despite a slumping stock price, Tesla is still riding high. It doesn’t need a supercar, but such a model would act like its Corvette or Viper. A halo car. Tesla needs something new to draw shoppers into showrooms and to parade around auto shows that isn’t a family hauler. Tesla is growing up and needs to keep the energy alive around the brand. Nothing excites more than a supercar. And cup holders. Please, Elon, put some damn cup holders in your cars. |
Marketing Automation For Mobile Company Appboy Grabs $15 Million More | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | , a marketing automation company for mobile apps has raised $15 million in Series B funding, in a round the company says was “oversubscribed.” Early Marketo investor InterWest Partners led the round, and is joined by existing investors Icon Venture Partners, Blumberg Capital, T5 Capital and IDG Ventures. As a part of the new funding, InterWest General Partner Doug Pepper, whose background includes time spent working with Flurry, Optimizely, Tapjoy and Spredfast, will join Appboy’s board. The funding comes on the heels of last year’s $7.6 million Series A, and brings Appboy’s total raise to date to $22.6 million. The company, by way of background, offers app publishers a suite of tools to engage mobile users, understand their app users’ demographics, then target them accordingly through in-app messages, push notifications and email. Its goal is not to focus on user acquisition, but instead on keeping the users after they arrive. That’s proving to be a difficult challenge for mobile publishers, as the leading app stores now top over a million apps each, and end users seem to have developed a relationship with apps where the majority are seen as disposable – or worse, are merely just forgotten, abandoned on distant homescreens. Appboy says its company has seen 210% growth in its customer base since the beginning of this year, and now touts a line-up that includes well-known names like LifeLock, Shutterfly, USA Today Sports and Urban Outfitters. The additional funding will be put toward sales and marketing, says Appboy. |
Evernote Unveils Evernote Context, An AI Play That Surfaces Content From Outside Sources As You Write | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | Today, — the note-taking and storage app now with 100 million users — announced one of its latest and biggest steps forward in its bid to develop services that will not just keep people using its app to store notes and thoughts regularly, but to use it for ever more purposes: it’s launching — an AI play that will see it surfacing and suggesting new content to you from third party sources as you read and write, alongside Evernote’s existing ability to surface relevant content from your own documents and, in Evernote Business, those of your work colleagues. “Your workspace should have the information that you need,” CEO Phil Libin said today. This will mean adding a new content feed from third party sources that will appear within Evernote, alongside and relevant to the work that you are doing within the app, wether you are on desktop or another client. Sources that will show up include social networks like LinkedIn (which earlier this year and seems to have a wider relationship now with Evernote), data resources like CrunchBase and news sources — such as the WSJ (and TechCrunch, from what I understand). This is part of a wider relationship with WSJ and News Corp., too, which includes swapped-over premium subscriptions where users of Evernote Premium get one year of free WSJ; and WSJ subscribers get a free year of Evernote Premium. Evernote is likely to launch Evernote Context by “next month”, Libin said. The news was made public today at the company’s big annual conference, EC4, where Libin talked eloquently on the merits of short-term and long-term decisions and how that applies to life and also to Evernote. Evernote has a wider remit to create a platform that people can use for the rest of their lives and beyond. Moves like adding in more third-party content to use while you are creating documents is more about how Evernote is used for more immediate work and synthesizing ideas. “The idea is whenever you are working in Evernote, you’re not doing it in a vacuum. You’re not opening up a blank page. Evernote is finding information that is most actionable to you right now,” Libin said today. This is The idea behind Evernote Context is that it builds upon features that Evernote already have. One, Related Notes, which surfaces your other notes that are related to the one you’re typing in. Evernote Business users, meanwhile, get related notes from coworkers. These are now being rolled into the wider Context service. Sourcing third-party content in Context will be the next step in that trajectory. It will give you notes in the left margin that will then be able to be brought into the document that you are writing. When you mention something in your writing, Evernote “reads” this information and suggests links to you, for example contacts from LinkedIn, or data from CrunchBase or a story from one of its partners (in addition to the WSJ and TC, there is Factiva (for those who subscribe), Fast Company, Inc. and Pando Daily. You can then drag info from these cards as a notation into your document in to illustrate what you are writing. “This changes how you interact with business news,” Libin said, saying that this will help with all four of the pillars that it sees as essential to how people use Evernote: writing, reading, collecting and presenting. “We’ve tried to make the writing experience across all our clients really polished,” CEO Phil Libin said today. “Evernote wants to be the best place for writing.” There is also a wider idea here that’s worth highlighting: by bringing in context sources to Evernote itself, it’s also positioning Evernote as a place where people can not only create content, and store interesting things that they have collected elsewhere, but now also discover new content. This is the route that other sites like Facebook, Twitter have taken and have helped transform them from simple services for communication into wider platforms where you can spend a large part of your online life. |
Selfinception: Frontback Adds Selfie Comments | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | All your selfies are belong us. photo-sharing app just received a major update. You will now be able to leave comments on a Frontback post — but not just text comments. With Frontback React, you take a selfie of your reaction and adds a few words. It’s perfectly in line with the of the app. While I very irregularly post to Frontback, I open the app every day — you can call me a lurker. I get to see what my friends have been up to, beautiful or funny staff picks, and posts from popular accounts. As a reminder, a Frontback post is just two square-ish photos on top of each other, filling up the entire screen of your phone — the bottom picture is usually a selfie, while the top picture is what you see. You get a photo and the context of the photo. For the last few weeks, I’ve been browsing reactions from strangers around the world. Something interesting happened. People from very different parts of the world started sending reactions to my friends. Depending on the original post, they could be funny, supportive or helpful. The vast majority of them are nice and personal. With each swipe to reveal a new reaction, you can feel the pulse of the Frontback community. And because sometimes selfies are not that helpful, you can also switch camera and take what you are seeing instead of taking a selfie. You can even shoot a short video. Overall, React is by far the biggest update for Frontback and deeply changes the main mechanism of the app. By adding comments, many things could have gone wrong, but the startup did this right. First, you have to understand how the Frontback community works. Before today, the only possible interaction with a Frontback post was pushing the big central heart icon to like a post — the only feedback you got on your pics was the number of likes. In other words, the app voluntarily restricted you to positive feedback. There is probably nothing worse than receiving insults on a selfie, and Frontback prevented that — this is not a . Don’t get me wrong, there are strong business incentives for this. You improve your retention rate, make your platform more welcoming to new users, lower self-censorship. In short, your numbers look better. Then, as Frontback is a global public platform, memes started to appear — , , , , etc. Community manager Elissa Patel has done a good job fostering them. To talk to each other and react to meme posts, people started taking a picture of their laptop screens showing a popular Frontback, and answering it with the other pic. React is just the natural evolution of this use case. Frontback posts can be very personal, and reactions follow the same trend. Each comment displays the username, the location and a caption. And of course, most of the time you can see your friend’s face. In some way, it reproduces real life interactions as closely as possible. Recently a Frontback user has been going through a depression and sent a Frontback with a caption that read “My depression hasn’t been this bad in years.” Beta users from Japan, the U.S., Chile and Canada sent reactions to bring her a bit of support. This is one of the most human experience I have seen on a social network. Finally, Frontback’s new feature is a funny turn of events. Before Frontback, the team was working on Checkthis, a storytelling website and app. You could put together multiple photos and paragraphs to create a short story. While the product didn’t get enough traction, Frontback accidentally recreated part of the storytelling experience behind Checkthis. Co-founder and CEO Frédéric della Faille has used the React features multiple times to add more pictures to his posts. For instance, he recently got a coffee table book about the inspiration behind . He shared a few pages of the book in the reactions, adding more pictures to his original post. To build a feature like React, you first need to nail the basic user experience of your app and create a community. Comments can’t work without a lot of active users. Now, I have no doubt that reactions are going to be an important part of Frontback. I can’t wait to see how the community is going to use this new feature in a creative and compelling way. |
Evernote Launches New Web Client | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | The web client is about to get a big refresh, CEO Phil Libin announced during his keynote at today’s EC4 conference. By Libin’s telling, the team realized that the user experience was “clunky,” and sought to make a simpler interface that “melts away” as you write. The new web app uses a lot more white space throughout the interface, leaving you with a much cleaner workspace that doesn’t draw your eye to past notes as you add new ones to the same extent as you’d fine the native desktop app. As with the previous web client, this new update will be available for free to registered Evernote users but will offer more features to Premium subscribers. If you’d like to check out the difference between the desktop or mobile apps (or have yet to sign up but would like to see what the fuss is about), Libin says that the new web client will be available today. : I just jumped over to the site, and the new client is indeed available if you agree to go to the Beta. Here’s what the new home screen looks like: And here’s the new note-taking interface looks like. Libin wasn’t kidding when he said that things melt away from the screen: |
Twitter For Mac Gets Multiple Photo Sharing, Support For Photos In Messages | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | Twitter’s native application for OS X users has just been updated with a small handful of photo-sharing features and other improvements that bring the desktop application more in line with what’s available on the web and on mobile. Most notably, the app now supports the ability to tweet out multiple photos in one update, where before it was limited to just one. The ability to share multiple photos was , and, frankly, it’s been a little frustrating for Twitter for Mac users to have to leave their preferred application to do something as simple as posting a few more pictures. The end result, likely, is that people didn’t bother. That now changes. As on other platforms, Twitter for Mac only supports sharing up to 4 photos at a time – a seemingly artificial limit that doesn’t always make sense. For instance, I recently out the onboarding screens for Gmail (because hey, it’s not every day you get to see what a new Gmail user sees!), but found that I had to drop an image or two from the series I wanted to share. You’ll also be able to click each image preview in order to view the full photo, the app update’s text informs us. In addition to the multi-photo posting option, Twitter for Mac users can now share photos privately in Messages, too. That’s another feature that arrived quite some time ago for web and mobile users – in fact, it first rolled out . Beyond those two key upgrades, the rest of the update appears to include the usual “bug fixes and performance improvements.” I hope this means I’ll stop seeing the spinning color wheel of death on occasion, when trying to use features like block and report spam. We’ll also be checking to see if anything else interesting flew in under the radar, but for now the app is a free upgrade on the . |
Evernote Market Has Sold $12M In Products Since Launch | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | CEO Phil Libin gave us an update on the company’s digital marketplace for productivity hardware and accessories, , at today’s EC4 conference in San Francisco, Calif. He began by noting that the company opened Evernote Market hoping that it would simply break even. Sold more than $12 million in product since launch, vastly beating expectations. Libin also went on to say that 50% of revenue from the Market comes from buyers making their first purchase. That’s pretty surprising, considering he also gave the stat that Evernote Business users are three times more likely to buy goods from the Market compared to Premium users, and 80 times more likely than the service’s free users. One aspect of the Market’s growth have been accessories that people who are obsessed with productivity can use during their daily lives, away from their computers. For example, Libin noted that they’ve sold more than half a million Moleskine notebooks since the store’s launch. Evernote is also working to further integrate Evernote with the products that it sells on its Market. Libin gave the example of the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, which lets you quickly scan pieces of paper into a file that works with Evernote. To further improve that functionality, Evernote is releasing a new app called “Scannable,” which will make the document reading function accessible from your phone while also making documents scanned more quickly accessible. |
Keep Calm And Attend Hardware Alley In London | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | It’s Hardware Alley time again and we want to see you at ! The alley, which runs during the last day of Disrupt, features all of my favorite startups – the hardware ones – in glorious Technicolor. What is ? It’s a celebration of hardware startups (and other cool gear makers) that features everything from robotic drones to 3D printers. We try to bring in an eclectic mix of amazing exhibitors and I think you’ll agree that our previous We’d like you to register as a Hardware Alley exhibitor. You’ll get to exhibit on the last day of , October 21, to show off your goods and get access to some of the most interesting people (and most interesting VCs) in the world. All you need to demo is a laptop. TechCrunch provides you with: 30″ round cocktail table, linens, table-top sign, inclusion in program agenda and website, exhibitor WiFi, and press list. You can reserve your spot by purchasing a . If you are Kickstarting your project now or bootstrapping, please contact me at john@beta.techcrunch.com with the subject line “HARDWARE ALLEY.” I will do my best to accommodate you. Hope to see you in London! |
Facebook Announces Stricter Guidelines For Research And Experiments On Its Users | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | After a study on whether turned into a PR disaster, Facebook has now set up a on its users, and to centralize all the academic work done on its enormous data set. Facebook admitting to screwing up with the , explaining “We were unprepared for the reaction the paper received when it was published and have taken to heart the comments and criticism. It is clear now that there are things we should have done differently. For example, we should have considered other ways to do this research. The research would also have benefited from more extensive review by a wider and more senior group of people. Last, in releasing the study, we failed to communicate clearly why and how we did it.” Facebook is not changing how it receives consent from users to experiment on them, and it doesn’t mention any external auditors for research, which could alarm some academics calling for both. Facebook bakes consent into its long, legalese Terms Of Service statement, so users automatically surrender to experimentation just for using the social network. They don’t have to sign or agree to anything about specific experiments, nor are the even usually aware of them. Facebook’s new framework for internal and external research now has clear guidelines. Facebook says if the research focuses on specific populations or demographics or is related to content “considered deeply personal (such as emotions), the study will have to endure an enhanced review process will before being pre-approved. A panel of senior researchers in different subject matters like privacy, legal, research, policy, and engineering will determine if a study meets the guidelines. Facebook will also train its engineers during their six-week introductory bootcamp on how research should be conducted. And veteran employees will also get education on proper research methods during annual security and privacy training sessions. Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer writes, “We believe in research, because it helps us build a better Facebook. Like most companies today, our products are built based on extensive research, experimentation and testing.” Yet the announcement is sympathetic to the public, which thought the emotional manipulation study crossed the line in terms of ethics. At the time of the uproar, I made three suggestions for how to win back public trust: If we’ve gained anything from the emotional manipulation study backlash, it’s that more of Facebook’s research will now be out in the open. Before, it was buried in academic journals and often lacked comprehensible explanations of what Facebook was doing and why. That both made it feel like Facebook was shadily being secretive, and left research open to sensationalist interpretation. While the concept of the emotional manipulation study was troubling, its execution only made people posted 0.1% fewer positive words in their posts. That’s that was trumped up as Facebook hurling people into depression. With more research transparency and a public conversation started about what’s ethical when experimenting on users, any happiness sacrificed by subjects of the emotions study has gone to the greater good. |
WhoWeUse Launches A New App For Local Service Recommendations | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | , a new mobile app delivering recommendations on local services from your social network, . As local services ratings and recommendation companies like Angie’s List thanks to rumors of a prospective sale to potential buyers like Amazon, Google, or Home Depot; it’s clear that companies still need a good referral for how to get at local markets. And WhoWeUse thinks it has the mobile answer to all of your local problems. The Maplewood, NJ-based company was created in the backyard bar of serial entrepreneurs and developers John Garbarino and Pete Clark and former Wall Street Journal reporter Spencer Ante. The three men met when Ante moved to New Jersey and began chatting up Garbarino, who lived two houses down the road. Garbarino had a mobile application development company, and was working on a new product, which would become WhoWeUse. The app developed from an email list for local sports that had morphed into a recommendation engine for doctors, electricians, and other services in the town. “It’s something that people were doing naturally and it wasn’t being done efficiently,” says Ante. While Garbarino adds, “It hit home for Spencer, because he just moved to the town and needed to know who to use.” WhoWeUse differs from the anonymous reviews on Yelp or Angie’s List in more than just its mobile native platform. The company bills itself as word of mouth “on steroids”. When someone downloads the app, it scans for local services that are in an address book and imports that contact information into the app. The app then organizes the services into ones that an individual uses and others that are used by other members of the contact list. The app then sorts each service into categories like car services, repairs, medical and health, and other categories. On top of the organizational feature, WhoWeUse has also layered on customer relationship management functionality and an ability for businesses to see who are the influencers within certain social networks, says Garbarino. Eventually, the app will add payment features and functionality so that the entire process of booking and paying for most local services can be handled through the app. “The low hanging fruit is lead generation,” says Ante. “It’s pay for performance… [small businesses] don’t have time to do marketing and don’t have a lot of online knowledge… So we become the social service for local.” |
GrabTaxi Raises $65 Million To Increase The Competition With Uber In Southeast Asia | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | You’d be forgiven for thinking that the taxi app war is exclusively a U.S. phenomenon, such is , but similar rivalries are actually ongoing across other parts of the world. The battle is heating up in Southeast Asia today, after — a Malaysia-headquarted company that is active in six countries — announced a $65 million investment round that it hopes will enable it to defeat Uber in Southeast Asia. The company has been busy raising funding this year. This round is the third investment it has announced since April. Though undisclosed, GrabTaxi says it takes it to “approximately $90 million” in funding this year. Given that it in April, and , this Series C round is around $65 million. The round is led by new investor Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures, GGV and Chinese travel giant Qunar. Another new investor, Hillhouse Capital, also put into the round. A $65 million raise is a lot of money for a startup in Southeast Asia, and GrabTaxi CEO Anthony Tan told TechCrunch that it will be spent hiring “great talent in order us to best in the region and a world-class app,” improving driver loyalty programs and the service generally for GrabTaxi drivers, and general grow and expansion. Tan says that GrabTaxi — which operates in 16 cities across Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia — will announce a new city expansion before the end of this month, though he declined to reveal it just yet. GrabTaxi is likely to also continue to expand the types of services that it offers in the region. He did not reveal GrabTaxi’s revenue rates or estimated time to profitability, but Tan did say that the company’s app has been downloaded more than 2.1 million times. It sees over 400,000 monthly active users, he noted, and claims a network of more than 50,000 drivers. Back in May, GrabTaxi claimed 1.2 million downloads and 250,000 monthly users. Initially, GrabTaxi made its name as an app that could be used to book licensed taxis, but it launched an Uber-like private car service GrabCar in Malaysia May, and has been rolling that out across its markets since then. At the same time, Uber has expanded its services in the other direction. The US firm began its time in Asia offering only its Uber Black private car service, but this year its cheaper UberX service has been launched across a number of cities in Southeast Asia. GrabTaxi is pushing out into new areas with the introduction of a motorbike taxi service, which last month, but Tan said it is too early to say how that initiative is going and where it might launch next. Tan has typically been reluctant to discuss Uber’s position in Asia, but he did tell TechCrunch that more competition is good for the industry, which is still to gain the awareness of mainstream consumers, though he believes his billion dollar rival can be toppled: Uber’s emergence within the region has opened the doors for us to strive for the better. The introduction of the GrabTaxi app was the initial phase of disruption for the taxi industry. Taxi drivers have been stuck in the rut for the longest time but Uber’s rise has helped us to push taxi drivers to take them to the next level. We’ve opened their eyes and ears for them to improve themselves and their service to remain relevant. We never rest on our laurels and say we’ve done enough. That is not something GrabTaxi will ever do. My team and I are constantly challenging ourselves to be able to remain the largest and most dominant player in this region. Hailo recently to focus on Asia, and earlier this year to expand into global markets. Given its position in the market, GrabTaxi would seem like a potential acquisition option for either firm, but Tan says his company’s exit is “is something that we will have to think about at a much later date”. For now, he says GrabTaxi is focused on providing safer and more convenient transportation for the 600 million people who live in Southeast Asia. That suggests that the service will remain focused on the region and not expand into other parts of Asia, although Tan declined to give specific information when asked about expansion plans. |
Lever Raises $10M From Matrix To Build An All-Encompassing Human Resources And Hiring Platform | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 10 | 2 | There are plenty of old-school software platforms for hiring and talent management like Taleo, which is owned by Oracle. But a new startup called , backed with $10 million from Matrix Partners, thinks that it might be time for a change. They’ve built a full suite of human resources software that’s meant to help companies source, schedule, interview and manage their pipeline of job candidates. In their private beta, they’ve racked up customers including Box, Coursera, Foursquare, GitHub, Lyft, Quora, Reddit, and Slack. It’s a SAAS-based business model where they charge fees based on usage, although founder and CEO didn’t disclose rates yet. “The market is really fragmented. On the one hand, there are applicant tracking systems and products like Jobvite, Jobscore, Taleo, and there’s SuccessFactors. Then there’s this whole other market of agencies,” Nahm said. “It’s an old market.” product includes Chrome extensions and e-mail syncing for sourcing, if a company wants to mark or remember candidates. You can e-mail, archive, and tag candidates in bulk. Agency recruiters can also send candidates into the system, and then there are little features like scheduled or delayed responses if a recruiter needs to say no to a candidate. For interviewers, there are simple feedback forms and scheduling systems. Then for overall HR managers, Lever produces reports on whether a company is meeting its goals. “We’re really trying to be that system that ties together the entire process. There are a lot of great products that are optimized for or crucial parts of the hiring process, like HackerRank, but there’s not really anything that can pull it all together,” Nahm said. “The hunger for these modern tools was so intense that it was actually pretty crazy.” Nahm was previously a product marketing manager at Google and she, and started the company back in 2012. They argue that “hyper-growth is the new norm” for many companies, which need to double in size every year while maintaining a high bar for quality and retaining a strong company culture. With so many companies vying for talent in the Bay Area, it’s incredibly competitive so companies have to move fast. With the round, Matrix general partner Dana Stalder, who has served on the board of other enterprise companies like recent IPO Zendesk, will join the board. Other investors include SV Angel, Redpoint, Index Ventures, Y Combinator, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Khosla general partners Keith Rabois and Ben Ling, Homebrew’s Hunter Walk and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. |
Mirantis Scores $100M To Continue Quest To Be Enterprise OpenStack Leader | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | jumped on the OpenStack bandwagon a few years ago when most companies had never heard of it, and it has ridden the wave as the project has grown increasingly popular with each passing year. Today, the company announced $100M in Series B funding to continue its quest to be the leader in enterprise OpenStack, a chunk of change that should help it keep marching forward. It’s a huge round for any company, but especially one based on open source software, and it’s even more impressive when you consider they raised $20M in total in two rounds total prior to this. The round is led by Insight Venture Partners. Other investors include August Capital, as well as existing investors Intel Capital, WestSummit Capital, Ericsson, and SAP. Alex Crisses, managing director at Insight Venture Partners will get a seat on the Mirantis board of directors as part of the deal. is an open source platform for deploying infrastructure as a service. It was launched four years ago as a joint project by Rackspace and NASA. The idea was to create an open source project as a check against the growing power of large proprietary IaaS providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. It has grown steadily and has an involved and growing community, a rich ecosystem and a vibrant supplier network that includes some of the biggest names in enterprise software. While they probably wouldn’t put it this way, Mirantis wants to be to OpenStack what Red Hat has been to Enterprise Linux. In other words, they want to be the corporate face of the project. And chances are, it’ll need every bit of that money, because it has some pretty stiff competition with the likes of HP, IBM, Cisco and yes, Red Hat, going for a piece of that enterprise OpenStack business. Just a couple of weeks ago, from client-server to cloud computing with an emphasis on OpenStack. But the competition doesn’t scare CEO Adrian Ionel. In fact, he appears to be supremely confident that his is the best pure play OpenStack out there, and he says it’s the only version that is true to its open source roots. When asked about his corporate competition, he says they don’t scare him, and in fact, he tells me his team trained the HP, Red Hat and Cisco engineering teams in OpenStack. “I’m not so sure they are heavy hitters, but they are all large, that’s for sure,” he said sarcastically. Ionel feels good about his position because he says he’s the only real open-OpenStack vendor out there unless you want to take your chances with the raw open source code. “Most customers who are adopting OpenStack are looking for open pure play. They don’t want to be locked into the product architecture of one specific vendor.” And he claims if you go with one of the big corporate names, they will add proprietary parts that will lock customers into those versions. He says his company’s is the only version out there that has actually been tested in large deployments and he says the company has 136 customers such as Wells Fargo, Orange, DirectTV and Ericsson (one of the company’s investors), and he says the company raised this money to send a message that they are in it for the long haul. “We are in it for the long run and think we can build a VMware-sized company,” he told me. What’s more Ionel says the company has gone from booking $1M a month in new business last year at this time to $1M a week now. The company is growing in leaps and bounds, and it has obviously attracted the attention of investors. He says straight out that the company expects to submit their IPO paperwork some time in 2016. And Mirantis is being a good corporate citizen. Ionel says they contribute 100 percent of everything they do upstream to the project and dedicate over 100 engineers to the next release of OpenStack. That’s a lot of resources for a company with 600 employees, 420 of which are engineers. As you would expect, that number is going to grow now with the new influx of cash, but even without the money, Ionel is a leader with confidence in his company and his products and he clearly wants to be the leader in enterprise OpenStack. The money his company got today should help. |
Yahoo In Talks To Buy Video Ad Platform BrightRoll For Around $700M | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | has been building up its video and video advertising content, and we have heard that it may make another key acquisition in the area to further raise its game. The company is in talks to acquire , the cross-platform digital video advertising service. TechCrunch has heard that term sheets have been signed, and that the price, if the deal is completed, could be anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion, but looks likely to be in the region of $700 million – $725 million. Yahoo is currently to consider a breakup and/or sale of the company. This could potentially have an impact on negotiations. Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL — Starboard’s target for a merger — earlier today said that a as part of AOL’s future plans. Were a BrightRoll acquisition to go through, you can see Yahoo’s logic: BrightRoll is a strong competitor against the and its leading online video property YouTube when it comes to video ad volumes and attracting publishers and advertisers. BrightRoll’s platform — which works across web, mobile and connected TV devices — acts as an intermediary and service for both advertisers and publishers. Advertisers plan, target, optimise and report digital video ad campaigns, while publishers plug BrightRoll ad inventory into their content. Its platform is one of the biggest of its kind: “#1 in ads served and largest reach to unique video viewers,” according to comScore in June 2014, and as pointed out by BrightRoll itself. The company works with 25 of the top 50 publishers, and 85 of the top 100 advertisers. Meanwhile, Yahoo is in a period of change. Under CEO Marissa Mayer, the company has made more than 30 acqui-hires of smaller startups to bring more talent to the company, in part to build out a stronger mobile business. But according to a report in , Yahoo, now flush with post-IPO Alibaba cash, will shift its acquisition strategy. Going forward, Yahoo’s acquisitions will be more in the Tumblr model: focusing on companies that build up Yahoo’s product and revenue-generating muscle. That’s crucial, given that the company has seen several recent quarterly sales declines. BrightRoll — estimated in 2013 to be “easily doing over $100 million in revenue” and a clear video play that could help monetise Yahoo’s to grow and make money from its — could fit the bill. According to CrunchBase, BrightRoll has raised from investors that include Adams Street Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Comerica Bank, True Ventures, Trident Capital, KPG Ventures, Michael Tanne, Fabrice Grinda, Auren Hoffman and Jeff Clavier. BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti would comment for this story. We have reached out to Yahoo for a comment and will update if we get a response. |
And The TechCrunch Disrupt Europe Finalists Are Crate, Disease Diagnostic Group, Oscult And PhotoMath | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | people have walked through door at this year’s conference in London. We had everyone from Elvis impersonators to people dressed up as chickens participate, as one does at a tech conference. Highlights included with Josh Constine about the high growth future of Aol, and what he learned after the mistake of firing TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and Neelie Kroes for the European startup ecosystem. And after some very intense and sophisticated Startup Battlefield pitches, we are down to our four finalists at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe. It was a difficult decision because the 15 startups that presented all were solving hard problems, and impressed their judges in their own right. But we had to whittle them down to four. Here they are: “What if we told you we could save one million lives every year with just refrigerator magnets and a laser pointer? DDG uses magneto-optical technology to change the way diseases are diagnosed. Our mission is to create a low-cost, reusable device that can reach the patient and differentiate between multiple diseases.” “PhotoMath is the world’s first camera calculator app. Point your phone camera toward a math expression and get an instant solution with detailed solving steps. The company behind PhotoMath is MicroBlink, with its mobile vision and real-time text-recognition technology.” |
Apple CEO Tim Cook Addresses The iPad’s Continued Lack Of Sales Growth | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | During today’s earnings call for Apple’s fiscal Q4 2014, CEO Tim Cook took time to address the iPad’s performance at length. Cook referred to a lot of the general kinds of negative feeling around iPad performance circulating around media and analysts, and brought up his own perspective on the product category. “I take a step back on iPad,” he said. “I know that there’s a lot of negative commentary in the market on iPad, but i have a sort of different perspective on it […] We’ve sold 247 million over the first four years, that’s more than we sold over the first four years of iPhone.” “To me, I view it as a speed bump, not a huge issue,” he added, referencing the lack of growth year-over-year for iPad during the past three quarters. “That said, we want to grow, we don’t like negative numbers on these things.” Cook said that while there’s a popular view among critics that the tablet market is saturated, that’s not what he’s seeing from the available data. He cited market research from this past June, which revealed that in the top six countries for Apple in terms of revenue generation, the one that showed the lowest percentage of iPads sold to people who’d never owned one before still showed over 50 percent sold to new buyers, with the range over the rest of the countries spanning 50 to 70 percent. Those numbers don’t indicate a saturated market, Cook says – and indeed, they do seem to suggest there are still a lot of potential new buyers for iPad devices. He maintains that it’s too early to tell what kind of upgrade cycle consumers have when it comes to the iPad, given that we’re only four years into its existence. Cook also said that, in response to suggestions that other product categories are cannabalizing iPad sales, he conceded that some customers are probably opting to purchase Macs or iPhones instead of iPads, and also that he had no problem with that – an expression of Apple’s continuing willingness to eat into parts of their own business with successful products from others. “I’m very bullish on where we can take iPad over time,” Cook said, saying that the long view on the product tells a better story than snapshots of performance over a brief period. We’re continuing to invest in the product pipeline, we’re continuing to invest in distribution.” |
In Oakland, A Sign of Some Very High Times | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | Two years ago, this building in downtown Oakland was the part of the country’s first major cannabis growing educational institution, Oaksterdam University. After federal agents from the IRS and DEA raided the home of founder and marijuana legalization activist Richard Lee, he stepped down and the university gift shop pictured above shut down and was left vacant for about a year. Today, the building is home to Edyn, a Y Combinator-backed startup that builds a wifi-connected garden and soil sensor. In the background is a leftover whiteboard from Oaksterdam’s tenancy, listing some marijuana varietals that were grown in the same space. How bad is the commercial real estate crunch in San Francisco and Silicon Valley? Uh, So bad that that prices per square foot . So bad that Uber and build its own headquarters from scratch. So bad that Doug Shorenstein, part of the storied multi-generational family of San Francisco developers that rehabbed the building that houses Twitter’s headquarters, to explain why landlords are the demanding 10-year leases that are making Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley and Marc Andreessen finally talk about the . Space is so tight that startups are quietly trickling over into downtown Oakland, where rents for creative office spaces are roughly half to two-thirds of what they are per square foot in San Francisco. The’s city’s San Francisco’s at around 14 percent. Nothing might be more symbolic of Oakland’s oncoming wave of change than what’s happened to the Oaksterdam University gift shop. The university, dubbed “America’s first cannabis college,” was started by activist Richard Lee to teach growers about everything from horticulture to law. An activist for more than two decades, Lee was involved in a failed bid back in 2010 to legalize the drug beyond medical use through the California state ballot proposition. His house over the summer by federal agents from the IRS and DEA with no particularly well-explained reasoning that I’ve seen. After a previous raid in 2012, from leading the institution and the gift shop stayed vacant for about a year. Meanwhile, Jason Aramburu, a Princeton grad who had worked on agricultural sustainability issues in East Africa, was starting a company. With the help of designer and Jawbone chief creative officer Yves Behar, that could pick up soil acidity, temperature and moisture. His company, called Edyn, first debuted on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last year. After operating in and out of Berkeley and San Francisco, Aramburu needed bigger office space. It’s tough. On the large end, the last time I checked there were less than a half-dozen spaces with more than 100,000 square feet available in SF. Small space is just as competitive and pricey. But Oakland’s a totally different story. When Aramburu first checked out the gift shop space, which had been vacant for at least a year, he heard some recorded chanting music wafting through the air. His Chinese-American landlords were doing a kind of ritual for someone to take the space. He signed the lease. It ended up costing about a tenth of what he would have ended up paying in San Francisco’s startup-heavy SOMA district. Yeah, And it’s three blocks from a BART station. “It’s insane,” he said. He had more than enough space for what he needed, so he’s renting out the other part to a non-profit. So now, the one-time cannabis educational institute is home to an Internet-of-things gardening startup. Edyn isn’t in Oakland. Up Broadway Street, there are a few other Y Combinator startups like journalism crowdfunding platform and , which is developing an HIV and AIDS vaccine. There’s also the high-end photo app a hefty $40 million led by Accel Partners, and the stalwart Pandora, which has been in the city for years. On a few weeks ago, Sam Altman mentioned that two Y Combinator companies were moving over, but he didn’t name who because it was the startups’ news to share, not his. He said that one was pretty high-profile. Then over the summer, Menlo Park-based real estate investment firm also plunked down $25 million to buy the old 400,000-square foot Sears building downtown. They’re going to renovate it, rename it “Uptown Station” and hope to lure a big tech tenant. Is Oakland prepared for what might be coming? The city has twice the land mass, half the population and roughly of the city budget of San Francisco. It’s in the at the moment where issues like community policing, jobs and education seem to be more at the forefront than housing, which is San Francisco’s red-hot button at the moment. ( ) Current mayor Jean Quan has adopted a plan to build 10,000 housing units, which seems to be inspired by former mayor and current California governor Jerry Brown’s playbook. (She did not return a request for comment.) Rebecca Kaplan, who , sees a lot of room for in-fill development. She thinks Oakland could add another . Wait, what? “That might sound like a lot,” said Kaplan, an MIT alum who started programming in BASIC and Pascal when she was 11. “But given that we have so much unbuilt space and so many abandoned buildings that need to be brought back into re-use, I don’t actually think 100,000 people would make Oakland feel overcrowded. We would still be so much less dense than San Francisco.” Across the Bay in San Francisco, there is practically a pissing match every time over building even a 100 units here or there. Over the summer in one of the lowest turnout elections in city history, San Francisco voters that was higher than existing height limits, which are . That proposition was funded primarily by . The ostensible intent was to prevent a wall of high-end luxury condos from sprouting along the city’s waterfront. But there’s a perverse consequence of injecting so much political uncertainty into every development: project and borrowing costs have to rise to compensate for the heightened risk of something not passing through city’s highly politicized process. Those additional financing costs get reflected in the ultimate prices of housing units. Oakland’s development process, however, is slightly more relaxed. The non-profit Housing Action Coalition . And Kaplan pointed to a that’s permitted to be built right above the 12th Street Oakland BART station. That is a choice piece of real estate, given that tech companies like Dropbox, LinkedIn and Salesforce currently under construction in San Francisco. “We have some absolutely fabulous commercial real estate if someone wanted to step in,” Kaplan said. Libby Schaaf, who has after being endorsed by her former boss Governor Brown, and startups to the city. She to offer loans to small, homegrown Oakland businesses, lured Code for America to come to Oakland and worked with them on a program to make . An earlier version of this story said that Code for America moved to Oakland; it merely partnered with the city on a number of projects and has no plans to move from San Francisco. “I really am hopeful that tech companies that come to Oakland choose to have a social conscience,” she said. “We’ve always been a city of social movements. That is the part of the DNA of our city.” While she was hesitant to throw out a specific housing goal like rivals Quan and Kaplan, she favored a lot of market-rate housing development along transit hubs. “One of the best ways to stave off more displacement is to build more housing,” Schaaf said. “We can create more revenue streams to address the affordable housing need, but we shouldn’t discourage this much-needed infusion of market-rate housing.” She favors using targeted subsidies to transform existing units into permanently affordable housing over constructing new below-market rate units. In San Francisco, developers either have to build 12 percent of units on-site as permanently affordable or pay 20 percent into a fund. It’s a particularly way of providing affordable housing units, since each . Without as much federal or state funding for affordable housing as there has been in the past, those costs usually get passed onto the buyers of other units, which makes . This new building slated for 6th and Howard in San Francisco, for example, permanently affordable unit. Schaaf argues that taking existing units that people already live in and either using tax credits or direct subsidies to convert them into permanently affordable units might be a more effective route. She still favors upholding inclusionary goals that set aside 15 percent of new housing in redevelopment areas as affordable. She also to cap the maximum increases under rent control to 10 percent a year when a landlord does capital improvements or debt service passthroughs. Rent control covers about 60,000 of Oakland’s roughly 170,000 units, which is a slightly lower percentage than San Francisco, where 172,000 of the city’s 376,000 housing units are rent-controlled. Oakland’s maximum rent increases are also looser than what you’ll find in San Francisco; they match the pace of inflation unless the landlord does capital improvements. San Francisco’s rent board caps , which means that almost half of the city’s units’ rents are declining in real economic terms even as market-rate rents on the city’s 37,000 non-rent controlled units climb to nationwide highs. Kaplan’s goal is to set aside 25 percent of new development as affordable housing. “The goal is not for Oakland to copy what San Francisco has done,” Kaplan said. “Our goal is a future that is thriving, dynamic and inclusive. We won’t allow wrongful evictions, we’ll enforce the housing laws and we’ll protect tenants.” For comparison, Mayor Ed Lee has said that he wants 10,000 units of his goal to build or rehabilitate 30,000 housing units by 2020 to be affordable. Oakland could sure use the tax revenues from tech jobs and population growth. The city has had to over the last decade after the 2008 financial crisis gutted its finances. San Francisco’s progressives also don’t seem to mind pushing tech across the Bay either; former mayor Art Agnos in a forum This is the thing. Cities make these decisions to attract these jobs, startups and people because they the tax base. As vocal and critical as parts of the progressive community are about Mayor Ed Lee’s policies, San Francisco’s annual budget is . Virtually all of that it has created. After the financial crisis, municipal Bay Area governments made choices favoring job creation. These choices just worked far faster than people anticipated. Too well for the current infrastructure and region’s severely constricted housing stock to handle. I was in San Francisco in the Mission District five years ago when blogs like shutting down amid the recession. These days, it’s a different story. With some longtime businesses being priced out, city supervisors that’s paired with financial incentives for landlords to sustain them. Then, of course, there’s housing. San Francisco has ended up since 2010, but it has in the same time period. Even with all the construction cranes everywhere, last year is only marginally better: the city in the last year but finished a during the last four quarters. As I’ve pointed out, it is a regional problem. But the Bay Area’s diffuse power structure makes it difficult to have a cohesive, long-term vision for the entire region. In New York City, there are 8.4 million people under a single municipal government. In the Bay Area, there are 7 million people living under 101 city governments and 10 bus and rail systems. Everyone ends up just shoving the problem onto everyone else, and the wealthiest suburbs on the peninsula and in Marin County are the worst culprits. Back in 2012, the city council of Mountain View, where Google is headquartered, , but no housing. That combination of limited or no housing development, plus Google’s transformation into has made home prices and rents out of reach in what used to be a middle-class suburb. “On paper, I’m a millionaire,” said Lenny Siegel, who is running for Mountain View city council and bought a home there back in 1979. “My house is probably worth between $1.5 and 2 million now, but my kids can’t afford to live here.” Siegel is pushing to allow 5,000 new housing units in the North Bayshore area, . Kaplan also sees it as a regional problem. There is some groundwork for a regional movement, but it’s not very powerful or enforceable. A Plan Bay Area calls for by 2040 and there is a regional organization called the that is supposed to set aside housing allotments for every city. But many city governments do not actually follow it. Kaplan said that individual cities may need to work out deals. So, for example, if Menlo Park fails to build enough housing to go along with the 11,000-person campus Facebook is currently constructing there, perhaps they should pay into a regional fund that will build affordable housing elsewhere. While there are a lot of sexy, surface-level stories like this New York Times piece on how Oakland is the new there are also immense concerns around displacement. The history and landscape of Oakland has been profoundly shaped by racialized housing policies and in the mid-20th century, which in the flatlands of the West. Basically, minority parts of the region had little or no access to Federal Housing Administration-backed mortgages, which prevented the capital accumulation that other communities were able to experience through homeownership. Because banks deemed certain areas risky, that also meant that many kinds of basic businesses like grocery stores couldn’t find the capital to open up in these neighborhoods. If you want a primer on this, I would just go read In the face of so much exclusion and disinvestment, black communities in the East Bay had to build their own institutions and culture. Oakland has been home to everything from the Black Panther Party to strands of West Coast hip-hop, rap and R&B. The community’s size peaked in the 1980s, and between 1990 and 2011, the . Some of this is by choice as black homeowners sell property and move or . Some of it is not, with lower-income blacks being priced out and displaced into areas where the unemployment rate is higher. Broadly speaking, as both baby boomers and the young and affluent move back into the U.S.’s inner cities, in less dense areas that or institutions to deal with economic deprivation. Gentrification is a complex phenomenon that brings both risks and opportunities. In a over the summer, Harvard University’s and , found that gentrification basically bypasses areas that are . That segregation means that these communities get left out of the informal social networks that lead to jobs and upward economic mobility, and generally get relegated to underfunded schools and poorer quality public services. The impacts of being in these different neighborhoods are enduring and multi-generational, Sampson found in But what’s happening now in is at its most advanced, this growth is putting pressure on historically black neighborhoods. That’s what you’re seeing . Or when a plan to — . Or in . Or when director , as it starts to spill over into Bedford-Stuyvesant after Bushwick and Williamsburg. Or when the young mayor of . Shortly after the first tech boom, Oakland novelist Ishmael Reed railed against Jerry Brown for while practicing a brutal capitalist philosophy,” when the former mayor carried out plans to bring 10,000 new residents to downtown Oakland. For Oakland, it raises the question: For the tech community, which has faced criticism about its lack of diversity, there is an opportunity — if people want to rise to it — to create something integrated. Several of the city’s startups are ‘ Jason Young. Two pieces worth reading are Susan Mernit’s essay or writer and playwright from San Francisco Magazine. Mernit, a former Yahoo, Netscape and AOL executive, is the co-founder of , a non-profit that teaches tech skills to minority youth in Oakland. It recently and part of that Marc Andreessen and his wife Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen gave to three non-profits. “Oakland has a terrific start-up community, but it’s very connected to place, and to culture,” she said. “The way to do well here is to learn from your neighbors. Get involved in what’s here already–and hire some local people as you grow.” , who grew up in West Oakland and has worked as an engineer and product manager at Salesforce for the last seven years, said that hands-on time and mentorship might be more helpful than money or the creation of service-level jobs. Many of the tech industry’s fastest-growing companies like Uber or Homejoy, actively create a two-tier system of jobs that may pre-existing socioeconomic and racial inequities. Neither company has released diversity numbers on their employee contractor base; no one will enhance or diminish social mobility over the long run. Other big companies like Facebook and Google have also received blowback for how they pay and employ , shuttle drivers and delivery people for projects like Google Shopping Express. “There are jobs where that don’t require college-level skills like facilities and administration work. Many would like to see those jobs go to people in the community,” Selassie said. “But what concerns me about that is it reinforces a social hierarchy that says unskilled labor should be relegated to people of color and so it doesn’t solve the challenges of social inequity. It might put a temporary dent in gentrification, but it will be short lived.” The real work of building and training a diverse work force takes years of engagement and effort. (You know, maybe less of kind of “Making The World A Better Place,” and more of kind instead.) “For sustained change we need our startups to be vested in the social journey of people in the community,” she said. “They need to volunteer in the schools, mentor, and give their time — not just money — to the community to be a part of lasting change. I understand that startups can be capital-limited, and that’s OK because their story, life experiences and empathy are the most valuable thing they can give to these communities. Once that happens, real progress can begin.” |
App Store Downloads Top 85 Billion, Revenue Up 36 Percent Year-Over-Year | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | Apple CEO Tim Cook announced today during the company’s earnings call that Apple’s cumulative App Store downloads have now topped 85 billion up from 60 billion around a year ago. The number was announced alongside news of , and its record-breaking sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices. For additional context, at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco this June, the company announced that the iOS App Store had then reached applications. By September, that number had reached – a figure that had put Apple just behind competitor Google, which is currently estimated to have roughly or , depending on which reports you go by. (The latter is App Annie’s data.) In other words, the app store races – at least in terms of filling out the stores’ virtual shelves – are neck and neck. More importantly, perhaps – thanks to the launch of Apple Pay, also out this morning with the release of iOS 8.1 – App Store’s capability to grow developer revenue increases. Although many people only associate Apple Pay with the ability to pay at point-of-sale at a growing number of supported retailers, Apple Pay also enables in-app transactions to take place with just a touch of the finger. That means that more consumers will be able to purchase things in apps, and this will be easier than before because they’ll no longer have to remember their Apple ID and password. Instead, just by touching on the fingerprint reader on new iPhones and iPads running iOS 8, they’ll be able to pay using the credit or debit card information on file, already associated with their Apple account. (Apple already offers Touch ID for in-app purchases, but Apple Pay could enable even more types of transactions to occur easily – like ordering food or ordering an Uber, for example.) App Store compared to Q4 2013, said Cook. iTunes $4.6 billion in revenue for Q4 2014, with billings year-over-year. App Store developers are a boon to the company’s bottom line. This summer, Apple CEO Tim Cook cited iTunes as one of the fastest-growing segments of Apple’s business. “iTunes billings grew 25% year-over-year in the June quarter and reached an all-time quarterly high, thanks to the very strong results from the App Store,” he at the time. |
Apple’s Huge Q4: $42.1 Billion In Revenue, $8.5 Billion In Profit | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | Today after the bell, Apple reported its fiscal fourth quarter financial performance, including revenue of $42.1 billion, and earnings per share of $1.42. Analysts had Apple to report profit of $1.31 per share, on revenue for the period of $39.85 billion. During the fiscal quarter, Apple had net profit of $8.5 billion, up 13.3% from $7.5 Billion in the same quarter last year. Compared to 2013’s fiscal Q4, revenue ticked up 12% (up from $37.5 billion). The company sold 39.3 million iPhones, 12.3 million iPads, and 5.5 million Macs.
The company, up 2% during regular trading, is up in after-hours traffic following its earnings beat. The company had revenue of $37.4 billion in its , earning $1.28 per share in the three-month period. Apple recently launched two new iPhones, the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, which it claimed had better first-month sales than any other phone it released before. Apple also announced a number of new iPads. There has been some market pushback — — that Apple has now created too many different iPad models — do you need an iPhone 6 Plus, or an iPad Air 3, or an iPad Mini 2, or iPad Mini 3? Do you really know? This quarter’s revenues are preamble for its calendar fourth, fiscal first quarter which will include the holiday sales cycle. Apple’s revenues, which are seasonal to some extent, tick up in the period. The current quarter also has the advantage of being a full period of sales for the new Apple products, which could create additional revenue lift. |
We Tried Out Apple Pay In The Real World | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | , and with it comes the ability to use Apple Pay on the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus. We decided to try it out by going to two nearby businesses that already accept Apple’s NFC-powered mobile payments: Walgreens and McDonald’s. Getting my 6 Plus ready for Apple Pay took less than a minute. I opened the Passbook app, tapped the “Add” button, selected the Credit/Debit Card menu item introduced in iOs 8.1, and was presented with a form to enter my card’s number, expiration date, and security code. There was also an option to scan the details of my card in with the camera. I chose that route, and after a second-long scan only had to enter the security code from the back of my card. After this initial setup, you don’t need to open Passbook to use Apple Pay, though you’ll notice I did in the video above to see what would happen. At Walgreens, we spent more time figuring out what to buy than figuring out how to use Apple Pay. Once everything has been rung up, you just hold your thumb (or any other finger you have registered on your phone) to Touch ID and tap it against the part of the payment terminal with this symbol: Holding my thumb to Touch ID and my phone to the payment terminal, it took about a second and a half to register at Walgreens and the same amount of time at McDonald’s. Don’t expect it to change the entire experience however: you still have to sign for the amount shown at the drug store and get a receipt to show to the cashier when picking up your order at a fast food joint. At both places we tested Apple Pay at, the workers were aware of how it worked and didn’t need to ask for help. We’ve heard that isn’t the case everywhere, but within the next few weeks, most employees at should be caught up. |
Apple Sold 39.3M iPhones During The iPhone 6 Launch Quarter, 12.3M iPads And 5.5M Macs | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | Apple’s , and boy did they sell a lot of iPhones. The hardware quarter saw 39.3 million iPhones sold, along with 12.3 million iPads and a very respectable 5.5 million Macs, with the fading iPod category bringing up the rear with 2.6 million sales. iPhone growth year-over-year is the most impressive stat here, and it’s easy to see why the device fared so well this quarter: this is the first partial quarter of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus availability, and by all accounts, including Apple’s own, this is the most successful iPhone launch of all time. Analysts had expected iPhone sales of just about 38 million iPhones this year, and around 13 million iPad sales, with just under 5 million Macs moved and a paltry 2.3 million iPods. Last year, Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones, 14.08 million iPads, 4.57 million Macs and 3.5 million iPods during the same period. This quarter’s results are further proof that Apple’s big business is still the iPhone, with the iPad fading back to a position more similar to the Mac, with consistent performance but far less growth potential compared to its still-growing smartphone sales. The new iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3, and their sales performance, will be under scrutiny next quarter by those looking to ascertain the future of Apple’s tablet ambitions. Overall, Apple’s iPhone revenue jumped from $19.5 billion last year, to $23.7 billion this year during the quarter, while revenue from iPad dipped slightly from $6.2 billion to $5.4 billion. Mac revenue climbed from $5.6 billion to $6.6 billion, however, making up for the ground lost by iPad.
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Here’s What You Need To Know From Microsoft’s Cloud Event | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | Today in San Francisco, Microsoft’s CEO and his lieutenant Scott Guthrie detailed the status of their company’s cloud efforts, breaking out a few growth metrics, and announcing several new features that they hope will spur growth. Microsoft is hellbent to be a winner in the cloud space. With self-claimed $4.4 billion in yearly cloud run rate — expect a new number at earnings — Microsoft could be considered a leader in the space already. However, noting that two other companies also have the scale in place to be true, “hyper-scale” cloud players, Microsoft doesn’t appear ready to give itself a crown. Amazon and Google, the two rivals that Microsoft directly shouted out, would also contest any such coronation. Noting several hundred new features released in the past 12 months, Microsoft disclosed that Azure, its chief cloud computing and storage service, is currently picking up 10,000 new customers each week, and now stores 30 trillion objects. Here’s the slide: After the CEO passed the speaking baton, Microsoft executive vice president got up to dig deeper into what Microsoft is building, detailing a number of new products aimed at boosting enterprise demand for Azure. The company noted twice that 40 percent of Azure revenues come from 3rd party vendors, and startups. It was not clear what the split is between them. The message was twofold: Startups can use Azure over the more-popular-among-new-companies competing Amazon solution, AWS, and that Microsoft partners should push the platform, or miss out on income. Key among the value pitch was the idea of scale. According to Guthrie, Microsoft is about to spin up its two Australian datacenter regions. It will have 19 regions then, twice what Amazon offers, and six times what Google has on tap, according to the company. Some 11.4 million servers power Microsoft’s cloud. So, what’s new? A few things. First up: A new class of computing power called the ‘G family,’ which will focus on providing huge firepower to large computing problems. Guthrie crowed that it can provide twice the memory of the largest Amazon cloud machine. Next up was a “premium storage” option that will allow customers to dump 32 terabytes of data onto a single Azure virtual machine. I’m not sure how many people need that, but if you did, you are now pretty well set. Microsoft then turned to hit on the idea of hybrid clouds: Bringing cloud power in line with on-premises, legacy solutions. Enterprise has a similar market strategy. A new ‘Cloud Platform System’ will take Azure into existing corporate datacenters, helping large companies ease into the cloud more slowly. Microsoft is working with Dell on the hardware side of the offering, which kicks off next month. In short, if you wanted to bring some cloud to your data, but didn’t want to risk either a dilution of control, or the ability to keep your most sensitive files at home, Microsoft might have a tool for you. Finally, Microsoft announced a marketplace for Azure that will function across devices and platforms. Microsoft is continuing its push into all areas of the cloud: Enterprise, hybrid, Linux-focused, Docker-facing, and so forth. The company has branding issues among the companies most quickly zipping to the cloud (startups), and its most lucrative clients are hesitant to do this ‘cloud’ thing at all in many cases. So, Microsoft’s market position isn’t an easy one. But it is investing heavily. Things to watch: Growth in Microsoft’s cloud top line compared to Amazon’s, and the impact of the current cloud price wars in new investment by the three players. Microsoft seems nearly gleeful to spend billions on the cloud — having the cash and profits of an incumbent is probably fun. Google is also massively profitable and cash-rich. Amazon less so, but it has had a head start. Place your bets on who is going to be the top provider in 5 years. |
Smartsheet Helps Businesses Visualize Themselves | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | , the spreadsheet-based project and work management platform, is now making it easier for companies to understand how their employees actually work (and who they mostly work with). Companies mostly use the service to manage their projects and help employees collaborate. Because of this, the service knows quite a bit about who does what in a given business and now it allows businesses who opt in to this (and pay for it) to access this information through its highly visual Account Map tool. As Smartsheet chairman Brent Frei told me earlier this month, the team decided to go with spreadsheets because they are “conceptually free, easy to share and people immediately know what to do.” He believes that this is one of the main reasons the company is doing so well. The Smartsheet team tells me that the company now has over 50,000 companies with paid accounts on its network. It has also attracted a good $70 million in venture capital so far and grown to over 150 employees now. The idea for the Account Maps came from the company’s larger customers, Frei told me. Those businesses wanted to get better visibility into what’s happening in their companies. So the Smartsheet team looked into what it could do with the data it was already collecting. Ideally, that means tracking all the different projects and people involved in them in a company. With this, you can see who runs most of the projects in a group, for example (which is great for when you ask for a raise) or who doesn’t (which isn’t so great when it’s time for your annual report). But you can also see the connections between different groups. By default, Smartsheet makes a basic map available to all users. That’s not the interactive version, though. Smartsheet will happily create an interactive version for businesses that are willing to pay for it, though, and with that, users will be able to dig a bit deeper, down to the level of the individual employee. |
iMac With Retina 5K Display Review: Meet The Best Desktop Computer Available | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | has the best display ever on a computing device. Let’s just get that out the way right at the start: You won’t find a better screen anywhere else, period. The 27-inch, 5120×2880 screen has a PPI of 218, or roughly equivalent to that of the MacBook Pro with Retina display, but the specs on paper, while impressive in their own right, can’t convey the experience of actually using the thing. Apple’s price of admission for 5K goodness is steep, with prices starting at $2,499 (plus additional fees for custom configurations) but it’s worth every penny. Apple’s 5K iMac doesn’t look any different from the rest of the lineup on the outside – the tapered design it introduced in late 2012, which is thick in the middle of the back to house the bulkiest internals, and then tapers to a remarkably thin 5mm on the edge, is still in use here. The use of the existing design actually makes the design accomplishments of this computer more impressive, however – Apple was able to completely re-engineer their display without adding any thickness or bulk, after all. [gallery ids="1073145,1073146,1073149,1073150"] The industrial design still sings, too, even after two years of availability. Its edge-to-edge black bezel and minimal front-facing aluminum mean that the new Retina display almost floats on its own, and is free to show off its dazzling good looks without the presence of any extraneous visual distractions. The slimmer design also means that actually lifting and moving the iMac around isn’t all that strenuous of an activity, despite the display’s generous proportions. Around back, you’ve got a fairly good selection of ports to choose from, including four USB 3 ports, and two of the new Thunderbolt 2 spec that promises even faster I/O transfer speeds. There’s also an SDXC card slot, a headphone port (which supports optical audio cable connections via mini-TOSLINK) and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The SD card slot is still marginally less accessible around back than it was on the side of the older, thick-bodied iMac design, but the concessions of a sleek all-in-one are slightly inconvenient I/O port placement, and that’s a pill I swallowed long ago. While inputs around back isn’t ideal, Apple has gone to great lengths to make sure that this new iMac retains its user-accessible RAM slots, which means you can upgrade after the fact. That’s a huge advantage, given the cost of RAM via Apple’s custom configuration options, as compared to the cost of RAM purchased after the fact. It’s also an upgrade that most users won’t need right away, but one that can make a big difference to the usability and performance of a computer after a couple of years of ownership. In the end Apple’s latest iMac design may be a carry-over from previous models, but showcasing the 5K display is the role it seems born to play. The new iMac’s performance is impressive beyond just its ability to push pixels – though that’s nothing to sneeze at. In its base model configuration, the iMac with Retina 5K display comes with a 1TB Fusion Drive as the standard storage option, which offers a lot of performance advantages over a traditional spinning disk HDD on its own. The 8GB of RAM is a decent starting point, and the 3.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 CPU (which has Turbo Boost capabilities up to 3.9GHz) and AMD Radeo R9 M290X graphics processor will give most users ample muscle for even compute-intensive tasks like 4K video editing. Speaking of 4K video editing, you can see a screenshot above of me editing a sample 4K video file in Final Cut Pro, with the video playing back at full resolution, which still offers room for editing UI in the Final Cut application. I had to hide the inspector in order to fit it in entirely, and maximize the size of the preview window, but it’s still possible, and for video editors working with next-generation film formats, that’s a huge advantage. Running the preview video with playback optimized for performance, I saw no visual hiccups, though maximizing quality did result in a few minor stutters during live rendering. Remember, this is using 4K source files at full resolution, which is pretty amazing. The new iMac is also a powerful gaming machine, if that’s your thing. I played Civilization V on the machine at its max possible resolution (which is still just 3200×1800 in HiDPI mode, and therefore still scaled on the iMac’s Retina display) and the gameplay experience was smooth and fast, even in later stages of the game when the map gets a bit crowded with visual elements. Other action games, like last year’s Tomb Raider, also performed well. Photo editing with Adobe Photoshop CC is also a treat on this computer, with fast, responsive performance and execution of filters and visual effects. You can also work with RAW files right out of your camera, and using the ones from my Canon 6D, which have a max resolution of 5472 x 3648, I was able to work with them at 100% crop and almost fit the entire frame on the screen when using Photoshop in full-screen mode. I was able to get the iMac’s fan going, which is not something that normally happens in my average daily use, by running Civilization V, Photoshop and Final Cut Pro X at the same time, and switching between activities on each, but during most everyday use, you won’t hear a peep out of the all-in-one’s onboard cooling system. Let’s be honest – this computer is all about the screen, and the display is the factor upon which a buying decision from anyone considering it will rest. If you agree to that, then you must also agree that this computer is a must-buy for anyone for whom display quality is serious concern. If you switched from an existing Mac notebook to the Retina MacBook Pro when it launched, or at any time since, you’ll have some idea of the change between the existing iMac and the one with the new Retina 5K display. Somehow, though, this is a switch that has even more of an impact, especially if you do any work in any kind of visual field, from photography, to film-making, to design. That’s not the only group this new machine will impact, however; this new display also represents a huge step up for any kind of information professional, owing to how beautifully it renders text (here’s a hint of how well it works – you can almost make out the actual words on the Pages dock icon). In the future, we’ll look back on the time since the introduction of the computer until now as a time between “print” quality and legibility when it comes to text. You can’t make out any pixels on text rendered on the new iMac, just as you generally can’t on a printed page (unless someone prints a low resolution image) and if you spend all day staring, reading and writing on your computer, that makes all the difference in the world. The new iMac makes lower resolution reading, writing and browsing feel like it happened during a relative Dark Age. Apple’s display achievements here are something that have to be experienced to truly appreciate, but suffice it to say they’ve hit a home run. It took two years to adapt Retina display tech for the desktop, but now that it has arrived, there is most definitely no going back. It’s easy to say that Apple has created an all-in-one that’s ideal for creative professionals, especially those with a visual focus, with the iMac with Retina 5K display. But that’s not all the company has done with this machine; instead, they’ve built a computer that provides the future, today, for anyone with the financial capability to get it. Retina on the desktop provides advantages for video, photos and design pros that almost make it a professional imperative, but the benefits it brings to everyday computing are no less impressive, and this is an iMac that will satisfy anyone who takes the plunge. A Mac Pro might be a more powerful performer, but for most people, the iMac with Retina display will be the best all-around computer for their needs. |
What You Need To Know To Get Started With Apple Pay | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | Apple Pay is now available for anyone to use, provided they’ve got all the prerequisites, both for physical stores and for online transactions. But you can’t just walk up to your local brick-and-mortar store and wave your iPhone and walk out with whatever you want – that would be theft. Instead, you’ll need the following to be in place to have a happy Apple Pay experience. After you’ve got all that in place, you can opt to either use the cards you’ve already got on file in iTunes to pay, or add a new one. Adding a new one is as easy as snapping a pic of your plastic, and then manually entering the security code around back. You can also manually enter all the information, if you’d rather not use the camera. If the card is compatible, it will verify and make it available for purchases. If it isn’t, call your bank and ask them to get with the program. If you’re using a card already on file, you’ll just need to enter the security code found on the back to authorize its use, and then agree to the Apple Pay terms of service. Once that’s complete, you’re ready to roll. Apple Pay in stores should be available at participating launch retailers, which include Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Babies”R”Us, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Bloomingdale’s, Champs Sports, Chevron and Texaco retail stores including ExtraMile, Disney Store, Duane Reade, Footaction, Foot Locker, House of Hoops by Foot Locker, Kids Foot Locker, Lady Foot Locker, Macy’s, McDonald’s, Nike, Office Depot, Panera Bread, Petco, RadioShack, RUN by Foot Locker, SIX:02, Sports Authority, SUBWAY, Toys”R”Us, Unleashed by Petco, Walgreens, Wegmans and Whole Foods Market. Online, apps are already rolling out that also support Apple Pay, so check your updates column, or stay tuned to the “Featured” page, where Apple will be surfacing many of them. You can authenticate the purchases using your fingerprint, so long as you’ve registered it with Touch ID, or using your passcode if that doesn’t work for some reason. Apple Pay is secure thanks to the system it uses to store and transmit payment information, which doesn’t actually share any credit card details over NFC with the merchant, and it works with your existing cards, including rewards programs, etc. We’ll have a first-hand account of how Apple Pay works in the real world shortly, but early reports from Twitter seem to indicate things are working smoothly with the newly launched tech. |
CloudCannon Raises $500K To Make Designing Static Websites Simpler | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | , a simple CMS for web designers and their clients aimed at offering simple visual editing without the need for an advanced technical skillset, is today launching globally from TechCrunch Disrupt: London’s Startup Alley. The company is also announcing $500,000 in new funding, and a partnership with domain name registry Rightside. The additional capital comes from New Zealand investors Sam Morgan, Phil McCaw, Stephen Tindall, Simon Holdsworth and others, and arrives at a time when the company is seeing 18% month-over-month growth (as of January 2014). Today, CloudCannon tells TechCrunch, the company has grown its user base to over 1,110 cities across 120+ countries, though it declined to provide hard user numbers. We first came across CloudCannon when the startup had , which lets you put your webdesign files into a Dropbox folder and then wait for CloudCannon to do the rest. (The service also supports uploads via FTP and drag-and-drop, but the support for Dropbox was definitely a cool trick). CloudCannon’s websites are designed using standard HTML, CSS and Javascript, and allow designers to continue to use their favorite tools, like Dreamweaver, MailChimp, jekyll and Wufoo, if they choose, in addition to the service’s own WYSIWYG editor. CloudCannon, meanwhile, handles the technical details and the website hosting, so designers and clients can quickly collaborate on their sites’ changes together. The company, which competes with platforms like WordPress and Squarespace, also specifically focuses on the challenges associated around updating static websites which would otherwise see designers having to give up creative freedom if they were to use a typical website builder product. With the new partnership with domain name provider Rightside, the company is now looking to streamline the technical process involved with choosing a domain name and managing the DNS settings. Rightside also offers a number of new Top Level Domains, like .social, .rocks, .ninja, .dance, .reviews, .lawyer and more which may appeal to CloudCannon’s customer base of those designing for small-to-medium sized businesses. The company’s current pricing plans now include a free tier for prototyping then $9 – $49 per month for hosted sites. CloudCannon’s pricing page indicates they’ve taken some of the early feedback to heart and will soon offer plans to allow designers to publish sites to other storage providers, and integrate with Google Analytics. The four-person team behind CloudCannon, which launched out of Wellington-based Lightning Lab’s accelerator this year and is now based in San Francisco, will use the additional capital to hire more developers, and focus on partnership growth going forward. |
Fitbit Won’t Work With HealthKit Because It’s Building An Apple Watch Competitor | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | A few weeks ago, Fitbit that it had no plans to follow the growing crowd of fitness trackers and apps that are rushing to integrate with Apple’s HealthKit and Health app. In response, it seems, Apple has . And now we know why — because Fitbit is building a device that will compete directly with the upcoming Apple Watch. Yesterday The Verge published details related to a soon-to-be-released . According to the report, the Surge will be a $250 wearable with a watch-like display, built-in GPS tracking and heart-rate monitoring that will move Fitbit beyond its existing step-based activity tracking. The new device will give Fitbit owners a lot more sophisticated health data than had previously been available on its platform. In doing so, Fitbit could court a wider range of fitness fanatics who might have purchased more expensive GPS trackers or health monitors from the likes of Garmin or TomTom, or heart-rate monitors from companies like Polar. It could also potentially open up the market to Fitbit customers who want to track more of their own data. At the same time, Fitbit isn’t the only company going after this opportunity. Basis, which , has announced another . And Pebble, while it doesn’t do heart-rate monitoring, is moving in on Fitbit’s turf by into its smartwatch. And of course, there’s the , which also includes a GPS sensor, an accelerometer, gyroscope, UV detector, barometer, and heart rate monitor and feeds into the Android Wear health data ecosystem. But the elephant in the room is the , which the company in September but doesn’t plan to make available for sale until early next year. The Apple Watch will offer up push notifications and access to various applications, but it is expected to have a fair amount of health tech stuff built-in. That includes heart-rate monitoring, activity tracking and the like, which Apple users will be able to feed into the Apple Health app. Of course, Apple wants to aggregate data from other applications and devices into the app. And for the most part, it’s received a fair amount of interest from app and device makers feeding into the Apple Health ecosystem. App makers like Strava, MyFitnessPal, and LoseIt are building for HealthKit, while device companies like Misfit Wearables and Withings plan to work with the SDK as well. There are some advantages to doing so: Apple is more likely to feature mobile apps that work within its health and fitness ecosystem than those that don’t. Meanwhile, device makers that work with HealthKit can probably expect more shelf space in Apple retail locations than those who don’t. It’s unclear if that was the reasoning behind Apple’s removal of Fitbit devices from its stores, but it does seem that Fitbit sees the Apple Watch and HealthKit as competitive to its own devices and health-tracking platform. But to date, it has a pretty strong reason to keep going it alone — after all, Fitbit owns about 70 percent of the fitness tracking market according to the NPD Group. We’ll see if Fitbit budges when the Apple Watch is actually available. However, it appears the Surge — along with the fitness trackers — will likely make it into stores in time for the holidays, beating Apple by at least a few months. |
OnePlus’ Impressive $299 Smartphone Will Finally Go On Sale To All — But Only For An Hour | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | If you’ve been in the market for OnePlus One, that is available by invite only — thus far — then your luck is in. The startup has that it will make its first smartphone available to all members of the public, but for a one hour window only. The impressive device will be available to buy for an hour on October 27, starting from 15:00 GMT — that’s 08:00 PST, or 11:00 EST. The company is allowing would-be customers to pre-order their phone from today, so there’s no need to stand still until then. Those who pre-order now but manage to grab an invite before October 27 can skip the queue and order their device right away, so there’s no danger of being stuck waiting. OnePlus says the new public sale window will not replace its invitation system altogether, but — having in the past — this step is evidence of greater confidence in its ability to reach larger numbers of people with its devices. The company has been preparing itself for its sale hour, and it revealed that it sent out 50,000 invites during the first half of this month. “This was our way of testing our servers to make sure we are well-prepared for dealing with a large volume of orders,” OnePlus said. That’s a hugely important point given the issues that other smartphone upstarts have run into from selling large numbers of devices over a short space of time online. Demand for Xiaomi’s devices in India back in July, although the Chinese company has generally experienced few issues with its web-only sales model. Either way, OnePlus’s one hour window is a better move than its last major strategy, in which it caused controversy for . |
The Future Of AI Will Be Stacked | Rick Collins | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | We are entering an exciting period for artificial intelligence. We’re seeing more consumer impacting developments and breakthroughs in AI technology than ever before. And as Nova Spivack , it’s reasonable to expect that major players like Apple, IBM, Google and Microsoft, among others, will lead a fierce consolidation effort for the AI market over the next five years. Indeed, it has already begun. No doubt these efforts will produce some amazing innovation, and I’m excited to see how Siri, Google Now, Cortana, Watson, and even new entrants like continue to progress and transform our interactions with technology. However, I also believe these all-encompassing virtual personal assistant projects (VPA), and the race to create the one AI to rule them all, are driving the AI experience in the wrong direction. If we follow that path, we’re potentially risking important advancements for both consumers and companies alike. In considering how AI will develop into a critical technology for businesses, the idea of the comprehensive VPA seems less and less likely, and even unproductive to achieving the kind of substantial impact that it could have for the modern enterprise. Deeply integrated AI has the potential to transform businesses and industries, from the interface level of the customer experience to the breadth of institutional knowledge that employees are able to access and build upon. The key to any effective AI deployment for businesses, however, requires a sophistication and expertise that is specific to the industry and the company. We call that domain knowledge. The broad intelligence that general-purpose VPAs possess is unlikely to be able to integrate with, or properly serve, enterprise needs. Yet much like the cloud computing market, the most important advancements in AI will be propelled by the enterprise and how major companies are able to deploy the technology across the world’s largest, most complex systems. We should keep this in mind as we consider how AI should and will develop. Apple’s deployment of Siri, and the release last year of “Her,” have probably done more to define our current public perception and expectations for AI than anything else, for better or worse. While Apple, Google, Microsoft and others race to realize those ScarJo expectations in one form or another, we still have a long way to go before we are even close to the simplest simulation of a ubiquitous, global technology. Apple’s Siri should serve as an important lesson, perhaps even warning, for these efforts, though. As even Siri’s creators , it wasn’t originally developed to be an encompassing VPA, but rather the kind of strategically deployed, domain-specific assistant for functions around entertainment, scheduling, and information. The ambition of Apple to boil the ocean with Siri, to present it as the kind of “everything-assistant” and interface actually backfired for them and led to a lot of the technology’s significant breakthroughs and achievements being overshadowed by unreasonable expectations. Siri did, however, set the direction for AI and VPAs, with an emphasis on the personal computing market. Cortana has now taken up the challenge directly. The problem with this, and other AI plays that would seek to be a singular and comprehensive point of interaction for customers, is that we are drastically reducing VPAs’ effectiveness, their transformative and meaningful capabilities by spreading them too thinly across functions and domains. No VPA can be all things to all users. If, as Spivack opines, we are entering a period of significant consolidation for the AI market, the resulting risk is that it impedes VPA advancement in terms of depth of intelligence in favor of breadth of deployments. It’s the classic endgame of vendor consolidation. For companies looking to plug into and develop upon AI technology, the drive to consolidate into a single platform — whether it be Watson, a Siri or Cortana mobile AI, or Google Now experience — doesn’t just threaten to lock them into an ecosystem, it threatens their brand. For an AI to truly function at the enterprise level, it will require such deep integration with company knowledge, and even proprietary information and data, that the experience necessitates control of the VPA by the company. This isn’t cut-and-dried back-end software, this stuff impacts every aspect of the customer experience. Outsourcing the experience is too big a risk, regardless of any upside from standardizing on a platform. It’s not simply about retaining the customer experience that a brand has defined, though it is essential; it’s about how your company expertise is best leveraged, communicated, and put to work for the customer. A general-purpose VPA simply isn’t designed to do that. Aside from the functional dilution that results from attempts to create an encompassing VPA, for brands and enterprises, the stakes are even higher. Even if domain expertise could be preserved within the one-size-fits-all assistant, we quickly enter into problems of who would own and be responsible for customer data, or data surrounding the experiences. There are no industry-standards for privacy and security in that scenario. So what options will the enterprise have? What we need instead, and what I think serves as the most realistic and effective development of the B2B VPA market, is a full AI stack that companies can begin building and piecing together to best serve their unique needs and their customers. Just as we think about companies building their CRM or marketing stacks, we’ll begin to see enterprise companies building their AI stacks. Right now, this is not how the enterprise AI market works. If a company wants to develop a robust VPA that is deeply integrated with their processes, brand, and systems of record, their options are limited. They will reach out to an AI platform provider — whether our Alme platform at Next IT, IBM’s Watson, or SRI — and we work to develop a VPA very specific to their needs and goals. It’s design and development from the ground up, built on the intelligence of the proprietary AI platform of course, but architected for a particular company. The B2B VPA market is still very specialized, so we have the luxury of working deeply and in very white glove ways with companies that want to develop and integrate full VPA capabilities. But as B2B AI scales to become more prevalent, and more of a priority for enterprise, this single platform and AI provider approach becomes less tenable or even desirable for the companies. The future of enterprise AI will be the AI stack. But what does this enterprise AI stack look like? Obviously it must work consistently across every channel and device, which can be accomplished by layering NLP on top of existing services in order to deliver an ‘omnichannel’ experience. Domain expertise and systems of record will be effortlessly accessible, connected and cross-correlated. It may even have components for integration with customers’ own VPAs, but must have the agility and capabilities to transfer experiences over to companies’ own systems when required. There are also aspects such as the branded VPA personality, response channel flow and navigation, and personalization through customer data and history to consider. All of this is completely under the control of the enterprise as it compiles its own stacks. We can even take this one step further and imagine how various enterprise assistants will begin working together. This won’t happen under a single VPA system, but rather by companies’ AI stacks being able to communicate, route and transfer customer service inquiries from the Internet of Things to the appropriate device channel, to coordinate between a patient and their doctor and their insurer, or even between your bank and your investment portfolio. Customer experience is everything between a provider and a user. Customers expect your applications and systems can communicate with others to accomplish key tasks when they need immediate assistance. And so the future of big picture AI is an AI stack that can play nice with other stacks, serve the customer experience, and do it all while enriching your operations through data. It must preserve the deep domain expertise and branded customer experiences in which enterprise companies have already so heavily invested. Consolidation of various AI components, solutions and services could be counter-productive to allowing companies to build their stacks, or give rise to niche services designed to fulfill specific AI stack functions. Either way, as the enterprise begins building its AI stacks, we need to shift the conversation from one of universal VPAs to singularly focused solutions that can be customized for specific business needs. |
Zap Puts Ads On Top Of Taxi Cabs As They Scoot Around Town | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | Unlike startups Zoom, Pow, Zing, and Schwongooza, Turkish startup is trying to disrupt the on-taxi advertising market. By placing bright LED signs on the top of standard cabs, the company aims to turn dead space into a lucrative advertising spot for drivers and fleets. Founded by Yigit Kipman, Ahmet Bati and Emrecan Bati, the company has received a $100,000 grant to expand through Europe in 2015. The company can send ads to the LED signs automatically over the air and clients receive a cut of the advertising. Ads are displayed throughout the day and some hours are more expensive than others. “We have completed a pilot during the local elections in Turkey and earned our first revenue,” said Bati. “We’re launching in Ankara by the end of this month with 10 taxis. Turk Telekom will be our first corporate customer.” “Our business model is more effective, with cost-per-airtime model advertising budgets are used 100% effectively. Our technology is more advanced, high-impact LED screens than can be remotely controlled.” The team has five years hardware and software expertise and the team recently joined Turkey’s accelerator program, PILOTT. They plan outfit 100 taxis in Turkey this year and hope to expand in 2015 after completing their Series A. “Outdoor advertising has become so common and unattractive int he last years,” said Bati. “The real need of outdoor advertising market is reaching target audience effectively with limited budgets. So we introduce our disruptive outdoor advertising channel where we play ads based on location and time on taxi tops.” [gallery ids="1073135,1073134,1073133,1073132,1073131"] Zap launched today at . Bazooooonga! |
CareZapp Is Building A Support Platform For Home Healthcare | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | If you’re hoping to provide home care for a sick or elderly family member, startup is building a technology platform to help. The company just announced its public beta on-stage as part of the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Europe. Co-founder and CEO Andrew Macfarlane told me that his interest in the field began with his mother’s death from cancer more than two decades ago, and the “challenges and difficulties” that he faced in providing for her care. Understandably, he didn’t go into too many details, but he did suggest that not much about the industry has changed since then. At the same time, Macfarlane argued that , insurance companies in the United States and state healthcare organizations in Europe are, by necessity, going to be pushing for more home healthcare. “With digital health, the Internet of Things, and civil society, there’s a new opportunity for us to deliver a better way of caring for people at home,” he said. CareZapp builds on the work that Macfarlane did as part of , an “age friendly initiative” that tests ways in which smart home technologies might be used to help the elderly. Macfarlane said there are “three things you need in order to be able to be able to care for somebody well — community, environment, and technology.” Correspondingly, there are three main components to the CareZapp platform. First, there’s a private social network where caregivers and professionals can communicate and collaborate. Macfarlane said CareZapp allows people to create their own groups for private discussion, and allows different groups to communicate with each other. So a family could create a group to coordinate care for an elderly relative, and they could also share messages with their local physician. The second piece is a framework for applications that can assist with home care. For example, Macfarlane said that if a family member is suffering from dementia, one application might tap into motion detectors in the home to alert you if something potentially dangerous happens. To be clear, CareZapp isn’t trying to manufacture these smart home devices itself, nor does it expect a bunch of custom apps to be built for its platform. Instead, it’s partnering with hardware manufacturers and integrating with existing health tools. The final piece of the CareZapp platform is a “discovery network” where you can find local service providers. Altogether, it sounds like a lot of different products trying to serve several different customer groups. To bring CareZapp to market, Macfarlane said he won’t be selling it directly to consumers, but rather partnering with health care and service providers, initially in Ireland and the United States. In fact, the company is announcing a partnership with with Irish homecare company . The basic communication tools will be free — CareZapp will make money by charging for apps, and by charging service providers to be listed in the discovery network. Macfarlane concluded by saying that by using CareZapp, “You’re empowering your own care networks. We’re facilitating access to a lot of the things that are out there already, but they need to be connected. [We want to answer the question,] ‘How do we connect that village that will care for Mom and Dad?’” Q: Are you assuming the wide adoption of many different sensors? A: We use a wide range of technology and devices. For example we already integrate with existing intruder alarm systems. Q: Are you saving people money? A: There are significant savings compared to other options. Q: During your pilots, were you able to demonstrate cost savings by engaging the family and friends? A: In the example of the hospital we worked with, we were able to maintain eight out of 10 participants outside the hospital, which leads to big savings. Q: How do people here about you? A: In a few ways — from care and support organizations, and then there’s viral adoption through friends and family members. Q: How do people feel about giving up this autonomy? And is there a “cried wolf” issue where the alerts might be a little too sensitive A: It actually gives them piece of mind where they don’t have to worry about family members constantly. |
The Best Panels, Talks And Startup Pitches From The First Day Of Disrupt London | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | day one of Disrupt London we thought it would be fun to look back at some of the most interesting panels and projects on stage. While most Disrupts are full of great startups and fun interviews, London has been particularly potent. Our interview with Tim Armstrong answered some interesting questions about the future of AOL our fireside chat with Google Ventures showed us what’s on the horizon for Europe. Then there are some amazing pitches by some great stealth startups including and . In short, it’s business up front and party in the the back. Here are a few highlights from today’s Disrupt day in London. To start off our annual European conference, we brought the new Europe onstage at Disrupt Europe in London. The panel was mostly focused on explaining Google Ventures’ investment strategy for its European arm. In particular, Google Ventures will employ the same operational strategy as in the U.S., and will be looking for co-investors for most of its deals. . During the second talk of the day, TechCrunch’s Josh Constine sat down with FeeX’s Uri Levine to dig into how the new company is doing. Levine is best known for his work with Waze, a mapping service that Google bought in a 10-figure deal but also founded FeeX, which has raised a total of $9.5 million to date, including a $6.5 million Series B round of funding this August. FeeX is built around the idea that common investors are paying too much in fees on their saved monies. As the largest e-commerce store in its region, has been called the “Amazon.com of Russia.” But this morning on stage at Disrupt EU: London, Ozon CEO Maelle Gavet shot down the notion that her company should be called an Amazon clone. For one thing, she said, Ozon was founded 16 years ago, which was around the same time as Amazon in the U.S. And it’s much bigger than just selling goods online — the company also supports travel and other verticals. “E-commerce is applicable to Russia, just as it’s applicable to any other market,” she said. What do you do when Facebook clones your app? That’s a situation that Onno Faber, the founder of buzzy messaging app Taptalk, ran into when Facebook released Slingshot, its second effort at an ephemeral messaging app which borrowed many cues from Taptalk. A group of important ecosystem builders took the stage at Disrupt Europe to give us a picture of the European tech landscape. The common thread was about the current state of the ecosystem compared to five years ago. Things have changed dramatically — and in a good way. The European Commission’s Neelie Kroes has urged those with “interesting business ideas” burning a hole in their brain to “apply, apply, apply” for research funding from the EC — despite conceding that the application process can be a “jungle” to fight through. Kroes, the outgoing European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda — which covers both IT and the telecoms sector — was being interviewed on stage on a range of digital issues by TC’s Mike Butcher, here at TechCrunch Disrupt London. At Disrupt Europe today, TechCrunch senior editor Jon Shieber talked to Peter Hames from Big Health, the National Director for Patients and Information in the National Health Service Tim Kelsey, and Dr. Dominic King from the HELIX Centre. Unsurprisingly, given these panelists, the first part of the panel focused on Ebola and the role tech can play in handing this and similar crises. Lots of startups start with good ideas, but few of them become huge successes. More important than a good idea to their success is just having the resilience required to keep going even if your idea isn’t so great, Y Combinator partner Justin Kan said at Disrupt Europe 2014. That certainly was true in Kan’s own experience as he and his team transitioned from an online life-casting stream into a massive live-streaming platform for video gamers. “If you look at all startup stories, it’s not a straight line… to success,” Kan said. “If Justin.tv could work and be successful, then no one has any excuse. That was a terrible idea.” Jason Goldberg, the co-founder of Fab.com, says that the design marketplace was burning through $14 million per month at its peak before it went through a drastic round of layoffs and decision to pivot the business. Speaking at our Disrupt London conference, he said that the startup’s decision to pivot was inevitable after the company didn’t raise as much money as they had expected to. Hackathon hack masters Jordon Poulton and Sam O’Keefe revealed the highlights of the first-ever TechCrunch Hackathon held in London. After a short highlight reel showcasing the event, the top three teams presented their creations on the Disrupt stage. While on-stage today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Europe conference, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong dismissed the latest rumors that Yahoo and AOL might merge. Specifically, Armstrong said AOL has a board meeting tonight (I guess he’s flying back to New York really soon), for which he’s prepared what he described as a 30- to 40-page presentation outlining his plans for 2015. “I don’t think Yahoo is mentioned once in that deck,” he said. Tim Armstrong also confirmed today that AOL is in early discussions to spin off CrunchBase, the database of tech companies and people that became a part of AOL as part of its acquisition of TechCrunch in 2010. Join us tomorrow as we conclude the first Disrupt held in London. It’s been a hoot and we are sad to leave. |
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Travel, Retail And Media Are 3 Industries Taking Over The App Store | Bertrand Schmitt | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | Mobile apps have come a long way since Apple launched the App Store in 2008, with over 5 million apps available across the leading app stores. While many factors have contributed to the growth, the ability to reach a global audience with a relatively small upfront investment has certainly been a significant contributor. The potential ROI if an app is successful is huge — just ask the creators of Flappy Bird or the Kim Kardashian app. What’s so amazing about the growth is not simply the sheer number, but also the variety of apps, with an app for just about every imaginable task possible. The iOS App Store boasts 23 app categories, while Google Play has 20, and that’s not even including the sub-categories for both gaming and newsstand apps. Even so, not all app categories have evolved at the same pace, with gaming and social apps leading the pack. In fact, most of in terms of revenue and downloads consistently belong to either the gaming or social media categories. Not surprisingly, social and gaming apps lead the pack in downloads and engagement, too. These apps have pioneered the monetization strategies that quickly transformed the app stores into the billion-dollar powerhouses they are today. This is not to say that other app categories aren’t building steam, and certainly the developers, brands and industries behind these apps are having their own measure of success. While gaming once had an exclusive hold on the top app store rankings, the travel, retail and entertainment industries are now contending for those spots and quickly becoming the new app store heavyweights. Given that mobile is expected to account for a quarter of U.S. online travel sales by 2015 — — travel brands are investing heavily in mobile. Inherently suited to travel, mobile apps are connecting travelers with hotels, airlines and ground transportation on the go, fulfilling a critical need. As the industry becomes increasingly crowded, travel aggregators — which make up five of the — are optimizing their online offerings for smaller screens and facilitating curated search, efficient payment processes and last-minute, location-based deals. These aggregation apps are also maintaining their edge by adding new app features to extend their services beyond reservation booking. As an example, HotelTonight stands out as a trailblazer in the industry. The mobile-only company simplifies booking a last-minute hotel in just eight seconds, with three taps and a swipe. The clean UI appeals to today’s tech-savvy, self-sufficient traveler, and while similar self-service tools are available from select hotels and airlines, HotelTonight lets customers access these conveniences across thousands of brands. The company aims to create the most frictionless hotel experience by investing in features like mobile check-in and keyless entry. Retail apps, when leveraged effectively, can be influential at all points of the shopping experience. Revenue from U.S. smartphone commerce is forecasted by Forrester Research to increase from $16 billion to $46 billion from 2013 to 2018. With the rise of “showrooming”– browsing products in-store and purchasing them later online at a lower price — successful brick-and-mortar retailers are responding by using apps to drive consumers back to the physical store. Research shows that creating an interactive in-store experience with a mobile app can increase customer engagement by up to 5 times, moving the needle on loyalty and sales. The Home Depot app, which customers use to browse and shop for over 600,000 products, has steadily climbed the ranks among iOS lifestyle apps by connecting shoppers with physical storefronts. Built-in scanners enable easy product search, GPS functionality prompts location-based coupons and product suggestions and shopping lists linked to store maps enable efficient shopping. “Pick Up In Store” and “Ship to Store” saves customers shipping charges and expedites time-sensitive projects. Overall, the app successfully guides consumers in-store by combining the convenience of e-commerce with the tactile experience of in-person shopping. With the number of digital TV viewers set to reach , the entertainment industry is also turning to mobile apps to connect with its fan base and extend the viewing experience. Netflix and other streaming providers are making it easier to binge on your favorite shows by tracking activity across multiple devices. Fans are accessing everything from movie trailers to games and interactive live chats via studio-created mobile apps. TV and film studios are offering exclusive in-app promotions and content by partnering with content providers and developers. CBS launched its popular My CBS app to boost its viewer engagement with exclusive interactive in-app content. This includes a series of live video chats in which viewers can tweet questions to stars of CBS shows, and the actress/actor will respond on camera in real time. The app sends push notifications when episodes of favorite shows are added. CBS also partnered with Amazon to provide Prime Instant Video with exclusive episodes of Stephen King’s Under the Dome four days after the original air date for each of the first two seasons. With more and more people interacting with brands on mobile devices, the question isn’t if mobile apps will become a critical channel for reaching consumers in your market — it’s when. The most successful companies will emulate and innovate on the smart, location-aware, interactive and frictionless apps put forth by market leaders like HotelTonight, The Home Depot and CBS. |
A Guide To Co-Leadership: Why It’s Hard, Why It’s Good, And How To Make It Work | Aaron Schildkrout | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | In September Larry Ellison stepped down from the helm at Oracle and appointed a co-CEO pair as his successors. about the announcement spoke of such dual arrangements in discouraging and doubtful tones. Meanwhile, in NYC, a well-regarded VC recently told me that she thought at least 50 percent of early-stage startup failures are rooted in co-founder conflicts. And a few weeks ago from Pando. Not surprising. In a time when collaboration is a flourishing ideal, shared leadership is an increasingly attractive proposition. And yet, leaders are the fulcrum that receives, holds and either utilizes or gets crushed by the considerable pressures generated by early-stage company building; two is not necessarily better than one at the cornerstone. Said otherwise: multiple founders/CEOs means more complexity, and while more complexity at the fulcrum can mean more strength (internal levers, combustion systems, failovers, etc.) it can also mean considerably more vulnerability to fissures, conflict and collapse. This post is a brief guide to co-leading. I’ll outline why having co-leaders is hard, why it’s a source of enhanced productivity, creativity, and joy when it works, and some tactics for success. I’m going to use the term co-leading throughout. I’m focused primarily on co-CEO relationships, but I think what I write applies equally to co-founders and other collaborative executive structures. I’m writing primarily from my experience co-founding and subsequently co-CEO’ing with , my best friend since childhood. Over about five years, we grew the company to 100 people, and then — this past summer — sold it to IAC. We’re still best friends. The company is the body of its leaders. Everything is on you as leader: both superficially, in that your work ethic, smarts, creativity, values, vision, etc. will determine the path and success of your company; and also fundamentally, in that your company will look, feel and operate in accord with your actual constitution. This is true in a long-term sense (you will reap what you sow) and in a short-term sense (if you’re enthusiastic today the company will up; if you’re down people will be miserable). This translates into huge pressure on co-leaders and their collaborative relationship. Each weakness in your co-leaders will diminish your own chances of success. More subtly, everything your co-leaders do will be a reflection on you; and so their weaknesses become your weaknesses in the public eye. Conversely, your weaknesses (yes, you have them) will become deeply known – and very possibly resented — by the people with whom you’re leading. Most frequently, the fissures manifest in the process of setting and executing on your company’s core strategy. Here’s why… First, and most obviously, your strategy will determine your company’s fate — so the stakes of consensus are high. Second, different people approach strategic questions in accord with their natures (e.g. Bill’s a cynic, so he sees the potential pitfalls as more likely than the next guy and so chooses a more defensive strategic position than Jane, the optimist). And so, in your strategic debates you are actually debating your fundamental world views; whether or not you are psychologically oriented enough to see and state this, it will be felt. Third, co-leaders often take more extreme positions in strategy debates than they would were they solo at the helm. For one thing, they know that their co-leader will balance their extremism. Also, an extreme early position in a strategy debate can be used later as retroactive rationale for why we “should have done it my way.” Yes, this is all rather embarrassing, but the psyche is the psyche. This extremism can dilute rationality and lead to pigeonholing and blame. Fourth and most important: Setting core company strategy is where co-leaders often run into the biggest accountability challenges. As co-leaders, you have so much to do that you absolutely must divide and conquer. And yet, you often have to do this in areas where boundaries of responsibility aren’t totally clear. Roles, titles, and agreed-upon purview only go so far. The rub: If more than one person is equally in charge of something it is incredibly difficult to avoid subtly relinquishing responsibility and accountability. Hard decisions can become harder to make. And your company becomes at risk of a pleasant mediocrity. Alas, the challenges of co-leading don’t stop there… You are the chief bards for the company — telling the company story and defining the brand in the way you comport yourself all day every day. Alignment is essential and difficult to attain, particularly as the company story evolves. Equity- and finance-related issues can be particularly complex, forcing co-leaders to agree on their relative importance to the company — both historically and going forward. It’s not like the conditions are easy. Things are moving very quickly. Time and energy are precious commodities. You have big problems to solve. You are stressed and haven’t had an eight-hour night of sleep in months. It’s hard to stay hydrated, let alone well-rested, let alone pleasant company. And all of this is glaringly visible to all. The public nature of your relationship makes challenges exponentially more difficult to mediate. So it’s not surprising that co-leader relationships can easily degrade into a Petri dish for any number of pathologies: cycles of blame, guilt, and shame; self-perpetuating patterns of anger, frustration, defensiveness, poor communication, misunderstanding; and so on. It can get ugly. It often does. And if you succumb to this it will genuinely hurt your company’s outlook. And yet, two can be exponentially more powerful than one. Co-leadership can be an extremely powerful lever for building a great company. Indeed, it can and should be energizing, efficient and inspiring for you, your team and your company. Why? And so on. The boons of the collaborative leadership assuredly make the challenges worth traversing. Here’s my top 5 list, plus a bonus track: This one is obvious but critical. Regarding the people you co-lead a company with, be sure the relationship fulfills these three requirements, at an absolute minimum: This one is so easily overlooked amidst the excitement of creation, the contagious feeling of invincibility, and so forth. Don’t miss this. If you aren’t running into conflict, you likely aren’t pushing your limits enough. Conflict isn’t bad; it is a common side effect of drawing out each person’s unique perspective. You need to create a consistent system for reflecting on your co-founder relationship: what’s working, what’s failing, how you can improve, etc. Calling on outside support to facilitate this is often a good idea. Again, so obvious but so easily screwed up. Ninety percent of the division is really easy. It’s the 10 percent that will get you. This 10 percent includes, most importantly, areas of shared decision-making. I would say you should almost always choose being left out over sharing accountability. Without extremely refined skill, shared accountability means less accountability. If you share responsibility you will end up relinquishing it in subtle and damaging ways. Each thing should ultimately be owned by one person, even the most mission critical things. You have to trust each other. The 10% also includes tricky issues that traverse various areas. A classic one here is data. Data often is the responsibility of marketing product sales. But who really owns it? You need to proactively, and on a granular basis, get really clear about who owns these category-traversing business functions. About a year into my co-founder/CEO relationship with Brian, we realized that we kept getting into conflicts around issues that we actually agreed on. I had a tendency to say that things with small likelihoods had “absolutely zero f@#$!#$ chance of ever working,” while Brian tended to embrace the language of possibility: “that definitely could work ☺!!” Turns out we both thought the thing in question had about a 17 percent chance of working. Upon realizing this, we started avoiding all vague probability terms and talking in actual percentages. Doing this eliminated about 40 percent of our conflicts. So, “speak in percentages” is my way of saying: Find the communication techniques that help you arrive at understanding, consensus and useful action. If you are incapable of seeing your weaknesses — and particularly the things you do that are hard for your co-leaders, even if they aren’t categorically counterproductive — then you will end up in a prideful, defensive, unhelpful stance. If you see your weaknesses then you will be able to build a balanced view of the relationship dynamics that will support rapid de-escalation and effective collaboration. Your vulnerability will be fuel. Any time you spend being defensive is time wasted. Humor is the most unsung of all leadership skills. If you don’t laugh your asses off pretty frequently then you are probably in for trouble. I’d say this is a subcategory of the bigger necessity for fun and friendship. You don’t need to go drinking every night together. But you should spend time together, laughing at the absurdity and excitement of the whole endeavor. We are in a collaborative moment. As such, I imagine that collaborative leadership will become increasingly common — and hopefully we’ll also become increasingly skilled at making these relationships truly work. Because, when they do work — which is to say when you make them work — you unlock a groundswell of productivity, intelligence and inspiration. |
iMac With Retina 5K Display First Impressions: A Screen In Which To Lose Oneself | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | Apple’s boasts a screen with an almost preposterous resolution of 5180×2880 pixels, which makes it the world’s highest resolution display. The screen is the key ingredient here, despite changes under the hood, and after a couple of days of use, it’s still the screen that (stating the obvious here) catches my eye. Amid the flurry and elbow-throwing of the Apple hands-on room at their unveiling event this past Thursday, truly coming to grips with the quality of the iMac’s screen wasn’t really possible – only when I got my review unit home and stared at it untroubled by throngs of competing journalists was it clear just how much of an achievement Apple has pulled off here. It’s even more apparent in my home desktop setup, where the new iMac is flanked by a 2011 27-inch iMac on the left, and a 27-inch Thunderbolt display on the right: The iMac with Retina 5K display is far and away the best visual experience ever produced, for any kind of computing device, and likely for any kind of A/V device, period. It’s easy to make a big screen look good when it’s designed to be seen from five or more feet back; this iMac is made for use with only a couple of feet at most between it and the viewer, and it looks absolutely stunning even when seen with a gap of just a few inches. What’s even more amazing is that the display quality doesn’t seem to come with any trade-offs – it’s brighter and has better contrast and color rendering than the two Apple-made monitors flanking it on my desktop currently, which is no small feat. Performance doesn’t stutter, and you don’t even see the kind of minor visual hiccups on image-rich pages that we witnessed with early Retina MacBook Pro tech. When you can find 4K video samples (which took some digging), they render beautifully, but even standard HD content upscales remarkably well. This isn’t just a video and image geek’s dream machine, however: Text on the new iMac is rendered with a whole new level of crispness and legibility. More than once, I’ve found myself staring at a block of text not because I’m engrossed in the content, but because I’m infatuated with the detail and quality of the rendered type. Our full review will go into much more detail, but suffice it to say for now, the new iMac’s display alone is worth the price of admission. |
Handbook For A New Era Of Crowdfunding | Sandeep Sood | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | Ever been to Indiegogo? Kickstarter? Spend any cash? What’d you leave with? Why does anyone buy a product that doesn’t exist yet…and may never exist? On the surface, crowdfunding seems to defy logic. Economists find the phenomenon of crowdfunding startling. If you think like an economist, crowdfunding shouldn’t work. But it does. And those who understand why it works are able to get results every time. There’s no amount of economic acrobatics or consumer rationalization that can explain it. That doesn’t mean there’s no explanation. I’ve seen it work first-hand a dozen times — predictably. The explanations move you beyond logic into behavioral psychology.You need to understand how crowdfunding works because it has become a driving force for everything from hardware products to startup investing. Figure out what the economists can’t, and you’re on your way to making crowdfunding work for you. Instead of going to the bank and putting up collateral to fund their crazy idea, entrepreneurs tap into a world that is seeking out connections and ideas everyday. Just hack together a passable prototype, and a product is making money from day one without giving up a thing. No stock, no IOUs, nothing. People back these entrepreneurs knowing this. Based on a video and a few paragraphs. To buy a product that may never get built at all. Why? Are we so in need of a story that we’ll open up our wallets to anyone taking a risk? Because some dude with a cooler looks like he’s having a lot of fun? Maybe. I’ve taken a long hard look at crowdfunding behaviors. What makes people want to give to some projects and not others? It’s more than just altruism and some irrational gift economy gumming up the works of the supply-and-demand machine, as the New York Times suggested. It’s an emotional thing, and it’s bigger than logic. First comes love. Backers often want something so badly, they’ll do anything for it to exist. On Kickstarter or Indiegogo, when someone sees a product they love, made by someone they believe in, backing is a way of throwing their hat into the ring. They wager what it takes to realize an idea, even if there’s risk involved. It doesn’t matter if they can’t enjoy the result right away. Love is patient. Love is kind. Next, backing a crowdfunding campaign is essentially a chance to shape the way things are. It’s influence, and it gives backers an outlet where they can be creative. Even if it’s just vicariously. Throw in a little surprise (nine months later something shows up in the mail) and bang, they didn’t just buy something. They were part of an experience from start to finish, and research shows buying an experience makes us far happier than buying things. Build your campaign around love of the product and a chance to make a dent in the universe, and you’re a step ahead of the game. Instead of economics, let these emotional impulses guide your decisions for what you build, how many you build, how much you charge, and what you give away. If everything you do isn’t helping people feel—love and vicarious creativity—your crowdfunding campaign doesn’t have much of a chance. Here’s your challenge: Your competition is getting bigger, corporations are testing out new products, and venture capitalists are using crowdfunding as a proving ground before they shell out any cash. I’m not saying it’s not grassroots anymore, but there’s a newer, bigger movement that overshadows the small guys we send to Sundance every year. Here are five considerations to use in the new era of crowdfunding: Platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter were designed for storytelling. Anyone can sell a product off a shelf. How many can sell thousands before they’ve been made? Only the ones that capture our imagination. Bring people along on your journey. Where did your idea come from? How will it change their lives? The was born out of a family who was tired of fumbling with technology. suggests that if you use its chips to keep track of stuff you lose track off, you’ll have time to find something big, like a husband. A good narrative can make unremarkable garage-sale items sell for 50 times more than what they’re worth. What can it do for you? Every campaign’s got the same tools to tell its story. It’s about how well you use them that’ll make the difference. My guess is, there are some things you’d be better off leaving to the pros. The first thing people do is watch your video. My advice: get some all-stars who know how to make an emotional pitch and can package it up nicely. It’s hard to talk about yourself, and even harder to look good doing it. Consider agencies that work JUST in video, such as Sandwich Video (which launched Coin), and Feedback LLC (which launched Tile). PR companies orchestrate launches like Houston blasts rockets. Get the timing right and get the right people talking about your product. Organic traffic from your crowdsourcing platform won’t account for much more than 10 percent of a successful campaign’s booty, so you’re going to have to look elsewhere. PR firms such as Inner Circle Labs (which launched Jibo), JumpStarter PR, or BAM Communications (which focuses on innovation) should be considered. Get a marketing team that understands technical marketing and how to design and develop compelling web and mobile experiences, such as Wareness.io and Agency20, which focus just on crowdfunding. You’ll want them to launch and manage your funnel, but they should also be thinking about your user experience and building you a website that can serve as the traffic hub of your campaign. Have a budget of at least $50,000 to start. Grassroots isn’t dead, but it isn’t growing, either. Making people feel emotionally invested in your product is table stakes. You’ve got to start there. But advertising is the only thing that gives your campaign legs and makes it predictable. Everything else is holding your breath and hoping for the waters to part. So build advertising into your budget, and if you’re raising funding, start with at least that much. Plan to spend your first $50K learning. Figure out what you need to spend to acquire one new customer. Scale that to 10. Test the crap out of it. Then, scale that to a thousand, ten thousand, and a hundred thousand. Test a variety of media and ad channels. If you have a solid product and stay diligent, you will reach a point where you’re spending what you need to spend on each customer to make long-term money. Hear that humming? That’s the sound of your very own perpetual money machine. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. If you didn’t get it by now, we’re not really talking about crowdfunding as a “campaign.” This is the new way to market your product. Don’t just think of Kickstarter or Indiegogo as some punctuated thing that’s going to end. Make it your storefront and your e-commerce engine. Use the crowdsourcing platform as a way to accept payment and take control over how you tell your story. You need your own site in addition to any platform you’re using. You can build your own site and sell people on your own even if you are using platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter. When your crowdfunding campaign is over, your team should be ready to make some tweaks and turn this into your store. Nothing is wasted. Your crowdfunding campaign isn’t some moonshot gamble; it’s the beginning of everything. Like I said, everyone’s working with the same materials. But some repurpose them in a way that no one’s ever done before. Exaggerate what makes you different. Have a gaming product? Maybe you let people unlock achievements and new levels of contribution. Weight loss tool? Perhaps track total pounds lost in parallel with funds earned. Don’t be afraid to let your personality set you apart from the noise. It is now possible to develop your product and your customer base simultaneously. We’re only beginning to realize the implications here — in an era where we can prototype groundbreaking products in our garage, we can also practice telling our story to millions of customers, learning what will and won’t make them fall in love. This is the way we build (products and customers) now. And the crowd is going wild. |
Bag Week: Daame Bags | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | While I can’t say that are the best daame bags we’ve tested (see what I did there?), I can say that they are definitely an interesting rethinking of the women’s laptop bag. We tested two types – a wide leather laptop tote and other 13-inch model. I showed both of these to a human woman, my wife, who said that she liked the elegant and spare design but noted they had a bit of a new car smell when they came out of the box, something that might have turned her off if she handled the bag in the store. However, that could have come from the packaging. The bags are handmade in the USA of real leather outside a special recycled inner lining. The insides are a pleasing sea green while the grey exterior is decorated only with an embossed Daame logo. The company also has a message of philanthropy. “We give 5% of all profits to our partners who are dedicated to providing long-term services and education for girls in impoverished circumstances,” writes the founder, Mille Yu. That’s a noble thing. The Daame origin was bred of necessity. Yu was looking for a bag that looked stylish but still could hold a full laptop and charger. “After significant amount of search, I left to begin R&D work and launched a selection of products early this year that combines style and usability,” said Yu. “One of the unique qualities of the product is the lining that is specially engineered to be resilient to stains, bacterial, liquid (even beer) and is easy to clean.” In truth, these don’t look like laptop bags. The leather is soft and supple and barring the smell, there was little my wife didn’t like. There is a large inner pouch for your laptop along with smaller pouches for phones and the like. The rest of your items – your notebooks, pens, etc. – can fit a smaller pouch or just hang out in another main compartment. My wife said she would have preferred a few more inside pockets but understood the limitations. Now for the bad news: the bags start at $395 and go up to $495. That’s definitely not high for a leather bag but it is high for a laptop bag. To be clear, you’re paying for a useful, handmade, and nicely designed fashion item with an interesting message. Compared to some nylon monstrosities we’ve used so far, this is by far the nicest of the bunch. You can check them out . [gallery ids="1071969,1071968,1071967,1071966,1071965,1071964,1071963"] |
10 Trends Transforming Enterprise IT | Matt Murphy | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | When it comes to corporate IT, revolution is in the air. The way companies buy, build, manage, optimize and secure information technology is changing dramatically. From cloud computing to big data analytics to ubiquitous mobile connectivity, corporate IT systems are getting faster, more efficient, cheaper to operate and easier to use. In the process, a new wave of tech companies has emerged to challenge established players. Venture investors are pouring money into enterprise computing like never before. The sector attracted a record in capital in the first six months of 2014 alone. Fueling that enthusiasm are the successful multi-billion-dollar IPOs for companies like Workday, Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, ServiceNow and Splunk. There will be many more in the quarters ahead. Here’s a look at 10 important trends changing the face of enterprise computing: According to Morgan Stanley, nearly one-third of all workloads run on the cloud today. What makes cloud computing so powerful is the ability to easily expand the resources committed to any given application without buying more hardware. Need more capacity? Your cloud provider can offer more in an instant. Virtualization turns a disparate set of servers into a single pool of computing resources that can be adjusted on the fly. Server virtualization has been so successful that IT departments are now starting to virtualize everything else in the data center, including networking, security and storage. Purchasing decisions have shifted from CIOs and IT staff to individual heads of sales, marketing, finance and other departments. The same bottoms-up adoption of technology that drove growth in smartphones and cloud computing is opening up new opportunities for IT vendors, who now have a broader set of buyers with reduced budget resistance and greater willingness to experiment. Driven by the emergence of Web-based sales channels, more companies are building businesses without quota-carrying salespeople. This allows them to more quickly get their products into the hands of customers and validate demand before building out a sales force. Enterprise businesses are emulating consumer software companies by offering free trials and freemium pricing models, allowing customers to experiment without large up-front financial commitments. Lightweight adoption, paying for value, and focusing on validated customers works for vendors as well as buyers. Open source technologies like MySQL paved the way for this model – and the rise of Puppet Labs, DataStax / Cassandra and MuleSoft all show that open source continues to do well – but we now see freemium models in a variety of other IT software products. Widespread adoption of mobile devices has led to more efficient enterprise workflows. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff recently said he . This gets easier every day. Whether it is quickly turning around business documents via the e-signature application DocuSign or fine-tuning scheduling and route optimization for people in the field via ServiceMax, mobile applications are reinventing and automating processes across the enterprise, enabling work to get done faster and smarter. As my partner Ted Schlein has , security threats are becoming more distributed. As a result, companies have to think about security at every level of the network – from servers to endpoints and everywhere in between. Companies are also shifting their focus from protecting borders to securing data. As attack vectors abound, a new generation of security companies, like Ionic Security, Illumio, and Bromium, has emerged to meet the new nature of cyber threats. The promise of Big Data is its power to bring new insights to light. Improved analytics have triggered new, non-obvious ideas about how businesses operate. For instance, InsideSales.com discovered that a sales rep who calls a lead back within 5 minutes of a request for information boosts the likelihood of closing a sale by 10X. By harnessing big data sets, companies will discover patterns like this for the first time. Faster application performance will distinguish the winners in enterprise. Studies by Walmart and Compuware show that one additional second of latency in application delivery can decrease revenue by 10 percent. An emerging set of companies is focused on speed: Instart Logic accelerates application delivery, AppDynamics monitors and helps address application response time, and PernixData and Fusion-io leverage flash-based storage to make data delivery many times faster. Consumers spend tons of time using mobile apps that are beautifully and intuitively designed. People want the same from enterprise apps. Better-designed applications with friendly interfaces are starting to displace harder-to-use incumbents. The days of top-down, company-mandated choices for enterprise products are coming to an end. Corporate IT has been democratized and reimagined. The trends may be bad news for the incumbent vendors, but they offer a host of opportunities for enterprise-focused entrepreneurs. |
#Gamergate Shows Tech Needs Far Better Algorithms | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | If teaches us anything — beyond, of course, vastly obvious observations about the toxicity of certain Internet demographics (which is hardly new news) — it’s that algorithms and formulaic behaviour can and are being gamed. This is especially obvious in this sorry saga (for a detailed breakdown of Gamergate I recommend reading ; I won’t be rehashing the specific events here) because the players involved are exactly that: gamers. This rage-ful, over-entitled, Internet-connected fraternity of kids share one core skill: playing games. Little wonder, then, they have proved so expert at driving a toxic hellbrew of misogyny into the — and — by gaming popular online channels using a sophisticated playbook of disruption. Of course they have been able to do this. These individuals’ hobby is examining virtual structures for weaknesses they can exploit with digital weapons in order to progress to the next level. Gamergate’s players have gamified online media channels and are pwning them hard. Whether it’s via sock puppeting to spread misinformation, or provoking and co-opting existing online subcultures to pressgang an impromptu troll army to flood mainstream social media with targeted abuse, or crafting a carefully worded email campaign to apply collective pressure on corporates to withdraw ad support from their targets. The tactics are myriad but the end result can be summed up with one word: bullying. What this tells us is that the technology industry absolutely needs better algorithms — to identify, badge and offer users the option to filter this stuff out of their streams — unless everyone thinks it’s okay that online discourse be hijacked by playground bullies. Existing features of digital platforms such as ‘trending’ content or auto-suggestion prompts have always been blunt instruments; a crude measure of volume, lacking context, which can — as Gamergate amply underlines — be gamed to lift the crudest sentiments and content into mainstream view, even without considering targeted attacks. In the most minor example, start typing a Twitter hashtag for #feminism right now and you’ll find yourself prompted with auto suggestions such as FeminismisAwful and FeministsAreUgly. Ergo Twitter’s algorithms are being co-opted into an orchestrated harassment campaign. Algorithms this crude are trivial to game. You certainly couldn’t call it hacking because so little skill is needed to reverse engineer the formula and turn what was intended as a helpful feature into targeted and amplified abuse. Well meaning these features may have been, but as their algorithmic rules are exposed the platforms they are attached to become vulnerable to subversion — meaning the features are no longer fit for purpose. And the rules powering them need changing up to keep up with targeted abuse. Gamergate also underlines that our current Internet services are doing a very poor job of addressing this issue. Indeed, mainstream digital services are actively washing their hands of it. Twitter shrugs its turquoise shoulders at the problem of online harassment, takes a moment to oil its feathers and then chirps that ‘the tweets must flow’ (unless of course it’s legally compelled to act — by, for instance, frameworks forbidding anti-semitic comments in certain countries. Or, hey, if you’re a celebrity unhappy about the hateful treatment meted out to you by Twitter trolls in the wake of your famed father’s suicide and you threaten to leave the service entirely). Business self-interest can clearly trump algorithmic hierarchy and lead Twitter to tweak the tweet firehose behind the scenes. Orchestrated online bullying campaigns such as Gamergate are not, however, apparently, worthy of Twitter’s attention. That’s a massive failure.
It also confirms that it tweaks its own auto suggest algorithms when they relate to piracy, noting: “Google has taken steps to prevent terms closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete and Related Search.” But if you happen to be an average human dealing with some other human unpleasantness that’s attached itself to you online, whether that’s via bullying jerks or technical quirks, well sorry that’s just how the algorithm works. Google absolutely defends its right to define you by what others choose to click on (and/or what drives the most revenue for its advertising business). If you are a private individual living in the U.S. and *don’t* like the Google search results associated with your name — results which inevitably work to define your identity online, since they sit there for any curious searcher to conjure with a few keystrokes — well, too bad. Mountain View’s commandment is also that the free speech much flow. In Europe this specific situation has very recently shifted, thanks to a Spanish man’s lengthy legal battle against Google because its algorithms were continuing to foreground a news story about a 16-year-old housing-related debt he’d long since repaid. The result of that battle, this May, was a that identified Google and search engines as data controllers and thus requires them to process requests from private individuals who want something de-listed from search results associated with their name. If the information is outdated or irrelevant or erroneous in that private name search it should be de-listed per the request, says the ruling. Now don’t get me wrong. Google has not gone quiet into this pro-privacy goodnight. It’s lobbied tooth and nail against the ruling, and continues to do so. Only this week Eric — reiterating Google’s intention to observe merely the letter of the law, while staying strangely silent about that go against the spirit of the ruling — by widening loopholes that result in the opposite effect being achieved (i.e. fresh publicity for private individuals, not the sought for obscurity). While Schmidt was happy to say he wished Google could find a way to automate the process of reviewing the hundreds of thousands of search de-listing requests it’s so far received (“because we like to automate things — it makes everything more efficient”), he expressed no such love for fixing the philosophical and human-impacting conundrums that are evidently being generated by Google’s algorithms. Indeed, he personally shrugged off finding a solution for the loopholes Google’s actions are helping to exacerbate — outsourcing responsibility to an outside panel of (which, yes, is an oxymoron). This official sounding public advisory council model is entirely of Google’s own making. And allows the European Court of Justice’s ruling to be publicly chewed over, as if it’s still up for debate, and the entire Google-paid-for roadshow to generate discussion that undermines the law via the perception that it’s an unfixable can of worms. Here, says Google’s Schmidt chairing this Google generated roadshow, is a ruling that has even the philosophers foxed. Go figure! Schmidt’s responses during the London advisory council meeting to audience questions curious about Google-made decisions were typically shorter and curter than those questions which played to the company playbook by indulging his evident dislike of European privacy law. He ended the four-hour session by mocking the idea that implementing the ruling was possible. (Such an attitudinal imbalance is also in evidence in , which earlier probed the company for details on its implementation of the ruling.) Google is not playing a straight bat here because as an entity and a business it prioritizes information over privacy. Its mission statement, after all, is to ‘organize the world’s information’. So its playbook on individual privacy — which can and evidently is being compromised by its algorithms — is to make a sticky wicket even stickier. None of this is surprising. Google is a business after all. But what is perhaps surprising is that Google is not generally to be in the human misery business — yet there’s no doubt its algorithms can and do cause collateral damage to private individuals’ lives (witness the hundreds of thousands of search de-listing requests it has fielded in Europe over the past few months). Damage which Google de-emphasizes in the interests of its greater mission of organizing all of the things. And while the notion of causing damage to individuals may instinctively sound like bad business, in fact human misery is the pull the press has used to shift news off its stands for generations. Misery sells papers — and drives clicks. So again it’s no surprise that many media outlets have aligned with Google’s arguments against this privacy ruling, decrying it as ‘censorship’. Really the truth of the matter is a whole lot more messy and complex than that. Nor is Facebook immune from criticism here. Facebook’s algorithms are in equal thrall to what drives clicks, and equally open to being gamed as a result of being driven by such single-minded formula. If you want to game the Facebook News Feed, a basic ‘hack’ is to add the word “congratulations!” to a status update and watch it float to the top. Or enlist your friends to like your status update en mass to propel it to the top. (Ironically, Facebook has even — which demonstrates an awareness of the psychological power of whatever is allowed to be most visible to users of its platform.) Facebook has also been for being reluctant to remove misogynistic content from its platform, initially claiming this type of hate speech does not violate its terms of use. (Yet, , it has also been alacritous quick to yank photos of women breastfeeding as a T&Cs breach.) Bottom line: Facebook’s platform, Facebook’s rules. And these rules skew towards content that appears popular — which means a well orchestrated hate campaign can easily push its algorithmic buttons. What links these mainstream online platforms is a failure to take collective responsibility for how easily their services can be misappropriated. How the potency of the algorithms that shepherd content around these massive digital landscapes can be manipulated and gamed to intentionally amplify social discord. And, most importantly, how they can be misappropriated to actively harass. Gamergate illustrates how successfully a toxic fringe can exploit mainline digital tools to generate a disproportion level of online disruption on the very mainstream channels that actively disown their views. Congratulations guys, you’ve been pwned! Toxic viewpoints have no shortage of outlets online. The sprawl of the Internet offers a place for all comers. So there are dedicated channels for haters of all stripes to swap prejudices together. That may not be utopian, and certainly isn’t pleasant, but if you want to find some kind of silver lining to online cesspits you could say well at least the Internet is a level playing field. Except it’s not if the largest playing fields can be so easily gamed. The big social problems come when sophisticated online armies of algorithm gamers mobilize to intentionally repurpose mainstream platforms to grab far more eyeballs than their views would otherwise get. And the big issue here is they are being helped to do that by the priorities of these platforms on which they are running amok. This is about superpowered muck spreading — following a viral marketing playbook — so that it spills out of all proportion, enabled by self-interested commercial services that care most about chasing clicks. The entire Gamergate populous is by all accounts a minority movement. Even terming it a movement is to give it far more credit than it deserves. It is certainly organized. And orchestrated. Much like a group of online gamers banding together to play Battlefield or Halo. But this is a very small army whose grievances are absolutely not a mainstream concern. The have a right to shout loudly and angrily, sure, as do we all, but in normal circumstances no one but these kids’ parents would hear them. Thanks to our current crop of digital services’ formulaic mechanics, we’re all being forced to listen. So, amid all the manufactured sound and the fury of #Gamergate, a useful take away is that small, orchestrated online groups can magnify the impact and influence of fringe viewpoints by weaponizing mainstream digital services to repurpose these platforms as propaganda machines. This is not a new thing but the frequency with which it is happening online appears to be growing, and the toxicity being generated is becoming harder to escape as the tactics in play are honed and polished to ever greater effect. Gamergate activists use online channels to funnel graphic death and rape threats as a weapon to silence feminist critics. But they also repurpose more banal channels — by, for instance, carrying out orchestrated email campaigns that fire carefully worded missives at advertisers to apply commercial pressure against targets (such as hated media outlets). One campaign apparently successfully encouraged . Again what’s interesting is that a small group of angry people are able to achieve disproportionately large results — with tangible fiscal impacts — by using digital tools as amplifiers. What the technology industry needs is far smarter algorithms that do more than take a crude measure of volume to determine which content floats to the top. We need mainstream services that build in user support structures to protect against these types of malicious gaming tactics — by making it harder for trolls to mobilize to subvert platforms for their own fringe ends. And we the users need to apply pressure on the tech makers to examine how their tools are being weaponized and come up with fixes that can combat abuse, such as more intelligent filters/blocking options for users to arm themselves against attackers if they so choose. Trolls will always want to shout loudly, but let’s hope our algorithms aren’t always so dumb as to actively help subvert online social spaces that should be rich, varied and interesting places by transforming them into megaphones for haters. |
Are American Tech Companies Disloyal? | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | FBI Director James Comey had some for startups and technology companies about their increasing use of encryption and their responsibilities to law enforcement. Speaking at Brookings, Comey argued that “…if the challenges of real-time interception threaten to leave us in the dark, encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place.” He specifically named Apple and Google as companies challenging the FBI in its pursuit of criminals. “Both companies are run by good people, responding to what they perceive is a market demand. But the place they are leading us is one we shouldn’t go to without careful thought and debate as a country.” He argued that the FBI is not looking for backdoors, but rather “We want to use the front door, with clarity and transparency, and with clear guidance provided by law.” As the debate over end-to-end encryption heats up, there is a fundamental question at work: What loyalty do companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook have to the U.S. government? After all, working with law enforcement used to be easy when customer records were in manilla folders in warehouses, and even remained easy in the early era of cell phones. Now, , the line between legal and extralegal activity is not so easy to discern. Indeed, Comey’s request for transparency is precisely what the world has been clamoring for ever since the Snowden revelations revealed just how cavalier the U.S. government had become in treating the personal communications of American citizens (let alone citizens in other countries). Comey leads the country’s top law enforcement agency, and as such, he is looking to create the due process needed to bring criminals to trial, and ultimately, to put them behind bars. Most American citizens and companies are not opposed to this use case. The challenge is that so long as companies hold consumer data, they are a target for all kinds of difficult security situations. End-to-end encryption isn’t just good marketing for technology companies peddling their services to wary consumers, but also a means to absolve these companies from having to deal with the very real politics at the heart of data and national security. Given that shareholder value is the metric by which we judge companies on the markets, it shouldn’t be surprising that companies have responded by trying to be seen as above local politics. International markets represent an enormous portion of revenues for many of America’s elite technology companies, sometimes even a majority. was 54% in 2012, and has increased to 58% this year. of Cisco’s revenues, and even ecommerce companies like Amazon get . The concerns of citizens in other countries about their privacy has put these companies under the microscope. , and the company also posted adamantly arguing that it will not cooperate with government requests for information, “And we never will.” Other companies have made similarly strong statements in recent weeks. These companies know that the closer they get to the U.S. government, the farther they become to their largest source of growth. China has spent billions of dollars building up its internet firewalls, in addition to developing policies that make it effectively impossible for Western internet companies to compete in its market, let alone function at all. Today, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and even Wikipedia are all blocked in China. Such websites are also frequently blocked in countries like Iran. But it isn’t just authoritarian regimes that put in place such policies, but democracies as well. South Korea, , has also developed a policy system that prevents foreign tech companies from competing effectively. since it allowed its users to maintain their credit card information on file. A few years ago, , since maps are considered national security data and therefore cannot be processed on servers outside of South Korea. This puts America’s technology companies in a real predicament. While they want to remain above the local politics in all the countries that they operate, a combination of protectionism and national security concerns may just prevent them from competing in many of them at all. That’s why tech companies shouldn’t ignore U.S. policy, but should rather help shape it, since both sides fundamentally agree on the value of the open internet. America built the internet, and it was designed for decentralization and not for control right from the start. As Vint Cerf, one of the internet’s fathers, , “By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.” This model is fundamentally democratic, and so the United States intrinsically benefits every time a country uses it. Indeed, this sort of nuanced view about the technology industry took a while for agencies like the NSA to understand. For decades, the agency fought the export of computing equipment, arguing that it allowed foreign governments access to technologies that made surveillance more difficult. But the decline in the financial health of the computing industry in the early 2000s . There were deep worries that export controls might harm local manufacturers against foreign competitors, eventually forcing the NSA to become dependent on foreign manufacturers for computing power as American companies declined. Such concerns are still present , which the United States is very concerned about since it is successfully competing against domestic networking companies like Cisco. We are seeing echoes of this same battle today over encryption. Is it better to have Google’s services be secure and used all over the world, or have backdoors and exploits that make surveillance easier, but at the cost of losing control over much of the world’s information? To me, the answer is obvious. A strong technology industry is fundamentally good for the United States, and a government that supports an open internet is fundamentally good for technology companies. We just have to come to an understanding of what the rules of the game are. We need to ensure that these rules have due process, and that companies are required to disclose adequate accountability data to verify the privacy of consumers throughout the world. And despite what companies argue about end-to-end encryption, most tech companies still require access to their user’s data in order to present web pages, display custom ads, and sell services to them. So I am less believing that this model of encryption is going to become the de facto standard anyway. We shouldn’t expect companies to be loyal to the U.S. automatically, but such loyalty may well be in the best interest of all parties, from consumers to companies. Engaging with U.S. policymakers and making the case for what rules should apply to encryption is the first step to a better and safer internet for all of us. |
The Disrupt Europe Hackathon Kicks Off At Old Billingsgate In London | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | The Disrupt Europe hackathon began just a few hours ago at in London. Participants are now gathered in The Vault, the venue’s ominously-named underground area — but earlier, when everyone was still waiting for the doors to open, Mike Butcher and I walked the line and talked to a few of the attendees about why they’d came and what they’re planning to build. There were some cool ideas (not to mention a few highly secretive teams), but the best part was hearing how many people were coming to Disrupt for the first time, or to their first hackathon ever. Teams will have a little less than 24 hours to complete their projects. On Sunday, they’ll be presenting the results on-stage and competing for prizes from TechCrunch and the various event sponsors. |
Gillmor Gang: Solar Panel | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, October 17, 2014. This year’s Dreamforce 2014 overshadowed another Apple reveal of new hardware and consolidation of the mobile operating system platform. Hilary Clinton set the tone for the week by reminding us that vocabulary is the doorway to opportunity, and Al Gore and Neil Young found hope emerging from the calamitous global climate crisis. You could almost hear the echoes of Ohio on Howard Street: Smartphones and icecaps melting, we’re finally on our own… Philanthropy for the soul, a complex message as the enterprise rolls up its sleeves and harnesses the Social Wave. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
You Too May Be A Victim Of Developaralysis | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | Dear developers: Do you feel insecure because you’re only fluent in a mere eight programming languages used across three families of devices? Does exposure to yet another JavaScript framework make you shudder and wince? Have you postponed a pet project because you couldn’t figure out which cloud platform would be best for it? You too may suffer from Developaralysis. Be afraid. There is no cure. The panoply of options available to developers today is . We’re choking on a cornucopia. Over the last few years I’ve been paid to write Java, Objective-C, C, C++, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP (sorry) backed by various flavors of SQL/key-value/document datastores (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, BigTable, Redis, Memcached, etc.) Do I feel good about this? Good God, no. Mostly I just feel guilty that I haven’t done anything with Erlang, Clojure, Rust, Go, C#, Scala, Haskell, Julia, Scheme, Swift, or OCaml. I’m a victim of : the crippling sense that the software industry is evolving so fast that no one person can possibly keep up. Take almost of those languages, zoom in on the various frameworks and toolkits and libraries available for it … and try to keep your head from exploding. It would take months just to complete a serious evaluation of all the permutations of JavaScript frameworks and libraries out there today. And do you have any how many Ruby gems are available? Or iOS frameworks? Or NewSQL/NoSQL datastores? And don’t even get me started on Hadoop vs Spark vs Google Dataflow, or Avro vs Thrift vs protocol buffers, or or or … At least the mobile world has shrunk to an Android/iOS duopoly — although that hides crossover alternatives, like or cross-platform HTML a la PhoneGap or Sencha — but just try figuring out where and how to deploy your back end. I’ve worked on systems deployed to Heroku, Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, and Parse…which just makes me feel bad that I know little about the guts of OpenStack, Force.com, Azure, AppFog, the many AWS services I’ve never actually used, et al. Starting a basic website in 2014: 1. Install Node 2. Install Bower 3. Pick CSS framework 4. Pick responsive approach … 47. Write some HTML — I Am Devloper (@iamdevloper) Developers today face such a thronging armada of available options that we now use a plethora of tools which exist : Bundler, Bower, CocoaPods, Pip, etc. Which are great! I wouldn’t want to live without them! But still. And then you start those other tools, and half the time when you really get down into their weeds, you begin to realize that configuration isn’t quite enough, you actually want to rewrite them … just a little … or maybe replace them with another alternative … The sad fact is that the sheer number and diversity of languages, tools, frameworks, and platforms available to developers today is incredibly daunting. Of course nobody wants to admit this. Everybody wants to pretend to be a master/mistress of all trades. But the truth is that we all suffer from the stigma of . Even gathering the information required to make an informed decision is almost certainly counterproductive. If, before embarking on a project, you actually took the time to analyze all the possibilities, and then climbed the resulting learning curve, you’d promptly get beaten to market by some teenager using PHP and Swift with — –but on the other hand, if you settle on Swift and PHP, then you live in constant terror that some ninja / programmer will wind up running rings around you in the same way that , back in the day: When you choose technology, you have to ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will work the best … In fact we did have a secret weapon … We were just able to develop software faster than anyone thought possible … We wrote our software in a weird AI language, with a bizarre syntax full of parentheses. Hence: . Do we choose what we already know, because we can move now without crawling up a learning curve, and live in terror that someone somewhere else is doing it better, faster, more elegantly–and our skills will be obsolete and uncompetitive next year? Or do we expand what we know, because we love to learn and better tools are both more fun and a huge competitive advantage…at the expense of copious time, effort, and cognitive load? Trick question! There’s no right answer. That’s why every month is . I’ll be sending out blinking kaleidoscopic ribbons for you all to wear, just as soon as I figure out which 3D printer, microcontroller, , and drone OS to use. Don’t hold your breath. |
Snapchat Ads Are Probably Cooler Than Facebook’s, But Still Not Cool | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | Prepare for ads on Snapchat, bruh! The company that users will start receiving ads from brands under the Recent Updates section of the app. This is the same portion of the Snapchat inbox where you find , a product that threads together multiple snaps (both video or photo) into one, long snap. The ads are opt-in, in that you don’t actually have to watch them if you don’t want to. (Brands will love it!) After viewing, or within 24 hours, they disappear from your inbox. However, users have no control over whether or not they actually receive the ads. They’re coming, whether you like it or not. Either, it’s a pretty chill way to approach advertising, and it focuses predominantly on the happiness of the user, not the brand. It’s hard to say the same for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which all force users to look at ads that are interstitially woven into the main social experience. Still, an ad is an ad is an ad. And ads are never actually cool. Snapchat first started experimenting with this idea with the , a collaborative Snapchat timeline centered around specific events. The first Our Stories event was . Though Stories is a growing product, Our Stories have limited visibility because they are so targeted around a certain date, location, and group of people. Advertising within regular Stories, as opposed to location-based advertising, makes far more sense in terms of reach. But how powerful can these ads be? If users have complete control over whether or not they view these ads, brands run the risk of spending money on a platform where the majority of users aren’t even seeing their content. On the other hand, users are getting a pretty good deal. Of all the social networks in the past decade, this may be one of the only ones to employ advertising that isn’t forced onto the eyes of users. It’s unclear how Snapchat will actually monetize these ads — they could charge for every user that a snapvertisement, with a bonus for every time a snapad is opened, or they could simply charge for every ad on the platform. Within the announcement, Snapchat mentioned (Clueless-style) that it would be “totally rude” to put ads in your personal communication, like IMs or Snaps, and they are exactly right. They also explained why they’re introducing ads. “We need to make money. Advertising allows us to support our service while delivering neat content to Snapchatters. We promise that we’ll use the money we make to continue to surprise the Snapchat community with more terrific products – that’s what we love to do!” (I love the bit about promising to use the money to power Snapchat, considering founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy each skimmed $10 million off of the top of their $80 million Series B for themselves. We promise we’ll use the money on the product this time, guys.) You can read the full blog post here: This weekend we’re placing an advertisement in “Recent Updates” for Snapchatters in the United States. It’s the first time we’ve done anything like this because it’s the first time we’ve been paid to put content in that space. It’s going to feel a little weird at first, but we’re taking the plunge. The best advertisements tell you more about stuff that actually interests you. Some companies spend a lot of time and collect a lot of data about you to figure that out. The product we’re releasing today is a lot simpler. An advertisement will appear in your Recent Updates from time to time, and you can choose if you want to watch it. No biggie. It goes away after you view it or within 24 hours, just like Stories. We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication – things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted. It’s nice when all of the brilliant creative minds out there get our attention with terrific content. Understandably, a lot of folks want to know why we’re introducing advertisements to our service. The answer is probably unsurprising – we need to make money. Advertising allows us to support our service while delivering neat content to Snapchatters. We promise that we’ll use the money we make to continue to surprise the Snapchat community with more terrific products – that’s what we love to do! If you’re into it, TechCrunch’s Josh Constine and I got into a bit of a debate when we first heard the news, and our co-editor Alexia Tsotsis decided to record it. You can view it here: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bAF7w3puQI&w=640&h=480] |
Convergence In The Internet Of Things Is Priming The Tech World For A Major Cultural Shift | Artyom Astafurov | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | To anyone who is tuned into the tech world, it should not come as earth shattering news that machine-to-machine (M2M) technology and the have hit a major convergence point in the tech industry. What is fairly new however is that the two have become so closely intertwined with each other that you can no longer think about one without thinking of the other. If you look back in time at the progression of both concepts though, you’ll discover that these were in fact two starkly unrelated ideas at one point that have since evolved from a loose correlation to a tightly interwoven dependency. In fact, in order to understand from today’s standpoint the current and future relationship between the two, you must first understand their nuances, as well as the transformations they have undergone as one technology has begun to flow into the other. Yes, M2M technology and IoT have a complex relationship. But IoT is the only way to describe a movement in which machines as traditionally defined are no longer at the forefront of modern development. In order to explore this claim, a shift in focus needs to occur to bring IoT to the fore. So to jumpstart this discussion, we will explore here the key, underlying questions that need to be addressed: How has M2M technology evolved into IoT and what is the significance of this evolution moving forward? The concept of M2M technology originally emerged when computers were first networked and enabled to exchange data and transmit it unilaterally with one other. One of the first major M2M developments in the concept’s history was OmniTRACS, a satellite-locating and messaging service created by Qualcomm, which appeared in the late 1980s. It is thanks to this service that computer networks were able to be successfully integrated into fields, including healthcare, security, telematics, payments systems, navigation, smart home systems, green energy, e-government and beyond. Then enters IoT, a term that and has been on Strategic Technologies list since 2012 , the sudden leap of interest began in early 2014, mostly due to the increasing number of wearable devices appearing on the market. These “things” tend to be lightweight and low power. Many of them are not meant to be attached to machines, nor can they be considered computing “machines” themselves, meaning they don’t have terminals and operating systems for end users. And there are of these devices now, with experts across the board citing a massive proliferation yet to come. IoT separates itself from M2M not only in the simplicity and quantity of devices involved, but also by how the devices communicate with each other. It’s “the cloud” versus the cloud, with some help from “the fog” (extended cloud computing paradigm, ) at the ground level. Whereas M2M tends to rely on point-to-point exchanges between individual devices, IoT communications involve dispersed devices sharing data through a central server, resulting in exponentially more data based on the relationships and patterns that emerge. Electronic gadgets, vehicles, apparel, home appliances and more are expected to instigate a major cultural change – and arguably they have already begun to do so as evidenced by this fog phenomenon – with their capacity to report back and paint real-time pictures of our lives and daily habits. The value of these pictures of consumers is what provides the monetary motor in IoT development. Sure, there are some critics who believe that IoT solutions may create long-lived devices that will accumulate decades of expenses through the costs of cloud infrastructure without ever generating new revenue, which would of course be hugely problematic in the business world. While these concerns have some merits though, I really think that any concerns over negative revenue streams will just propel companies to work harder to develop better business models, such as monetizing anonymized usage data and selling it to energy companies or giving insurance companies more data points so that they can better calculate risk models. For years, ERP platform developers were the ones with the financial incentives to drive innovation of their products for large-scale deployment, since they were geared toward the business world where analytics could identify trends that have the ability to save millions of dollars. But now that the tools exist to analyze Big Data on consumers, there is an ROI for developing M2M systems and for capturing it and aggregating it (and then selling it to marketers). A number of advances on the infrastructure side have enabled IoT as well: As IBM has rightfully predicted, the evolution from mainframes to powerful PCs and then back to the cloud is causing the IoT pendulum to swing toward edge devices. The direction of the swing and its speed, though, will depend on technological advancements in networking, storage, RAM and processing power and how all of these elements will move ahead of or behind Moore’s Law. Here, it’s important to note that this shift will not happen overnight; it will take a long time for communication standards to evolve to a state in which peer-to-peer communications are possible between edge devices. In this transitory period, we’re already seeing this evolution in action. And thanks to proximal networking standards like , devices will be able to detect and transmit data themselves rather than relying on people to input it for them. Furthermore, realized advances will not be limited to just “sensory” capabilities. “Actuation” capabilities are becoming a reality, too. In other words, your home security system won’t just tell you that you forgot to lock your door. It will lock it for you. But let’s not forget that IoT is much more than just gadgets. It can be about applying IoT intelligence to remote equipment monitoring of items such as vending machines (as an aside, one of the first applications of M2M tech was status reporting for vending machines using dial-up modems in the late 1980s and early 1990s). IoT thus has various industrial applications that can decrease equipment maintenance costs and generate subscription revenues to offset cloud infrastructure expenses. As we understand it now, the Internet of Things is not just a collection of M2M devices; in the Internet of Things, you can make any “thing” connected and you can retrofit any connectivity into legacy industrial equipment and make it smarter. We have all of the components to make this stuff happen now. True, in order to really get this industry shift off the ground, lots of fine-tuning is needed from open protocols, open source, and the involvement of the maker community. But once we have that in place, we’ll be able to move exponentially closer to new territories and innovations, like cars that can warn each other about road hazards in real-time. Complex machines will always be a part of the IoT, of course, and their role will grow as they are incorporated into physical solutions. In December 2013, Google announced its acquisition of eight robotics companies. With its subsequent acquisitions of , and the artificial intelligence company , it appears to be preparing for the IoT in whatever form it might possibly take. Perhaps its future form may be less of a computer network and more of a real life object network where everything is a node, and robots are ready to act intelligently based on what various objects need. Ten years ago, did you think we’d be seeing drones rushing to repair a downed power line? With the pace of the industry right now, it’s unlikely that it will take another ten before this is the new standard. |
11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Anna Escher | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | From egg freezing to Apple’s iPad and iMac debut event in Cupertino, here are the top stories from 10/11 to 10/17. 1. as part of the New Yorker Festival, where he was asked a couple of variants on the question of what we can do to protect our privacy. He explained that in addition to seeking out encryption tools, people who care about their privacy should stay away from popular consumer Internet services like Dropbox, Facebook, and Google. Coincidently, several days after this speech Dropbox was again in the headlines for a security related issue. . Dropbox has pushed the blame to users for making weak passwords. Online security is a hot topic, and I’m sure we’ll continue to see more products and services emerge to address our day-to-day privacy concerns. 2. Facebook and Apple both have instated policies through which they will . Some view this idea as a positive step toward closing the gender gap, while others believe this to be another way to urge employees to put the workplace before family. 3. The stock market has been going bonkers, and . Last Friday was a massacre. Everything from Microsoft to GoPro got crushed. On the earnings front, and Google reported less-than-awesome results. . 4. Jillian Kay Melchior wrote an article about how to control the narrative of the conflict in Iraq and Syria. She expands upon the idea that real journalism is dangerous, yet essential. 5. Apple held an event at the Cupertino HQ to introduce the new , , , and . We got a first look at these new products, and you can find our full coverage on the . After the event, . Sarah Perez also wrote a piece explaining that . 6. . So far, we know that this acquisition means a new logo, and they’re simplifying the pricing. 7. Ron Miller spotlighted two successful , reminding us that there are many cities that have their own startup scenes complete with incubators, funders, startup spaces and lots of companies vying for fame and fortune. 8. , a new wearable that can call and text without a phone. Will.i.am’s new wearable technology company i.am+ will also carry a jacket that powers the PULS, a backpack with a sound system, glasses that will take pictures by tapping on the PULS, and shoes that tell you how much you weigh and how many steps you’ve made per day. 9. . The winner in the consumer electronics race continues to be smartphones, and Android smartphones dominate. This should be good news for and . 10. . HBO is a little late to the game, and there are still a lot of questions about the details at this point. 11. . There’s a battle brewing between Amazon Prime and Google Express. TechCrunch Disrupt Europe: London kicks off today with the Hackathon. We’ll have the main event streaming on our site on Monday and Tuesday, or you can follow along on Twitter (#TCDisrupt). It’s also Bag Week at TechCrunch. You can check out our reviews . |
Jack Ma’s AliPay Might Partner With Apple Pay | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 27 | Jack Ma and Tim Cook both repeatedly teased a possible partnership between The Paypal-like AliPay and Apple Pay in two separate talks while on stage at the conference in Laguna Beach, California this evening. Cook joked with the WSJ’s editor-in-chief Gerard Baker that he was going to go discuss a marriage between AliPay and Apple Pay after his talk. He said of Ma, “If we can find some areas of common space, I love it. I love partnering with people like that.” Ma had hinted earlier that he was, “very interested in something like that,” when referring to a possible partnership with Apple’s newly unveiled mobile payment system. Ma holds the majority stake in AliPay, which handled over $200 billion in payments worldwide this last year. Compare that to PayPal, which processed $180 billion in 2013. While Paypal dominates in the online payment space in the U.S., AliPay is the strongest contender in China. About 800 million customers use the payment service, accounting for 70% of China’s online transactions. An Apple Pay/AliPay partnership is certainly intriguing. Apple Pay within the first 72 hours of going live with the service, making it a strong contender in the digital payment space. AliPay dominates in online payments for a good chunk of the rest of the world and, as Ma pointed out on stage, “Alipay is now the third largest payment system in the world, behind Visa and Mastercard.” Cook ended his talk by saying he and Ma would probably talk sometime this week about maybe getting together. |
Bag Week: The Pad & Quill Attache | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 18 | If life was like Toy Story, and when we fell asleep, all of our inanimate objects suddenly came to life, the Pad & Quill Attache bag would be some super combo of both Woody and Buzz Lightyear. Socially, this bag would be the head honcho. With a beautiful, hand-crafted leather exterior, the Attache laptop bag feels slightly Old-World. It’s a classic, beautiful shoulder bag that comes in both brown and black and can be carried by handle or by a strap. It comes with hand-pounded copper rivets at key stress points and is made with the very best leather from grass-fed American cattle. But on the inside, this thing screams “To infinity and beyond!” [gallery columns="5" ids="1070297,1070295,1070294,1070293,1070292,1070288,1070289,1070290,1070291"] It’s got more than enough organizational pockets, including a slot for up to a 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina and a designated soft pocket for an iPad. Plus, the inside is lined with signature Pad & Quill orange suede. There’s no doubt whatsoever that it’s a handsome bag capable of fitting a day’s worth of work and gadgetry comfortably and stylishly. However, there are just a few minor setbacks. The bag itself weighs five pounds, which is approximately how much my current backpack weighs when it’s packed for the day. The second, very minor, issue has to do with the handle on the top of the bag, for your hand. It sits on the backside of the top of the bag, as opposed to centered across the top. This may adjust itself after extended use, but I found the shoulder strap to be far more comfortable, albeit a little less professional looking. The price for this bag is high, at $429 with free domestic shipping, but I’d argue it’s totally worth it. When you buy a leather jacket, you don’t buy a shitty fake one from H&M (like I did). You make an investment in something that will last you a lifetime. The same could be said for the Pad & Quill Attache. Check out more about the bag . |
null | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 10 | 20 | null |
BigPanda Wants To Bring Order To IT Alerts Madness | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 10 | 27 | Today we have monitoring tools generating logs and logs of data flowing into our data centers, letting us know everything that’s happening down to a detailed level. That’s a good thing, right? Not necessarily, because the more information we need to sift through, the more overwhelming it becomes and the more impossible it becomes for humans to track. asserts that it can bring order to this madness and it came out of stealth today flush with $7M in Series A funding from Mayfield and Sequoia Capital to attack the problem. BigPanda recognized that companies were getting overwhelmed with information from their IT logs, creating a problem where they couldn’t see the forest for the trees. They would come into work with screens and screens of alerts from traditional data center monitoring tools from HP and IBM to modern tools like New Relic, AppDynamics, Splunk and on and on it goes. And IT pros had to sift through all of that data making it a challenge to prioritize the flood of alerts and determining which ones truly required immediate attention. What’s more, once an IT pro found a legitimate problem that required immediate handling, it took detective work to figure out the root of the problem. BigPanda launched the company to look for a way to simplify all of that. Here’s what they claim to do. They say they filter the firehose down to a handful of meaningful alerts. Founder Assaf Resnick said the company formed in 2012 with the intent to apply intelligence to the data pile and turn that big blob of alerts into a handful of high-level alerts that are much easier to prioritize and deal with. He said there is a lot of natural language processing and decompression going on that begins to understand the relationships between alerts and can take multiple alerts and filter them down to a single one, then learn and remember those relationships in the future. But Resnick said they also wanted to give users enough information to solve the problem faster. By narrowing down the list of possible alerts, they wanted to give them a way to act on the most important ones more quickly then point them to the source of the problem such as a recent event like a code change that caused a chain reaction of problems. What’s more, it includes a collaboration component, so if the problem requires outside help, you can easily pass the problem along to someone who is better suited to deal with it, and it hooks into service ticketing systems like ServiceNow and JIRA. And if a problem is something that can wait, but will need your attention at some point, you mark it to deal with later in a similar fashion to how you mark email in Mailbox to deal with at a later time, and it will surface again. A couple of years ago I saw a talk by Paul Maritz who was CEO of VMware at the time and he said that the amount of data being generated in the data center in 2012 when he gave the speech had already surpassed human ability to deal with it. IT information had become a big data problem and that’s the case even more so today than when Maritz gave the speech. That means you have to apply data science techniques to this information to make sense of it and find those signals that really matter amongst all of the noise. This is what BigPanda asserts it can do, and if it can truly pull it off, perhaps it can bring some order to the chaos that is the mountain of data being generated by IT monitoring tools. |
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