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CrunchWeek: Apple Releases New Stuff, HBO Streaming And The Gang Talks Dreamforce | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | This week we discuss all the iPads and other announcements out of Apple, the shows we are excited to watch on HBO sans cable and that time we met will.i.am and when Arianna Huffington told us to do a “digital detox” at a technology conference. Our video producer Felicia Williams joins Kyle Russell and myself this week on Crunchweek for her second appearance on the show. |
Watch These Tiny Robots As They Fly Well With Others | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpO8DpeYC2k&feature=youtu.be] The quadccopters at the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab are truly trained to follow the golden robot rule: fly with others as you’d fly with yourself. Thanks to researchers Yash Mulgaonkar, Gareth Cross and Vijay Kumar, we can see how close these little flying robots are to their noble goal. The team has created a number of failsafe systems that allow the robots to recover from damage while flying. They can even react to hitting moving objects without falling out of the sky. In one case, two human subjects can even play a little bit of robot ping-pong by batting a docile quadcopter back and forth. The team has also created a system for a sort of uncanny flocking behavior. “Later in the video you see 4 pico quadrotors in a ‘tactical delta formation’ showing that multiple pico quadrotors can not only fly in formation, but also follow the leader. In this video, three ‘scouts’ (forming the triangle) protect the leader (center) by forming a protective perimeter, and following the leader’s movements in real-time while maintaining the formation. We can also increase or decrease the span of the formation in real-time,” he said. The robots can also react to mid-air collisions and even right themselves after an impact. In short, these little quadrotors are pretty darn cool. “The project was started earlier this year with the design and development of the pico quadrotor. I’ve designed the robot from the ground-up, right from the circuit boards to the software to control it,” said Mulgaonkar. He is most excited by these tiny robots because of the size and agility. “Small quadrotors have great potential in the fields of search and rescue, first response, and law enforcement, where their ability to fly through unstructured, constrained, 3-D environments permit human operators to safely obtain information about dangerous or otherwise inaccessible locations. In addition, scaling down the size of MAVs produces a significant increase in their agility.” The coolest thing? None of the robots need much computing power to maintain level flight. Because each little robot has a set of sensors and processors built-in, all of this behavior can happen in real time without connection to a back-end computer. It’s not perfect, though: the robot does need to report to base when it’s trying to fly in formation and around obstacles. |
Odrive Offers A Dropbox-Style Interface For Browsing Your Online Photos, Documents, And More | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | If you’re tired of logging into different websites every time you want to access your Facebook photos, your Google Drive documents, your Instagram photos and so on, may be the application for you. It’s a desktop app created by startup — it uses Oxygen Cloud’s file syncing technology, but odrive differs in that it’s built for consumers, not businesses. The idea, basically, is to give you a folder interface for browsing all of your online files, almost as if they were files on your hard drive. You can think of it as a Dropbox-style interface for a bunch of stuff that’s not in Dropbox itself — the company describes it as “Dropbox for everything.” Odrive currently integrates with Dropbox, Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive, Gmail, and Microsoft OneDrive. Some of those services, including Google Drive and Dropbox, allow two-way sync, so you can update files and save new ones directly from odrive. (Other services, including Facebook, don’t support this.) Oxygen Cloud’s executive vice president Alex Teu said support for Salesforce and Box are going live later today — so even though it’s a consumer-focused product, you can use it for work, as well. And as I mentioned, odrive uses Oxygen Drive technology, including the company’s “progressive syncing,” where files that are larger than 10 megabytes only sync when you select them. That means giant files aren’t downloaded to your hard drive unless you want them to be. Teu gave me quick demo of odrive, highlighting one of his favorite features — the fact that you can set up hashtag searches, creating a folder that will be updated in real-time. By setting up the right searches, Teu has been able to keep track of Instagram photos shared from the protests in Hong Kong. I also installed odrive myself. There were some initial hiccups; it takes a little while to log into each service (hey, at least you only have to do it once) and then sync the desired files. In addition, trying to access documents from Google Drive isn’t ideal, because odrive tries to open those documents in your browser. Other than that, however, it was pretty much as fast and convenient as Teu said it would be. So if you agree with his claim that “everything in a folder is better,” then this is pretty much the perfect interface. And even if you’re not as enamored with folders as he is, having a single interface for browsing different services is still pretty cool. Odrive is currently in beta testing and available for free. Teu said the company will add paid features eventually. |
null | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 10 | 28 | null |
One Year Into Title II Of The JOBS Act | Rob Leclerc | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | The first rule of raising capital is: you do not talk about raising capital. That was the de facto credo of nascent startup companies looking to secure investors before the fall 2013. Then on September 23, 2013, the SEC the new Title II rules of the JOBS Act, which permitted the general solicitation and advertising of private investment opportunities under a called Rule 506(c) of Regulation D, provided that an issuer verified that all investors in an offering were . Prior to the inclusion of Title II, an entrepreneur had to have a “substantial and pre-existing relationship” with a prospective investor in order to receive funding for their startup business. Broadcasting your offering was completely off the table. That meant no ads, no e-mail solicitation, no talk of fundraising during press interviews or conferences and certainly no financial outreach efforts across social media platforms. Sound antiquated? From the perspective of contemporary entrepreneurs trying to get off the ground, absolutely. Look at it this way: If consumer product companies like Apple needed to have close ties with each individual customer in order to sell iPhones, or if an emerging author weren’t allowed to sell his new book on Amazon without an established reader base, it would be extremely cumbersome — impossible even — for either of them to get their products into the market. That’s essentially how the private securities world had to operate up until the new SEC exemption took effect, and it shaped investment banking in the Information Age. Before the Google era, the motivations behind the restrictions on advertisement and solicitation were sound. The SEC wanted to protect grandma from being baited by nameless cold callers and investing her life savings into small, private companies that would most likely fail. Today, however, sequestering information is a tall order — and in an increasingly Internet-savvy culture, it’s probably a bad idea anyway. In early 2011, the New York Times that Goldman Sachs was setting up a special purpose investment vehicle to invest in Facebook and was going to raise as much as $1.5 billion, with a of $2 million, from some of the wealthiest clients in the world (certainly not grandma’s life savings, that’s for sure). Nevertheless, once the SEC got wind of this, it opened up an inquiry and Goldman Sachs promptly shut down the offering to U.S. investors. Foreign investors were still able to participate because they’re not subject to SEC restrictions, but the deal was officially off limits to American investors. If the new Title II rules had been in place, Goldman Sachs could have promoted the deal on CNBC or other major broadcast networks. Or alternatively, Facebook could have skipped Goldman Sachs altogether and promoted the same offering themselves. Either way, tearing down the Title II restrictions on advertising and solicitation feels fundamentally more democratic; even if you and I don’t have enough money to sit at the big table, at least we can stand by and watch. The morning of September 23, 2013, was surprisingly quiet. Hedge funds weren’t tying up phones at 9 a.m. There were no random text messages about oil wells in the San Francisco Bay. The jumbo screens in Times Square were not overrun by flashy Wall Street ads, and girls in string bikinis weren’t handing out prospectuses on 5th Avenue. Sparks didn’t fly, and the world of investment banking didn’t implode. But from investors and entrepreneurs alike, there was a collective sigh of relief lofting through the air on that early Monday morning last fall. As CEO of AgFunder, an equity crowdfunding site for Accredited Investors focused on the agriculture and agtech space, I can vouch for that. If there was ever a sector that needed help connecting with investors, it’s agriculture. Since we launched our investment marketplace in February 2014, listed companies using the new 506(c) exemption have raised over $10 million and have been able to connect with investors and other potential stakeholders from across the country, and helped to break geographic boundaries that limit the flow of capital. Our comes from a new San Francisco-based health bar company called , led by Lisa Curtis who had successfully led a $50,000 campaign on rewards-based crowdfunding platform Indiegogo the previous year. Kuli Kuli sources moringa, a highly nutritious (and largely unknown) plant, from women’s farming cooperatives in West Africa, and once in powder form, uses it as the chief ingredient in its products. Today, Kuli Kuli’s moringa bars are sold in over 100 major stores on the West Coast, including major retailers like Whole Foods and Krogers—a direct result of two successful public fundraising campaigns. Curtis, , met her target of $355,000 in just 60 days. Leveraging the new 506(c) rules, Kuli Kuli had their fundraising covered in a number of blogs and publications. Kuli Kuli also promoted its campaign on its website. The company was able to leverage this public campaign to broadcast its story to thousands of potential investors, including celebrity venture capitalist Brad Feld, as well as Mary Waldner, the founder of Mary’s Gone Crackers. Feld even tweeted about his investment in Kuli Kuli while the campaign was still live. Just invested in . Cool startup introducing Moringa food products to US mkt. See . — Brad Feld (@bfeld) In addition to Kuli Kuli’s victories, interesting dynamics can also play out during investor webinars. For our own investor webinars, we typically see about 90 or so registrants, of which approximately 50 percent are accredited or institutional investors. But what’s also interesting is that these webinars are attracting other potential stakeholders, including channel partners, customers, press and industry professionals, which may be far more valuable to a company than capital. This open format also provides investors with a chance to study how a company responds to concerns and questions from potential partners, customers, and even competitors. While only accredited investors can invest in these opportunities investors win when they can gain insight into issues or opportunities they may not have considered otherwise. If an investor were to hire consultants to tackle such an inquiry, it could cost tens of thousands of dollars. At the end of March 2014, six months after the new Title II rules were passed, Keith Higgins of the SEC that only 900 companies had used the new 506(c) exemption to raise $10 billion in new capital. Compare that to over 18,000 for all of 2012 for $900 billion in new capital. Similarly, most marketplaces have not fully embraced the new Title II rules. On CircleUp, only are currently using the 506(c) exemption, so CircleUp must still erect an accredited investor verification wall to protect those companies that are not using 506(c). Consequently, even companies that are using 506(c) are still missing out on opportunities to engage with other stakeholders, while investors miss out on an opportunity to see how the company interacts with these stakeholders. Similarly, Realty Mogul purportedly , but first-time registrants are still greeted with an accredited investor verification wall followed by a cooling-off period before they can view the investment opportunities. Under the old rules, a cooling-off period was considered necessary to establish the SEC’s requirements for a “substantial and pre-existing relationship,” but this is no longer necessary under the new exemption. Still, the new 506(c) exemption may not be viable options for some types of investment marketplaces. For instance, syndication platforms such as FundersClub or AngelList Syndicates, which aggregate investors into special purpose investment vehicles that invest in one or more underlying companies, might not be able to advertise their fund. Not unless all of the underlying companies are also engaging in 506(c) offerings. The biggest hurdle to widespread adoption of 506(c) offerings centers around the extra step that issuers must take to verify their Accredited status as well as some minor hesitation amongst startup lawyers who haven’t yet dealt with a 506(c) offering. In practice however, we’ve seen no pushback from investors when asked to provide the necessary documentation, and the SEC presented a number of guidelines so that investors do not have to turn over sensitive information. With Title II putting an end to the financial exclusions of yesteryear, investment marketplaces have an opportunity to offer a more collaborative and transparent fundraising process. And as they evolve and mature, they may become the precursor to new types of eInvestment Banks leading the globalization of private capital markets. |
ModCloth Hit By Second Round Of Layoffs | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | E-commerce retailer has laid off additional staff across engineering, creative, product, producer, social teams and more in a second wave of layoffs. The news which, at the time, affected around 70 employees, or a little under 15 percent of its then 500-person-plus workforce. ModCloth confirmed the new layoffs to TechCrunch, explaining that the company was affected by a broader downturn in the retailer sector. We’re hearing that most of the San Francisco team has been affected, with a headcount of around 40 or 50 or so being let go, and possibly some cuts in other offices. According to multiple sources, layoffs were made across the engineering and product teams, and the social team is being scaled back this December. Some copywriters in San Francisco were cut along with the blogging team. The producer team is not being dismantled, but it is being relocated to Pittsburgh after the holiday season. Also, ModCloth’s creative director is being let go. Several sources told us that all the product and engineering personnel were laid off in their entirety, but that’s not the case – the teams were scaled back. The social department also continues to exist, despite the cuts. And the blog is not being shut down, as some believed. That being said, many of the creative jobs are now being handled out of Pittsburgh for strategic reasons. The technology team leadership is also going to be based there, though ModCloth will retain some of its San Francisco tech members. The primary functions of the business in L.A. will remain the same. As we understand it, some of the laid off staff were asked to leave the company yesterday, while ModCloth is asking others to wait until mid-December to depart after much of the work for the holiday season is done. ModCloth is expecting a “multi-million dollar” profit after the 2014 holiday season said one source. (The company last year was to be on track for over $100 million in annual revenue then.) We’re also hearing that Pinterest bought ModCloth out of its lease on Brannan St. in San Francisco, and ModCloth will be moving north of Market when all is said and done. Pinterest confirmed it signed a lease at 651 Brannan, but didn’t share more details. “While our company is still growing faster than the industry as a whole, we have been impacted by the broader downturn affecting the retail sector,” a ModCloth spokesperson told TechCrunch, when confirming the layoffs. “As a start-up, it is in our DNA to remain nimble and these cuts will allow us to return to profitability. We are confident that the difficult decisions made this week position us for a return to stronger growth in the months ahead.” During this summer’s layoffs, ModCloth told employees how many were affected. But this time around, the company was not offering a number. It’s possible that ModCloth was being too optimistic about the market conditions during its last round of layoffs, and didn’t cut as many people as it should have. Founded in 2002 by husband-and-wife team Eric and Susan Koger, the company is known best for its vintage-inspired dresses. The team has from investors including Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Floodgate, First Round, Harrison Metal, Great Oaks VC and others. Several people have already taken to Twitter to express regret over the news of the layoffs, and to let their friends know there will soon be a flood of talented people, including hard-to-find engineers, hitting the job market soon. Some of the tweets also confirm what we heard privately – that yesterday’s layoffs were one of two, staggered waves announced before the end of 2014. Sad to hear about another round of layoffs at ModCloth. Lots of talented engineers, UX designers and PMs will be looking for work soon. — Erynn Hesler (@erynnalice) Pouring one out for my Modcloth peeps. Three staggered layoffs announced before the end of the year. — Jonathan Howard (@staringispolite) So much love to my friends and former colleagues at ModCloth about the layoffs. What sad, sad news and what a very talented team. — Martha Smith (@mostlymartha) More ModCloth layoffs announced today, with more to come this year. All the feels for the great people there. :'( — Rachel Myers (@rachelmyers) So, modcloth announces massive layoffs today. Then tweets “what are you wearing to work tomorrow?” Rude? Simple mistake? — Candi Kenney (@candikenney) |
Tumblr Debuts Its First Desktop App On The Mac App Store | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | On the heels of the release of Apple’s new Mac OS, , blogging platform Tumblr has its first official desktop application with the launch of a Tumblr app for the Mac App Store. The app allows users to post to their personal Tumblr blogs from anywhere on the Mac, whether that’s content like links, images or videos you stumble across online, or files you have saved locally to your computer. The first feature is designed to take advantage of the share button introduced in the Mountain Lion version of OS X. However, the Tumblr app will only install on the very latest version of OS X, 10.10 Yosemite. The new app also functions as a Tumblr browser, allowing users to track the blogs they follow, post to their own blog, keep tabs on their notifications, and more. Essentially, it’s a full-screened version of the Tumblr web app, all in its own window. The app’s feature set is fairly limited compared to what you can already do via Tumblr on the web, so it’s not necessarily going to be a must-have install for occasional Tumblr users. However, for those who regularly engage with the blogging platform, the app makes sharing content easier than before, and with fewer steps, so it may have some appeal. The app, which complements Tumblr’s mobile lineup, is a free download . |
Twitter’s Music Strategy: No App, Just Better Listening | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | Music is a special kind of content, and people discover it on Twitter. That’s why building a music experience was a boondoggle, and treating music like any other piece of media within Twitter sells it short. These insights have led Twitter to a better strategy since , according to a source at the company: Just improve the music listening and sharing experience inside Twitter. Today we saw the with the on iOS and Android, which lets users listen to music from embeds in tweets, and dock the music player so the jams play on as they surf around Twitter. The first launch partners are and , but the plan is to get more music services integrated into the Audio Card. [From left] 1. Twitter’s Audio Card can play music with one touch. 2. This opens the full-screen music player. 3. The player can be docked in the bottom left from continuous play while you browse more of Twitter. A core tenet of the strategy is that music is different from photos or videos. You don’t take a quick three-second peek at a song like you do a photo, and you don’t stare at a song like a video. Listening to music is not a standalone activity. It’s quite literally become a soundtrack to everything else we do online. But until now, Twitter on mobile didn’t understand that. While on the web you could expand a tweet and play music embedded inside of it while you kept scrolling through your timeline, on mobile embeds open in a separate window or in some case a separate app. That meant you had to leave Twitter to listen to a song in full, which doesn’t promote easy experimentation and discovery, or the song would stop playing if you wanted to keep reading other tweets or check your mentions. HOT !!! Here is the remix of !!! I really love it. Click below to listen to the track ;) — David Guetta (@davidguetta) The Audio Card finally treats music as a distinct content type meant for background play. Songs from SoundCloud and iTunes play with a single click, and can be docked to continue playing while you browse Twitter. It would make a lot of sense for Twitter to work out partnerships so songs from YouTube, Spotify, Rdio, Google Music, and more play nice in the Audio Card. Spotify and Rdio were launch partners for the Twitter Music app after all. Perhaps Twitter could one day parse what song is being shared and let you listen in whatever music service you prefer, similar to that let the listener decide. By making the listening experience better, music tweets get more engagement and deliver more value to people who see them, which incentivizes people to share them. This unlocks a big opportunity to get music makers and critics more invested in tweeting. Artists will on Twitter if they get lots of plays. Reviewers will create native, 140-character assessments and post them with a song rather than just a boring links back to their website. I’d imagine both groups would be keen to see analytics on their song-tweet engagement. Pitchfork Podcast: talks with and about the latest Best New Music — Pitchfork (@pitchfork) Rather than building and maintaining a separate Music app of charts and lists, this strategy encourages Twitter to rely on an amazing social content discovery platform: Twitter. Better in-tweet listening will get people to follow more artists and critics, or follow friends who retweet them. It utilizes people’s existing feeds rather than forcing a different one on them. If the plan comes to fruition, a lot more music conversations could gravitate to Twitter. That could solve two of Twitter’s other problems: growing its user count and timeline views. People might re-activate or sign-up for a Twitter count to hear songs the second they are released. And with a soundtrack caressing their ears that only lasts as long as they’re on Twitter, users might dig deeper into the timeline and explore other parts of the app until the last note plays. |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 10.17.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. |
Apple Begins Taking Pre-Orders For iPad Air 2 And Mini 3 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | Apple revealed new iPad models on Thursday, and they all go on sale starting . Today is just the beginning of pre-sales, with iPads officially shipping to pre-order customers and arriving in stores sometime “late next week,” according to Apple. Pricing for the new iPad mini, which is essentially the same as the existing model with Touch ID added and a new gold color option, starts at $399, while the iPad Air 2, with its full external and internal overhaul, begins at $499. Configuration options include 16, 64 and 128GB options, with both Wi-Fi only and LTE-capable models of each. Delivery time for the new iPads is listed as October 23, which partly helps explain why the date wasn’t set in stone on stage. Apple seems to want to get these out the door as soon as possible, instead of staging a defined, singular street date, so they could be shipping them in batches as soon as they come off the line. Our own initial impressions of the new iPads found that the , but as for the iPad mini 3, unless you have a burning desire for Touch ID or you’re upgrading from a first-gen Mini, it might be worth holding off on a purchase. |
Jolla Does Angry Birds Themed Android Launcher To Fling Its Sailfish OS Further | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | , the Finnish smartphone startup that expanded the MeeGo open source project into its own Sailfish OS, has released its first Android launcher — to give users of Google’s mobile platform a taster of what its alternative OS has to offer. Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon, now its COO, previously the startup was building an Android launcher to act as a “springboard” to showcase the capabilities of the Sailfish OS — and get potential users more familiar with the gesture-laden interface. The Chinese market was especially front of mind for Dillon, who said reflashing mobile devices (i.e. installing a different OS to the one they came with) is “exceptionally common” in the region. Back in February he pegged the total size of the opportunity as “a hundred million at least potential”, adding: “Even a few percent of that is already a tremendous thing for a company like us.” Jolla has maintained that Chinese focus, with the launcher landing initially on Chinese app stores and , as a free download. A Google Play offering will be announced “in the near future”, it added today. To help pull in the punters, Jolla has partnered with Finland’s Angry Birds to create a Stella themed look for the software — which has the rather cumbersome title of ‘Angry Birds Stella Launcher by Jolla’. On the Angry Birds front the launcher offers “quick access” to themed wallpaper, ringtones and unlimited access to ToonsTV. (This is, as a TC colleague pointed out, a whole lot of launchers — when you consider the Angry Birds game involves launching birds from a trebuchet: “You can launch your launcher from the launcher, to launch your birds at the pigs – all from the new launch launcher”.) While Sailfish features supported by the launcher include the OS’ applications covers feature, which displays running apps as small cards on the device homescreen; pulley menus to access specific functions using a single finger gesture (i.e. by pulling down and releasing to select); and access to the user’s extant Android apps via Sailfish’s multitasking OS view. Compatibility with Android apps has always been Jolla’s strategy to compete as a plucky minnow in a pond dominated by Google’s leviathan — allowing it to offer a different interface but tap into the same app pool. Jolla also makes its own hardware too. Last month it , expanding the Sailfish-powered device to the second non-European market after Hong Kong. The initial launch for the handset was in Finland . It’s unclear how many handsets Jolla has sold thus far as it’s not breaking out sales figures. A Jolla spokesperson said: “We’ve been pleased with how our sales have progressed this year, with successful launches in India, Hong Kong, and continuing sales in Europe.” Jolla is evidently hoping to drive interest in that hardware in Asia by tapping into the Android ecosystem with this free launcher. Its hope is that a launcher can help smooth the learning curve to encourage people to switch from the familiarity of Android to its different interface. “This launcher is the first separate Sailfish OS initiative in addition to Jolla phones, and we just started today with a few thousand downloads. The promotional campaign kicks off beginning of next week,” the spokesperson added. |
MasterCard Will Borrow A Touch ID Trick For Fingerprint Scanning Credit Card | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | Apple isn’t the only company using biometrics to authenticate payments and purchases – Apple Pay partner MasterCard wants to make fingerprint scanning something even people without an iOS device can use to digitally ‘sign’ for contactless transactions. The credit card company is launching the “world’s first” with technology partner Zwipe, which will have the exact same dimensions as existing plastic payment cards, but with an embedded fingerprint scanner. Like Apple’s Touch ID, the card stores any fingerprint data records only on the card itself, rather than transmitting them to the cloud or MasterCard’s servers, which makes it far less likely that the information can be intercepted and stolen. Activation occurs via a simple initial scan setup process, and after that, the chip-based cards use a successful scan match to complete payments, instead of the usual manual entry PIN. Power for the scanner is actually provided by the payment terminals they work with, every time they’re used, which means they don’t require conventional charging. As you’ve probably guessed based on the fact that it uses chip-and-pin, it’s going to be rolled out in markets outside the U.S. first starting in 2015, but since the U.S. is finally moving to EMV, expect it to come there, eventually, too. Clearly Apple’s hoping that it can convince users to ditch the cards altogether in favor of a centralized storehouse of their payment methods on the iPhone, but it’s smart to see credit card makers move into biometrics, provided they work well and thus offer actual convenience, instead of added hassle. |
Amazon Brings Grocery Delivery To Brooklyn | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | Amazon announced this morning it’s bringing its grocery delivery service to Brooklyn, confirming of a New York area expansion. Initially, the service will be available to Prime members in Park Slope, but the company says it will soon expand the service to additional ZIP codes in Brooklyn. There’s no word yet on when AmazonFresh will arrive elsewhere in New York, including Manhattan. The service will allow consumers to order from over 500,000 items for same-day and early-morning delivery, including fresh groceries and other products from local speciality shops, as well as toys, electronics, and household goods. Some of the local retailers on board include The Lobster Place, Dickenson’s Farmstand Meats, Gotham Greens, and Amy’s Bread. Items have to be order by 10 a.m. in order to take delivery by dinnertime, or by 10 p.m. to get items by breakfast, says Amazon. AmazonFresh will be free for Prime members until year-end, but in 2015 they’ll have to upgrade to the $299 per year subscription service if they want to continue with the program. Amazon has been experimenting with the logistics and pricing for its AmazonFresh service for years, and currently operates in other test markets, including Seattle and in several zip codes in Southern California. This Brooklyn launch, however, is the first time the service has arrived on the Eastern side of the U.S. The move comes at a time when a number of companies are testing the waters related to same-day delivery, and in some cases, coming up short. Ebay’s same-day service Ebay Now, it was reported , was failing. This week, it was basically confirmed that while Ebay isn’t immediately closing up shop, the service . Google, which , brought its Google Express service to several new cities this week. And is working with national chains like Whole Foods and Costco, as well as regional retailers. Meanwhile, Walmart has taken a different approach to e-commerce, testing everything from curbside pick-up to ship-to-store to next-day and more. This week, it in the Eastern U.S. aimed at offering speedier while still affordable next-day delivery to more customers. |
With $2M In Funding, AirMedia Aims To Be The Syndication Platform For Premium Video | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | With more viewers than ever tuning into digital video services, premium publishers are looking for more ways to get in front of those audiences. With a syndication network built specifically for video, a startup called hopes to find new distribution for premium publishers. AirMedia was founded by RealGravity execs Luke McDonough and Doug Neiman, along with former Nexon and Backtick CTO Lynn Gabbay. After , RealGravity was and became the basis for its internal video player and distribution platform. But RealGravity also had other clients, and as it became clear that Scripps was focused on it as an internal tool rather than one that would continue to become available to other customers, there became a need for another player out there in the market. AirMedia hopes to solve several problems for premium video publishers that are being underserved in today’s market. The first is one of distribution and syndication. Premium publishers today are mostly getting views for their videos on their own sites, and are looking for audiences from around the web, but there aren’t a lot of tools for doing so. In part, that’s due to a number of acquisitions and shifts in the marketplace for syndication platforms. As companies like 5Min and RealGravity got acquired and integrated into their new parent companies, new platforms failed to replace them. Meanwhile, companies like Taboola and Outbrain focus primarily on serving links to pages around the web, but video is not a huge priority to them. Those latter companies are also poor at serving up very much premium content. As you might have noticed, the “links from around the web” that appear at the bottom of many publisher sites tend to point to lowbrow content focused on celebrities in bikinis and such. While they add highly coveted ad revenue, they are an eyesore for many publishers. AirMedia seeks to solve the quality problem by only promoting content from premium publishers. It will not only provide a new outlet through which those publishers can find video viewers, but it will also provide high-quality recommendations at the bottom of publisher sites. For video owners, the platform provides a way to reach new audiences, but also provides the ability to do all their own promotion and ad sales. Finally, in addition to syndication and content recommendation on third-party sites, AirMedia will also provide also a portal on which it will feature videos from its partners. While small today, the hope is that the portal could eventually provide an alternative to YouTube, which has a whole lot of viewers but doesn’t provide a great monetization platform for premium publishers. The AirMedia team has only been working on the platform for the past 10 months, but it’s already signed up some premium publishers in the sports arena, including NBC Universal Sports and Cinesport. Now their video clips will be available as part of a syndication platform that can become available on a number of digital publisher sites that would otherwise not have access to highlight videos — and get paid to feature them alongside their own content. AirMedia has also gotten the attention of some serious media investors. It’s raised $2 million in seed funding that was led by Otter Media, the joint venture between Chernin Group and AT&T that is focused on online video services. Otter Media has also purchased a controlling stake in companies like FullScreen and Crunchyroll, and has $500 million to commit to similar media and technology companies. Other investors include Allen Debevoise, Trevor Traina, and Skip Paul. |
The Spirit Of Coopetition Is Alive And Well In The Cloud | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | Increasingly, companies that compete directly with another have been announcing major partnerships, and we saw a couple of good examples this week with Microsoft and Salesforce and IBM and SAP. Not coincidentally in my view, they both involved the cloud. That’s because companies may want to compete, but customers want their technology vendors to just get along. They need products to play nicely together –and it seems it’s much easier to do that in the cloud. We are also seeing and when that happens companies that use the common platform can’t let their competition kill the underlying golden goose. They know they have to work together to keep the project healthy and growing –and compete on what makes their products special. When companies that would normally be at each other’s throats, suddenly start cooperating, they like to call it coopetition. You could call it being frenemies, but whatever you call it, for whatever reason, these companies are coming together in seemingly greater numbers –and the customers are the beneficiaries. But make no mistake, the companies hope to gain something as well or they wouldn’t be doing it. Just because they cooperate doesn’t mean they aren’t in it to win it. WHY CAN’T WE JUST GET ALONG? It would be a mistake to suggest that companies who are cooperating love one another. They probably don’t. They still want to beat the competition and find a way to get the upper hand, and within these agreements between competing companies, surely each one is trying to gain an advantage in the negotiation just as you would expect, but there is also an understanding that there are certain benefits to cooperating. Box CEO Aaron Levie told me in an interview at BoxWorks in September, companies are cooperating more today for a number of reasons, but in large part because it’s just easier to do now. “The barrier to cooperation is lowered by an order of magnitude. In previous eras [companies] had to choose allies and enemies judiciously. Today you can plug two APIs together. The friction is no longer there. ” And he says customers are demanding it because it’s possible. Kevin Hart, CEO and co-founder of says there’s another reason we are seeing this spirit of cooperation –because he says in the past companies tried to do everything and they couldn’t possibly do it all well. Instead of trying to deliver a range of ancillary services, he wants his company to concentrate on what it does best. “The best startups focus on core competencies,” he told me. He added that the relationship of driving growth through partners is critical and he has connected with partner companies like DoubleDutch and Survey Monkey because they have expertise his company lacks. That means a startup like Eventbrite doesn’t need to waste time developing these types of functionality when these other companies do it well. COMPETITIVE FIRES STILL BURN Just because there is an easier way to cooperate, doesn’t mean that competition is dead. Far from it. These companies, like athletes, still are in it to compete and win, but the cloud and open source (and APIs and standards too), all have a way of bringing these companies together on some level, even when they don’t really want to cooperate with their competitors. ob Wiederhold says there is some level of cooperation that happens because there is often a common platform on top of which companies are building products, but he says that just moves the competition a bit, it doesn’t remove it in any fundamental way. “With open source, there may be portions of your technology stack where you’re cooperating, but all that’s done is shift the competitiveness of the companies to the part where you’re differentiating.” He adds that there’s still intense competition in the market in spite of a level of cooperation that might exist for common-good reasons. A good example of this is a company such as , which is built on the open source Apache Hadoop project. CEO John Schroeder isn’t afraid to admit that he likes to compete and win, but there is also a level of required cooperation at the base where Hadoop is concerned. “Ours is a slugfest, for sure. We like competing. It’s one of the reasons I do this. Competing means there’s a big brass ring you’re going after and you’ve got some worthy competitors and that means it’s a big market opportunity.” That said, he says the competitors understand that the Hadoop project is one they have to work together on to protect and preserve because it’s the basis for all the businesses in the space. “We are all interested in the adoption of Hadoop, so we try not to let the competition hurt the adoption curve,” he said. That means they tend to cooperate around issues that affect the underlying platform such as a security because it’s in everyone’s best interest. Omer Artun, CEO & founder at says while he sees the upside of cooperation, he still hates his competition and wants to beat them in the worst way. But he still acknowledges that there is a spirit of cooperation among startup founders in the community that surprises him. “I can pick up the phone and they would help me out, much more here [in the Silicon Valley] than anywhere else,” he said. He makes clear, however that cooperation stops when it comes to competitor companies. He’s not out to make life easier for them. THE GROWING MICROSOFT AND SALESFORCE ALLIANCE And yet in spite of that desire to compete and win, we see companies like making agreements because it’s in their best interest and the best interest of their customers. In fact, Marc Benioff had a chummy fireside chat on stage at Dreamforce this week with Tony Prophet, corporate vice president for Windows marketing –it was fireside so it must have been warm and fuzzy right? Let’s not forget at one time these two companies . Microsoft still has a CRM product called Dynamics that competes directly with Salesforce CRM, and yet they intend to extend their growing alliance because it’s one that makes sense to both sides. That’s because CEO Satya Nadella has decided that being a trusted cloud vendor is more important than beating Salesforce in the CRM business, which is just a small part of Microsoft’s business anyway. It’s a smart strategic decision on his part (even though it ) and it gives him access via Office 365, OneDrive and Outlook.com to a stream of Salesforce customers who get the cloud and aren’t afraid of it. It solves a problem that Nadella has with his own customer base. They are slower to move to the cloud and he has the potential to gain a critical mass of cloud customers much faster this way. For Benioff, well he gets access to all those Microsoft customers, and those companies that might have used Microsoft Dynamics CRM, might be willing to use Salesforce now that Office 365 will be so nicely integrated into the ecosystem including an upcoming Salesforce app for Outlook (where many sales people prefer to work). If Salesforce is more smoothly integrated into the Microsoft experience, it works in Salesforce’s favor because the Office franchise remains very popular inside the enterprise. IBM HOOKS UP WITH SAP In another case of companies that quite often compete for the same customers, SAP and IBM announced a cloud partnership this week. It’s not quite as strange as the one between Microsoft and Salesforce because these guys have been partnering in various guises for decades, but they admitted you could call them frenemies in spite of the good working relationship. At least they haven’t ever sued one another. SAP will be using IBM Softlayer’s network of 40 data centers to run the cloud version of SAP HANA, and provide a substantial increase over the data centers that SAP runs on its own. SAP increases the size of its worldwide data center network dramatically, simply by writing a check and without the hassle and cost of building the data centers themselves. What’s more, many of SAP’s customers have data sovereignty issues, which means the data in some cases has to stay in-country. Having a network of data centers across the world increases the possibilities that there is one close by and that can mean the difference between winning and losing a sale. IBM has invested more than $1B since buying SoftLayer last year to increase its data center count from 13 to 35 with five more going on-line by the end of the year (for a total of 40). Having a partner like SAP gives IBM a huge customer that will help begin to pay off some of that investment in new data centers. It also gives them a selling point for other large customers that a big company like SAP with a worldwide presence is using its infrastructure services. It’s another win-win. See what happens when companies play nicely? The companies win and the customer wins too and ultimately that’s why they do it. There is an intense customer need and open source, cloud APIs and services make it easier for these competitors to work together. They may not ever love one another, but they understand that it’s worth doing for the benefit of the business –and that’s why you’ll continue to see companies cooperating in this fashion. PHOTO CREDIT: |
Blog So Hard MotherF’ers Wanna Distribute Premium Digital Content, Connect With Advertisers, And Engage With An Audience At Scale | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | So I’m currently hanging out in the AOL offices here in London, . To their credit, the and crew have been great. I have a nice desk, a coffee machine nearby, and even a can of cold Coke to drink. Sitting at this fine desk, however, I ran into a bit of sticker shock. Observe: You can’t make that up. It’s literally stuck to your monitor. Oh, and while writing this someone offered to give me a ‘chair massage.’ It’s just like Vegas, but you can’t smoke inside. #Culture! |
Shave Like The Ancients Did With The Beluga Razor | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | As you prepare to apply your Barbasol and your hair pomade while whistling a bit of Benny Goodman, what razor to do you reach for? Do you grab a seven-bladed monstrosity, cast in bright orange plastic and chrome and made to last three shaves? No. You reach for a single blade beauty, a razor that can shave four star generals and the common Joe with equal aplomb. You’re going to reach for a . Or at least that’s what Zac Wertz of Cincinnati, Ohio is hoping. Wertz has founded Beluga Shaving Inc., a company that makes handmade razors that use the ultra-simple, double-edged blades made famous by your grandpa who didn’t take any guff and was happy to dry shave with a broken beer bottle if he had to. Unlike most single-blade razors, however, this model has a pivoting head and special guards to ensure you get a close but not bloody shave. I meant just read this stuff: Hipster shaving heaven! To be clear there is absolutely nothing high-tech about this thing. It is more of a design project. But as someone who has tried a number of razor solutions, including disposables and even some ultra-primitive single-blade solutions, I can see this thing filling a definite need. There are those of us out there who believe the old ways are best and if we can save a little green and feel like Hemingway after a five-day drunk while we rinse off our razors, more power too us. It’s important to save resources and, as smooth as those 10 blade monster razors seem to be, I think the smoothest shave still comes from a blade, a handle, and a hand steadied by a belt of whiskey and a little bit of barbiturate.
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Snapchat and Spiegel’s Interesting Call on the Hong Kong Demonstrations | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | I don’t mean to pile onto Snapchat in the middle of the #Snappening. But I thought there was something interesting that went missed in During the Hong Kong demonstrations that blew up this month, he and his team briefly discussed turning the protests into an ‘Our Story,’ and then decided to do it. ‘Our Story’ is a feature that Snapchat launched over the summer so that users at the same location can adds Snaps to the same collective Story. They launched it with the EDC music festival and you can see . So why promote the drug-fueled electronic music festival EDC and not some of the most visible pro-democracy protests that greater China has seen in two decades? Spiegel explained: Snapchat has some very different sensibilities than its slightly older Northern Californian counterparts like Facebook and Twitter. For one, Spiegel left the Valley for Venice Beach, near where he grew up in Pacific Palisades. Instead of showing up in a hoodie and flip-flops like a younger Zuckerberg, he appeared on-stage with Bloomberg wearing from . Los Angeles and New York have, er, more transparently transactional business cultures than the ambitiously loopy San Francisco Bay Area. Los Angeles’ big consumer Internet startups like Tinder, Whisper and Snapchat haven’t outgrown their lascivious roots the way that Facebook has had to leave its fratty beginnings behind and and buying virtual reality companies like Orange County’s Oculus. And while San Francisco does have younger and unabashedly ruthless companies like Uber, there is still a cultural expectation that you’re supposed to be . For example, Google is one of the main financial supporters of , on the belief that knowledge-based jobs will help Gazans get around Israeli blockades and find economic mobility. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to join the Ferguson demonstrations, and the company was so proud of its role that it . So I suppose it comes down to your tastes in tech overlords. Do you want companies that try and not be evil, so you can hold them accountable to their ideals and rhetoric when they inevitably mess up? Or you do want companies that are less actively interested in the greater social good, whatever that may be?
The second point I wanted to make is that while it sounds like this was an individual call that Spiegel and other leaders made, Snapchat either has taken investment or has been in funding conversations with some of China’s biggest Internet companies. Tencent is a and the company reportedly . Chinese capital is and will continue to be an invaluable tool going forward for Snapchat to remain an independent entity and rebuff acquisition talks with Facebook. I could imagine that actively promoting political unrest in greater China through social media might complicate some of these relationships. For years, companies like Facebook and Twitter have mostly written mainland China off. After Google largely pulled out of China a few years ago amid frustration with hacking attacks and censorship, few pure software plays outside of professionally-focused products like LinkedIn have tried to compete against well-protected local mainland Chinese rivals. (Hardware companies like Apple are the exception.) Today, the U.S. and Chinese markets are starting to converge again in a totally different way. Now that Alibaba has gone public and is worth $221 billion on public markets, it and the other Chinese giants like Baidu and Tencent Many deals are in gaming, where I think the expertise of Chinese companies in free-to-play gaming, virtual goods and paid premium business models that are less reliant on online advertising is arguably superior to that of Western companies. But I have to wonder that when you’re dealing with pure communication utilities like Snapchat, how will an influx of Chinese capital influence the sensibilities of U.S. startups around public discourse and free speech? |
Google And Microsoft Battle For Market Cap Supremacy | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | — Google and Microsoft are currently locked in a dogfight to be the second-most valuable technology company in the world. Following Google’s less-than-awesome earnings report, combined with a pre-market rise from Microsoft, the two tech giants are neck-and-neck for market cap supremacy. Apple and Exxon Mobil will still be worth more than the dueling technology giants. The four firms have a combined market cap of more than $1.5 trillion. Yesterday, Google’s earnings report in after-hours trading. Google fell in early pre-market trading, but opened up a fraction. Microsoft opened up just over 1 percent. Leaning on and , Google closed yesterday worth $354.77 billion. Microsoft, $352.17 billion. Today, Google opened worth $357.05 billion, and Microsoft $356.13 billion, keeping a minute sliver of air between them. Put another way, Google’s quick rally before the open of the market saved it from starting the day less valuable than its Redmond-based rival. The potential switch-up is more symbolic than material, but worth noting all the same given the massive competitive surface area that the two companies share. As with , Google and Microsoft compete in a number of categories, from gaming to music to cloud computing to hardware to operating systems to developer ecosystems, and all the way back to search. Thus, to perhaps see one firm surpass the other in worth is something that will cause consternation on one end, and smugness on the other. Hold fast, however, as Microsoft has yet to report its own earnings. If the company manages to pass Google today, it could easily give up any edge if its quarterly grades aren’t up to expectations. What might go wrong? Weak Surface revenue would hurt, as would a larger-than-expect phone loss. A deceleration in Office 365 growth might spook investors. Poor consumer demand for PCs could harm Windows incomes. And if Azure slows down, the street might look for an exit. But that’s all to come. For now, , Microsoft could be headed for at least one day in the sun . |
The NSA Won’t Disclose What It Leaked To The Public | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | The NSA doesn’t like leaks that much. But it does like leaks when it chooses to leak, as then it gets to exert influence over the media, and thus potentially shape the public narrative. And as , not everything initially marked TOP SECRET//COMINT//NO FORN needs to stay that way. But that doesn’t mean to say that the NSA, which when it leaks certain information, wants you to know what it has leaked, and what has otherwise managed to find its way out on its own. A to through what might be my : Your request has been processed under the provisions of the FOIA. The document responsive to your request has been reviewed by this Agency as required by the FOIA and has been found to be currently and properly classified in accordance with Executive Order 13526. This document meets the criteria for classification as set forth in Subparagraph (c) of Section 1.4 and remains classified TOP SECRET as provided in Section 1.2 of Executive Order 13526. The document is classified because its disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security. Because the document is currently and properly classified, it is exempt from disclosure pursuant to the first exemption of the FOIA (5 U.S.C. Section 552(b)(1)). Take that. What was precisely requested in the Freedom of Information Act request? “[A] copy of any notifications to Congress that may have been transmitted by DoD in the past 12 months concerning authorized public disclosures of intelligence information.” As noted before, the Congressional component matters as there is a requirement for our nation’s deliberating body to be kept informed of what is being leaked to prevent confusion and embarrassment. : There have been numerous authorized leaks over the years, including the . There have been even more unauthorized leaks, however—by government officials and workers. It makes sense for Congress to want to know when classified information has been leaked or declassified in order to distinguish official leaks from unauthorized ones. Lawmakers on the intelligence committees look silly when they tell reporters they can’t talk about something, while government officials are freely yapping about the same topic behind their backs. They also look silly when they publicly call for a criminal investigation into a leak that turns out to have been authorized. And, of course, members of both parties in Congress want to know when the party in power in the White House might be authorizing leaks for political gain. Therefore, to ask Congress what was disclosed is a pretty decent way to ask what was leaked by the government. And there is a document! We just don’t get to see it. So what the government thought was fit for public consumption to help build its own case and shape discourse — — we can’t know, because then the terrorists might win. There is a chance that the public’s knowledge of a leak’s origin — in the case of a leak that was in some sense blind — could aid an enemy. That chance seems remote. But the remoteness of that potentiality instead belies what I think is a far simpler explanation: The government doesn’t want to disclose the extent of what it has leaked, because it would undermine its case that all these leaks are so damaging. For now, though, no information for you. |
null | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 17 | null |
Kmart Hacked | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | First it was Target. Then it was Home Depot. And now? Kmart. In the latest of what seems like an endless series of massive retailer hacks, Kmart has just disclosed (on a Friday afternoon when no one is really paying attention) that their payment systems were compromised throughout September and early October. Time to call your bank! The scale of the hack hasn’t been determined just yet, so there’s no word on how many cards were exposed — just that both credit and debit cards (albeit no PINs) were leaked. This isn’t the best timing for Kmart, given that they spent much of the beginning of 2014 shutting down stores across the country. |
Glimpse Pivots To Privacy-Focused Group Messaging For Teens | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | is going through some major restructuring, with one co-founder departing as the startup shifts gears from general-purpose photo and video messaging to focus on groups and teens in particular. The biggest news is that co-founder and CTO Pax Dickinson (former CTO at my previous employer, Business Insider) is leaving the company (though he says he will “still help out”) and handing his responsibilities to CEO Elissa Shevinsky. In a statement, Dickinson writes that he’s departing due to the frustration that comes with raising money for a privacy-first app in a market where VCs can’t help but salivate at the idea of selling user data to advertisers: Why am I leaving? It’s disappointing to me but today’s funding environment for consumer security and privacy products is very broken. Mainstream tech VCs expect reams of user activity data which is anathema to a privacy play and it seems that “security investors” are clueless about consumer products. I started Glimpse because I was inspired by Snowden to build “easy to use” privacy and security products. It’s clear that the current ecosystem doesn’t support that for early stage startups. The private, ephemeral messaging app space was already crowded , and if anything Snapchat has only gained stronger footing in the interim period, despite So Glimpse has decided to focus on a more specific market: teens. To help tune in on what teens actually care about, the startup has actually brought one on as an official co-founder. Menlo Park-based teen (and high school senior) has joined Glimpse as the Chief Product Officer. She’s taking on an impressive load, making designs, building community, doing user acquisition, working on business strategy/development and marketing, and more. Why focus on teens? Zhong says that the early iterations of the app did well among sororities and that they frequently received requests to add a group messaging function. Anecdotally, she also says that fellow students “wanted “Snapchat for groups” and that there wasn’t any good group messaging apps where you can just say anything.” In addition to Zhong’s new role, Glimpse is also beefing up its engineering team. Former Yo Android developer Mohammad Adib has joined the team, meaning Glimpse’s app should hit the Google Play Store in the next few months. |
Netflix Now Finally Works On Linux | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | Remember that Netflix streaming would soon finally, work on Linux? (That is, it’ll work without requiring a bunch of trickery to convince Netflix you’re running something else.) Tada! . There are a few caveats, though… First, it’s not working on Linux distros — just Ubuntu for now. If you’re on Debian, or Gentoo, or whatever other flavor of Linux that isn’t Ubuntu, you’ll have to continue dual-booting to get your fix. : Looks like it and (the Ubuntu-based) Mint, too! Second, it… only works in Chrome. Why? Because the whole thing relies on the library, and only the latest build of Chrome for Ubuntu is currently up to snuff on the front. Other browsers will likely follow suit, but it’s Chrome or nothing for now. Enjoy! |
CrunchWeek: Airbnb Is Legal, Satya Nadella’s Unfortunate Statement, And The Snappening | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | We’ve got some big topics to talk about on CrunchWeek: the San Francisco in the city, , and Snapchat users sharing photos using a few third-party clients CrunchWeek regulars and were joined by TechCrunch writer , who attended the Board of Supervisors discussions and |
Glu Mobile Releases Diner Dash On iOS And Android | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | , the same company behind , just released Diner Dash in the and on . Originally published by San Francisco-based , Diner Dash has received over 550 million downloads, making it one of the most popular downloadable video games ever. Glu acquired PlayFirst for $12 million in stock this last spring and the new game owners quickly started adding improvements and new characters to the popular time-sensitive game series. The game is still pretty similar to the old version, featuring the beloved Flo character. Players guide Flo as she seats customers and takes orders under a high pressure time limit in an effort to fight against the takeover of Mr. Big’s Eat-More fast food restaurants.
The new mobile 2015 edition runs on a freemium model for the first time ever, as well. The old game started around $1-$3 under PlayFirst. This is similar to the ultra-popular Kim Kardashian: Hollywood game. It’s free to start and then players are encouraged to buy products to get to the next level within the game. The Kim K game is Glu’s most successful to date and the ninth highest-grossing iOS game in the U.S., according to . The app is speculated to rake in $200 million by the end of this year. No doubt, Glu is hoping to repeat that success with Diner Dash. |
For President Obama, A Net Neutrality Reprise | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | President Obama’s recent comments in favor of strong net neutrality regulations ignited a fresh round of media coverage: He’s opposed to Internet fast lanes! Hold loose everyone, we’re in charted waters. The president’s remarks illustrate the fact that the ultimate net neutrality decision is out of his hands, resting instead in those of his appointee, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. And despite the media splurge, the president did not break new ground in his commentary. His comments, : Speaking about preventative health care. And I also have been a professional musician for about 20 years. So I want to speak to the issues that the little guy is facing in terms of their innovation being protected, and in terms of boot-strapping their entrepreneurial endeavor. I want to speak to net neutrality and to intellectual property rights protection. Yes, well, this is obviously an issue that we’ve been working on for a long time. It was something that I spoke about back in ‘08. And we’re continually trying to fine-tune it and stay focused on. On net neutrality, I made a commitment very early on that I am unequivocally committed to net neutrality. I think that it is what has — (applause) — I think it’s what has unleashed the power of the Internet, and we don’t want to lose that or clog up the pipes. And so there are a lot of aspects to net neutrality. I know one of the things that people are most concerned about is paid prioritization, the notion that somehow some folks can pay a little more money and get better service, more exclusive access to customers through the Internet. That’s something I’m opposed. I was opposed to it when I ran. I continue to be opposed to it now. Now, the FCC is an independent agency. They came out with some preliminary rules that I think the Netroots and a lot of folks in favor of net neutrality were concerned with. My appointee, Tom Wheeler, knows my position. I can’t — now that he’s there, I can’t just call him up and tell him exactly what to do. But what I’ve been clear about, what the White House has been clear about is, is that we expect whatever final rules to emerge to make sure that we’re not creating two or three or four tiers of Internet. That ends up being a big priority of mine. Fine stuff to be sure, but it does highlight the limited purview of the White House over the matter. Independence is a tricky thing. For context, here’s the president in August ( ): One of the issues around net neutrality is whether you are creating different rates or charges for different content providers. That’s the big controversy here. So you have big, wealthy media companies who might be willing to pay more and also charge more for spectrum, more bandwidth on the Internet so they can stream movies faster. I personally, the position of my administration, as well as a lot of the companies here, is that you don’t want to start getting a differentiation in how accessible the Internet is to different users. You want to leave it open so the next Google and the next Facebook can succeed. That’s the same substance. Going back even further, here’s then-candidate Obama on net neutrality: That’s, again, the same substance. What we’re seeing today is the president reiterate and not much more. Again, the help is welcome, but it doesn’t ice the issue in any way. What matters in the new comments is their increased pressure on Chairman Wheeler to heed the call of the White House — independence goes a long way, but the influence of the executive is strong. Oddly, or happily, there has been interesting commentary in the past few weeks regarding how to structure net neutrality regulation following the official comment period — . The President, you’ll note, did not call for a specific method to achieve an open Internet. Instead, he merely demanded it in polite terms. As such, Chairman Wheeler has wide range to wrap the issue in the manner of his choosing. Keep in mind that two commissioners of the agency — the two Republicans — have all but backed out of discussions. That leaves the chairman in a position of negotiating with the two Democratic members of the Commission. He cannot lose a vote on that side, limiting his maneuvering room. We’re heading towards an FCC report and order on the issue. The White House has again stated its views. What happens next is up to the agency. We’ll see. |
This Is Withings’ Vision For The Future Of The Home | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | Slowly but surely, has been building up its product portfolio to provide a truly holistic approach to gadgets and digital services. Recently, the French company brought over its latest products, outfitted a snazzy New York city hotel room, and gave us a sweet little tour of what the perfectly connected home looks like. The priority, of course, was to take a look at the freshly announced monitoring system that not only provides 135-degree wide-angle zoom and night vision video, but it detects people, pets, and even specific noises such as a crying baby. The Withings Home monitor also has a series of environmental sensors for monitoring air quality, temperature, etc. We then ventured over to the newly announced that looks and acts almost exactly like a regular analog watch, except its constantly sending back information about your activity and fitness to an accompanying app. The Activité can hook in with the Withings Heart Rate monitor to give a more comprehensive look of your health on a regular basis. Withings clearly takes a comprehensive look at fitness, including their iconic connected scale, but sleep is also important to the company. uses a light system, a sensor, and a speaker to help users fall asleep, track their sleep, and wake up feeling rested. We got a quick peek at the Aura during our tour, but we’ll be hitting you with more coverage of that in the coming weeks. For now, sit back, relax, and enjoy a trip through Withings’ vision for the connected home of the future. |
Correction: 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship Did Not Up Age Limit To 23, But Maybe It Should | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | [ : Despite sending out emails and updating its site to ask people 23 and under to “apply” for its $100,000 stipend to skip college, the Thiel Fellowship tells us it’s is not accepting anyone older than 20. We reported earlier it was taking people up to age 23. Apparently those over 20 are only eligible for the Thiel Summit, which brings together bright youngsters with mentors, not the Fellowship with its $100,000 stipend. However, for the logic I lay out below, it might make sense for the age limit for the Fellowship to be raised. This article has been edited to reflect the correction.] The might want to consider forgiving kids for experimenting with college. The program gives superstar youngsters $100,000 to sidestep university and start working on a big idea for two years, but is currently restricted the fellowship to people 20 years old or younger. That may disqualify potential fellows who went to college for a few years, had to serve in their country’s military, took some travel time, or finished high school late. The point of the Thiel Fellowship is to offer capable youth a more self-directed, applied education alternative to sitting in a college classroom. PayPal co-founder-turned-venture-capitalist, and fellowship founder, Peter Thiel once told the that “[traditional] education has become a way to avoid thinking about the future.” Rather than having to make a decision about what to work on and actually get your hands dirty, you can coast for a few years. The Thiel Fellowship recently sent out an email that said: “The Thiel Fellowship is a program supporting young entrepreneurs build the future. We award 20 fellowships each year and we’re helping hundreds of applicants by connecting them to resources like mentoring, internships, and inviting them to participate in our Thiel Foundation Summit Community. If you’re 23 or younger we want to hear from you, give you feedback on your projects and help you on your way. We look forward to reading your application and being inspired by your vision for the future. 2 Years. $100,000. No limits. Build something amazing with the Thiel Fellowship and Thiel Foundation Summits. Take a shot at the Thiel Fellowship!” [Note: Judging by the text on the Fellowship site and this email, it’s obvious that the Thiel Fellowship needs to more clearly communicate its age limit. Still, I apologize for spreading the confusion.] Thiel’s fellowship pays kids a stipend that liberates them to work on ways to improve the world, rather than saddling them with debt. They get mentorship, workshops, connections to resources, and an alumni network without a formal alma mater. say college has socialization benefits, and that graduates earn more, but Thiel has countered saying these complaints typically come from academics financially tied to the success of old-school … schools. The theory is that many come out of college without being much closer to finding their purpose in life, but having burned some of their most enthusiastic years to shackle themselves with student loans. But there are brilliant young minds who miss the 20-year age limit for the fellowship. Maybe they tried but didn’t find fulfillment in college, or had to serve in their military like in Israel, Korea, Singapore or Norway. One of the smartest freshman I knew at Stanford was 21, as he had served in the Singapore military doing “tank math.” If the Thiel Fellowship flexed to give an opportunity to late-starters who want to educate themselves and define their own destinies, it might be able to create an even stronger signal that college isn’t the only way to learn. |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 10.10.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | – Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, David Ossman, and Steve Gillmor. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Tesla, Amazon Fire 7, And Withings Home Monitoring | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | Tesla just announced new and Matt can’t shut up about it. Meanwhile, Amazon announced a new and found to be quite the solid little reader. He argues, however, that it isn’t a tablet. We also take a look at the newest stuff from Withings, including the Home monitoring system, as well as rumors around Coin’s imminent failure. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
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Ubooly Cuddly Learning For Kids | One Lap | Rob Coneybeer | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | Carly Gloge and her team at are pioneering a new product category – interactive toys that leverage the capabilities of modern smartphones. I’ve always been intrigued by Ubooly, because their initial products convert commodity, widely available smartphones into fun and accessible toys for children. With well-written software and clever case design, Ubooly uses smartphone microphones, displays and speakers to create characters that engage kids and display all of the characteristics of artificial intelligence. AI will take many different forms, and smart toys represent the leading edge of AI technology deployment in the market today. You can imagine how the right content-creation tools and software could be used in similar ways to bring cartoon and movie characters to life for kids around the world – not just for entertainment, but for engaging educational experiences, as well. I’ve known Carly for several years, and I’ve always been impressed by her vision and determination to define and create a new product category. During our conversation on the racetrack, Carly demonstrates how Ubooly works, talks about the challenges of entering the toy market, describes how they build content for Ubooly, and explains why she loves having kids as customers. In this week’s episode of One Lap, Carly joins me at Sonoma Raceway to talk about Ubooly. Sonoma Raceway has a long history as one of the most technical racetracks in the United States. Formerly known as Sears Point, it features significant elevation changes and has only a few short straightaways. Riding shotgun as a passenger at this track is a lot like riding a wooden roller coaster with constant changes in direction. |
The Year Of The Corporate Divorce | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | It’s been a good time to be a corporate marriage counselor, and an even better time to be a corporate divorce attorney. Just in the last two weeks, we learned that , HP is into separate companies, and . Like two embittered high school sweethearts who later learn that things aren’t working out well together, these companies seem genuinely excited for life after independence. Certainly Wall Street investors are excited, with all three stocks moving up on the announcements, and eBay in particular jumping 7.5 percent. Ditto for the lawyers and bankers, who will receive a boatload of fees for using some scissors on the corporate org chart. But the excitement over these splits belies a deeper question: When did size become such a weakness? Just a little more than a decade ago, , creating one of the largest technology companies in the world. Around that time, Microsoft was fighting the final throes of its , trying to avoid being split up. Just a few months later in 2002, in one of the largest startup acquisitions in the post-dot-com era. Size, though, just doesn’t have the same relevance anymore. There used to be enormous benefits to being bigger in the technology field, particularly when it came to sales. Companies like Microsoft, HP and Cisco rely on strong, deep and constant relationships with corporations and governments around the world to sell them software licenses, hardware products and services. These sales often come in bundles with long-term contracts, providing huge sales leverage to these companies, who can ensure stable revenue for years while also blocking competitors and startups from getting a sales foothold. But the whole notion of a “Microsoft shop” is declining. Companies, pressed to find ways of controlling IT costs while building additional capabilities, are more willing than ever to consider multiple vendors in their procurement processes, and are also more wary of software licenses and long-term maintenance contracts than in the past. Perhaps even more importantly, the software-as-a-service movement has made important inroads into the Fortune 500, which has created not just competition against traditional software licenses, but also a new mindset among CIOs. They are much more concerned about purchasing all of their services from a single vendor today, aware of the pitfalls of vendor lock-in. It shouldn’t be surprising then that as their long-term contracts come up for renewal, these purchasing officers are beginning to look at new options to meet their needs. The sales leverage that comes from being huge has declined, and in fact, may even be a liability today. Large also used to mean easier financing and lower cost of capital. Unlike startups and smaller corporations, the largest technology companies have traditionally had enviable access to the debt markets, allowing them to raise relatively cheap money through corporate bond issues. That cost of capital dynamic meant it was relatively inexpensive to start new product lines or quickly scale up a division when demand warranted it. A diversified product portfolio also used to be a huge advantage in weathering technology change. The profits from cash cow legacy products could help to subsidize investments in the next-generation set of products and services. HP, for instance, makes billions from its printer business, and that money can be used to finance a range of innovation in areas like cloud services. In addition, size also helped these companies handle recessions, when revenues from different business lines could be aggregated and distributed to avoid massive disruption to the business. These competitive advantages have waned as startups have gained easier access to capital. Bonds and other forms of corporate debt may still be better than late-stage growth equity, but it is clear that startups are , as the number of $1 billion startups reaches a new record. And despite what corporate strategists have hoped, size hasn’t really helped companies in downturns. HP alone due to a tougher business environment and previous recessions. The conglomerate model of a cash cow with around it will still exist of course – one just has to look at Google, Apple, or Facebook to see this in action. But when it comes to the enterprise software space, it definitely seems to be on the way out. Ultimately, enterprise companies are experiencing what consumer companies have dealt with for years: velocity. As long-term sales contracts decline and cost of capital goes down, enterprise startups have more chances than ever to get their product in the hands of customers. Size still has some advantages, but the major disadvantage is the inability to move at the velocity at which the industry is developing. Just take a look at PayPal, which remains one of the largest payment processors on the internet, but has lost mindshare to fast-moving upstarts like Stripe, Balanced, and Braintree (which it acquired a little more than a year ago). In short, large is no longer the defining quality most companies are seeking. Today, the market demands products faster than ever before, with greater flexibility in purchasing agreements. That requires a more efficient organization with fewer lines of communication to ensure that ideas don’t get stuck in endless meetings while startups zoom ahead with their competing products. The strategies that worked in the 1990s and into the 2000s are no longer the strategies that will ensure growth for these technology companies today. With three major splits in just two weeks though, the question is: who is next? Microsoft itself is going through a period of layoffs and restructuring, but what about companies like VMWare, Cisco, Oracle, and SAP? Time will tell if they watch the neighbors and see love through divorce. Certainly the attorneys and bankers are already drawing up the paperwork and getting their scissors ready. |
Stratos Raises $5.8M To Build An All-In-One Connected Credit Card | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | Meet , another startup aiming to disrupt the staid credit card industry by building and producing an all-in-one, connected credit card. The Michigan-based company recently announced its $5.8 million in funding and is charging forward with manufacturing. Stratos was founded in Ann Arbor, Mich. in 2012, and the team recently shifted from R&D to preparing to launch. Production is already underway with the additional raised capital going to help the company accelerate and scale its recruiting and manufacturing. Stratos is hardly the first to announce a connected, all-in-one credit card yet CEO Thiago Olson tells me that he doesn’t see a competitor offering the same set of features. “We don’t think there is a comparable offering with the card and platform,” Olson said. “We’ll be unsurpassed in use of use and reliability. You want it to be accepted everywhere” But of course he would say that. Olson tells me the they are currently working on pin and chip integration, which if successful, could be Strato’s strongest competitive advantage. Much like Coin before it, the Stratos card will allow owners to load their credit and loyalty cards onto the smart credit card. Yet unlike Coin Stratos purposely avoided launching on Kickstarter or seeking early press. Olson tells me that the biggest challenge is the technology involved and it’s something difficult to get right. Olson sees Apple Pay not as a competitor but rather a solution that validates the space. He explained to me, though, that with Stratos, a person can use the card just like a credit card including using it in an ATM (unlike Apple Pay). The startup raised $5.8 million from Midwest and West Coast investors. San Francisco-based Toba Capital led the round with Western Technology Investment, Hyde Park Venture Partners, and Michigan-based Resonant Venture Partners also participating. Stratos is one of the latest companies to come out of Ann Arbor. Olson was born in Michigan, and its CTO co-founded Detroit Labs. Stratos operates out of the same building that houses . “Ann Arbor and Michigan are not your usual spot for tech startups,” Olson said. “We’re really excited to be building what will be the next great tech company right here in Ann Arbor.” Stratos expects to launch within the next 12 months. It seems that the team is proceeding with plenty of caution and has built a lot of leeway into its timeline. While Stratos will not be alone in this space, the credit card and loyalty market is large enough for multiple players. However, the first to get to market with a working solution will have a big advantage going forward |
Months After Its “Upgrade,” Simple’s Online Bank Is Still Broken | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | Simple is no longer “simple.” Nearly two months after to its systems and infrastructure, online banking service Simple is still recovering from a series of glitches that have affected every aspect of money management from bill payments to being able to see a correct available balance to refund delays, credits appearing as debits, and much more. The startup built an updated front-end focused on improved web and mobile banking. It has some clever features, like being able to move money into “goals” that deduct funds from a “safe-to-spend” balance. The company but has continued to operate separately. And like most startups, it has faced some challenges. Consumers today are fairly forgiving of apps with bugs, as long as those issues are acknowledged and addressed in a reasonable amount of time. But when the startup dealing with bugs is your bank (or more correctly, the way you your bank account – Simple’s accounts are actually held at Bancorp Bank), users may be less forgiving. Things started off poorly for Simple when the scheduled maintenance window for the ” went longer than expected. But that’s not so uncommon – and Simple communicated the problems during the event, . Given my experience banking with a small, community bank prior to Simple, I’ve seen maintenance windows of this length before, so while the issues were disconcerting, they weren’t completely out of the ordinary. What has been difficult, though, has been every day since Simple came back online. We feel you—it’s annoying. Our engineers can’t wait to get things back to normal, and they’re working overtime on it. ^CH — Simple (@simple) Initially, a host of bugs were left unaddressed, including — critically — bill pay. The problem became so bad that Simple began crediting its angriest customers $50 to make up for the problems, which The Oregonian equalled roughly $600,000 in payouts. While the vast majority of Simple’s issues – like card downtime – were resolved within the 24-hour maintenance period, some customers (like myself) continued to have problems. Some of these problems were one-offs, while others were more widespread, and were related to things like customers’ individual spending or balances, Simple told me at the time. I personally experienced issues with the “safe to spend” amount showing incorrectly, duplicate payments, slow refunds, numerous display issues, and an overall, fairly broken bill pay system. I’m not alone. My bill payment issues were chalked up to a change to a new bill pay provider, said Simple. Because my bill payments never appeared to process — at least on the front-end — I deleted them and then re-added them in an attempt to get them to go through, as advised. I even had to delete the bill payees themselves and start from scratch. And yet, they still failed. Making things even more confusing, during this time, the web and mobile interface showed different views of what was going on. In the end, some of my bill pay recipients ended up receiving three checks from me, causing a good deal of confusion. I had to explain the problem, and inform them which of the three checks had not been voided. In September — now weeks after the upgrade — bill pay still had problems. For example, a scheduled payment was showing as being extracted on “null” instead of an actual date, which Simple’s customer service explained was a “purely cosmetic” display error. Bill pay functional, I just couldn’t tell because of the way the information was displayed on the screen. We know there’s a lot of work yet to do. Sorry to hear our site has been frustrating. Anything in particular you’re seeing? ^CH — Simple (@simple) Earlier this month — October, let me remind you — Simple was still suffering from these sorts of “display issues.” In another instance, a credit I received from a merchant appeared as a debit, which Simple corrected by offering a courtesy credit so my balance and “safe to spend” amounts would show correctly. And the original refund itself was so delayed that I had assumed the merchant forgot to process it. I’m not using these personal examples as a way to draw attention to my own issues and get help – I’ve been using proper channels, as any customer would, to reach a resolution, and have no outstanding issues as of today. I’m merely illustrating the problems, which are affecting many, with these examples. (If you don’t believe me, check Twitter.) And now, as of this morning, I received what appears to be a form email sent out to a number of Simple customers that says: “Within the past two months, you may have noticed that a credit you received was missing from your Activity.” The message says Simple engineers have figured out how to fix the problem, and “over the next few hours, you’ll see your account balance increase to reflect the credit…” Wait, so for two months, Simple wasn’t even showing customers ? Isn’t that, like, one of the most important aspects of online banking – an easy way to see your current balance? Dang. This is the final straw with . They’re going back to just being a backup bank for me. — Greg Barbosa (@gregbarbosa) And yet, this is only one of many ongoing bugs Simple is still dealing with, including (as per a list provided to Simple customers upon login): check hold display issues, payment issues (not appearing in scheduled activities), merchant refund delays, and bank statement delays. Simple is a broken bank and failing to live up to the promises made by its name. While the interface for the new mobile apps, , is nice enough, the underlying system is clearly damaged. Simple has had staff “working around the clock” since the problems began, but the trickle-down effect is that a lot of things that once made Simple great are now no more. Shoot, I’m sorry to hear that. Normally we’re able to pick up a lot quicker. Were we able to help when you reached us? ^CH — Simple (@simple) You can’t trust what the screen in front of you tells you, you’re unsure if basic banking processes are functioning, and Simple customer service – the great feature that offered real humans chatting with you via web and mobile messages and the phone – is now so overworked that messages are no longer responded to the same day, as before, and other customers are stuck on hold. With its many troubles, Simple’s bigger vision will suffer. The company wanted to , charts and graphs – something that sounded like Mint combined with a bank. ( .) With Simple 2.0, the company improved Goals and offered more details for individual transactions, but many of the changes were cosmetic: a new look-and-feel, a “favorites” function, new navigation, etc. There is a lot that could still be improved when it comes to banking, including not just an analysis of spending that has taken place, but real-time alerts that stop you from over-spending in real-time, or alerts remind you about budget goals, for example, asking you to contribute. Analysis is just step one, recommendations should follow. But these sorts of things can’t be addressed until Simple can fix its core problems. And there seems to be no ETA on that. |
Monsieur, The Drink Robot, Raises $2 Million | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | A robotic bartender named and his human partners have raised $2 million in seed investment from BIP Capital with Base Ventures, Paul Judge, TechSquare Labs, NFL star Derrick Morgan, and NBA star Glen Davis. The funding will go towards building more Monsieur drink robots for bars, restaurants, and my bedroom. “We are in pilot with several NBA arenas, one of the top hotel brands that has over 4,000 locations, and a popular movie theater brand that has over 500 locations. Monsieur will be in at least 3 NBA arenas this basketball season. Those arenas have a total capacity of over 110,000 attendees,” said co-founder and CEO Barry Givens. As you’ll recall, and is essentially a black box full of booze. You program in a drink – a Manhattan or a Slippery Wapdoodle With A Twist – and the machine mixes the drink in proper proportion and squirts it into a glass. The whole system runs on an Android tablet and a set of pumps and can be upgraded and controlled remotely. You can think of it as a robot bartender that will never talk back and can programmatically buy you a shot. “The idea came when I was waiting for his drink to come at a popular restaurant chain. He was there with his friends to watch a playoff basketball game and did not get his first drink until halftime. At that moment he realized that there was an opportunity to develop something that could provide consumers with a better experience but also help the businesses get drinks out faster to increase drink sales,” said Givens. The team has deployed beta units at restaurants and bars in Atlanta and they’re working on partnerships with drink brands and sports arenas. They see this as sort of a “bartender in a box” that staff can roll into a room and let users order drinks without having staff on hand. The system maintains a log of what was served and the venue can ring up a bill at the end of the night. I’ve tried the drinks that pour forth from this delicious machine and I can report that they are as good as human-made libations. Now if they can only replace bar patrons with faceless robots who won’t bother you with long stories about conspiracy theories, I might just be set. |
As Account Management Gains Importance, Gainsight Raises $25 Million | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | The software business model has changed and that change has put more emphasis on keeping customers and keeping them happy than in the past. Gone are the days when a software business could sell an installation and then wait for a customer to call with a problem. The service model that has swept the software industry (business software anyway) means exactly that, customers need to be serviced (keep your mind out of the gutter) if they’re going to remain customers. The startup software developer has spent the last three years developing technology to ensure that account managers can do their jobs better, and has just raised $25 million in new financing on the belief that as account managers become more central to businesses, the company’s technology will become more central to account managers. Initially founded as Jbara roughly four years ago, the company has managed to develop a technology that responds to the changing ways in which software for businesses are being sold, according to Bessemer Venture Partners Byron Deeter, whose firm led the latest round for Gainsight. It’s the second time in two years that Gainsight has raised a big round. raised roughly $20 million in November 2013 from investors including Summit Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. “We still had half the money we raised from the balance sheet,” says chief executive Nick Mehta. The reason for the round, which could value the company at somewhere between $200 million and $250 million, was to bring in experience investors like Bessemer and co-investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to Mehta. “We had the opportunity to partner and we really wanted to double-down,” Mehta says. “The way people think about customer relationship and sales are changing dramatically,” Mehta says. “They don’t sit by the phone and wait for the support call. Anytime anyone interacts with a customer, they have a quantitative view of ‘customer health’ [using Gainsight].” The Gainsight software analyzes different aspects of account managers interactions with customers and then creates reports around those interactions, based on the assessment of those interactions the company offers predictive solutions and automates parts of the account management relationship, Mehta says. So far, there are around 100 customers using the company’s service, including a few in both the Lightspeed and Bessemer portfolios. “In a world where every customer experience is amplified on social media, these types of tools are critical,” says Nakul Mandan, a principal partner at Lightspeed. “These things have gone from a cost center to a revenue generator.” |
So Long #Gamergate. What Did You Teach Us? | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | The hashtag is still going, as are the fervent speculations and plans for operations on 8chan and Reddit, but the movement that is #Gamergate is exposed for what it always was: A core of angry men hidden within a softer (and far more naive) crowd that liked to think of itself as diverse. The shield dropped when someone went too far, someone threatened a school shooting. Someone else threatened another woman in games out of her home. And the response from the key gaters boiled down to an extended “ “. Yeah, that’s game over. There was a point perhaps six weeks ago when some aspects of the Gamergate argument could be talked about. Perhaps there could have been a reasonable discussion about ethics in the media if that’s what the cause was ever actually about. But of course it wasn’t, as you all know. The doxxings continue and the deranged accusations still come (The latest? Accusing Zoe Quinn of actual murder.). The parrot repetitions drone on without anything approaching a shred of of substance. The tedious hypocrisy of the self-entitled and the ignorant demands to be heard and yet has nothing to say. To be identified as a Gamergater (or gater for short) has become the equivalent of being called a leper back in ancient Rome. Gamergate is effectively dead. But what, if anything, did it teach us? A number of came out in support of Gamergate and helped to propel the message. Some, like (2m subscribers) were moderates who tried to stick to the principle of the argument and argued against descending into hate. Some like (1.5m) were advocates for the intellectual argument behind the movement and sometimes controversial. Many of the smaller Tubers, on the other hand, were gleeful participants in the wackiness, doing their level best to attract subscribers by spinning yarns of blame and rage under the banner of supposedly reasonableness. The lesson? Vlogging, it seems, is similar but different to blogging. Blogging is debate whereas vlogging is emotive. Blogging goes for the mind where vlogging goes for the heart. Blogging is for older people where vlogging catches the young. In a split very similar to that between conservative talk radio versus liberal written journalism, what we’ve seen is the emergence of a new media of talk radio style hosts on YouTube. Many of them haven’t the first clue what they’re talking about, but they’re speaking to large audiences nonetheless. This we must all pay attention to, and I don’t just mean in terms of getting YouTubers to Let’s-Play our games. The youth conversation around the medium is happening in this realm more and more, and at the moment its idea spectrum ranges from the moderately conservative to the extremely conservative, and that’s a problem. Games need their NPR equivalent rather than asking Anita Sarkeesian to carry that torch all by herself. The typical gater seems to believe that his movement is diverse, his goals reasonable, his quest for objectivity justified and his viewpoint wholly (and conspiratorially) misrepresented by a self-defensive global media. And in this context a great many actions are either justified or tolerated. All sham evidence presented in support is taken on faith whereas all actual evidence against it is attacked on an ad hominem basis or ignored. As has been said by myself and several others, it’s a Tea Party dynamic, self-reinforcing, utterly righteous and highly misinformed. The lesson? That gamers have long been tribal is not a new revelation, nor is the fact that those tribes are largely led by corporate heroes rather than people. It’s why I keep telling clients that they need a marketing story. Gaters, however, show the extent to which that kind of thinking has become allergic to criticism, and furthermore how perhaps in the rush to change academia and other intellectually rich forums have left them behind. The gaters seem willing to be sold snake oil as long as the seller speaks to their values, and that’s a toxic environment for them to be in. So, even though it is difficult to contemplate, the largest task facing the industry’s media and educational sector is becoming one of exposure and education. Many of today’s younger gamers seem to only be hearing an inverted logic around their medium of choice and harboring a warped picture of what it is and how it works. We do have to take hearts-and-minds steps to change that. Leigh Alexander wrote the fierce column on Gamasutra that essentially triggered the Gamergate movement (and earned her endless abuse in the process). She : “ ” and urged game makers to consider that the gamer-as-culture group didn’t have to be their audience. Some gamers subscribe to a vision of reality wherein there are over a billion gamers (including iPhone, Facebook players etc – It all depends on your semantic definition of gamer of course, and how wide you cast that net). However any reasonable person would acknowledge that the wider you cast, the more the word itself starts to become normative (like reader, listener, viewer), less a mark of tribe and more an adjective of activity. This is the part that gamer culture does not want to acknowledge. Either gamer means “those who play” or “those who are enthusiasts”. It can’t be both at the same time. Gamers tend to want to believe that they are at the center of video games (and gaters want to believe that they are the defenders of that center) but this hasn’t been true for a while. The gaming universe has no center, no single that governs the whole show. It is not one unit. It is not one simple duality between “hardcore” and “casual”. That mentality still persists in the gamer mind, but the reality is the market moved far beyond such simplicities a long time ago, and it’s never coming back. The lesson? She used overly-strong imagery and emotive rhetoric perhaps, but – despite all the shouting and name calling that followed – Leigh Alexander was essentially right, and Gamergate proves it. It’s not a big movement in terms of user numbers, just a very passionate movement. It reflects a declining voice in the landscape of all things game, a voice that screams and resorts to extreme tactics to be heard, but still. Which leads me to… It seemed for a while there that the wider gamer community was either in lock step with gatering, or in tacit agreement. This led to private admitting of depression and doubt between many industry friends on Facebook. (Weirdly, Facebook has become the bastion of calm debate through most of this). We were appalled by the whole thing, embarrassed that it existed, galled by its actions and frustrated by what it said. To have believed that gaming had come so far only to be undone by a month of tween pique and cloaked misogyny is not a pleasant feeling. And then came the school shooting threat. But after that, finally, hope. Another hashtag arose, #StopGamerGate2014, and with it a much larger volume of tweeters (the silent majority that gaters presumed were on their side) and responders moved to anger. Enough was enough, the larger collective said. So did the gaming media, which had been somewhat kowtowed by the movement because it stood accused. No more. Voice after voice spoke up, said the whole thing was just not okay, that this was not what gamer culture could be . The lesson? Reason finally woke up, as it always does. Much has been written about the capacity of Gamergate and its campaigns to seize agendas and bring the thunder but – as is often the case – what we’re seeing now is how such campaigns always implode. The Internet is not as broken as it appeared. The moderate view takes some time to find a voice, sometimes needing to be propelled by a trigger event that seems just too awful, but eventually makes itself heard. Much as the 2013 government shutdown and high drama over the debt ceiling had the effect of painting the Tea Party as simply irresponsible, the Utah/Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu events have had the same effect on Gamergate. touched on this already: Gamergate shows the capacity of some social networks to be put to acidic uses – particularly when hit in a co-ordinated fashion. We’ve all had to learn about two-factor authentication learn a new word: doxxing. We’ve seen target lists emerge, forums like 8chan act as hubs and lightning rods, and for a while none of us knew what to do about any of it. That fear is lessened (just say “No Gaters” over and over, adopt it as your policy) but the structural lessons need to be learned. Especially on Twitter. Twitter is basically four things: The stream of people you follow, the retweet, the #hashtag and the @mention. Those functions provide the affordances of being able to say, to advocate, to join in a conversation and to reply to someone. The first two work well while the third provides much of the platform’s momentum. Like it or loathe it, #gamergate shows how and why hashtags have power. The problematic function is the @mention. Anyone can @mention you. Anyone can send you a pointed remark or response that is worth considering. But equally anyone can send you a thoughtless insult, a trolling question, or even a stream of harassing tweets like death threats. Twitter pre-supposes consent to being treated thus and your only recourses in that scenario are to manually mute, block, report or take the nuclear option of making your stream protected. You can’t nip them in the bud. The troll, the sealion and the harasser get to damage to your mental state first, and then you have to block them out. This essentially means that Twitter is a bad experience for the power users who drive its use. My ideal fix would be for Twitter to do these three things: Perhaps then we’d see the end of sockpuppet and trolls accounts and a return to Twitter being used for the purpose for which it was intended. Perhaps the biggest lesson is how games themselves have changed. Gamergate is reactionary but that means it’s reacting to something. To what? The sense that games are changing of course. That we now exist in a medium that’s willing to accept personal expression games, games that aren’t conceived in a build-a-better-product mindset, games that don’t fit into the old review score structure that prized function over form. So much of what Gamergate asserted about itself was that it wanted “objectivity” in journalism, but on closer examination this turned out to mean “function-first games reviewing”. That has been with us for so long that for some it seems intrinsic. It isn’t. For the gaters games were presumed to be on a path toward play perfection and have somehow been waylaid by dark forces. In truth games have expanded and embraced, and become a better medium for it. So much so that I’d call it “The New Games”. If Gamergate is the dying gasp of an old mindset, then these are the birth pangs of the new. We must do what we can to urge that new age in. |
Tinder Spammers Move To SMS After Improvements To Dating App’s Security | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | Dating app Tinder for had been flooded with – fake accounts that flirt with users in order to redirect them to adult sites, and yes, take their money. This summer, security firm Symantec , and later, Tinder addressed the issue with a technical update. That update, it appears, effective at cutting down the in-app spam. However, it didn’t necessarily address the spamming activities themselves. According to a new report, Tinder bot spammers just moved to a new channel: SMS. When Symantec’s report was released, Tinder users could block profiles, but couldn’t report spam. Now, that has changed. Plus, in July, the company rolled out what it described as a “major technical solution to our current spam issue, which should result in measurably less spam and bots than prior,” the company at the time told . However, out this week from indicates that Tinder’s attempts at curtailing the spam activity on its service hasn’t actually slowed down the higher-level spam campaign, the firm says. The company, which monitors online phone spam complaints in order to identify and analyze new and popular scams, found in early August an emerging scam involving Tinder. Immediately after the Tinder technical update, phone spam complaints skyrocketed. Before August, the company’s Topic Modeler software hadn’t identified any Tinder-related complaints. By September, Tinder complaints made up 0.31 percent of total phone scams being tracked, and made the Tinder scam the 14th most popular scam that month. According to security researchers, Tinder’s update was effective in shutting down spammers’ ability to send spam links through the app, but didn’t seem to address the issue with the bots’ existence themselves. Apparently, Tinder spam bots simply changed their scripts in order to get users’ phone numbers instead. They then proceeded to text them the spam links via SMS. Of course, just because Tinder made a technical change then Tinder-related SMS spam increased, that doesn’t mean that the change the spam’s increase. Asked if the uptick could possibly be just a coincidence (a correlation), the lead researcher, Raj Bandyopadhyay, replied that they believe it’s not. “Our topic modeler looks for phone number related complaints, and then classifies them using Data Scientist to validate correlation. In this case, we isolated complaints related to Tinder, and then compared them to historical complaints,” he says. “This gives us a high degree of confidence that the spike is specific to Tinder activity and not just an overall spike in spam. In addition, it is important to re-emphasize that this is a pattern we have frequently seen – fraudsters migrating to phone after being thwarted online.” On that latter note, he means that it’s common for spammers to move their activities to the SMS channel as online services are hardened against their tactics, and that’s what we’re seeing here with Tinder. We asked Tinder if it would share any metrics related to the decreases it’s seeing in spam bot activity, or if it could offer details as to what percentage of its user base was spam bots before and after the update. We’ll update if the company responds. |
Who To Follow On Twitter, According To Marc Andreessen | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | Well-known and investor Marc Andreessen has produced a list of his favorite people to follow on Twitter. He was prompted to do so by an article in The Information called by Jessica Lessin, who questioned if the industry leaders most often quoted by the media (she cited Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel) really “represent the views of the broader Silicon Valley community.” “The more media coverage Silicon Valley gets, the more important it is that other voices get heard,” Lessin wrote. (In addition to Lessin’s thought piece, New York magazine also just published with Andreessen, in which he talked about the cultural changes in Silicon Valley since he arrived in 1994 and diversity in the tech industry, among other topics.) His list “only a highly abridged selection,” Andreessen (@pmarca) tweeted, but a helpful one because his has over 600 members. Since Andreessen’s prolific use of Twitter means his tweets tend to get buried quickly, TechCrunch has saved his highly abridged list for posterity here. 1/Jessica Lessin writing about “Silicon Valley’s Frontman Problem” aka “Peak Andreessen/Thiel/Musk”: — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 2/She says “Silicon Valley has the microphone. More people should step up and seize it.” — I wholeheartedly agree! — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 3/In that spirit: Here are a bunch of tech people who aren’t widely famous (yet) but who routinely say interesting and provocative things! — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 4/Founders: –Sunil Rawat, Omniscience; –Ahsan Rizvi, Kiddomapp; –Mohammed Al Saqqaf, Project Prepay — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 4/Founders: –Sunil Rawat, Omniscience; –Ahsan Rizvi, Kiddomapp; –Mohammed Al Saqqaf, Project Prepay — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 5/ –Andrew Trabulsi; –Bilal Farooqui, CrystalMD; –Chris McCoy, YourSports — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 6/ –Danielle Fong, Lightsail Energy; –David Aron Levine, Artivest; –Helen Grenier, CyPhyWorks — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 6/ –Danielle Fong, Lightsail Energy; –David Aron Levine, Artivest; –Helen Grenier, CyPhyWorks — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) > 7/ –Jessica Mah, InDinero; –Jude Gomila, Heyzap; –Meredith Perry, UBeam; –Nait, AgLocal — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 8/ –Louis Anslow, Newtru.st; –Paul Baumgart, WhatWeOrder; –Ruzwana Bashir, Peek — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 9/ –Sophia Amoruso, NastyGal; –Matt MacInnis, Inkling; –Elizabeth Stark, StartX; –Tikhon, Parse — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 10/ –Tristan Walker, Bevel; –Tiffany Zhong, Glimpse; –Zaid Farooqui, CrystalMD — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 11/VCs: –Aileen Lee, Cowboy; –Alice Lloyd George, RRE; –Ann Miura-Ko, Floodgate; –Bilal Zuberi, Lux — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 12/ –Jordan Cooper, Lerer; –Geoff Lewis, Founders Fund; –Renee DiResta, OATV; –Semil Shah, Haystack — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 13/ –Sarah Kunst, VFA; –Shai Goldman, SVB; –Steph Palmeri, SoftTech; –Tomasz Tunguz, Redpoint — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 14/Other roles! –Andrea Kuszewski; –Atif Raza; –Monica Roman Gagnier; –Sam Bhagwat — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 15/ –Farooq Butt; –JJ; –Kyro Beshay; –Lauren O’Neill; –Mina Radhakrishnan; –Ramez Naam — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 16/ –Pierre Rochard; ; –Santiago Suarez; –Sriram Krishnan; –Bushra Farooqui — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 16/ –Pierre Rochard; ; –Santiago Suarez; –Sriram Krishnan; –Bushra Farooqui — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 17/ –Subrahmanyam KVJ; –Susan Athey; –Michael Tsai; –Zhan Li; –Tarak Parekh — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 18/Longtime thought leaders: Andy Rachleff– ; Bill Davidow– ; Bill Janeway– ; Nick Szabo– — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) 19/Most of these folks are not affiliated with me/A16Z — what they have in common is, when they say things, I learn things! — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) |
PSA: You Won’t Be Able To Upgrade The New Mac Mini’s RAM Yourself | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | If you’ve ever owned a Mac Mini, there’s something you should probably know about the recently-announced : the RAM? It’s soldered to the board now. In other words, you won’t be able to upgrade it yourself. Past generations of Mac Minis allowed the user to crack open the case and install RAM they’d sourced themselves (generally at a price quite a bit cheaper than what Apple offered it for). Word of the change comes from , who runs a Mac Mini hosting farm in Las Vegas. He also notes that the latest generation Mac Mini now has tamper proof screws, making things that user serviceable that much more difficult to get to: Confirmed: RAM in the new Mac mini is not user accessible. Hard drive can be replaced/upgraded, though not keeping warranty. — Brian Stucki (@brianstucki) If people didn’t like to hear the confirmation of soldered RAM, wait until they see the foot of the Mac mini with tamper-proof screws. — Brian Stucki (@brianstucki) An Apple support page seems to confirm the soldered-on RAM: The memory for Mac mini (Late 2014) computers isn’t user accessible and is integrated into the main logic board. You can configure your computer’s memory at the time of purchase. Compare that to the , which tells you exactly what sort of RAM to buy. |
Loly Adds A Supersized Emoji Sparkle To Your iPhone | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | Move over boring old static smiley face and wine glass emoticons, Loly is a new, bigger, prettier emoji app . Online fashion pioneer created the new app to fill a need for the “chic and stylish” to have a better way to express themselves. Pell is the founder of early e-commerce fashion site Splendora. That got acquired by a few years back. Pell joined Joyus after the acquisition but left a couple years ago to take some time off. She likened the creation of Splendora to her new venture Loly and says she even sketched out all the emoji herself before handing it off to a design team. “Emoji and emoticons have been such a hot topic lately which is why I created something I thought was sorely missing in the market,” says Pell. There are six distinct categories of emoji in Loly: Some of my faves are the blinged-out “Dope” emoticon and the one that has a picture of some tote bags that says “totes.” It’s just ridiculous enough to get a laugh from your friends. Just like with regular emoji, you can also mix and match any of these to convey the exact phrase you are hoping to get across. Use the “lightening bulb” and then add the cheeseburger emoji to text your friend that you think the two of you should go grab a bite to eat, for instance. It’s a crowded space, with hundreds of emoticon apps out there to choose from. But so far the app seems to be doing well with the Silicon Valley crowd. Everyone from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams to One Kings Lane’s Alison Pincus have said they use Loly. Pincus wrote in to TechCrunch that even her 70 year old aunt was getting a kick out of using it. “I especially love the more obscure emoji like an animated Gnome Chomsky that says ‘Question everything’,” added Gina Bianchini from MightyBell. On top of that, , especially among the young (or young at heart). There’s no shortage of emoji over-users. Even Facebook has recognized the trend and has opened up more ways for us to use emoji to express ourselves in other areas. Those Facebook stickers are within comments, events, and groups as well as messages. You can text, email, send a Loly on Facebook or copy it to send some other way. Loly is a stand alone app on the App Store for now but Pell tells us she is working on a keyboard version you’ll soon be able to integrate with your other keyboard settings. She’s also working on a “Let’s go Giants” emoticon for all you Giants fans out there. |
A User’s Guide To Disrupt London 2014 | Leslie Hitchcock | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | Hard to believe that Disrupt London opens tomorrow! As always, TechCrunch has partnered with an amazing array of folks who promise to make your experience at the conference better than ever. Our wifi is sponsored by . You can find it using the network name “Cushman And Wakefield.” : is pleased to sponsor our fun-filled Hardware Alley day again on Tuesday, October 21. : Atlassian is offering 6 months of unlimited group chat, video chat and screen sharing for free to Startup Alley! They are also giving each attendee 6 months of free HipChat Plus. Register using code EUTCDisrupt14. is reprising its role at the Hackathon, providing the platform for our . Thanks, y’all! has long been a TechCrunch partner. If you purchased a ticket, you used Eventbrite. We love them and we think you will, too. If you haven’t purchased a ticket, please go do that Don’t miss a thing: You can follow along with our hashtag on Twitter, #TCDisrupt. |
Inside The Spotify – Echo Nest Skunkworks | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | Pig, and it’s ProTools for playlists. Punch in parameters like “danceability”, date ranges, or emotions and Truffle Pig spits out a set of top jams that would fit your “Lovesick 90s Party Starters” playlist. Truffle Pig is just one of the new musical inventions dreamed up at the sonic skunkworks born from . Deep inside Spotify’s New York headquarters, the team gave me a peek how the combined company plans to nail recommendations, hook other apps up with legal music, and meld human DJs with algorithms to surface the best songs from the history of recorded sound. It’s taken a long time for Spotify to get the basics sorted so it could get to this experimentation phase. It’s history is chronicled in a sprawling mural in its NYC HQ’s lobby. Each milestone is illustrated, from founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon giving birth to the company in Stockholm back in 2006, to musictech curmudgeons Metallica joining the service, up to the modern day when 40 million listeners rely on Spotify. The art gives a sense of the struggle to make digital music legal again after Napster established piracy as the norm. The only thing missing from the mural is the huge amount of money, , that Spotify has . When Spotify launched in the US in mid-2011 with help from Facebook, it was one of the only on-demand streaming services with collections from all the major record labels. Three years later, music has become a brutal turf war with Apple/Beats, Google /Songza, Rdio, Amazon, Deezer, and more duking it out for ears. Spotify has one of the largest libraries, with over 20 million songs and 20,000 more added each day. But it’s not the size of your catalogue, it’s what you do with it that counts. Users are overwhelmed with choice, and need curation to sift out the sweetest sounds. So each service is desperately trying to differentiate itself with discovery. That’s why Spotify acquired The Echo Nest. A fundamental building block of music intelligence, The Echo Nest’s vault of meta data and personalized recommendation algorithms powered discovery on Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, SiriusXM, and more. So to make sure it knew what people wanted to hear better than any of its competitors, Spotify ponied up $100 million, mostly in stock, to buy the Massachusetts startup. After a few months of mashing the companies together, the combined music juggernaut gave me a look at what its been tinkering with. In an assuming room buried in the office, I meet Spotify’s VP of Product Charlie Hellman, and The Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese. A lot of people out there claim to be feverish music fanatics, but few foam at the mouth with excitement quite like these two. The Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese “The philosophy here is to create the absolute best listening experience” says Lucchese. “To reach every passionate music fan out there, and get casual fans more engaged and more passionate.” Luckily, Spotify’s business model isn’t about selling hardware or search ads. Its incentives are aligned so everyone benefits when Spotify sounds better. Hellman explains “The longer people stay on the platform, the more likely they are to pay for premium”, which is Spotify’s real money-maker. The key to unlocking that enthusiasm is understanding each user’s unique music preferences so Spotify can suggest them the right song. So The Echo Nest’s first job was to dive into all of Spotify’s data. “Our most engaged users are coming more than 20 days per month and listening to an hour per session. There’s so much data, more than the listener even realizes” Lucchese says. The goal was “to understand you as a music fan with a level of depth that neither of us could do until we came together.” The result of all this digging is what Spotify calls “Taste Profiles”, a preference analytics and visualization tool currently available only to employees. By assessing the meta data of what you listen to, Spotify can determine a ton of attributes including: The Taste Profiles tool measures you on each of these scales and compares you to everyone else, then declares “You are 6.6% above the median freshness.” Beyond being interesting, these stats helps Spotify know if it should suggest you more or less mainstream tracks, stick to classics or serve up the freshest release, and whether it should use your savvy ears to suggest what’s hot to other users. “It’s important to know If you’re a music savant on the bleeding edge, or if you’re more of a casual listener” Hellman tells me. “Because ultimately, we want those users to have two different experiences.” Spotify also assesses the genres and artists you favor to visualize your music “Clusters”. These are the different sides of your listening identity. My music taste broke down into “Indietronica” like , , and , “Nu Disco/Retro Electro” like , , and , and “Shiver Pop” like , , and . I could infer the icy, detached sound of that last one from its name, but I was totally stumped by what “R-Neg-B” was. At first I thought it was a buggy rendering of the “&” in “R&B”. But Hellman explained the “Neg” refers this genre’s refute of traditionally safe R&B subject matter, and its inclination to explore topics like homosexual relationships and asceticism, as characterized by artists like and . Spotify constantly crawls the semantic web trying to pinpoint these obscure genres. [spotify id=”spotify:user:ajaykalia:playlist:2nYkoCRqPmS6GZuP7ACCk1″ width=”300″ height=”380″ /] Clusters can also be turned into different playlists, including ones with the most popular tracks in a genre, the top songs by artists of that style who you already listen to, or peppered with new artists you might like. Taste Profiles and Clusters both rely on a combination of algorithmic gathering and editorial insight into how to lump artists into genres. Hellman says “It’s a really good example of how machines and humans are not at odds at all, but are really working together.” These features are still incubating in the skunkworks, but you can savor the recommendations they power in the Spotify Browse and Radio sections. Pandora prides itself on its music genome’s ability to play what you want to hear next without a flesh-and-blood person behind the wheel. Yet Spotify is trying to embrace a classic discovery method: asking the infinitely knowledgeable record store clerk. Rather than rely entirely on the human brain, though, Spotify’s skunkworks has devised a tool to turn its mere mortal editors into playlist-making cyborgs. Truffle Pig. “Playlisting is getting to the next stage of its life” says Hellman. “It started with what you had in your collection or could record from the radio” But now thanks to the labels offering access to their entire back catalogues, Spotify’s team that makes playlists for its Browse feature needed a way to sort through its 20 million tracks. Truffle Pig creates an advanced search engine which returns results that can be easily collated into precise playlists. Tapping The Echo Nest’s detailed analysis of every Spotify song, editors can punch in parameters corresponding with Taste Profile attributes like hotness, or quantifiable aspects like tempo or recording date. But what’s really cool is its ability to surface tracks depending on characteristics about their actual sound, like “acousticness”, “speechiness”, or “loudness”. Each Truffle Pig search parameter can be set with a threshold, so editors may allow a little bit of speech or require a high loudness score for a song to qualify. Want to make a wordless playlist to work to, but are sick of techno and classical? An editor could search for songs from the last 60 years with zero speechiness, high acousticness, and high energy to build a playlist of motivating yet non-distracting songs from artists like Spanish guitar virtuosos like Rodrigo Y Gabriela. Pissed off but hate heavy metal? Dial up the danceability, set the emotion to “angry”, and exclude anything from the 1980s. Engagement with the resulting playlists is monitored to determine revisions and see which playlisters have the golden touch. Spotify VP Of Product Charlie Hellman “There’s no one taking playlisting more seriously than Spotify” Hellman claims. “Editors are giving each other shit over their skip rate, making fun of them for a song that performed poorly but they didn’t take out.” Spotify wants to offer curation at scale by putting playlisting on steroids, and Truffle Pig is the performance-enhancing drug. This human curation combines with social recommendations from what friends listen to and algorithmic charts . Sadly, you won’t find Truffle Pig publicly available just yet, but Hellman says Spotify is looking at how it could offer access to tastemakers and top amateur playlisters in its community over the course of 2015. Even with its catalogue and The Echo Nest’s data, Spotify can’t build everything. There are so many ways to sort, discover, and play music. The company recognized this early, and launched a platform for third-parties apps within its desktop software in November 2011. But buried amongst other features, many users never even found apps like MoodAgent for emotionally resonant music discovery or for nearby concerts of your favorite artists. And since the apps lived entirely within Spotify and weren’t on mobile, they were tough to monetize, developers shrugged off the platform, and Spotify stopped accepting new apps. Yet there was a massive opportunity. Spotify had done the expensive legwork of getting legal music licenses from the major labels — something extremely tough for small music startups to do. So when Spotify acquired The Echo Nest, I suggested it create an API that would let people log in to third-party music apps with their Spotify account, and . This would make Spotify the backbone of legal music across the industry, like how Facebook became a backbone of identity across the web by letting you log in to other apps and bring along your social graph. Instead of being a siloed one-size-fits-all music app like its competitors, Spotify could become a true music platform with a wide variety of interfaces built atop its library. It seemed to me that with each additional app where you could play your Spotify music, you’d be that much more locked in and likely to pay for a subscription. Spotify apparently had the same melody in its head. A few months later it launched its and . By logging in with Spotify, the apps began letting people mix any two songs from Spotify’s library instead of restricting users to music locally stored on their device, like in iTunes. The Echo Nest data can also detect the BPM, danceability, and key of a song currently being played, and suggest songs that would mix well with it. The impact of this API can’t be overstated. You can suddenly DJ with pretty much any song every recorded, rather than the handful you own. That’s a complete game-changer for music performance. And it’s only available if you have a $9.99 a month Spotify Premium subscription. “The way we’re going to thrive is if people are finding more and better music to listen to, and they’re getting more value out of this ecosystem” Hellman says. If you had to pick between streaming services to subscribe to, Spotify hopes you’ll choose the one with a whole solar system of apps in orbit. Spotify may have 10 million paying subscribers and a skunkworks full of future products to recruit more, but it’s still never quite figured out social. First, it let share news to friends of every song you played. A lot of people hated this. It felt simultaneously invasive and boring, filling Facebook with occasionally embarrassing and rarely useful stories about how you’ve been listening to Britney Spears. Then Spotify revamped its own ticker on desktop that let you . Stuffed in a forgotten corner of the app, the feature was rarely used. The only thing anyone really followed was , a public playlist of indie gems run by Spotify director and Napster founder Sean Parker. People dug how you could subscribe, and new tracks would be periodically added at the top so you always had something fresh to listen to. While social feels broken on Spotify, it’s still one of its most important elements. “The strongest thing that’s pulling casual listeners into Spotify is friends” Lucchese tells me. That’s why rather than build its own little Twitter for music, I think Spotify should take the best elements of the ticker, its Browse section, and Hipster International to create what I call the PlayFeed. The idea is to offer a personalized, constantly updated playlist based on what friends are listening to, new releases from artists and genres you like, chart-toppers, and picks by Spotify’s editorial team. Instead of Spotify’s Browse feature which is part blog, part News Feed, and requires your full attention, the PlayFeed takes the familiar music-first, fire-and-forget format of the playlist. But rather than staying static or requiring you to add new tracks manually, they’re automatically injected at the top based on all of The Echo Nest’s data. At any time you could press play to get a constant, passive stream of new song recommendations, or dig down deeper to return to old suggestions you enjoyed. This would effectively unify Spotify’s social, algorithmic, and editorial curation into a single place for music discovery. Done right, it could become as addictive as our other feeds, help artists grow their audiences, lock in subscribers through their social graph, and give Spotify a differentiation point. The big problem for Spotify is that its on-demand streaming . Apple uses music software to sell iPhones and MacBooks. Google Music is designed to lock people into its ad-filled ecosystem. Amazon bundles music in for “free” with a $99 a year . [Update: Spotify just launched a , which lets users buy premium subscriptions for up to four additional family members at 50% off, or $4.99 each. A family of five would pay $29.99 through the family plan to each have their own accounts complete with their own playlists and personalized song recommendations, rather than $50.] Still, Spotify’s competitors could offer music cheaper than it can because they make money elsewhere. Eventually, on-demand streaming could be something we expect to come free with a phone or mobile OS. And most music listeners aren’t hardcore enough to desperately need or even be able to recognize a better interface or catalogue from one that’s simply “good enough”. To win, Spotify will need to have the best app, and rely on the easy of trying out its ad-supported version. Lucchese says “I believe in today’s app economy, there’s no such thing as ‘good enough’. It’s so easy for users to try out a new experience that people aren’t got to settle for what comes in their phone.” So while competitors fuddle with integrations and try to decide how much music is even worth to them, Spotify can just keep fine-tuning its product. Lucchese concludes, “We look at it as ‘we’re never done'”. |
Infected Flight Wins The Disrupt Europe 2014 Hackathon Grand Prize, Appilepsy And Seeusoon Are Runners Up | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | more exciting than this. Yesterday, we welcomed hundreds of hackers at Old Billingsgate in London for the Hackathon. They all have worked tirelessly for the past 24 hours in an awesome dungeon-like venue to come up with a neat, funny and smart hack. We could all feel the excitement in the air when the 89 teams took the stage to present a short one-minute demo to impress fellow hackers and our judges. But only one team could take home the grand prize. So, without further ado, meet the Disrupt Europe 2014 Hackathon winner. Infected Flight is a cross-platform web app to model how diseases spread. It is built on top of differential equations created by one team member currently doing his PhD. The hack separates a population into four different groups: susceptible, exposed, infected or recovered. Behind the scene, Infected Flight analyzes real flight path data (source city, source airport, flight time, destination airport and destination city) to figure out whether your country is greatly affected by a disease or not. You can enter parameters and simulate infections over time. It might be a use case targeted towards health professionals, but the on-stage demo was pretty slick. [gallery ids="1072227,1072230,1072231,1072223"] Appilepsy is a mobile app that detects if you are having a convulsive epileptic seizure through an intelligent algorithm which analyses accelerometer data in real time. It then sends a text message and calls your emergency contact. This is the kind of hack that is both cool and useful. Seeusoon helps long distance couples get together. It monitors flights and alerts you to meet in the same city for a romantic weekend. The user experience is really slick as you can even buy tickets directly from Seeusoon. Finally, our judges wanted to give an honorable mention to iComic for putting together a compelling hack. The team didn’t quite make it to the top three teams, but deserved an on-stage mention. The winner will take home £3,000, and the three leading teams will take the stage once again on Tuesday to demo their projects on the main Disrupt stage here in London. But that’s not all — other hacks took home some generous prizes from our API sponsors. Hackathon sponsors include ChallengePost, CrunchBase, Esri, Evernote, Intel Mashery, Matrix, Ministry of Justice, Nexmo, Paymill, Twilio, Yammer and Zalando. They have selected teams and graciously given them prizes of their own for the best use cases of their APIs and services. And of course, all the teams with a score of 3 or above will get two tickets to attend the main Disrupt conference. Our judges this time around were Government Digital Service engineer Camille Baldock, Startupbootcamp Partner & Program Specialist Eric Brotto, Virgin Management investor Claudia De Antoni, Techstars Director Tak Lo, and FutureLearn developer Melinda Seckington. And that’s a wrap! Congratulations to all the Hackathon participants, there’s nothing as exciting as designing and developing something from start to finish — it was tough but you’ve made it. Disrupt Europe conference starts tomorrow in London. Here’s a backstage interview we did with the Infected Flight team after its victory. Camille Baldock ( is a software engineer. She has spent the past years writing code and making APIs, web and mobile applications for a development agency, a startup and now works at the Government Digital Service. In her spare time, she coaches junior developers and is a 3D printing enthusiast. Eric Brotto ( ) is currently the Partner & Program Specialist for Startupbootcamp. Eric cut his teeth in the tech world as a iPhone App Creative Developer at the digital production studio Smile Machine where he built apps for brands such as Ford, Nike and Ubisoft. Today, Eric is the Co-Founder and Principal of Creative Bytes, a monthly networking and panel discussion which revolves around creative technology and digital marketing. He is also a Global Facilitator for Startup Weekend and Decoded. Claudia De Antoni ( ) is an investor at Virgin Management, the family office of Sir Richard Branson, where she focuses on technology, media, telecom, education and health & wellness sectors. Among other projects, she is currently supporting the development of the first Virgin-branded mobile application – expected to launch in 2015. Prior to Virgin, Claudia founded Popup Supper, an online marketplace for catering and entertainment services. Tak Lo ( ) is a Director at Techstars. Previously, he spent over 5 years in the London and NYC startup communities, having founded and mentored several startups on both sides of the Atlantic. He was formerly a management consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, an investment banker at Nomura, and an US Army veteran. Tak dabbled at London Business School and the University of Chicago. He writes regularly at taklo.co Melinda Seckington ( ) is a developer at FutureLearn, a social learning platform offering free courses from a wide range of university partners and cultural institutions. She loves attending and hacking at Hackdays, BarCamps and other tech meet-ups, and since 2009 has been organising them at Geeks of London, including HACKED at the O2 last year. She also runs MissGeeky.com, a blog about all things geeky and girly. |
Movie Nights Lets You And Your Friends Find And Agree On A Film To Watch | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | Trying to figure out what film I want to watch at home from the thousands I can pick on various VOD services is a pain. The only thing more annoying is trying to find one that my husband and I can both agree we want to watch (love you, Marc). A app presented today at TC’s Disrupt Hackathon called Movie Nights has created a way to solve that problem: it lets two parties enter either preferences and presents a selection of films that might fit the bill. “Our idea was to combine two different sets of preferences from people who can’t seem to find a compromise, and then draw out common threads,” one of the creators, Matt Dell, told me after his team presented the app today. The app links up with the Rotten Tomatoes API, and at the moment its algorithms make suggestions based on film titles you input. You could also use actors, directors, genres and other parameters. Although Rotten Tomatoes is strong also on current releases, Movie Nights sticks to those that are available on VOD services. “The problem we had with latest films is that you just don’t have a lot of choice,” Audrius Zujus, another of the app’s developers, told me. The pair teamed up with two others, Elvia Vasconcelos and Yousuf Shaikh,to make Movie Nights. Between them they have skills in user experience, full stack stack developing, and iOS development — which in their normal lives they put to work at Deloitte Digital here in London. There, they have worked on a bunch of apps and other services. “We try to stay away from big enterprise integrations,” Dell tells me, shrugging off the kind of projects you normally think of when you hear the phrase “management consultancy.” Some of this has included a lot of experimenting with iBeacons. (When I talked to them after the presentation, it turns out that they were actually the team behind the very first iBeacon implementation in the UK, at Waitrose.) It was some of that work in monitoring traffic in specific areas that had actually been the inspiration for the four coming to the Hackathon. “We came here with very little idea of what we would do but had been vaguely thinking about some kind of app that would work with TFL,” said Zujus, referring to Transport for London, the organization that manages all public transport and traffic in London. The interesting thing about Movie Nights is that the basic algorithms could not only be improved — with time, for example, with machine learning that could be trained to know particular users’ preferences — but they could very much be applied to entirely different categories. “We used one of the APIs available here at the Hackathon but you could apply this to other things, like where to go for dinner,” Dell says. Add in technology to pinpoint specific locations and that could be a very interesting way for a couple or a group of friends to make a decision about where to meet to eat — giving a whole new meaning to “collaborative consumption” in the process. Presentation video and Movie Nights’ own video below: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVNFLnq5h-Y&w=560&h=315] |
Iranian Users Petition Microsoft For Greater Windows Support | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system preview has , and tens upon tens of thousands of votes on its . Curiosuly, one dominating theme has emerged over the past few days: Requests for better support in Iran. The Verge’s wrote a post last week , noting that users are asking Microsoft to include support for the Persian calendar in its new operating system. Since Warren’s article was published, a number of other Iran-focused requests have risen to prominence on the public board. A sampling: Iran, a country of , has all but taken over the top list of Microsoft’s user request forum. That will certainly of Redmond. Iranian users have previously that they from the . If Microsoft somehow missed those earlier paeans, it won’t be able to dodge this very public, and perhaps even slightly embarrassing show of interest and consternation from the country. What Microsoft can, or will do remains to be seen. It isn’t clear if the company has addressed the matter directly on the public record. I have a request for comment in with the company, but as it’s around 4:30 in the morning over there, I don’t expect a speedy response. Microsoft has been clear so far that it wants direct feedback from testers to help it guide the final development of Windows 10. And while the Iranian-centric petitions have less to do with what is new in Windows 10 than what has been lacking in both Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, the feedback underscores that there is market demand for the Windows Store. That’s good new for Microsoft, a company that is still looking to grow developer buy-in for its newly reconstituted Windows platform. |
Newsly Hack Is Tinder For News Articles | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | Tinder’s interface for quickly filtering people you might like to date from those you definitely don’t is being applied to all sorts of other sorting tasks. We’ve had , for instance. And here at the Disrupt Europe 2014 hackathon in London we’ve just seen a Tinder for news stories, called Newsly, presented on stage. The three-person strong team of UCL students behind Newsly hacked overnight, using machine learning APIs to create a news reader app that tailors which articles the user sees based on their personal preferences. The reader is shown articles on cards (below, right) that contain the headline, subhead and article image. They then swipe right if they want to read an article or left if they don’t. Just like . About twenty swipes will generate enough data to start tailoring the articles being pulled in to the user’s preferences, according to team member Davit Buniatyan. “The Facebook News Feed is based on 20 previous likes. So it’s kind of this one but the advantage over Facebook is we have also dislikes which is very important in training [the algorithm],” he tells TechCrunch. “Every time you swipe it will learn more about you.” The user preference data being generated then has clear value for advertisers wanting to target ads, he says. “We’re using the Intel Mashery API that pulls information from ,” adds Muhammad Rafdi, noting that other news sources — TechCrunch — could easily be added to broaden the mix of possible news. For tailoring news content to personal preferences the app is doing natural language processes. “It searches through the [news] content — it does a text analysis, and the text analysis will produce keywords which are then stored into the server,” explains Rafdi. “After several queries it builds up a new one and then that will fetch a new list of news feed based on your preferences.” “The idea is derived from Tinder but we implemented our own algorithm,” he adds. For the MVP they built overnight the team didn’t have time to add additional features — such as a read later list — but that’s one obvious feature to implement. Letting users actively specify news topics they want to read about (via keywords) is another obvious addition. To prevent the Newsly user’s world view narrowing to a vanishing point of sameness, the app resets preferences after a set period. There’s also a random element built in to deliberately include articles that are not part of the preference processing. “But the main part is machine learning because the user should feel it learns from you,” adds Buniatyan. While this latest Tinder for X project is focused on news, there is of course plenty of scope to apply its ‘Tinder + machine learning’ formula to other categories of content and tasks. “Maybe something for investors as well,” says Rafdi. “That gives them a list of startups that they might like [to invest in]. Using the CrunchBase API it can provide the app with lists of companies and investors can just swipe left or right. And eventually they will find the right match.” Newsly is currently open source, and Rafdi invited people to . “Currently there’s only three contributors, which is the team, but if we like what people do with the code we can just pull in the changes and then merge the code,” he adds. |
Passage Replaces Your Passwords With Images | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | , from the Edinburgh-based team behind , replaces your passwords with images. So instead of typing in a password, you simply hold a previously registered image up to your screen — maybe a photo of your family you have on your desk or your driver’s license. The team, which built this service over the course of the last 24 hours during our , has a background in image recognition, but as Peekabu CEO Alexander Cole told me, a lot of that work has focused on 3D image recognition in the past. Passage is a bit of a departure from this, but it’s also a good way to test many of the company’s systems, especially if it ends up being a popular service. From the users’ perspective, here is how it works when you end up on a site that uses Passage: you register with your email and then, instead of entering a password (twice), you hold up your image in front of your camera to register it (currently, the team has this up and running for the web — through WebRTC — and on Android, with iOS support coming soon). You can use a different image for every account and even multiple images so you have a fallback for when you lose your driver’s licence, for example. You could even register an image that automatically initiates a password reset. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGCGqHC4Hzs In the background, the service then runs the image you scanned through its recognition algorithms and matches it with your registered images. Thanks to a Chrome plugin (which the team sadly wasn’t able to finish during our hackathon), you could even link the Passage phone app with your desktop, so you could scan your image with your phone and use that to log into a website on your desktop. As Cole told me, the team is thinking to turn this into a full-blown password manager, but for the time being, it’s still a bit of a hack. The team, which includes Cole, as well as Jacek Dudek, James Nesfield, Jan Wessnitzer and Chris Aitken, plans to release an alpha version within the next week and a half, though (we’ll put a link to the code into this post once the service is live). The other project the team is working on is a basic messaging app. But users will have to take images of certain locations (or maybe a movie poster) to see the messages that other users left for them. |
null | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 10 | null |
Watch The Disrupt: London Hackathon Judging Live Stream Right Here! | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 19 |
I’m tired and I didn’t do anything. After coding for 24 hours, the participants of the first TechCrunch Disrupt: London hackathon will now present their creations on the massive Disrupt stage. From developer geek to investor chic, these judges are ready for anything and will assess hackathon participants on a scale of technical difficulty, usability, usefulness and creativity. In sum, they’re looking to be wowed and all of the presentations will be streamed live right here. We’ll be back tomorrow with the first day of the inaugural TechCrunch Disrupt: London at the beautiful Old Billingsgate venue on the banks of River Themes. The conference’s agenda is packed with the whos who of the European startup scene. and we hope you can join us for the first Disrupt held in London. However, the entire conference will be streamed live and you can watch it right here. Camille Baldock ( is a software engineer. She has spent the past years writing code and making APIs, web and mobile applications for a development agency, a startup and now works at the Government Digital Service. In her spare time, she coaches junior developers and is a 3D printing enthusiast. Eric Brotto ( ) is currently the Partner & Program Specialist for Startupbootcamp. Eric cut his teeth in the tech world as a iPhone App Creative Developer at the digital production studio Smile Machine where he built apps for brands such as Ford, Nike and Ubisoft. Today, Eric is the Co-Founder and Principal of Creative Bytes, a monthly networking and panel discussion which revolves around creative technology and digital marketing. He is also a Global Facilitator for Startup Weekend and Decoded. Claudia De Antoni ( ) is an investor at Virgin Management, the family office of Sir Richard Branson, where she focuses on technology, media, telecom, education and health & wellness sectors. Among other projects, she is currently supporting the development of the first Virgin-branded mobile application – expected to launch in 2015. Prior to Virgin, Claudia founded Popup Supper, an online marketplace for catering and entertainment services. Tak Lo ( ) is a Director at Techstars. Previously, he spent over 5 years in the London and NYC startup communities, having founded and mentored several startups on both sides of the Atlantic. He was formerly a management consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, an investment banker at Nomura, and an US Army veteran. Tak dabbled at London Business School and the University of Chicago. He writes regularly at taklo.co Melinda Seckington ( ) is a developer at FutureLearn, a social learning platform offering free courses from a wide range of university partners and cultural institutions. She loves attending and hacking at Hackdays, BarCamps and other tech meet-ups, and since 2009 has been organising them at Geeks of London, including HACKED at the O2 last year. She also runs MissGeeky.com, a blog about all things geeky and girly. All times in GMT Opening Remarks by TechCrunch Fireside Chat with Google Ventures EU: , , , , , In Conversation with (Waze, FeeX) Fireside Chat with (Ozon) Founders Stories: (TapTalk) BREAK From Shoreditch to Berlin and Beyond, Building the European Tech Hubs: (Seedcamp) , (Second Home), (Everplaces), (Earlybird) Fireside Chat with (European Commission) The Acceleration of Digital Medicine: (Big Health), (HELIX Centre, Imperial College London) Fireside Chat with (Y Combinator) Fireside Chat with (Fab, Hem) LUNCH Hackathon Highlights Fireside Chat with (AOL) How the Startup Battlefield Works Startup Battlefield Session One – Access Judges: (General Catalyst), (Techstars), (Silicon Valley Bank), (Cluster) BREAK Startup Battlefield Session Two – Explore Judges: (HXLR8R), (DN Capital), (EyeEm), (Connect Ventures) BREAK Startup Battlefield Session Three – Track Judges: (Entrepreneur First), (DFJ Esprit), (Octopus Ventures), (angel investor) After Party at The Gable 25 Moorgate, London EC2R 6AR Opening Remarks by TechCrunch Funding Europe’s Next Unicorn: (Accel Partners), (Index Ventures), (Passion Capital), (Balderton Capital) In Conversation with (Coinbase) Founders Stories with (Mind Candy) Startup Battlefield Alumni Update BREAK Fireside Chat with and (Cloudflare) How the Startup Battlefield Works Startup Battlefield Finals Judges: (Just Eat), (Accel), (PROfounders Capital), (Lakestar), (Atomico) LUNCH In Conversation with (LundXY) Founder Stories with (Raspberry Pi) Fireside Chat with (Soundcloud) Fireside Chat with (Zendesk) BREAK Money, Money, Money: (Transferwise), (DueDil), (Seedrs) Founder Stories with (Homejoy) Fireside Chat with (Benchmark) and (Docker) Founder Stories with (BlaBlaCar) Closing Awards Ceremony Closing Cocktail Reception, hosted by Microsoft Ventures |
Pizza, Beer, Glory, And The All-Night London Hackathon | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | Here in London, the hackathon is racing towards its conclusion, with its participants all prepping their presentations for judging later today. Last night, however, around midnight, fueled by a recent infusion of pizza and beer, TechCrunch went around to ask a few questions and cause a little mayhem. Between a spider robot, far too many blinking lights and house plants, this year’s European hackathon looks like it is shaping up to be one of the best yet. Of course, while every hackathon has its own innovative work, this hackathon had a spider robot. What more could you ask for? We’ll bring you the winner in just a few hours. For now, don’t forget: The answer to ‘Turn down for what’ is never ‘what?’ |
With Laplock, You Get A Text Message When Somebody Unplugs Your Laptop | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | Fresh off the , is a nifty little app developed at our TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in London. Martin Saint-Macary and Ivan Maeder worked tirelessly for the past 24 hours to build an easy-to-use software lock for your Mac. Here’s how it works. At heart, Laplock is a menubar app for your Mac. You install it, enter your phone number and/or , and that’s it. After that, whenever you close your laptop lid and leave it somewhere, if someone unplugs the power cord, an alarm will blast through your speakers and you will get a notification on your phone. Notifications can be a simple text message or a Yo. If reception is bad, the app will call you instead. Behind the scene, the two hackers used the to manage the notifications. While Saint-Macary was already part of the runner-up team at the , it was Maeder’s first hackathon. They two met at the venue yesterday, and started working on this project right away. “I think it’s great because you spend 2 days doing something full time,” Maeder said. “You wouldn’t do that normally.” I asked whether he managed to get some sleep. He just put two chairs together and slept as much as he could for a couple of hours. “This hackathon really feels like 10 days,” he said. Yet, when I see the end result, it was worth it — I’m definitely going to install the app after the event. You can download it on ‘s website right now, and the app was just submitted to the App Store as well. Good job guys, and enjoy your nap. [gallery ids="1072057,1072056"] |
Andrei Cherny’s ‘Aspiration’ Brings The Investment Tools Of The 1% To The Other 99% | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 10 | 19 | At 39 years old, has , consulted with Fortune 100 companies, worked as a state prosecutor, served as a Naval reserve officer, founded a , and a couple of . Now he’s adding entrepreneur to the list. In November Cherny will launch , a company which aims to democratize broad swaths of the financial services industry by giving middle class investors access to investment products that had previously only been available to the wealthiest Americans. Cherny sees the new venture as the culmination of the work he’s done recently in and out of government. While several from the Obama Administration have been aimed at protecting investors and reining in a financial services industry run amok in the wake of the financial crisis, Cherny says policy is only one of several tools that society needs to address the problem of wealth and income inequality in the U.S. In some ways, the work actually harkens back to the beginning of Cherny’s career when he worked in the Clinton Administration. that it was his boss’ repeal of the Glass Steagall Act that created the economic conditions which ultimately led to the housing crisis and economic meltdown nearly a decade later. “What the financial crisis laid bare, was that there really is this two-tiered investment world,” Cherny says. No matter the cause, the divergent fortunes of America’s rich and poor in the wake of the crisis has been for the past few years, and was by the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen. “The dynamic I just described of what happens when an everyday investor loses a huge chunk of their portfolio… I’ve seen [the problem] as a financial fraud prosecutor and then working with Elizabeth Warren on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” says Cherny. “There’re different pressure points that you can bring to this problem, but what it requires is a private sector solution.” Cherny remains mum on the actual specifics of his business, deferring for the company’s official launch date in November, but the company intends to offer an array of investment products that had previously only been available through investments in things like hedge funds and private equity funds, says Cherny. “There’s some mix of the way the political system is set up and some mix of the economic systems and how wall street is set up,” says Cherny. “People do very well investing in [hedge funds], and from an economic standpoint and the way they’ve been set up they have no need or desire to bring those type of products that they’ve created to everybody else. So there’s a real opportunity to be an investment firm for the middle class.” A , have launched services that aim to provide better investment advice for everyday investors through algorithms. Companies like , , , , , and are all offering retail investors a better way to save money, but it seems as if Cherny’s business is focused on replicating some of the more arcane strategies for everyday investors. “What we do is bring to people a set of investment products that have historically been out of reach,” says Cherny. “The question is can we provide to everyday investors what hedge funds are supposed to do, which is leveling out volatility.” Cherny began working on the company two years ago, alongside his longtime friend Joseph N. Sanberg, a former managing director of Tiger Global Management. Over that period he quietly amassed $4.5 million in capital from undisclosed angel investors and began laying the groundwork for the company. “At the time I was a business consultant and consulting for a lot of tech companies and big banks and seeing these things up close. The conversations were the starting gun of building a business, building a technology, and working with the [Securities and Exchange Commission] for the past year,” Cherny says. Sanberg has come on board as an advisor alongside heavy hitters in the tech community like Alexis Maybank, one of the founders of Gilt Groupe, and Jeff Skoll, eBay’s former President and the founder of the Skoll Foundation, the Capricorn Investment Group, Participant Media and the Skoll Global Threats Fund. If Cherny’s board of advisors is impressive, the is not too shabby either. They include a former executive at the Blackstone Group, the former director of Ryan Seacrest Enterprises, a former user interface designer for Nest Labs, and financial heavy hitters from Merlin Securities and Cantor Fitzgerald. “The company is a mix of Silicon Valley, Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood,” says Cherny. “I’m really proud of the team, but I think what I’m most proud of is that shared mission that really infuses the culture of the company.” For Cherny, someone can be a capitalist and still have a conscience. “That’s been central to why we’ve been able to get these investors, advisors, and team members.” |
Elon Musk Compares Building Artificial Intelligence To “Summoning The Demon” | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 26 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-qEiB6a5f4&w=640&h=390] This past week, Tesla CEO/Living, Breathing Tony Stark/Space X Founder Elon Musk was interviewed at the MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium. While the whole interview is worth watching (and is embedded above), one answer to a question from the audience takes a particularly intense turn. Asked about his thoughts on AI, Musk starts by noting that we ought to take care in closely regulating AI development, calling AI our “biggest existential threat.” But wait, there’s more! And by more, I mean demons and holy water. Musk’s full answer is transcribed below (if you want to watch it for yourself in the video up top, it starts at ) I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence. I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he’s like — Yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out. [audience laughs] So I’ll take it there’ll be no HAL9000 going to mars? Heh. HAL 9000 would be easy [to deal with in comparison to the AI he’s talking about]. It’s way more complex… it’d put HAL9000 to shame. That’s like a puppy dog. |
Mobile Games Need Their Artists | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 10 | 26 | Across 2013 and into 2014 the stories around games went in many directions, to Steam and Steam Machines, to consoles, to VR and microconsoles. It could be said that a considerable degree of the anima behind those stories was driven by hunts for the next big break in video game platforms. Where, people asked, would another Facebook or iPhone style explosion come from? Where would lean product and plentiful players be found anew? Steam got full quickly, microconsoles struggled to find an audience and console feels like a repeat performance of its previous generations to the same crowd as always. My posited is still in the mysterious future and tablet sales have slowed. There are certainly interesting developments – smart watches, virtual and augmented realities and whatnot – but none seems to have the scope to really hit like mobile did. We may be seeing the audience just settling in with what they have. In 2014, despite everything else, it’s still all about the smartphone. PC sales may be up and Sony may have sold a fair few PlayStation 4s, but Apple sold 10m iPhone 6’s in a weekend. And when you think about it that makes a lot of sense. Potential platforms are more specialist than the smartphone. You’ll use VR in certain circumstances and your tablet in others, but you’ll likely have your phone with through all of those situations. Phones handle all of your quick computing, your easy access apps and a variety of other media functions too (photos, music, etc). Of course phones would remain the core around which everything else you do would work. Those of us in tech and games are conditioned to expect total revision every two or three years now, almost to expect it. But it’s not really happening. Though they may have bigger and smaller sizes and new features, the smartphone looks to be as durable a paradigm as the PC has been. 20 years from now we’ll largely still use them in much the same way as we do today. They’re not going anywhere. There will be an iPhone 7, 8, 9, 29, and 209. Well maybe not that last one, but still. Perhaps it’s okay to assume that we’re moving into a phase of relative platform stability. So what does that mean for games? Sometimes the games industry settles into a routine, a way of being where recent innovations are absorbed and exploited. At those times it’s less about what’s new and exciting in technology or business and more about simply putting what’s out there to good use. A key canary in this particular coal mine is the way that developers drift back to looking for publishing money. Another is the way that brands start to reassert themselves, and how licensed content starts to seem like an attractive business model. A third is how games stop hitting the headlines outside the usual channels. Primarily though it’s watching how, with the old order having been previously unseated, new orders start to morph into next year’s old orders. In mobile gaming this started to happen about 18-24 months ago. As the iPhone got all full up things like the cost of user acquisition started to rise and the prevalence of incumbent games sitting at tops of charts became all too apparent. We slowly started to see the tail off of breakout games (with acting as the great exception) and an increase in talk of bigger budgets, more competition on visuals, a need for game companies to get good at PR, speculation over the power of YouTubers to overcome discovery woes and subsequent speculation about the ethics of sponsored coverage in that medium. All of this is essentially the move toward stability. When platform are in their unstable phase, nobody knows anything the rules for success are anarchic. Games that “should” succeed totally fail whereas games that shouldn’t ride the waves to monstrous success. However when stability does begin to emerge it tends to mean that two avenues for success form, and the degree to which they are success depends on the particular platform. The first road is to sell games based on distribution-led strategies. Thats’ where all that talk of user acquisition, retention, advertising, paying for clicks and views and plays and installs and so on comes in. That sort of thinking usually surfaces early and settles on a variety of tactics for success, and it usually drives some notables in the space. The sense of conventional wisdom moves quickly but adopts relatively comfortable shapes, and both startups and investors buy into that wisdom (regardless of how true it is: a good example is that gaming startups and investors often still believe that mobile game companies should strive for a catalog of releases – even though all the data says otherwise). For those that get in on the ground early this is the time when you see big exits from companies that only formed 3/4 previously. However this approach tends to tap out. While the process-oriented side of the business tends to figure out the early shape of what works in any platform it also tends to red-ocean itself into stasis pretty quickly. Companies that operate that way never really know how to value creativity and their culture eventually winks it out, leaving nothing but stat-head thinkers who get trapped in you-can-only-improve-what-you-can-measure thinking. Ultimately they stall, sometimes even falling back just as quickly as they first arose. It turns out that for all their structure and process the product that they’ve built engenders little true loyalty. It’s just a game, same as any other. This is where the second road starts to matter. it’s the game developer who treats their game as a piece of media, of art. They focus on selling the vision of the game, of building a pre-selected audience and a marketing story. Rather than make the conversation all about business, they make it about the journey, about the magic of the game, the thauma, the fiction and the promise of what it will be. This path is as completely different from the business-led path as HBO and other cable television channels are to regularly broadcast TV. Broadcast is a world of low-rent product that sells based on reach. HBO is a world of selling on quality, on vision and voice. And usually it comes after the business wave, after the first roaders have done their thing. Is that happening in mobile? I really hope so. One encouraging example of this is Robin Hunicke’s studio Funomena, working on a new game (pictured above). At the in Seattle this week, she stood up on stage and talked about its artistic influences, the kind of experience she was trying to create and the importance of games-as-art and finding not just customer but a fan, of building a relationship. Another is the wonderful adventure that is . Speaking about what it’s like to develop , lead designer Ken Wong is keen to stress how the studio maintained an entirely quality-first approach. A third is Camouflaj’s episodic game , which continues to try to make storytelling/adventure work in this new space. Beyond a certain point every platform needs its artists to keep it growing. It takes orthogonal thinking by people who aren’t businesslike to engender a wider and more lasting conversation, to find the new genres, new ideas of what might work and so on. The reason I say “I hope so” that these kinds of games are happening in mobile is bigger than simply saying I like cool games though. I do, but I also mean “It’s not certain”. Artists need organizations structured to support their efforts. They need patrons. In console gaming that patronage layer exists with some publishers and platform holders like Sony, people who can offer an umbrella in which quirk can be allowed to manifest and sometimes come good. On PC Steam sort-of offered an environment that permitted that to happen, although Valve didn’t actively fund many of the games on there. In mobile, however, patrons are lacking. There are publishers, some of them ambitious, some of whom talk in terms of helping developers and giving them fair deals, but none of them really constitute patrons yet. They’re too meat-and-potatoes still, usually operating with limited remits and asking for big business cases to be proven around potential games before they’ll invest. And so it’s left to individual developers to secure financing in an uncertain landscape. That kind of effort is rarely scalable. HBO style TV needed HBO to make it happen. Without that organization TV would have stayed in the hands of process thinkers and never gone much beyond game shows and soaps. Gaming is much the same. Mobile games could do with a more ambitious kind of publisher, but we’re not really seeing that yet. Aside from hearing Robin Hunicke, the vast majority of the day’s conversation at MGF was still very meat-and-potatoes. It was talks about the psychology of winning and monetization techniques, app discovery strategies and what packages to include in your game to improve performance. Still very first-road in other words, still just about process. And it’s been like that for a while, essentially just repeating and repeating. Will anyone step up and rethink mobile publishing and bring forth the next wave of mobile games? That is the question. |
PhotoSpotLand Wants To Help You Take Better Photos | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 10 | 26 | Our smartphones now allow us to take more photos than ever before, but even as those cameras get better, they still don’t allow you to take DSLR-quality images. For that, you still need big sensors and the right kind of lens for the right kind of situation. is a new service for those of us who still like to travel with “real” cameras in order to take images that a smartphone just can’t handle. It’s a mix between a travel site and photographer community, with a strong focus on helping you become a better photographer. Instead of being about sharing photos, PhotoSpotLand founder and CEO Mario Bucolo told me at Disrupt Europe in London last week that it’s about “offering you the best shared experience in travel photography.” [gallery ids="1075129,1075135,1075131"] At its most basic, you can use the service to find great spots to take images. For that, you can either use the website or the company’s recently updated mobile app. What’s different about PhotoSpotLand compared to a photo-sharing service is that it show you everything about the kind of equipment others used in this spot to take a certain photo, and other photographers can share tips about the location, too (best time to take an image, whether you’ll need a tripod, etc.). The other aspect is that PhotoSpotLand also tries to help you meet up with other photographers while you are traveling. That part of the service, however, will only really come into play once PhotoSpotLand launches its mobile app in the coming weeks (it’s only available in a private beta right now). [gallery ids="1075133,1075137,1075138,1075134"] What makes the mobile app stand out is that you only need is a working cell connection to send and receive SMS messages — you don’t need to have a data connection. PhotoSpotLand smartly encodes your location and other data into a message and can receive information the same way. There is no way to share an image this way, of course, but it’s good enough for exchanging location data when necessary. The company argues that this can help users save on international data costs, though your text messages will obviously still cost you a few cents if you want to use this service. The company has applied for a patent on this technology. For now, the service is still officially in beta, so the number of photo spots that have data available isn’t all that high. I’m in Munich right now, for example, and wasn’t able to find a single spot here (and the city has plenty of great photo spots). In Italy, however, the selection is far better, but that’s also due to the fact that the company is partially based there. The team is obviously aware of this issue — which any new online community faces — and is working on a to upload photos and spots to the service (and they are getting priority access to the mobile app beta, too). |
This Scientist Is Using Open Sourced Software Techniques To Turn Bugs Into Patent-Free Drugs | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 26 | Chemist and “semi-recreational” codemonkey Isaac Yonemoto is running a crowdfunding campaign called to create open sourced, patent-free cancer drugs. Yonemoto proposes a $75,000 stretch goal to fund an experiment he hopes will prove we can use a compound sequenced from microscopic bug cultures to treat cancer. It’s a plan that could liberate pharmaceuticals and dramatically lower the cost of anticancer medicine. The global market for these drugs surpassed $1 trillion this year. The average monthly cost of a brand-name cancer drug in the U.S. is about $10,000, according to the . Yonemoto believes patent-free medicine to be the solution. “The software industry and the open-source movement have shown that patenting is not necessary for innovation. Releasing without a patent means the drugs will be cheaper and it will be easier to build on the work to make improved drugs or drug combinations. Releasing without a patent means expanded access to drugs in countries that can’t afford extensive licensing and export agreements,” he writes on the campaign website . Chemical composition of original sibiromycin compound discovered by Russian scientists in the 1970’s. This is actually not a new idea. Russian scientists first came up with a parent compound to treat cancer using synthetic biology in the 1970’s, but soon found their compound caused heart defects. A researcher at the University of Maryland revisited the original idea and discovered that cutting out an oxygen molecule made her compound likely to be both safer and more effective than the original. Yonemoto picked the work up after she left to take a job with the National Institutes of Health and could no longer work on the project. Yonemoto decided to take on the project and now wants to run an experiment to prove the researcher’s initial work. He’s using to host the campaign on , as opposed to a more traditional crowdfunding site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. The cash will be used to buy lab space and tools, as well as for the actual experiment on mice. The campaign initially started with an ask of $50,000, but met that goal already and created a larger goal of $75,000 to include a couple other compounds to work with. He plans to start clinical trials in January or February of next year and says he will most likely launch “a fun advocacy campaign” before lab work begins. “The big picture is we’ll be trying to solve the problem of expensive pharmaceuticals by releasing drug candidates that put downward pressure on price through competition,” Yonemoto tells TechCrunch. The campaign ends this Tuesday, Oct 28. |
Whisper Suspends Editorial Team Involved In Guardian Visit | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 26 | Anonymous messaging app has suspended its editor-in-chief and other staff members after Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller wrote a letter Whisper execs to an in-person meeting to discuss the app’s privacy practices. “While Whisper provides users a unique social experience, the allegations in recent media accounts are serious and users are entitled to privacy policies that are transparent, disclosed, and followed by the company,” writes Rockefeller. The Guardian has accusing the app of breaching user privacy and reporting that members of Whisper’s staff showed the Guardian how its database could locate users within 500 meters (a little less than a standard city block in distance) of their location, including those who had asked not to be tracked. Zimmerman shot back on Twitter that the accusations were “vicious lies.” He then continued on a 20 post tweetstorm in an attempt to clear up what he said was misinformation surrounding the data that Whisper gathers. 20/At no point during their visit were Guardian reporters shown anything not already approved by top brass &used by Guardian in pub’d pieces — Neetzan Zimmerman (@neetzan) Senator Rockefeller sent a letter to Whisper CEO Michael Heyward late Wednesday asking for a meeting with him and his staff so that Heyward could explain how the app tracks users. Neetzan’s Twitter account has been silent since Wednesday, following several rants about what had been happening. Heyward said he will continue to discuss the inner workings of Whisper with the public and Friday, addressing the latest Guardian article . In it, Heyward suggests that the Guardian has gathered incorrect information from non-technical people, including editorial staff at Whisper. Whisper accused the Guardian of quoting staff who were not aware they were on the record, including one such conversation in which editorial staff showed two Guardian reporters how they would be tracking an apparently sex-obsessed D.C. lobbyist “for the rest of his life.” The back-and-forth argument on tracking gets a bit nuanced here. The Guardian had reported that Whisper tracked location in two ways, one being GPS location and another by use of IP addresses for those who have not opted into location tracking on the app. “For example, if a user is soliciting minors, we will share the limited information we have with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” wrote Heyward. The Guardian claims Whisper rewrote its Terms of Service and added a new section about privacy just four days after learning of the Guardian’s plans to publish its expose. Whisper includes concerns about suicide in its new privacy policy section: Whisper is meant to be a safe place. There may be situations where we may need to disclose the information we may have about you for the greater good, such as if we see suicidal statements or statements that involve the intent to harm oneself or others, or learn information about missing children, or threats to the community. Suicide has been a popular topic on the app, . It seems that Whisper is readily admitting how it tracks user info but the Guardian is inferring this is a common practice outside of Whisper’s claims to only use this info in “extreme law enforcement cases.” Whisper had admitted earlier that it hands certain information over to the Department of Defense and other government organizations. However Zimmerman downplayed what that information was, tweeting that Whisper only collects data on the number of times suicide was mentioned, not actual location information. . again, “user data” consists of the number of times suicide was mentioned on the service. Nothing more. — Neetzan Zimmerman (@neetzan) Whisper’s senior vice president, Eric Yellin, wrote in an email exchange with the Guardian prior to the first article being published that Whisper used IP addresses, “to determine very approximate locations.” The Guardian claimed this put Zimmerman and Yellin at odds in respect to how Whisper operates. Heyward claims Yellin meant this for cases of safety, not as a practice used on the general Whisper community. Whisper had said earlier that it does not track users “passively or actively.” That’s a bit of a head scratcher, though. While Whisper may not be able to track the exact address of a user, it would seem having the ability to track a user’s location within 500 meters and also tracking IP addresses of users who have opted out of GPS tracking for the express purpose of handing that over to the government would be considered both passive and active tracking. As Heyward writes in the letter: “Previous locations of posted Whispers may be taken into consideration when evaluating the veracity of a user’s claims for editorial purposes. For example, if a user claimed to be a doctor treating an Ebola patient in West Africa, and never in fact had any Whispers posted in West Africa, our editorial team would not feature the post.” Heyward asserts in the letter that Whisper drops IP address info after seven days. However, this seems counter to a later paragraph in which he addresses the Guardian’s concerns over storing user data “indefinitely.” The Guardian reported that info was readily available at any time using an in-house mapping tool that allowed editorial staff to search posts and verify their authenticity in order to feature them on the site. Photo credit: The Guardian. Heyward defends this practice, explaining that it’s a feature that allows users to search for old posts, not something that can identify individuals or their location. This one also ends up being a tricky argument. The Guardian claims Whisper staff can search and identify people, using their post info. Heyward says it’s just the post, not the individual info that is associated with the post that gets stored sine die. Is this just semantics over what constitutes passive and active storing of information or a nuanced misunderstanding of how the privacy sausage is made? Is Whisper hiding something, as the Guardian claims? Is the Guardian a bunch of “alarmists,” just “outright lying and totally wrong,” as Whisper claims? No date, to our knowledge, has been set yet for Whisper execs to meet with Rockefeller and sort this out. But what is clear is that if you are thinking of committing an illegal act, you should definitely not post that on Whisper. That is, unless you’d like the government to go knocking on all your neighbors’ doors about it. |
About That Microsoft Quarterly Report | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 26 | Microsoft’s . The fiscal quarter, corresponding to the calendar third of 2014, brought stronger than expected revenue and profit. The company’s cloud business continued to grow, Windows Phone put points on the board, Surface took off and Office 365 picked up a grip of new paying users. Put more simply, devices and services had a big quarter, while productivity kept its transition on course. On the platform side, Microsoft’s , even though that release didn’t factor into the earnings report. The of the new Microsoft — devices, services, platforms, and productivity — are therefore in what appears to be high repair. The market has to handicap whether the quarter’s growth is sustainable. The quarterly results show the bearing-out of a number of bets that Microsoft made over the last few years. It’s worth taking a moment to take a look at how the company got to where it is today, so that we can correctly apportion responsibility. It’s too easy to presume that any success or failure under a CEO is completely of their own provenance. Let’s begin. When Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer that he would step down within a 12-month period, it capped a tenure that was as controversial as it was long. However, if you moved past the Vista days, discount the company’s massive miss on phones, and a dozen other mistakes, . Toward the end of Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, Surface, which is just now hitting its stride with the Surface Pro 3, was born; Windows 8, which is just now hitting its stride with Windows 10, came to life; and Windows Phone, which is just now hitting its stride with the Nokia purchase and growing device volume, launched. Strap on big investments into Azure, the launch of Office 365, a , the green-lit construction of Office apps for rival platforms, and a picture of change emerges. Of course, Windows 8’s nasty launch harmed the Windows brand, something that will take time to rectify. Windows Phone has cost Microsoft billions, and failed to deliver a truly diverse, strong OEM partner network. And Surface torched billions itself, publicly, and threw Microsoft’s potential as a hardware company into broad doubt. Those damages have not been erased. Instead, they are perhaps now being chipped away at. I also think that it’s correct to say that despite some aggressive action, Ballmer didn’t see his creations through. The Nadella decision to get Office for iPad out the door and into the market is the simplest detailing of that fact. Not to be too nice to myself, but here’s a quote from a post that I wrote around the time of Ballmer’s departure announcement: If Ballmer had exited, say, during the Windows 7 period, I think that his time at Microsoft would have deserved a different badge. However, missteps included, the recent few years have been a fundamental shift for Microsoft, leading it to functional preparation for the future, which is to his credit. If the company had failed, we would have blamed the leader. So as the company finds new success, we should laud the boss. Let’s be consistent, at least. Presuming that Ballmer’s successor is competent, he or she will be inheriting a firm in transition, but one with a future that is quite interesting. And it hasn’t been too long that we’ve been able to say that about Microsoft. That mostly holds up. The most recent quarter was Microsoft’s strongest hardware quarter to date. The company set an all-time record for Lumia sales, getting 9.3 million out the door. That’s only up 500,000 from the year prior, but it shows passable sequential quarter growth. Heading into the holiday period, Microsoft could break the 10 million mark for the first time. Windows Phone is still far, far, too small. But it’s growing, and that might be enough to keep Microsoft hanging onto the edges of the mobile market for now. To become a real player, the company will need to multiply its device volume many-fold. On the Surface side of things, the last quarter was a surprise. I didn’t think that the product line would break the $700 million revenue mark. It did $908 million instead. Now, some of that revenue comes from orders booked the preceding quarter that were not delivered until the fiscal first, but even with that the number was a surprise. Device volume for Surface compared to the even-shrunken PC market puts Surface on the microscopic end. As a project, compared to the PC market, Surface is a hobby. It is now a far less unsuccessful hobby, but a single quarter’s good results do not a trend make. Also keep in mind that tablets based on Windows itself remain bit players in the tablet space that Android and iOS essentially own. Surface hasn’t changed that, despite improving unit volume. Like with Phone, Surface is doing better, but has nearly all its growth still ahead of it. As Phone and Surface did better, Xbox had a more middling quarter, moving more than 2 million consoles. Microsoft didn’t break out the Xbox One sales figures, which tells you all that you need to know. But the Xbox line has been around for more than a decade, and so its current performance isn’t as tied to Ballmer’s exit or anything that Nadella might be up to. We’ll come back to it when we dig into Windows. Microsoft announced in the final quarter of its fiscal 2014 that its “commercial cloud” revenue was on a “$4.4 billion annual run rate.” Did we get a new number this time around? Nope. Microsoft is being quiet, because, I can only imagine, someone in its PR or IR hallways decided that when you are doing decently in a market category, not talking about it is the way to go. In its fiscal first quarter, the most recent, Microsoft indicated that its cloud revenue was up 128 percent compared to the year-ago period. Azure, born under Nadella’s watch while he was under Ballmer, is doing pretty well. The company recently held a that continued its push into the space. Microsoft noted during that event that only itself, Amazon and Google have put the billions into straight metal required to be a truly competitive cloud player. Back when Nadella ran Azure, he had this to say on the product: “Fundamentally, we’ve been at this platform business forever. This is part of our core DNA, that whenever we think about how do we build out anything that we do, we think about the developer component as a very, very significant, first-class piece.” Microsoft’s cloud growth has been a multi-year story, and its most recent quarter is more continuation than revolution. But it’s worth noting that Azure started with Nadella under Ballmer and is growing what appears to be faster in dollar terms under Nadella’s CEO tenure. Azure is not the market leader in terms of mind share here in Silicon Valley. And market share will become increasingly dear in the space. Amazon is . Google . There is enough growth in the cloud to allow each revenue growth, I’d guess, but that doesn’t implicitly matter in real market share terms. That’s where the real war will continue with the platform companies. Speaking of platforms: Moving from the most recent earnings report for a moment, Windows 10 approaches. The recent developer preview saw more than 1 million downloads in 2 weeks. The number was a bit softer than I expected, but perhaps more importantly is the simple little fact that Windows 10, even in its yet-nascent-very-oh-god-not-nearly-done format, is picking up some decent reviews. Paul Thurrot, a human that I quite like, : To date, most of the conversation around Windows 10 has focused on -level niceties like the new Start menu and the ability to run Universal mobile apps on the desktop side-by-side with other applications. These are important changes, to be sure. But other advances in Windows 10 rival and even surpass anything that Microsoft has ever attempted in the past. And with this in mind, it is very clear that Windows 10 isn’t just another major new Windows release. It is inarguably the most audacious release in the history of the platform. I don’t state that lightly. I agree. Here’s me (And I am not subtweeting Paul here. His post was great, and worth reading.): 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 quarter saw the first release of something approaching Windows 10, an operating system that borrows on Windows 7 and 8 and 8.1, which all came under Ballmer. So what began under Ballmer continues under Nadella, reaching a point of chrysalis this quarter, as the culmination of the company’s Windows 8.x strategy, and its work to unite its platforms under a single Windows tag. Finally, productivity: Akin to services, the current quarter wasn’t as seminal for Microsoft’s productivity efforts as earlier periods this year. But the numbers were still good: Office 365 Home and Personal subscribers totaled more than 7 million, representing more than 25% sequential growth over the previous quarter. Office 365 is just past its third birthday, putting it towards the end of Ballmer. It’s only accelerated under Nadella, who was more than content to launch the iPad build of the productivity suite, and zip ahead with the Android build, even as the ever-missing, touch-based build of Office for Windows muddles along. Ballmer started it, Nadella capped it, and the revenue is rolling in. I am not trying to shade what Nadella has accomplished thus far as the CEO of Microsoft, any more than I am trying to draw up a hagiography for Ballmer. There’s little need to praise the rich, but it is worth noting that much of what is going well at Microsoft is a combination of both their work. If Microsoft can keep its hardware business growing, and continue executing on its transition to SaaS in its various forms, the company could pupate in motion. That would be a feat. However, it’s far too early to call victors. Quite literally the smartest technology companies are working to make sure Microsoft fails. That’s not minor friction. |
The ChronodeVFD Resurrects Old Displays For A Cool New Watch | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 26 | I am, as you may know, a sucker for watches that use older display technologies (see also ). For example, by freelance engineer uses a vacuum fluorescent display tube, an early form of digital display that cast a bright blue light and was first used in 1980s-era electronics. They will be familiar to folks who owned Subarus with digital displays after about 1983. The watch is a “costume” project so it runs for about 6-10 hours on a single AA battery. It includes a small roll cage to prevent the crystal from cracking, and De Cristofaro has built his own circuit board that is set with the aid of three small buttons.
De Cristofaro will publish the schematics and bill of materials shortly, but until then let’s bask in the glory of dead technology resurrected. |
Fab And Mind Candy Founders Talk About Their Companies’ Struggles And New Directions | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 26 | I’m finally getting over my post-Disrupt Europe jet lag, and I guess that means the conference is old news. But before we leave it in the rearview, I wanted to highlight a couple of backstage interviews that you might have missed if you weren’t watching the live stream — specifically, my conversations with Fab’s Jason Goldberg and Mind Candy’s Michael Acton Smith, two founders whose companies have had some pretty visible stumbles. TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook , and he talked about , as well as the launch of home furnishing business , which will be the company’s focus moving forward (although the Fab marketplace will still be around). Backstage, Goldberg told me that he’d held off on attending events like Disrupt for 18 months: “I just didn’t feel it would be appropriate for me to be out there doing public speaking and events like this when we were going through layoffs and restructuring. And you know, it was a tough time for the company, and we’ve now finally come through the other side of it.” I also asked about one of the more eye-opening numbers that Goldberg shared earlier. At its peak, Fab was spending $14 million a month (he said it’s down to $1 million a month now); to an outsider, . “Look, e-commerce is very competitive, low margins, very capital intensive,” he said. “If you want to run a successful, large-scale e-commerce business, there’s really only two choices. One is to be very broad based and very large margins, that’s the Amazon-Zalando model. Or it’s to be very laser-focused within a vertical and make everything yourselves — and that’s what we’re doing now with Hem.” Gaming company recently. While onstage, , but he told me afterwards that he still hopes to turn Mind Candy into “one of the greatest entertainment companies in the world.” “To do that, you can’t have all your eggs in one basket; you can’t be one [intellectual property],” he said. “So our thinking is, we have multiple IPs, we have multiple entertainment products that we launch, and we also try and own the distribution as well, which is . And the greatest entertainment companies, from Disney and others, own both those pieces, IP and distribution. That’s what we’re trying to crack.” By the way, the discussion of Mind Candy doesn’t start until about 50 seconds into the video, because what I wanted to talk about was . At Calm, Acton Smith said he’s the “silent co-founder.” |
iPad Air 2 Review: The Best Tablet Available, Now More Portable And Powerful | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | update includes a redesigned iPad Air, just one year after the device was first introduced. Typically, Apple keeps the outside case design on mobile gadgets around for two years before switching things up, so the new slimmer Air is a remarkable feat in terms of hardware engineering. The new iPad also now comes in a gold color option, and packs a better camera and beefier internals, including an A8X processor that improves on the version just introduced for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in September. Apple lavished attention on the Air this time around, and that investment has made it the best tablet available anywhere. Apple’s new iPad Air features a design that probably had more than a few hardware engineers burning the midnight oil – it shaves off a full 1.4 mm vs. last year’s model, which was then celebrated for its incredibly thin profile. Apple also dropped the weight to below a pound this year, also a savings vs. the previous model. iPad Air 2’s thinner design necessitated some changes, however, including the remarkable feat of fusing display glass and components in a single layer to decrease the required internal space, and the unfortunate removal of the physical rotation lock/mute switch on the side. That missing switch is indeed missed, and despite the presence of its functions in the Control Center panel, there were many times when I wished the physical control was still present. The new iPad Air is a great device to hold, however, as was its predecessor. Holding them together really reveals just how much of a difference the additional size and weight savings make, however – even holding it while also holding an iPad mini reveals significantly less tangible heft, despite the smaller tablet being lighter. The 6.1 mm chassis just makes all the difference when it comes to the Air feeling like something that you could comfortably hold for long periods of time, and even for all-day computing, should you need it (and it’s easy to imagine an event coordinator, for instance, needing exactly that). [gallery ids="1073902,1073895,1073896,1073897,1073898,1073899,1073900,1073901,1073903,1073904,1073906"] As reluctant as I have been to use the iPad as a camera, even when stuck without any other options, the iPad Air 2’s design does make it uniquely well-suited to that task. The huge screen is a remarkable viewfinder, as Apple remarked on stage during the iPad event last week, and its lightweight frame means that it won’t easily exhaust your arms, even when you’re holding it up to get a better angle. Our review unit came in Apple’s gold finish, and let me just say that on the iPad, that means there’s a lot of gold going on. Apple’s take on this particular metal color is better than most, but this definitely isn’t my favourite finish. The Air 2 in either space grey or silver still looks fantastic however, and the gold is definitely going to stand out in a crowd, especially if you’re also using the iPad as a camera. Apple’s latest iPad Air is easily the best-designed tablet out there, and that would be true even without the remarkable new ultra-thin dimensions it sports. But combining the extra sleek design with all that available screen real-estate means the iPad Air 2 is not only the best looking iPad out there, but also the most ergonomic, too. The new iPad Air is unique among Apple’s lineup of products in offering the A8X processor, an enhanced version of the chip that Apple released in September to power the new iPhone lineup. The A8X uses Apple’s second-generation 64-bit mobile architecture, and improves CPU performance by up to 40 percent over the speed of the A7. Graphics performance is improved by a factor of 2.5, and with the help of Apple’s Metal game development technology, the company says this can result in unparalleled application performance when working with advanced visuals. In practice, you get the usual feeling that comes with every new generation of Apple processor – that the device you thought was cutting edge until now just isn’t quite up to snuff. The previous iPads are still great devices, and extremely usable even years after their launch (which could account for slower upgrade cycles) but the new iPad Air 2 handles the visual flourishes and animations of iOS 8 with such aplomb that you’ll never even pause to think about them. My review iPad Air 2 has done extremely well as a photography assistant, with Photoshop and Lightroom Mobile handling plenty of heavy lifting. iMovie, likewise, provides a great experience thanks to the beefed up internals on the tablet. But what’s most exciting are the experiences that have yet to be launched, including the mobile version of Pixelmator, which was demoed on stage at the iPad launch event. We’ve yet to see just how much additional processing power developers can wring out of the A8X, but even the first early attempts have shown a lot of promise. The iPad Air 2’s battery performance is on par with that of previous generation devices, which is no small feat given that the volume of the batteries contained within is likely reduced to accommodate the new slimmer profile. 10 hours of mixed use is normal, I found, and Apple has once again delivered a device with an amazing life in standby mode, especially when you’re not using the built-in data connections. As for those, I found that Wi-Fi performed notably faster when used with my 802.11ac AirPort Extreme, while LTE on my local Canadian provider remained high, and likely carrier-limited in terms of what it was able to achieve, given the device’s new extended LTE support. The iPad Air 2 has a few prominent new features that weren’t present on previous generations – the most useful by far is Touch ID. This is the fingerprint authentication tech that Apple introduced to the world with the iPhone 5s, and on the iPad Air 2, it serves double duty as a way to both unlock your device, and authenticate purchases, logins and more in third-party apps. Touch ID on iPad Air 2 can’t enable in-store purchases, as Apple hasn’t included NFC in this device, with the logic being that no one wants to wave a large tablet in front of a payment terminal to conduct a transaction. That’s pretty sound logic I’d say, and the fact that Apple did include both Touch ID and the secure element that enables payments for e-commerce purchases is far, far more significant than its retail ambitions, especially on a device that is fast-becoming the most popular in the world for online shopping. It is indeed convenient and easy to use Touch ID with apps like Postmates that support it to transact payments, but the bigger benefit here from a general use perspective is just the added convenience of being able to unlock your device with a thumb press. I’m guilty of never having used a passcode on my iPads in the past, simply because unlocking them was too arduous, and because it seemed somehow more acceptable since this was a tablet, not the smartphone I carry around in my pocket constantly. With Touch ID, my data is now somewhat protected, which makes sense since I view and use the same content on both types of devices. Another new feature is the improved 8MP camera, up from 5MP on the first-generation iPad Air. The camera can capture images at 3264×2448 resolution now, which is better for high-resolution displays like that of the iPad Air, and the new Retina iMac. But the camera isn’t just sporting better hardware – there are a lot of software additions, including high-res panorama capture, burst mode with 10fps capture, time-lapse and slow-mo video and improved face detection. The slow-mo video can be seen in the example above, and captures content at the same 120fps rate introduced with the iPhone 5s. While that’s still only half the rate of the improved slo-mo video capture on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, it’s still plenty powerful for most casual users’ needs. Overall, Apple now appears to be taking the iPad’s camera seriously, and the resulting photos and videos reflect that. is also part of the deal here, and that means you can opt to receive phone calls and texts from your iPhone on the iPad, and respond to them to. You can also pick up a browsing session from your phone or desktop, as well as continue an email and perform various other tasks using Handoff. If you weren’t quite sure how all these devices would work together for you before, Apple’s software update really makes the case that they’re truly a complimentary network of gadgets. As part of its design changes, Apple moved the display closer to the glass to create a single component where once there were many, and the change works to improve image quality on the tablet, too. The screen appears just about flush with the surface, and more photorealistic than ever thanks to the new manufacturing process. Resolution is the same as on the previous iPad Air, providing a 2048×1536, 264ppi Retina image, but Apple has also added a new antireflective coating to prevent glare. This coating is not what you might be expecting, if you were looking for something like the matte screens that used to be an option for MacBook Pros of old; it’s more of a way to slightly lessen the ghosted images you’ll see in bright environments, or reflected from other light sources. The change is definitely noticeable, but it isn’t extreme – the iPad didn’t suddenly become optimal for sunlight reading, though the modification does make it among the top performers when it comes to backlit display technologies, and you can see in the photo above how the sun through the window is much less pronounced on the new iPad than on last year’s iPad Air. Apple’s iPad Air 2 cases include both a Smart Case and a Smart Cover, just as with previous generations. Both lock into place with magnetic closure elements, though the Smart Cover also connects its hinges to the side of the device via magnet. The cases are up to Apple’s previous standards with these devices, which is to say they’re well-made and do indeed offer good protection, should you feel you need it. The Smart Case will run you $79 for the iPad Air 2, or $40 for the iPad Air Smart Cover, which fits this model as well as last year’s. Apple’s iPad is a category that in some ways is trying to define itself, now that it’s moving into its relative young adulthood. Larger phones mean that it will mean different things for users than it did when it was introduced four years ago. The iPad Air 2 is the best reflection of what a tablet likely means to users currently, though – it’s a big-screened slate with a gorgeous display, an exhaustive software library and powerful processing capabilities that you’d be comfortable holding all day, should you have to. To build the iPad Air 2, Apple had to speed up and improve its usual hardware update process, and the intense focus and commitment required shows in the final results. There’s no question that if you’re in the market for a tablet, this is the best one available today. |
Carvey Is A Powerful CNC Machine For The Rest Of Us | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Robotic CNC machines – cutting systems that use spinning tools to swipe through metal, wood, and plastic – are cool but ugly. Most of them are as big as a fridge and designed to carve out objects in a few minutes but none will sit quietly on your desk and do its business with aplomb and elegance. Now, however, there’s . Carvey is the Form 1 of CNC. Designed to be a seamless, well-designed tool for designers and makers, you program it by entering a tool path – basically the movements the cutting head will make – and pressing a button. The system can be set up for specific materials. Now this isn’t a 3D printer. It’s more useful if you’re planning on building a flat-pack sort of buildable object (think Ikea) or a flat piece of a bigger project. For example, you could print an entire pair of glasses with this system by printing the stems and eyepieces separately. You could even cut out the lenses. Quoth the creators: Early bird units cost $1,999 and non-early birds will pay $2,399. They’ve already surpassed their goal and are aiming to ship next September.
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iPad Mini 3 Review: Apple’s Small Tablet Stays Mostly The Same | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | 3 is one of two new tablets launched last week at a special event in Cupertino, and it is definitely the one that got the least attention from Apple’s product development team over the past year. The has an all-new processor, new screen manufacturing tech, a new camera, and more. The iPad mini 3, by contrast, gains just Touch ID, and a new gold finish for the aluminum shell. Apple has left everything else the same, creating a specs gulf between the two iPad lines where there wasn’t one last year. As a result, the iPad mini is no longer my top pick for a tablet (that’s now the iPad Air 2), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great device, taken on its own merits. Apple’s iPad mini 3 update may call for the most appropriate use of the term “refresh” as applied to hardware ever – the tablet remains unchanged from last year, save for the addition of Apple’s fingerprint-based Touch ID unlocking and authentication tech, and the addition of a gold color option to the lineup. Both those elements do play a role in changing the gadget’s overall design, however. Touch ID is an aesthetic upgrade for the iPad mini, with its graphic-less sapphire glass circle and aluminum rim, color-matched to the back of the iPad mini. It’s a small thing, to be sure, but it undeniably looks better than the older model. [gallery ids="1073925,1073920,1073921,1073922,1073923,1073931"] As for the gold option, it brings Apple’s smallest tablet in line with its iPhone products, and with the iPad Air’s new color options, but this reviewer isn’t crazy about the aesthetic appeal of gold-toned products in general. Luckily, the review unit provided to TC by Apple is ‘space gray,’ which is still Apple’s most attractive color option across its mobile device lineup in my opinion. Users new to the iPad mini will still find the same great design that Apple introduced with the original, which includes rounded corners for more comfortable hand holding, and dimensions that make it portable enough to stow in a suit jacket or large coat pocket. The iPad mini 3 also retains the hardware rotation/mute switch, which the iPad Air 2 loses, which ends up being a silver lining on the disappointment of not seeing a slimmer case. The iPad mini 3’s performance is unchanged from last year’s model, as you might expect from its static spec list. The A7 processor doesn’t show any truly appreciable disadvantage for having been available for more than a year, however – Apple’s iOS 8.1 still runs fast and smooth on its 7.9-inch slate, and current top-tier iPad games and graphics software have no issue with the 64-bit mobile architecture. Developers have only begun to explore the A8X processor found in the iPad Air 2, however, and by Apple’s own admission it offers considerable improvements, especially in the area of graphics performance, so those concerned with owning a more future-proof device will want to opt for the larger tablet. Ordinary users will never notice a difference, however, and that’s what Apple is counting on – the iPad line going forward will probably start to be updated more like Macs, with the mini and the Air on different schedules, like the Air and the MacBook Pro, as they appeal to different buyers who mostly stick to one line and update only every few years. iOS 8 also brings support for Metal to the iPad mini line, which means developers can do more with graphics even on older processors. The Retina display Apple introduced on the mini last year is still one of the best tablet displays in the business, albeit with a slightly cooler tone vs. the warmer display on the iPad Air 2 I also tested. It’s a denser display than that found on the larger tablet, meaning it theoretically achieves even crisper rendering of text and images compared to the larger tablet, but for most users, the difference is indistinguishable. The iPad mini 3 gains Touch ID with this update, and while it’s probably a steep addition for most at the additional $100 the mini 3 costs vs. the mini 2, it’s a genuinely useful addition that will only become more useful over time. For now, even just using it to unlock and lock the device is a big change, and means that I actually secure my device with a passcode, vs. just leaving it open for anyone to access with a single swipe. Touch ID becomes more useful because of Apple’s decision to open it up to developers with iOS 8, and their introduction of Apple Pay in iOS 8.1. The third-party apps are already plentiful in the App Store, letting you use your stored fingerprint information to login, and Apple Pay means you can also now authorize transactions made through apps via your device (though not in-store – there’s no NFC in the iPad mini 3). I very much appreciate the addition of Touch ID in the iPad mini 3, and I think it might actually be worth the additional $100 over the second-generation device – provided you think you’ll use your iPad nearly as much or more than your PC or phone, and provided you do more with your tablet than just light web browsing and going back repeatedly to one or two core apps. Existing features of the iPad mini 3 still impress here, too, including its 10-hour mixed use battery life, and its Wi-Fi and cellular performance (though it misses out on improvements made to each in the iPad Air 2). The iPad mini 3 does come with the Apple SIM when purchased from the Apple Store, however, which lets you switch carriers on the fly, with a selection of carriers already on board in the U.S. and the U.K., and more to follow soon. Apple’s iPad mini 3 works with existing Apple cases, including the Smart Case and the Smart Cover, and those will be compatible with every generation of mini since the first, non-Retina tablet two years ago. The case offers more complete protection, as it includes a back cover sleeve, but both will offer protection for your all-important screen, should you throw one in a bag to travel. I generally use cases only to protect an iPad while in transit, unless there’s a dedicated pocket, and Apple’s offerings are the best I’ve found out there to suit those needs, since they’re also designed in tandem with the devices, instead of created by an outside organization. Apple’s new iPad mini 3 is the same iPad mini with Retina it introduced last year – with the welcome addition of Touch ID. The changed product lineup it also now offers, which include last year’s iPad mini 2 starting at $299, and the original iPad mini at $249, mean that for most users those will be a better all around value, even figuring in the reduced price you’ll pay for 64GB and 128GB storage options on the new iPad mini 3. If you want the latest and the greatest, however, and all the options that Touch ID does and will eventually bring, and you’re okay with spending a bit more for the privilege, the iPad mini 3 is still the best slate available, even without significant engineering investment from Apple this year – but you have to really value the ‘small’ aspect of that to make it worth it. The iPad Air 2 is the best all around tablet, however, and a much better choice for those looking to be at the technological forefront of this market. |
Myriam Joire AKA tnkgrl Is Out At Pebble | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 26 | Myriam Joire, evangelist for the wearables company Pebble, has been fired from her position. She was Tech Evangelist at the company and spoke at a number of events, including an event in Amsterdam and another in London this week. “Wow! I just found out that I’m no longer with Pebble,” she said in a tweet. Joire, also known as , was at the company for a year and a month. She posted the news on her . In a , Joire described her job as representing the fledgling company to the media and the developer community. She wrote: Joire declined to comment on internal issues at the company. I’ve contacted CEO Eric Migicovsky on the firing but have not received a reply. Wow! I just found out that I'm no longer with … — Myriam Joire (@tnkgrl) The company released the Pebble watch in 2013 after raising $10.3 million through Kickstarter. The company now faces threats from , , and, most notably, . |
Our Four Favorite Companies From The 500 Startups Demo Day | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Time just keeps flying by, as it’s already demo day for ‘s . We spent the better part of this afternoon watching the companies in the accelerator’s latest batch put their best face forward for a group of investors at Microsoft’s campus in Mountain View, Calif., and we’ve rounded up the most exciting companies that presented. As with our , we didn’t want to just throw a bunch of short descriptions of each company into a post and call it a day. We selected the following companies based on the quality of their early products and the market they’re addressing. In no particular order: While fitness-tracking bracelets may not be the sexiest hardware segment at the moment due to commoditization and incoming competition from the likes of Apple and Google’s Android OEM partners, their presence in the mainstream market and the release of OS-level services like Apple Health and Google Fit have opened the door for more advanced sensors to give fitness lovers even more insight into their workout routines. GymTrack is hoping to capitalize on this opportunity by building proprietary sensors that can be retrofitted onto the equipment gyms already have in use. With these sensors in place, gym attendees can have data from all of their workouts — including strength and cardio training — saved to their phones and have a virtual gym trainer provide encouragement and progress updates through voice notifications throughout a workout. Whether its for moral reasons, internal incentives, or just budget concerns that come from dealing with disposing of harmful chemicals, many businesses and public institutions have stepped up their efforts to buy sustainable goods and supplies. ProductBio is building a tool that simplifies that process for such institutions, collecting data on the materials and supply chain involved in thousands of products. In addition to cutting out much of the research involved in finding the right balance between cost and sustainability, ProductBio’s platform automatically compiles sustainability reports for those users who need to prove that they’re supporting products that are made ethically without damaging the environment. Neighborly’s pitch is that it’s modernizing the process for investing in municipal bonds, an asset class that can provide regular returns while also giving the feeling that you’re being a good citizen by contributing to the development and growth of your favorite city. Instead of buying a municipal bond through a brokerage that completely separates the asset itself from the work that’s going to be done with the money put in, Neighborly lets users see why a local government is issuing bonds as well as the total amount they’re raising. In the smartphone app market, developers have as little as a few seconds to prove to users that they aren’t wasting their time by installing and playing with an app. Just as analytics have helped content creators on the web optimize things like page and video length to increase engagement, UXCam’s “usability analytics” let developers see where the pain points are in their apps. By integrating UXCam’s APIs, developers can see exactly how people are using their apps. This can be as simple as looking at which “pages” in an app are most popular to watching a “video” of app usage showing where on the screen people are tapping and swiping, giving the granular insight that can point out things that might not be obvious intimately familiar with their own products, like users expecting there to be a “pull-to-refresh” gesture in an app whose primary interface is a stream of info or providing an easy-to-spot back button to get out of transactions in an e-commerce app. |
Hands-On With The Nexus 6 And Android Lollipop | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Smack dab in the middle of last week, Google announced two new pieces of shiny: the Nexus 6 phone, and the Nexus 9 tablet. Alas, both announcements came by way of blog post, rather than the standard fanfare-filled physical event — meaning no one actually got to the devices. Until now! While the amount of time I got to spend with each device is by no means enough for a full review, it was enough for those oh-so-important first impressions. The short of it? These things are . [gallery ids="1073862,1073863,1073864,1073865,1073868"] The Nexus 6 is about twice the price of its Nexus 5 predecessor ($650 vs $350) – a difference that Google makes up, at least in part, in the device’s aesthetics. The Nexus 5 never felt cheap by any means; it was, at worst, generic. The Nexus 6 meanwhile is undeniably more polished, and looks like a higher-end smartphone should. I was worried that the Nexus 6 would feel absurdly huge in my hand… but it didn’t. Bigger than my Nexus 5, of course — but if you’re comfortable holding an iPhone 6 Plus, you’d be fine with the Nexus 6. The two devices are absurdly similar in their dimensions and overall heft in the hand; close your eyes, and you’d probably have a hard time figuring out which is which without poking around to find the buttons. We only got to spend a bit of time with the Nexus 6’s 13 megapixel camera (we’ll give it a proper spin in a review in the coming weeks), but it seems like an instant and immediate improvement over all Nexus prior. It boots quickly, and the shot-to-shot shutter speed seems as snappy as you could hope for. The Nexus 6 is running Android 5.0 – the very latest edition, otherwise known by it’s traditionally-sweet codename of “Lollipop”. While it brings new APIs for developers to tinker with (Google estimates it at around 7,000), the most obvious change is an overhaul of its user interace. At least running on a freshly-unboxed Nexus 6, Lollipop is . Ridiculously smooth, even. Every animation (and Lollipop/Material Design uses a of animations and transitions) ran like butter, refusing to stutter even when I tried to trip it up by loading many apps in rapid fire. We look forward to giving all of the above — the Nexus 6, Nexus 9, and the Android 5.0 platform that ties them all together — in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for our full review in November. Nexus 6 Rear |
Hands-On With The Nexus 9 Tablet | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | The Nexus 9 in a nutshell: it’s big, and it’s beautiful. I got to spend a few fleeting minutes with the device this afternoon, and though we plan to have a full review in the coming days, I thought I’d share my initial thoughts. Like the jump from Nexus 5 to Nexus 6, there’s a pretty huge spike in quality and build feel from the Nexus 7 to the Nexus 9. The predecessor never felt cheap, mind you — but the new guy just feels . The Nexus 9 is expected to cost $200 more than the Nexus 7 ($400 vs. $200), and it certainly like a pricier device. With that said, it’s hard to look at the Nexus 9 and see an iPad. It was easy to avoid with the Nexus 7, with its 16:10 (read: widescreen) display. By switching to a more traditional 4:3 aspect ratio, the Nexus 9 instantly looks a whole lot more like its closest competition. Is that a bad thing? Not really. Outside of the devout fanboys, no one should really care. Use whichever device you like, and let them squabble amongst each other about the similarities. Anyway: build quality, device heft, platform performance — at a cursory glance, it all seems top notch. Android Lollipop runs like butter — for our impressions there, and for our experience tinkering with the wonderfully shiny Nexus 6,
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Yahoo Beats In Q3 With Revenue Of $1.09B, EPS Of $0.52 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | With all eyes on what Yahoo will do with its $5 billion+ in Alibaba cash, Yahoo today reported its Q3 earnings after the close of trading, with sales of $1.09 billion excluding traffic acquisition costs and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.52. Revenues including acquisition costs were $1.15 billion. Yahoo’s stock was up 3% in after-hours trading, following this news. Analysts were on average non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.30 on ex-TAC sales of $1.04 billion, making this a solid beat of estimates. “We had a good, solid third quarter. We delivered $1.094 billion in revenue ex-TAC and $1.148 billion in GAAP revenue. This represents 1% growth in revenue ex-TAC and 1% growth in GAAP revenue. We achieved this revenue growth through strong growth in our new areas of investment – mobile, social, native and video – despite industry headwinds in some of our large, legacy businesses,” said Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo in the . “I am also pleased to report today that our revenue in mobile is now material. In Q3, we saw mobile revenues in excess of $200 million on a GAAP basis. Further, we estimate that our gross revenues in mobile will exceed $1.2 billion in revenue this year. We have invested deeply in mobile and we are seeing those investments pay off. Not only are our mobile products attracting praise and engagement from users and industry awards, they are generating meaningful revenue for Yahoo.” Display revenue was $447 million for the third quarter of 2014, down 5% compared to $470 million for the third quarter of 2013, but search revenue – $452 million in the quarter – was up 4%. Meanwhile, the number of ads sold increased approximately 24% compared to the third quarter of 2013. Price-per-Ad decreased approximately 24% compared to the third quarter of 2013. It’s also important to note that the EPS figure includes the Alibaba cash – without the sale, the EPS figure would have been lower – in fact, it would have been a lackluster performance. Search revenues were up, but they’re smaller than ads. Also worth noting: Yahoo has $12 billion in cash now. GAAP net earnings per diluted share was $6.70 in the third quarter of 2014 (which included the gain from sale of Alibaba Group shares of $6.27 per diluted share), compared to $0.28 in the third quarter of 2013. Non-GAAP net earnings per diluted share was $0.52 for the third quarter of 2014, compared to $0.34 in the third quarter of 2013. Yahoo has had a mixed year so far when it has come to its quarterly results. In the last quarter (Q2) the company on both sales and earnings. In Q1 it but was flat in key areas like display ad sales. In Q3 a year ago, Yahoo had earnings per share of $0.33, and sales that were 3.3% higher at $1.08 billion. That, combined with the cash it has picked up by way of the Alibaba IPO, has led to a lot of conversation about what Yahoo will do next. The WSJ reported this weekend that today’s earnings could prove to be a crucial moment for the company. Its sources said that CEO Marissa Mayer will use the company’s earnings as a moment to set out her future strategy for the company, specifically in relation to how it proposes to use the Alibaba cash. The sale of part of Yahoo’s shares in the Chinese e-commerce company have netted Yahoo over $5 billion, and that has prompted some of Yahoo’s more vocal investors to demand more direction and change at the company. Investors like Starboard Value have suggested that a merger with AOL (owner of TechCrunch) could be one move to grow Yahoo’s scale. But the WSJ’s sources say that Mayer will likely take a different route: to focus more on acquisitions that give the company a bigger product push, and more possibilities to generate revenue. That would be in contrast to a large part of Yahoo’s acquisitions up to now, which have been heavy on acquihires to build Yahoo’s talent. In keeping with that, we have heard from sources that for around $700 million, which would make it the latest in a string of acquisitions, and one of the biggest. The news Yahoo’s stock up in mid-day trading. We’ll be dialing into the call to hear whether Yahoo gives out any more details on any of the above. |
Apple Adds Guide On iCloud.com Browser Security In Wake Of China Hack | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Apple has released an updated with instructions on how to avoid man-in-the-middle type attacks like those affecting customers in China reported over the past couple of days. The support site says that Apple is “deeply committed to protecting [its] customers’ privacy and security,” and that it is “aware of intermittent organized network attacks” but doesn’t specify the most recent incident in particular, nor does it mention China at all. It does provide tips about how to ensure you’re connected to iCloud proper, and not a redirected spoof site designed to lure you into revealing your credentials. In Safari, that means validating the certificate via the green address bar title and the message revealed when you click the lock icon, and in Chrome that means check the green lock icon next to the address owner name to verity that it is indeed Apple. Apple also details the errors you’ll see if there isn’t a secure connection possible. Apple’s using a ‘man-in-the-middle’ attack that injects a site masquerading as iCloud.com when users navigate to that address. The methods mentioned above won’t work in all browsers, including Qihoo 360, but users worried about falling victim should employ Firefox, Chrome or Safari to avoid the risk. Great Fire associated the attacks with the Chinese government, but Chinese authorities , despite continued claims from security experts that it likely came from government sources. Apple’s newly issued security document obviously doesn’t constitute a statement either way on the source of the attacks, but it should help protect users concerned they might be affected. Enabling two-factor authentication on an iCloud account could also help prevent subsequent attacks, even if a user has already fallen prey to the man-in-the-middle tactics. |
On The Heels Of Apple Pay, Jumio Launches A Card-Scanning Mobile Checkout Product For Retailers’ iOS And Android Apps | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Computer vision startup , best known for its payment card and ID-scanning technologies which allow end users to hold up their cards to a mobile device’s camera to simplify the process of entering in that data on small screens, is rolling out a new product today designed to improve the mobile checkout experience for retailers. Called “BAM Checkout,” the product is the company’s response of sorts to the looming threat that is Apple Pay. With BAM, e-commerce shoppers hold up their payment card then their driver’s license to automatically populate the checkout fields within a retailer’s mobile application. The process takes advantage of the technology Jumio has already built, but in a new way. While before, retailers may have used the credit card scanning option to speed up that portion of the checkout process, adding the driver’s license into the flow aims to simplify things further, and also allows the merchant to cross-check the customer’s name on both cards, plus alert the merchant to any differences between the two. Jumio, which today touts on its homepage a number of customers, including Airbnb, United, Kickstarter, Ridejoy, Gyft, Wallaby, Gopago, Western Union, YouWin, PokerStars, Skimm, World Remit and more, says that BAM Checkout is already being adopted by several of its clients, but these implementations have yet to go live and Jumio is not permitted to disclose their names. On the backend, Jumio invokes scans from its separate SDK products, and clients pay a flat monthly fee based on an annual contract that correlates to their expected volume. The pricing for BAM, meanwhile, remains the same as for the credit-card scanning technology involved with Netswipe – in other words, Jumio is rolling out two technologies for the same price as what it used to charge for one. Jumio’s product launch comes at a time when Apple’s payment technology, Apple Pay, has gone live not only for real-world purchases at point-of-sale, but also for buying things within mobile applications – like order-ahead food purchases, an Uber, or a product sold by an e-commerce retailer. Apple Pay now directly cuts into Jumio’s potential customer base, as it allows Apple device owners to pay for goods and services using the information they already have on file with their Apple account, no additional scanning steps necessary. And arguably, a press of a finger to the Touch ID sensor on a smartphone or iPad is a much simpler process than having to hold up your cards to your smartphone’s camera each time you want to pay. Instead, such scanning technology is now commonly used for the initial loading of cards into a payment system – for instance, Apple uses card-scanning to add payment cards to Apple Pay. And PayPal-acquired Jumio competitor now offers scanning technology in PayPal and SDKs. But while Jumio is clearly threatened by Apple Pay, running “industry news” reports on its site that Apple Pay’s potential, and even its , its technology could still prove useful to an Apple rival that wants to build its own fingerprint scanning technology for use with mobile payments. Instead of having to build their own card-scanning computer vision tech in house, they could snatch up Jumio the way PayPal snagged Card.io. Additionally, while changing payment standards involving tokenization will have consumers moving away from needing a physical card to pay online or on mobile, Jumio’s ID verification technology provides another point of interest for a would be acquirer, if it came to that. (Jumio has raised nearly $37 million in funding.). In the meantime, because Jumio’s BAM Checkout product works across both iOS and Android, it could make sense for retailers looking for a cross-platform solution. BAM Checkout works today with all major credit cards including Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Diners Club, JCB, Union Pay and Discover in both the U.S. and U.K. |
BlaBlaCar’s CEO Shares The Company’s 10-Year Journey And Global Expansion Plans | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Taxi apps and ride-sharing companies may have gained mainstream appeal over the past couple of years, but their arrival has been a long time coming. That’s certainly the case for , a France-headquartered startup that was started 10 years ago and to expand its business from Europe into the rest of the world. In an all-French panel session at Disrupt Europe, BlaBlaCar CEO and co-founder Frédéric Mazzella told TechCrunch writer Romain Dillet that the sudden rush of capital hasn’t gone to the Parisian startup’s proverbial head. “We’ve been discussing our business with investors for many years,” Mazzella said. “Each time we’ve raised money, we’ve had a goal.” BlaBlaCar’s first raise — $600,000 in 2009 — was aimed at making it France’s premier ride-sharing services, he continued. Subsequent rounds — $1.2 million and $7.5 million — were targeted at finding a business model for revenue and replicating its French model in neighboring countries in Europe. And this latest round? “The $100 million round just now is to help us become global,” Mazzella confirmed. “We have to take what’s proven successful in the countries we are, and go to the next level.” The BlaBlaCar founder said that, having just opened its doors in Turkey, the team is now looking at large markets like India and Brazil. “We want to reach economies of scale, so we are looking at big countries. [When assessing new expansions] we look at the price of gas, the state of transport in general, and how people are connected — are they using their smartphones? — then we make a call on whether it can work,” Mazzella explained. For now, he believes that “everywhere is working” in its markets, but he did concede that growth in the UK has been particularly challenging due to culture issues. “The UK is an island so distances traveled are different. Rides are often based on commutes to work rather than weekends with family or friends like in Europe,” Mazzella said. That said, he does believe that things will change in the UK and other markets, just like they did in France where “it took a while for people to get used to the idea you can share your car with someone you don’t know.” [gallery ids="1073691,1073695,1073693,1073694,1073690,1073689,1073688"] All this talk of expansion leaves an obvious question — will BlaBlaCar try its luck in the US market? The answer seems sooner rather than later. While he didn’t commit to any kind of timeline for a North American launch, Mazzella said — not for the first time — that the company has assessed the business potential of the US. “We can’t just do everything at once… frankly I don’t known when we might go to the US,” he said. Playing things down even further, he voiced a series of concerns about the feasibility of the business of long distance ride-sharing there. “It doesn’t really work in the US. Several companies have tried and failed [due to differences]: gas and tolls are cheaper than other countries, which means there is less incentive for drivers to share rides,” Mazzella said. The fact that no single competitor has cornered the market in the US is evidence that, while there is interest, the time is not right, Mazzella believes. As it stands, BlaBlaCar has 10 million registered users across 13 different countries. Mazzella said the service sees 2 million people traveling on it per month. Despite its recent successes — and that has included front page stories on national newspapers in France as well as coverage from online sites like TechCrunch — Mazzella has his head firmly on his shoulders. He told Dillet that he has not taken time off to party or celebrate the progress since there is a lot more to come from BlaBlaCar. |
Google Acquires Firebase To Help Developers Build Better Real-Time Apps | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Google today announced that it has acquired , a backend service that helps developers build realtime apps for iOS, Android and the web that can store and sync data instantly. Firebase currently has almost 110,000 registered developers on its platform and the Firebase team says that the service will continue to work as before and remain platform-agnostic. Firebase, which launched about three years ago, says that joining Google will allow it to scale its service dramatically. “With Google’s engineering talent, resources and technical infrastructure, we’ll be able to do much more, much faster,” the team writes. In addition, the Firebase team believes that its mission is complementary to Google’s. Thanks to the acquisition, Google’s customers will be able to write apps faster and Firebase’s users will gain access to Google’s infrastructure. For Google, this acquisition mostly seems to be about technology and talent, but it will also introduce Firebase’s 100,000 developers to its Cloud Platform. Google plans to announce new Firebase features at its event on November 4. Chances are this acquisition only closed recently, but Google has a history of integrating the services it acquires for Cloud Platform rather quickly. This is Google’s third major acquisition for its Cloud Platform this year after monitoring service Stackdriver (and quickly ) and for bringing visual effects rendering to its cloud computing service. In total, Firebase, which was founded by Andrew Lee and James Tamplin, raised in a seed round in 2012 and a in 2013. |
Building A Fintech Startup In Europe | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Today on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe, Taavet Hinrikus from TransferWise, Damian Kimmelman from DueDil, and Jeff Lynn from Seedrs took the stage to talk about the state of fintech startups in London. These companies took us through the current landscape, regulatory issues, and why it’s a good time to build a fintech startup in Europe. [gallery ids="1073642,1073645,1073646,1073647,1073648,1073649"] |
Product Hunt Gets Social With Twitter-Like User Profiles, Following Features And Notifications | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Product Hunt, the aggregation site currently focused on surfacing new tech products and startups, is now turning itself into something of a social network this morning with the launch of redesigned user profiles, following features and notifications. The new profiles offer a variety of information about the poster, including a bio, Twitter handle, and tabs for products they’ve upvoted, submitted, made themselves and more. You can also now keep track of the who’s who on the buzzy tech site, as Product Hunt’s profiles include Twitter-like counts of how many people are following a given user, and how many others that person is following in return. (Side note: more people are into than on here, indicating the site’s tech bias.) When you follow your fellow Product Hunt users, you’re able to receive a notification when they post a new product to the site, the company explains. The change will likely encourage more active participation from community members who may have otherwise lurked on the site, as now their activity is being quantified in a more straightforward way, and their influence is being made known by way of their follower count. According to Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover, just over 90,000 have signed up for the service but many more lurk. He says the company is keeping the site relatively simple in that it’s a homepage with a list of products the community finds most interesting, every day. “But we’re adding layers of social functionality – starting with notifying users when people they follow post a product – and will add more later,” he says. Some of these changes may be subtle. For example, now the people you follow are displayed first in the list of upvoters on the product page, Hoover points out. The new profiles and features were announced in an email sent to subscribers this morning as well as by Hoover on Twitter. In a ‘tweetstorm’ of sorts, he also noted that additional social notifications were in the works. Follower data is also being integrated into the API, he says in response to a question posted on Twitter, and hover card support is planned. This latter item would allow users to hover their cursor over a username anywhere on the site and then click a button to follow them on the card that pops up, instead of having to browse over to a user profile to follow that person, as you do now. The company from a16z, Alexis Ohanian, and others largely off of the community Product Hunt has been able to build around those who are sharing their enthusiasm for new tech products. Further down the road, the company may expand beyond the tech space to curate other types of products that would interest a broader audience than the Silicon Valley set and those from the startup scene who quickly fill the ranks as the early adopters to new services like this. That transition may prove to be more challenging, of course, but Product Hunt is already on its way to establishing a means of attracting new users to its service by having notable names or organizations curate their favorite products through the site’s “featured hunts.” The site had rapper Nas kick off its featured hunts and now regularly runs hunts that let users vote on new products of a specific type – like TechCrunch Disrupt startups or an accelerator’s Demo Day event, for example. |
The Ultimate Vision For Homejoy Is Not Just Cleaning, According To CEO Adora Cheung | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | On-demand home services company has been providing cleaning services over the last few years, but it’s hoping to expand into several other verticals. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe, co-founder and CEO Adora Cheung said the company would continue to test out other services in its different markets. Today Homejoy is in 30 cities around the world, including London, where the service launched in April. In fact, London is the company’s fastest-growing market and is comparable to Homejoy’s presence in New York City, Cheung said. It’s also moved into other European cities like Berlin and Paris. Over the next few months and into the first quarter of next year, she said Homejoy will be expanding aggressively into other cities on the continent. Even though it has a playbook for launching each new market, every city requires individual care to gain the reputation it needs among cleaning professionals and customers. “Every time you launch in a new market, it’s like launching a new startup,” she said. That mostly involves building up the supply of cleaners in each city in order to meet eventual demand. Once it’s reached 100 cleaners on its platform, it considers that city launched. In addition to new cities, the company also has ambitions for other services. It’s been testing out things like handyman and light plumbing and electrical services in certain markets. That’s something it will continue until it finds those which it thinks can scale. “The ultimate vision for Homejoy is not just cleaning,” Cheung said. “We will be testing out all of these different verticals and scale out the ones that go well.” Homejoy has come a long way since Adora and her brother Aaron first entered the business. Cheung says she cleaned customer homes for about four months in part to meet demand, but also to learn about the needs of the cleaning professionals working on the platform. “It taught us a lot about how cleaning professionals work and the tools we needed to build to make their lives easier,” she said. That includes things like the scheduling and booking flow, and creating a better algorithm for matching customers and service professionals. Now Homejoy thinks can apply those learnings to scale other services as well. [gallery ids="1073677,1073676,1073674,1073671,1073678"] |
Japanese 3D-Printed Gun Maker Is Sentenced To Two Years In Jail | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Yoshitomo Imura, an employee at the Shonan Institute of Technology in Japan, was arrested last may for printing and firing a 3D-printed gun called the ZigZag. He printed three guns in total and was arrested for running afoul of Japan’s strict gun laws. The prosecutors warned that Imura’s actions were a threat and felt he was “flaunting” his skill. They wrote: Imura claimed he didn’t know about the laws associated with 3D printing guns but, it seems, the Japanese courts have made him an example. |
And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt Europe 2014 Is… Crate | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | incredibly fierce at the inaugural TechCrunch Disrupt London. At the very beginning, there were 15 amazing companies presenting in front of multiple groups of industry leaders serving as judges. The startups were competing for £30,000 and the highly coveted Disrupt Cup. After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to four finalists: , , and . These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which were Mat Braddy (Just Eat), Sonali De Rycker (Accel Partners), Brent Hoberman (PROfounders Capital), Klaus Hommels (Lakestar), and Mattias Ljungman (Atomico). And now, meet the TechCrunch Disrupt Europe 2014 Battlefield winner. Crate.IO is a service to set up big data backend servers. It’s an easy-to-use interface to quickly set up a distributed database cluster. Once your servers are up and running, you interact with your database through standard SQL queries. While the project is open source, the team plans to charge for additional services like priority access to engineers, help with managing clusters and more. The first plan starts at $1,300 per month (€1,000). You can read more of our Crate coverage . [gallery ids="1073788,1073789,1073790,1073791,1073793,1073794,1073796,1073730,1073731,1073732,1073733,1073734,1073735,1073736,1073737,1073738,1073739,1073740,1073741,1073742,1073743,1073744"] Disease Diagnostic Group is developing the Rapid Assessment of Malaria (RAM) device. It’s a cheap, efficient, portable and accurate device to diagnose malaria, making it perfect for developing countries and populations living in rural areas. You can read more of our Disease Diagnostic Group coverage . [gallery ids="1073745,1073746,1073747,1073748,1073749,1073750,1073751,1073752"] |
Google Updates Play Music With Songza-Style Functionality | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | For the first time since , Google is integrating the technology into its Google Play Music service. The updated service gives you access to expertly curated playlists based around date, time, weather, and what Google thinks you might be up to. Starting today, Play Music users will be able to access thousands of differently expertly curated playlists that are suited to specific moods, activities, or date and time. Users also have the option to download the playlists for offline listening, which is functionality that Songza didn’t offer as a standalone company. Another new feature is the ability to see the next song on the playlist, as well as the ability to add, remove, or re-order the playlist to suit your particular interests. A bit like iTunes Radio, the Play Music app with Songza integration will also allow you to create a new station based on any song in the mix. Of course, users can also search for various stations based on a particular activity or by the name of the station. Additionally, Play Music now has a redesigned “Listen Now” section that will help users discover new music, with cards showing recently played music, new releases that might be of interest to you, and other radio stations based on what you’ve loved in the past. The updated Play Music app (with Songza tech built right in) is available for all Play Music users in the United States and Canada. The new “Listen Now” product is available in all 45 countries where Play Music is available. |
Life360 Acquires Two-Month-Old HelloWorld | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Today, location-sharing startup HelloWorld is announcing that it has been acquired by for an undisclosed seven-figure sum. That’s a pretty fantastic exit, given the fact that the startup was and built by 5 recent- and soon-to-be-grads who have raised no capital from angels or traditional investors. HelloWorld founder Ernestine Fu will be joining Life360 to head up a new “Special Projects” division. Both Fu and Life360 co-founder and president Alex Haro say that the company doesn’t have a defined plan for the new division, other than the fact that they’ll be looking at ways the company can use location data to provide unique tools for families, the main social group Life360 hopes to help connect (along with close friends). That will likely involve the Internet of Things, the illogically popular term for the idea that in the years to come, everything is going to have a sensor sending data about us and our things to be processed in the cloud. Life360 is looking at how they can tie in the kind of data you’d only share with your family with that trend — so, when everyone in a family leaves the home with their smartphone, the house can automatically bring the air conditioning to a more eco-friendly temperature and when it’s time to meet the significant other for lunch, you could just tell your car to navigate to your husband’s location. In a phone call, Fu told TechCrunch that HelloWorld received offers for funding from angels and VCs alike but turned each down during the initial rush of development around the young startup’s app, which was already working on iOS and Android coming out of the YC hackathon. Among the interested angels was Life360’s Haro, who along with his co-founder was looking to personally invest in HelloWorld about a month ago. But after getting into talks about the future of HelloWorld and the prospects for using location data among tight, private groups, it became clear to those involved that Fu could have a greater impact working on things for Life360’s ~100 million users. While Fu gets the big new role at Life360, her other four teammates will also be involved in their acquirer’s future projects, though in various capacities. According to Life360’s Haro, most will join the company, though one will continue work on his own separate startup and aid in an advisory role. |
Yelp Strikes Hotel Bookings Partnership With Hipmunk | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | Yelp has partnered with to allow people to book hotels within the business review platform. While this is not the first time Yelp has offered a way for users to purchase from businesses right on its site, it is the first time it’s done this with hotel bookings. Yelp says the idea is that people will book a place to stay immediately after reading the Yelp reviews on it. This creates a way to keep Yelp users within the platform and encourages them to leave reviews and other information about the place they stay.
Those looking for a hotel on the Yelp platform will now see a “Reserve a Room” button on hotel pages that are supported by Hipmunk. Users click on the hotel room they want and are then taken to a booking page within Yelp to complete the purchase. Hipmunk then sends out a confirmation notice to the booker via email. HotelTonight and other vacation booking platforms work much the same way. What we don’t know is if Hipmunk will be a standalone booking partner or if Yelp plans to integrate other travel sites into this new offering. Yelp rolled out the ability to book local services such as day spas and hair trims via the Yelp platform over a year ago. Businesses have been able to present potential customers with discounts for booking and payment within Yelp’s platform as well. But most of this has been for beauty services and the beauty space is a crowded one. There are a bunch of beauty booking apps such as and that offer reviews, bookings and discounts of local spas and hair salons, just like Yelp. Of course, Yelp is a broader space that offers much more.
“After launching the Yelp platform, we knew we wanted to expand to additional categories,” said Mike
Ghaffary, Yelp’s VP of corporate and business development. shortly before the Yelp platform announcement. The company then turned the tech behind SeatMe into Yelp Reservations and began providing table reservations within the platform last March. Yelp has since tacked on the ability to order food delivery as well. However, this is the first time that it has turned its attention to hotel bookings. It’s also the first time the platform has gone beyond local vendors to partner with a major site. Yelp’s mobile platform has been a boon to its review site business in recent years. Quarter 3 revenues in the nearly $100 million range, due in large part to ad sales on the mobile app. But it’s not clear if people will choose Yelp to book travel instead of hitting up Airbnb or HotelTonight’s app. Yelp could also see a potential growth in revenue in other areas such as tickets for concert venues or movies in the future. Yelp is adding a few new food delivery partners, as well as wine tasting booking partner, CellarPass, in addition to Hipmunk. “We’re looking to make Yelp as useful as possible for consumers, so we want to add all kinds of transactions and booking capability in the future,” Yelp spokesperson Rachel Walker tells TechCrunch. |
San Francisco Legalizes, Regulates Airbnb With 7-4 Vote, Lots of Amendments | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | After six years of operating in San Francisco, Airbnb will finally become legal on its own home turf. The city’s board of supervisors voted to legalize and regulate short-term stays through a controversial piece of legislation that has been two years in the making and comes in the midst of one of the city’s most acute housing shortages in history. David Chiu, who is the president of the board of supervisors and is running to represent San Francisco in the state assembly this November, has been the one leading the legislative process. I wrote and some of its more controversial points. The key changes include a limit on non-hosted rentals for up to 90 days per year. That’s on the concern that Airbnb will eat into the city’s limited housing stock. Another key point is the creation of a public registry, where hosts will have to pay a $50 fee, register with the city Planning Department and pledge that they’ll abide by the 90-day limit. They’ll also have to pay the city’s hotel taxes. They — not Airbnb — are responsible for certifying that they’re only hosting 90 days a year and for keeping records that prove this. During the four-hour long debate, city supervisors added several more amendments. Those include: -A private right of action in specific cases. Before, the law was primarily reactive. The city planning department, which is already overloaded and doesn’t have the financial or headcount resources to police thousands of short-term rentals, would respond to complaints. Now, if a building has a history of Ellis Act evictions, there is a private right of action for housing non-profits to sue and stop that activity. They are not eligible for civil penalties, so they aren’t financially motivated. They also have to have been around for at least five years, which will prevent people from inventing non-profits to file frivolous lawsuits. There’s also a private right of action for these non-profits to sue in clear cases when there are residential housing units that appear to have been converted into permanent hotels. -Buildings that have had Ellis Act evictions are also not eligible for short-term stays. What’s the Ellis Act? Well, San Francisco city and California state rental laws have some strange overlaps. The city has incredibly strong rent control laws, that cover 172,000 of the city’s 376,000 housing units. As long as the tenant handles their basic obligations like paying rent on time, they can’t really be evicted and there’s a culture of lifetime tenancy in the city that’s fairly unique. But the state of California passed a law in the mid-1980s that allows landlords to “go out of business” and take their rental units off the market. The concern in red-hot San Francisco housing market is that this law is abused and landlords will take their units off the market to convert them into tenancies-in-common or permanent Airbnb rentals. This change is supposed to clamp down on that. There were also a couple of rejected amendments. -David Campos, who is Chiu’s rival in the election next month, wanted Airbnb and other hosting platforms to pay an estimated $25 million in back taxes. He said, “I’m proud that Airbnb started here in SF on air mattresses and now it is a company valued at $10 billion.” But he added, “This is about ensuring that a multi-billion dollar company has to pay their fair share of taxes. It shouldn’t be the little people who should pay taxes. It should be everyone who benefits from being a part of this city that has to pay their fair share.” The issue with the amendment, however, is that it would prevent the law from taking effect until the city treasurer certified that back taxes were paid. Then there would be this whole question of collection. Would it come from the company? Or would the company be compelled to go after every single one of its hosts over the past six years to pay for previous taxes? -Another amendment to cap hosted rentals up to 90 days. This was out of concern that enforcing hosted versus non-hosted rentals would basically be impossible. How would you tell if hosts were present or not? Again, this was struck down based on a lot of feedback from home sharers that they are very dependent on their income to pay for living costs. “There are many people who absolutely rely on the income that they derive from these hosted rentals to make it in San Francisco,” said supervisor Scott Wiener, who represents part of the Mission and the Castro District. |
Staples Becomes The Latest Retailer Affected By A Payment Card Data Breach | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 21 | If you’ve shopped at a major retailer in the U.S., chances are your payment card data has been stolen at some point. Today, it appears you may be able to add Staples to the growing list of retailers who have discovered fraudulent activity related to a data breach in their stores. In Staples’ case, however, the company is currently investigating a “potential issue” in select locations in the Northeastern U.S. The , the security expert who broke the story of Target’s credit card breach which ended up up to 110 million consumers, thanks to the timing of the breach which involved going after customer’s payment card and personal information during the busy holiday shopping season. It’s unclear at this time how large the Staples breach may turn out to be compared with other attacks, but it initially sounds as if it may be smaller in scale. According to on the matter, “it appears likely that fraudsters have succeeded in stealing customer card data from some subset of Staples locations, including seven Staples stores in Pennsylvania, at least three in New York City, and another in New Jersey,” he writes, citing over a half-dozen sources at East Coast banks. That would indicate that Staples breach may be smaller than others, given that the company operates over 1,800 U.S. stores, and it’s looking into just a handful. The fraudulent activity was actually detected at non-Staples stores, says Krebs, which suggests that thieves used malware to steal the payment card info to create and use counterfeit cards. Staples now joins a long list of retailers whose systems have come under attack over the years. One of the largest was the 2009 attack on card processor Heartland Payment Systems which saw thieves stealing an estimated 130 million credit cards. Before that, in 2007, crooks stole 90 million cards from TJX (parent company of T.J. Maxx). But more recently, the attacks have continued. In addition to Target, major retailers affected by breaches have included , which saw 56 million cards compromised over a 5-month period – bigger than the attack on Target. (Only 40 million credit and debit cards were breached at Target, but 70 million more had their personal information stolen.) in recent breaches, though fewer were affected – about 1.1. million credit cards were compromised, the retailer . Grocer Supervalu Inc. and Asian restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s also reported attacks in recent months. Staples says it’s working with law enforcement, but isn’t providing additional information beyond confirmation of the investigation at this time. A spokesperson for Staples provided the company’s official statement (see below) when questioned for more information: Staples is in the process of investigating a potential issue involving credit card data and has contacted law enforcement. We take the protection of customer information very seriously, and are working to resolve the situation. If Staples discovers an issue, it is important to note that customers are not responsible for any fraudulent activity on their credit cards that is reported on a timely basis. |
Facebook Launches Hyper-Local Ads Targeted To People Within A Mile Of A Business | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | Facebook’s mobile ubiquity and push for always-on location sharing came to fruition today with the that could convince people to visit stores they’re nearby. Soon, brick-and-mortar businesses will be able to target ads to anyone who lives or was recently within a specific distance of their store. Advertisers can set a radius as small as a mile and the ads will show up on people’s phones or web browsers. These new will be available for US business owners in a few weeks, and around the globe in the next several months. Hyper-local advertising has been a long time coming for Facebook. Way back in January 2011 , which did this kind of ad targeting. Then in June 2012, VP Carolyn Everson hinted that , and I wrote about how they could work. The ads still aren’t served in real-time, but I’d bet that eventually businesses will be able to pre-bid on a hyper-local audience and have them shown to users when they enter the geo-fence. Now with over 1 billion mobile users, Businesses just punch in their address or select one from their Facebook Page, set their radius, gender, and age range, add a photo and message, and Facebook routes the ads to people in the vicinity. Businesses can even select to in their ad via a button that will launch a map app in a user’s phone. Eventually, Facebook could combine hyperlocal targeting with its retargeting functionality and ad network so any business you shop at could hit you with an ad in Facebook or another app when you’re nearby. That is some next-level ad tech. Along with today’s official launch of and last months launch of its , the company keeps pumping out new ways to make money. |
Twitter Sues The Government Over Data-Request Disclosures | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | Twitter wants you to know that it is serious about data request transparency, and that is a darn fine good thing. The social company is suing the government for the right to share, in more granular detail, the requests for user data that state makes. The United States government would like such data to be opaque. Twitter, the opposite. Both sides’ views are unsurprising. The government wants to keep terrorists in the dark. And Twitter wants to keep its users informed, so that they know that their information, at least through these specific channels, isn’t being absorbed wholesale. This argument is component to the larger debate the nation is currently having about how government surveillance impacts the privacy of the individual, and the nation as a whole. What does Twitter want? From : It’s our belief that we are entitled under the First Amendment to respond to our users’ concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing information about the scope of U.S. government surveillance – including what types of legal process have been received. We should be free to do this in a meaningful way, rather than in broad, inexact ranges. The nuance in the above is that when Twitter reports the number of national security letters and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court orders, it has to report a range such as 0-999. However, if the actual number is zero, Twitter would like to be able to say that. Given current gag rules on such specificity, it cannot. The ACLU . The company also called for passage of the Senate’s USA FREEDOM Act, a bill that, unlike its House counterpart of the same name, has teeth and the support of privacy groups. Other tech firms have also . Twitter is not the first company to take the government to court over this sort of disclosure. The right to report certain numbers at all was fought when Google and Microsoft, among others, sued. . The Justice Department is . Let’s hope Twitter can bring this one home. |
Dot & Bo Adds Media Vet Nancy Tellem To Its Board As It Looks To Combine Content And Commerce | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | You might know online retailer mostly as a website for purchasing stylish home furnishings, but the company wants to be much more than that. In particular, it wants to be seen as a next-generation content and commerce destination — what you might think of as a kind of QVC for millennials. Dot & Bo already has the commerce side locked down, but to ramp up its content, the company will be getting help from an entertainment veteran well-steeped in the production and programming of media. That’s because entertainment veteran is joining its board of directors. Launched about a year-and-a-half ago, Dot & Bo specializes in the sale of home furnishings “designed for the modern lifestyle.” It appeals mostly to young people, in particular millennials, as they set out to decorate their first homes and attempt to make those homes look like the type of place a grown-up might live in. It’s for customers who have grown out of IKEA, but haven’t quite graduated to Restoration Hardware. And, well, for those who want something a little more stylish than what they might find at Crate and Barrel. From an inventory standpoint, the site has the type of furniture you probably won’t find at other retail chains or online. But what sets it apart is the way it presents its furniture into collections, and how it creates stories around items it has for sale. The most obvious example of its content efforts is seen when you go to the home page and are presented with a , each of which is designed around a certain theme or decor. It also sends out regular newsletters to email subscribers with new and interesting groupings of products. With its , Dot & Bo is seeking to go beyond just curating a bunch of items. Not unlike Pinterest, the goal is to inspire customers to mix and match items as they decorate their own homes. As it ramps up content production, the company will lean on some of Tellem’s experience in programming for consumers. Most recently president of , Tellem has spent decades in traditional media trying to figure out exactly how to engage and connect with exactly the audience that Dot & Bo hopes to court as customers. “What’s happening now in my business is there’s a lot of disruption going on and a focus on the millennial audience,” Tellem said in a phone interview. But, she added, “traditional TV is having a difficult time reaching them.” Dot & Bo, by contrast, has largely succeeded in connecting with those consumers through a mix of content and commerce. To reach them, Tellem says, you have to be authentic, personal, and highly engaging, something which the company aspires to. Dot & Bo co-founder Anthony Soohoo has known Tellem for years, since they worked together at CBS. Together they bring a mix of digital and traditional media experience that Dot & Bo is hoping to leverage as it seeks to flip the model of content creation and monetization. At CBS Soohoo worked on the digital side of the house, handling online distribution of the company’s video properties at CBS Interactive. Tellem, meanwhile, served as president of the CBS Network Television Group, where she oversaw development, production, and programming of shows on the company’s networks. One of the properties that reported to Tellem was The CW, the joint venture between CBS and Warner Bros. that targeted teens and young adults. With shows like Gossip Girl, the network had some success not just in attracting an audience of those viewers, but also connecting them with songs that were part of the show’s soundtrack or part of its closing credits. As it relates to Dot & Bo’s content plans, the goal is to go even further in making content that is monetized by commerce attached to it. Because it has a connection with its visitors, Soohoo believes Dot & Bo can close the loop on a sales process online that was never possible in the one-way analog industries like TV, newspaper, or radio. In that sense it also differs from other e-commerce companies in that it’s trying to drive more engagement at the top of the sales funnel, rather than trying to optimize for transactions. Tellem believes that’s a winning strategy. After all, she posits, creating compelling content leads to more engagement, and over time that leads to more sales. Creating content for an e-commerce site might be a roundabout way of getting there, but it appears to be working. |
Belkin Breaks Its Routers Worldwide, Issues Temporary Fix [Update: Fixed!] | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | For some reason Belkin routers cannot connect to the Internet. Starting around midnight EDT, users took to Twitter en mass all pointing to their Belkin routers as the source of their connection woes. At 9:30am PDT Belkin acknowledged the issue and an hour later, . Belkin has yet to reveal the cause of the mass outage and the company did not respond to our request for comment. Belkin says all routers should now be fixed. We have confirmed that the internet connectivity issue is now resolved. If your service has not yet been restored, please unplug your router and plug it back in after waiting 1 minute. Wait 5 more minutes and the router should reconnect. If you have any further issues, please contact our support at (800) 223-5546. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience to our customers. We are taking a number of actions to eliminate this sort of incident from reoccurring Starting approximately midnight on October 7, Belkin began experiencing an issue with a service configured in certain Belkin router models that causes a failure when it checks for general network connectivity by pinging a site hosted by Belkin. We know this issue has affected select older Wireless-N Belkin router models including F9K1102, F9K1105, F9K1113 and F9K1116. We are continuing to investigate other possible routers that may have been affected. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. Until there is a fix in place, we have identified a workaround for customers that are using the F9K1102 and F9K1105 routers to regain internet connectivity. That work-around as well as ongoing updates can be found at our outage status page for more information: www.belkin.com/outage https://twitter.com/fureousangel/status/519527412707520512 |
The Equil Smartpen Puts Your Physical Notes And Doodles In The Cloud | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | Despite the convenience of jotting down notes into text files that can be saved to the cloud, many still prefer jotting down their thoughts or quotes from meetings with a physical pen and a piece of paper. The tech industry has responded with various gadgets targeted at those who prefer taking notes the old-fashioned way, from tablets oriented around using a stylus (hello, Surface!) to so-called “smartpens” capable of recording what you write as you write it, saving you the effort of snapping a photo of your notes when you’re done. The is the latest gadget to fall into the latter camp. It gives you a Bluetooth-connected pen, a charging case, and a little receiver unit that actually records what you write from the edge of whatever paper you’re jotting things down on. In concert with its mobile and desktop apps, you can jot down notes, get a PDF-scan quality copy, convert what you wrote into plain text, and upload to Evernote in a matter of minutes. The transcription Equil’s software provides isn’t always perfect (as you can see in the video above, where I had to fix a few typos), but if you’re the kind of person who simply has to write down notes by hand, it’s nice to know there’s a copy of your work beyond the easily-lost piece of paper you wrote it on. This morning, a not-so-fun set of coincidences led to me putting the Equil through its paces in a real-life work situation. I got to the office, and my work laptop (running Mac OS X Yosemite) decided it didn’t feel like letting me log in. After several reboot attempts, I had to give up, as I had a call to be briefed by a startup on upcoming news. I couldn’t go in without a way to take notes, but I hate having to keep a piece of paper around for when I get around to writing up the post. I figured that it was as good a time as any to test the Equil out, and while I can’t share a copy of my notes, I’ll just say that the text the mobile app got from my handwriting is more readable than the un-autocorrected transcripts that usually end up in my Evernote account. In terms of design, the Equil Smartpen 2 seems to draw inspiration from Adobe’s Ink & Slide and from Apple’s folding iPad screen covers. It’s a pretty slick package, though I do wish that Equil had taken the brushed aluminum design of Adobe’s stylus for its pen, as that simply felt far better in the hand in terms of touch and weight. Still, that device costs $30 more than the Equil’s $169 MSRP and is aimed at designers and artists hooked into Adobe’s Creative Cloud, not anyone who simply wants to save their physical notes and doodles. If you order via (which has already shot past its goal) you can get it for a cool $109. |
Tune In To TechCrunch Radio On Sirius XM 102 Indie Tonight | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | TechCrunch Radio Tuesday begins now. We’ll be back yet again tonight to discuss the goings on of the tech world on TechCrunch Radio on Sirius XM 102 Indie. HP is splitting the H from the P (not really, but they are ), and had a weird week, so we’ll probably talk about that. We’re also slightly fascinated by the uptick in (because why?). Then we’ll move on to the TC Radio Pitch-Off, where five companies have sixty seconds to impress us, a guest judge, and our fine listeners. We have some interesting companies lined up this week, so you don’t want to miss out. If you want to follow along with the show, simply tune into Sirius XM 102 Indie at 6pm East or 3pm West. (All the relevant info for on-demand listening, subscriptions, etc. can be found below). Also, we’re always looking for entrepreneurs to pitch their products on our show. If you want to participate, read the rules below and apply!
1. You must have a product that is available to general users. No sign-up pages or pre-orders with a TBD ship date. There must be a link we can give to listeners/readers where they can access your product, service, what have you.
2. You must be an early stage company. If you have raised a Series A or later, you are disqualified. Bootstrapped or seed stage startups are welcome.
3. You must be able to pitch your product with your words only.
4. You must be able to operate a telephone.
It’s going to be a hoot! |
IBM Sees Salvation In Watson’s New York Home | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | Armed with , an unprecedented degree of autonomy within IBM, and an entire Manhattan city block, IBM launched its media blitz to show the world its vision of a future enhanced and enabled by Watson, its artificial intelligence technology. So today 28 reporters convened on the fifth floor of 51 Astor Place with the IBM Sherlocks who would manage Watson in order to get a taste of the “Watson Experience.” Amid a heady mix of high-tech, flat-paneled display wizardry and more than a little razzle-dazzle of Hollywood showmanship, executives from the Watson program laid out, , their of artificial intelligence’s big brother. Beyond platitudes like the director of symbiotic cognitive systems for the IBM Watson Group, Dario Gil, telling a crowd that, “People are at the center of the Watson experience,” what’s truly at the heart of the Watson experience are the startups and companies that are going to use Watson. At least that’s what John Gordon, a vice president with IBM Watson told us in a video interview from the day. And as for companies that are working with Watson, there are already a slew of them. Ole Big Blue pulled out the stops for the show at its new headquarters just south of Union Square, touting the ways in which hospitals from Thailand, health care groups from South Africa, Australian universities, and Spanish banks were using Watson to transform their various disciplines, curriculum and industries. In all IBM revealed that it was working with companies across six continents and in over 25 countries through its new Watson initiatives. The distributed intelligence is learning Spanish through its work with Caixa Bank in Spain, and helping financial managers in Australia to offer improved advice for their customers. At Thailand’s Bumrungrad International Hospital, Watson is being used to improve cancer treatments through a program developed jointly with New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering, which will also be deployed at referral offices in 16 countries that feed into the Bangkok hospital. In Australia’s Deakin University, Watson will provide online student advisory services for the school’s 50,000 students, answering questions ranging from directions, to queries about social activities and course requirements. And wrapping up Watson’s big enterprise international tour, the Metropolitan Health Group in South Africa is using Watson to provide customer health advisory services for the company’s nearly 3 million customers. Beyond medical facilities and universities, a bevy of new startups are building entire businesses on Watson’s artificial intelligence. Travelocity founder Terry Jones, who was also the founding chairman of Kayak.com launched his new company on the back of Watson. The London-based startup is using Watson as a customer relationship management tool over a mobile app; Dedham, Mass.-based has Watson providing real-time alerts to store managers, while Emeryville, Calif.-based has taken Watson’s near infinite understanding of data and turned it into a way to link consumer questions with products on a company’s site. New companies like (also based in Waltham) are using Watson to link funders and donors with non-profits, leveraging Watson’s brainpower for the greater good. The list goes on… and on… and on… with using Watson in its Austin-based company to act like a security expert and try to suss out new security threats before they’re developed. Pleasanton, Calif.-based is using Watson to power its recommendations to patients that call in to its mobile platform for answers to healthcare questions. Closer to the ancestral seat of IBM’s power, in Syosset, NY, collates white papers, articles and manuals to provide tech support responses, all through Watson’s observation, understanding, evaluation, and relevance decision engines. IBM has staked a lot on Watson, and this distributed model of selling artificial intelligence to the masses, but the company’s employees are true believers in the transformative power of Watson to change the ways human interact with computers. For the company it’s a step-change in the evolution of technology in the same way that the machine age brought a new relationship between humanity and its tools. “Working with cognitive computing is a dialogue,” said Gil in his presentation on Watson’s ability to heal the sick. “[It has] the capacity to enhance and scale our minds in a partnership.” |
Facebook’s Potential Anonymity Project Could Be A Tough Sell | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | A new Facebook app project might try to embrace the kind of anonymous sharing that we’ve seen on apps like Secret and Whisper, according to a new report by . The software would be a standalone application designed for mobile that wouldn’t require users to employ their real names, a policy FB enforces on its main social network. The app should arrive some time in the next few weeks, per the report, but what isn’t at all clear is what kind of incentive will draw users in. Facebook’s goal here is to provide a forum for open discussion where users don’t have to worry about people associated their comments with their actual identity – think Secret or Whisper, but given the project is apparently headed by Branch product manager Josh Miller, we’re more likely to see something resembling Reddit with its discussion trees and nested comments. Allowing for open discussion certainly has its benefits, but it also invites the threat of potential bullying, and a tendency towards the spreading of malicious rumors. It’s clear that other social networking sites benefit from offering users a degree of anonymity – Reddit’s success is tribute to that fact. But what isn’t clear is how Facebook’s offering will differ enough to draw in a new user base, especially given the existing active, anonymous communities that already exist elsewhere on the web. Facebook will have a tough time convincing users that their anonymity is their top priority, given their rigorous insistence on users sharing actual biographical details with them on their main network, with the guiding intent of building a social graph that accurately represents the mass of people who make it up. Facebook has repeatedly been called out for privacy concerns and policy changes which are perceived as leaving users more exposed. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckberberg even said in an interview on stage with TechCrunch in 2010 that if he had the opportunity to do it over, he’d have made . Times change, of course, and a renewed interest in privacy has led to the success of the social networks mentioned above, as well as to the rise of Snapchat and other messaging platforms. But Facebook recently re-iterated its commitment to its real names policy (with the addendum that they be either legal or assumed) in a . While the new Facebook is eager to cover a number of areas of opportunity identified outside its original comfort zone, to varying degrees of success, an FB take on anonymous networking seems particularly ill-suited for groundswell success. If the report is accurate and Facebook does indeed go ahead with a launch in the next little while, the most interesting thing to look for will be the ‘hook’ that the company is using to differentiate its product, and overcome user perception of its existing track record around anonymity. We contacted Facebook to see if they have any more information to share about the supposed new app, but they responded only via a spokesperson that they don’t comment on rumors or speculation. |
Israeli Startup Scene Thriving Despite Conflict | Christine Magee | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | Investments in Israeli startups climbed to near record highs in the third quarter, even as the country was in the throes of the worst violence it has seen in years. Venture investments in Israel-based companies have not only increased in number of deals – with a near 40% rise this quarter over last- but more than tripled the total amount invested in Q1 of 2014. And this doesn’t account for the hundreds of venture-backed Israeli startups or the Silicon Valley.
“Basically it did not create any disruption,” says Chemi Peres, managing partner at , of the recent violence. “The high-tech industry continued to be vibrant, and we never delayed a product or missed a milestone,” Peres attests, adding that the single time he has feared for the safety of a team was in 2001, when one of Pitango’s New York-based companies survived the World Trade Center attacks. While it seems plausible that regional instability would hinder deals or deter investors, “the bottom line is that it comes with the turf,” says , Israeli entrepreneur and startup mentor. “Even when it’s quote-unquote peaceful here there’s always violence – we’re surrounded by enemies – but there are more entrepreneurs per capita in Israel than in any other country, and the innovation is really off the charts.” “This appetite for innovation and breaking the rules a little bit is appealing to U.S. companies” says Bruce Haymes, SVP of Business Development at , suggesting that Israel’s instability may not be a negative factor at all. The global information and measurement company launched Israeli incubator just over a year ago as its first step into the world of venture capital, beating out many Israel-based multinationals for a . “In our facility they converted our safe room into a conference room and teams worked out of the safe room for periods of time,” says Haymes. “People adapt and they continue to work.” If outside investors are still weary, Israeli VCs are raising new funds to sustain the ecosystem without international assistance. just closed a $150 million fund to invest in early-stage Israeli companies, which according to managing partner was raised during the three months of war with very little difficulty.
Although the press tends to separate the Israeli discussion into two separate dialogues – the Israel of innovation and the Israel of war – the two are intimately linked. “There’s a war but at the same time the innovation that led to the success in the military campaign is just technology,” explains Michael Eisenberg of . From the Israeli army’s use of SMS messages – warning civilians in Gaza to evacuate prior to air strikes, to the apps launched during the height of the war to or – it is clear that many Israelis turned to tech to combat increasing violence. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip do not have the same access to technology. Lacking an , over two thousand Palestinians were killed and thousands more wounded in comparison to the 68 Israeli deaths recorded in the seven-week span. The majority of Israeli entrepreneurs receive their technical training in the military, which serves as a psuedo-accelerator to develop young Israelis into adept entrepreneurs with technical skills and practical experience. partner Daniel Cohen says that a lot of the entrepreneurs they back come out of the military, but adds that recently they’re starting to see many more 2nd and 3rd generation founders. The connection between military training and startup success, however, means that a large group of Israel’s population is excluded from the burgeoning civilian tech scene. These are the 1.7 million Israeli Arabs, nearly 20% of the population, many of whom are highly skilled and highly educated. To address this gap, Pitango’s has helped launched Al Bawader, an investment fund with backing from the Israeli government, as well as , both dedicated to backing Israeli Arab entrepreneurs that are targeting the Arabic-speaking population. “As a small country that mostly focuses on science and technology, we cannot allow ourselves to leave these minorities out of the circle,” says Peres, advocating for Israel to one, leverage inclusivity to raise national productivity, and two, focus on global markets, in order to retain its place at the forefront of global innovation. Arabic speakers are believed to be the fourth largest language group of Internet users, following English, Chinese, and Spanish language groups, and the 300 million people in the Middle East have an average age of 25. The numbers alone signify a potentially massive opportunity for investors and founders alike. But many of Israel’s most active VCs are choosing to take a more passive approach, maintaining the position that they will invest in Arab entrepreneurs if the business opportunity is good but will not seek them out. “A lot of people are skeptical about the Middle East and don’t think it’s time to invest,” says Peres, “but my answer to them is this: 25 years ago it was not realistic to invest in China, 15 years ago it was not realistic to invest in Turkey, and 10 years ago Africa did not look so promising. We decided to be forerunners and invest.”
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HAXLR8R Increases Seed Funding For Its Next Round Of Startups | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | Hardware accelerator that it plans to offer companies in its next batch and beyond further options when considering taking seed funding and joining its program. Starting with it’s upcoming sixth batch, startup founders will have the option to take $25,000 in exchange for 6% of their companies (the previous rate) or $100,000 in exchange for 9%, giving them more capital to work with for testing and production. In addition to its new funding options, the accelerator is also moving into a bigger office in Shenzen and has hired f to run its accelerator program. HAXLR8R into its accelerator program, though 60% of the startups that have or are currently participating have come from the United States. Its next batch, which runs from January through May 2015, is |
Division Furtive Introduces A Line Of Super-Secret High Tech Watches | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | As an International Man of Mystery I’m often parachuted into dangerous places where I only have my wits, my iPhone, my iPad Mini, my protein bars, my suitcase full of clothes, my special travel socks, my hair gel, my toothpaste, some magazines, and my Advil to protect me. Now I hope to have a watch. Originally announced in , these odd watches are a mix of low and high tech. Designed to look like the guts of a 1970s jet fighter, you tell the time in up to three time zones by looking at bright LEDs that light up along the face. The LEDs double as a flashlight as well and can brighten your clandestine roaming to the minibar for a Toblerone. The coolest thing, however, is the setting mechanism. The watch connects to your cellphone through a light sensor and a special app with synchronize with your watch automatically by flashing the time. This means you never have to press tiny buttons on the side of the piece to set it. Created by Gabriel Menard, the watch pays homage to a Bondian not-so-distant past where Nixie tubes were the norm and enemy henchmen could bite through iron bars. Menard is looking to raise $50,000 and is at $13,000 right now. The watch costs $295 and runs on a single AAA battery, which means this thing is pretty darn big. However it pays to have a huge watch in order to deflect the bullets shot at you by evil henchmen as you go down to the hotel bar to eat free peanuts and run up a massive margarita bill. International Man of Mystery-ing, after all, makes a body thirsty.
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Warren Buffett Says Hillary Is Going To Run — And Win | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | Warren Buffett told 400 of some of the world’s top women in leadership at the in California today that Hillary Clinton will run for president in 2016. The Oracle from Omaha speculated in an on stage interview with his long-time friend and senior editor-at-large for Fortune, Carol Loomis, that Clinton will wait to announce her run as late as possible. Buffett was adamant that the former First Lady and Secretary of State will not only run but that she will also win the presidential race this time around. “Hillary’s going to win…I’d bet money on it,” he told the crowd. He also mentioned he believes Mitt Romney will be running again. Several Fortune staff and audience members tweeted about it his statements: "Hillary is going to run." -Buffet at — Alan Murray (@alansmurray) Carol Loomis: Is Hillary going to win? Buffett: Yes, I'll bet money on it. — Julia Boorstin (@JBoorstin) Warren Buffett says Hillary will run n Romney is interested. — Mary Civiello (@ccgmary) Clinton went on a Silicon Valley tour this summer, visiting the houses of Google, Facebook and Twitter to possibly lay the seed for financial asks from the tech elite in a 2016 Presidential bid. Buffett gave money to both President Obama’s and Clinton’s campaigns in 2008. |
Scripps Acquires WeatherSphere, Publisher Of 3 Top 10 Weather Apps On iTunes | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | , the company behind the #1 Paid weather application on iOS, and maker of three of the Top 10 Paid weather apps as well as three of the Top 20 Grossing weather apps, has been acquired by the E.W. Scripps Co. The portfolio of apps will live on following the deal’s closure, and will complement Scripps’ existing StormShield paid weather application. Term of the deal are not being disclosed. Combined, WeatherSphere’s apps saw a total of 3 million users. WeatherSphere founder and CEO Raghav Gupta tells us that he will continue to lead and now grow the team of six in Mountain View, expanding the WeatherSphere brand and apps. Scripps, which hosts a portfolio of TV, print and digital media brands was interested in the WeatherSphere properties because it understands that today’s consumers aren’t necessarily turning to TV stations anymore to get their weather news – even during emergencies. WeatherSphere has quite a bit of experience serving a user base that looks to mobile apps and alerts when faced with bad weather and storms. In fact, Gupta , the idea to develop the WeatherSphere brand full-time came after deadly tornadoes hit Joplin, Missouri in 2011. One of the apps he was working on at the time alerted users to nearby bad weather, and the app was all of a sudden hit with a surge of downloads from those looking to get real-time information about the location of the tornadoes. He increased the price of the app to $4.99 to save the servers from the load, and a business was born. “I began to research this further, and found that no one in Silicon Valley is looking at the weather space from a technology point of view,” Gupta explained of his move into the weather app business. In the years since, the company has developed a suite of applications including , , , and , as well as apps aimed at outdoor enthusiasts which let them monitor weather as it relates to hunting, fishing, ocean sports (via a Tides app), and more. The apps not only inform you of weather patterns and events in real-time, they can also be used for more practical concerns – for example, can navigate you around heavy storms so you don’t get stuck on highways due to heavy snowfall. The majority the apps are paid, and as noted above, maintain consistent positions in the App Store’s Top Paid and Top Grossing charts. Last year, Gupta told us the apps were profitable and the company had turned down funding requests from VCs. That remains the case, which begs the question, “why sell?” “The main reasons for selling are that Scripps will invest more in the business and help grow the team in Mountain View,” says Gupta. “And, it being a media company, will provide us the marketing and visibility boost that will significantly enhance the WeatherSphere brand in a short amount of time.” |
Hardware Battlefield Participants To Receive Exhibition Space At CES As They Compete For $50,000 | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | I’m very excited to announce that TechCrunch is now an official media partner at CES 2015, which means big things for our startup competition, Hardware Battlefield. Startups chosen to participate in Hardware Battlefield will now receive exhibition space free of charge in CES’ startup venue, Eureka Park. They will also receive four free exhibitor passes to CES. The winning startup receives $50,000 and the Hardware Battlefield Metal Man trophy. This is the second year in a row we’ve held Hardware Battlefield at the Consumer Electronics Show. Like the Startup Battlefields held at Disrupt conferences, panels of industry experts and investors will choose a startup to win $50,000 and the Hardware Battlefield Metal Man trophy. Hardware Battlefield entry is free and is open to all companies who are planning to launch (crowdfund or ship) a hardware product in the two-week window before or after January 10. We highly encourage launching your product for the first time on our stage so it receives the biggest impact. At the time of application, companies must have a functional prototype to demo to the selection committee. In selecting final contestants, we will give preference to companies that launch for the first time to the public and press through our competition. We consider new products from existing companies to be significant. Companies launching new feature sets do not qualify. We welcome startups from around the globe to submit their startups for consideration! The application process is now open and will close on October 30, 2014. Apply . |
This Is The New Squarespace | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | has just announced a brand new version of its product called Squarespace 7. Obviously, the interface of the service (which gives users a full suite of site publishing/e-commerce tools) looks refreshed, but it’s the new features that really differentiate between this and Squarespace 6, launched all the way back in 2012. For instance, now offers a side-by-side view for the interface and the content, letting you make changes to the website with a live preview as you’re doing it. This is a big leap from Squarespace 6, where users were editing their site blindly without looking at what the site actually looks like. Going beyond a split screen/live preview editing experience, the new Squarespace also offers little annotations on the actual website at any given time, so you can click on any editable element and make a change without ever using the site manager. Another interesting editing tool is called “device view.” This allows the editor to resize their desktop browser window and automatically see the way their website looks on any given device. As the window gets smaller, Squarespace 7 automatically resizes the site down to an iPad view, and then an iPhone view. Squarespace is also announcing an integration with Getty Images, giving users access to tens of millions of images to use on their website for just $10. At the live press conference, this addition got quite the round of applause. The company is also integrating with Google Apps. This will let users set up email accounts, schedule events, etc. Alongside the launch, the company has unveiled 15 new category templates for niche websites focused on various verticals, such as weddings or restaurants. Plus, people who need to build a one-off page, splash page, or cover page now have a brand new tool to do so. Squarespace 7 includes a splash page builder with 10 new templates of its own, which can be added to any existing Squarespace site. The launch of Squarespace 7 also marks the official beta exit of the company’s developer program, meaning that the platform will only continue to get more robust as more developers sign on. was founded all the way back in 2004, but has truly found its stride in the past few years. At the Superbowl last year, Squarespace was one of the smallest companies (relatively) to have a commercial during the big game. And in April, Squarespace pulled in another $40 million in funding, bringing that to $78.5 million raised in total. The company has also singed a lease on a 100,000 square foot space in the West Village as a new headquarters. [gallery ids="1066739,1066740,1066741,1066742,1066744,1066745"] |
It’s Decision Day For Airbnb in San Francisco | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 10 | 7 | Today, San Francisco’s board of supervisors is voting on how to legalize and regulate short-term rentals on platforms like Airbnb. It’s a critical moment for Airbnb because some of its most attractive and lucrative markets are in the world’s top-tier cities, many of which suffer from chronic housing shortages. San Francisco, which is currently embroiled in anti-eviction and anti-gentrification battles amid a tech boom, is also the company’s home turf. Even though Airbnb has been around since 2008, it’s been technically illegal to do short-term stays for less than 30 days through the platform. [ OK, under the current regime, you can do it legally, but Obviously, probably almost no one does this.] The city hasn’t been able to come to a consensus on whether and how to legalize it, even as the company’s footprint has grown enormously. A San Francisco Chronicle and Connotate report earlier this year with two-thirds of them being entire houses or apartments. To put that number into perspective, to keep up with its annual rate of population growth of roughly 10,000 new residents per year this decade so far. The city hasn’t been able to do that, even as have been added since 2010. That said, most of the Airbnb units appear to be occasionally rented out, although there were a few hundred listings that seemed to have heavy use. The regulatory effort, led by the city’s board of supervisors president and State Assembly candidate David Chiu, has taken two years. It’s a pretty thankless task. This is a contentious land-use battle in a city with a history of contentious land-use fights, and it’s hard for me to see how anyone could come up with a solution that would make everyone happy. Chiu wrote an op-ed today explaining This in theory should cut down the profit margins to a point where you wouldn’t hemorrhage additional residential housing units. Rentals where the host is present wouldn’t be subject to this limit. Hosts have to pay a $50 fee and register with the city Planning Department. The resident can’t charge more than they’re paying to their current landlord, which might create all sorts of interesting price distortions in the local Airbnb market. For violations, hosts would get charged increasing penalties for every violation. After repeated violations, they’d be forced the de-list, and if they continue, they could be charged civil penalties of up to $1,000 per day. Even with all of these changes, there is a whole cast of unlikely allies from the city tenants union to the landlord-representing apartment rentals association that are unhappy with Chiu’s legislation. They organized a demonstration last Friday. They argue it’s too hard to tell or enforce which listings are hosted versus un-hosted. Airbnb supporters, some of whom are part of an astro-turfing effort called , have opposed this and have written in dozens of letters explaining how The planning department will have responsibility for making sure that hosts and platforms follow the rules, but they and the Department of Building Inspections have been unable to do this for the past six years partially because they don’t have the bandwidth. Randy Shaw of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic pointed out that , which isn’t enough people to monitor thousands of rentals. San Francisco’s fee is also lower than what other comparable cities charge. Airbnb is also required to notify its hosts of the law. But there’s nothing they’re required to do in their reservation flow that would stop hosts from renting out their properties for more than 90 days a year (which would be an easy thing to build). The Chiu legislation makes it the host’s responsibility to keep two years of personal records on their whereabouts and hosting activities, in case they’re investigated for a violation. The enforceability is also reactive, rather than pro-active. Residents have to submit complaints, and this adds to a backlog at the planning department. The head of the tenants union has tried to crack down on about two dozen landlords, who appear to have converted entire building to vacation rentals. But they’ve been waiting six months for a decision, . Critics want to have a private right of action to go after and sue hosts independently. Understandably, hosts and platforms like Airbnb oppose this because they fear it would be abused. A few high-profile citizen lawsuits could have an enormous chilling effect on the entire market. While Airbnb now says it’s going to pay the city’s 14 percent hotel tax going forward, the coalition estimates that these platforms owe $25 million in back taxes. If Airbnb did this, it might set a precedent that other cities would fight for and it’s unclear how much their back taxes would add up to globally. Overall, I’ve been talking with a lot of the different parties throughout the legislative process over the past several months. Early on, my understanding was that Airbnb wouldn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach toward regulation and community engagement. Some cities, like beach towns, are highly dependent on tourism revenue and so they’re not as likely to put in rental limits. However, in cities like New York and San Francisco, there is a very real and valid concern that Airbnb is eating into an already tight housing supply. Airbnb has downplayed these effects. Here’s the deal: about one-third of the San Francisco’s 376,000 housing units are owner occupied, and then a little under half are rent-controlled. So the city’s market-rate rents are really based off of roughly 30,000 to 40,000 units and — even higher than New York’s. So 5,000 listings matters a lot and Airbnb adds pressures on the margins, even if they aren’t the core reason for the city’s housing shortage. The company has been disingenuous about this. The planning department on the number of nights that properties are rented across the city. But this doesn’t appear to be in the Chiu legislation. The public debate has mostly been operating off the Chronicle and Connotate’s study, which is incomplete. Airbnb basically responded by Another company called BeyondPricing, a San Francisco-based startup that optimizes pricing for Airbnb hosts, estimated over the summer that That puts it at parity with hotel occupancy rates. New York has pushed Airbnb harder by subpoenaing the company. That compelled Airbnb to crack down on thousands of hosts and . While I have used Airbnb all over the world as a traveler and it’s been wonderful staying with glass-blowers in Shanghai and reggae musicians in Bordeaux, I think that cities and the public have the right to know if and how much of their residential housing stock might be getting eroded by short-term rentals. Zoning for residential, commercial and hotel uses is a complex practice that has a 100 years of history in the United States. Urban governments, planners and the public, especially in San Francisco, go through very deliberative discussions over the look, feel and make-up of their communities. The public has a right to the data to understand whether this legislation — if approved — will actually work. |
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