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Kickstarter Chairman Perry Chen’s Next Act Is The Non-Profit Website Dollar A Day | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 10 | 1 | and assuming the role of chairman at the wildly successful crowdfunding company, Perry Chen’s next online act is launching , a site aimed at educating the public on the wide world of non-profit giving and volunteering. Dollar a Day began as a mostly volunteer project that Chen started with a few other friends from the tech industry and New York community to educate and finance non-profits. Everyone who signs up for the site commits to donate $30 a month to the non-profits that the site features every week. The first month of non-profits that the site is featuring is up , with non-profits ranging from the disaster relief supply and distribution organization to the technical wizards at , which design high-tech solutions to the problems people face in developing nations, to , which provides support to small tenant farmers to the education and tutoring organization launched by Dave Eggers’ . “For us, Dollar a Day is an education platform,” Chen says. “It’s a way to get people to discover nonprofits that they might not have heard of. From there they can learn more about the non-profit and interact directly.” People can subscribe to the group’s email newsletter for free, which gives a daily, one-paragraph description of the featured non-profit. From there, folks can decide whether they want to engage with that organization directly, or just contribute to the cause. Chen and his merry band of volunteer do-gooders have a few requirements for any non-profit that would be featured on the site or in the newsletter. They must be 501(c)(3) organizations in good financial health, addressing one of six key areas. Dollar a Day will feature non-profits addressing problems in education, health, economic development, arts & culture, the environment, and human rights, according to Chen. A full list of criteria is available on the website. The organization has a full-time staff of two, with Cassie Marketos running support and David Leeds handling non-profit research. The other members of the team are Zack Sears, Tieg Zaharia, and Ben Stone, who serve on the organization’s board. “We built this to be very simple and very small, but to have a big impact. You want a sound structure and you want to solve the problems that exist,” Chen says. “We’re not trying to grow this as big as possible in terms of hiring a bunch of people… We’re trying to let people know that Dollar a Day is a discovery and education platform. People can learn about non-profits that they might not be familiar with and take it from there.” |
Facebook Apologizes To LGBT Community And Promises Changes To Real Name Policy | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 1 | After weeks of backlash over Facebook’s real name policy, namely from members of the LGBT community who have had their Facebook pages suspended due to drag names, Facebook has met with members of the community and apologized for any hardship they might have caused. Facebook’s VP of Product today on Facebook apologizing (on behalf of the company, it seems) for any pain caused, and explaining how this situation came to be. The statement also included promises to improve the current real name policy to include all different types of people without risking the safety of other users. You can read the whole post below, but the gist of the explanation goes as follows: A single user flagged hundreds of Facebook pages of drag queens ( ) for using fake names, and as part of standard operating procedure, Facebook did a sweep of the profiles without realizing the attack pattern against drag queens using drag names on their Facebook profiles. However, Facebook met with a group of people from the LGBT community today to discuss ways to make the system better. This will include “better tools for authenticating the Sister Romas of the world while not opening up Facebook to bad actors,” along with taking further “measures to provide much more deliberate customer service to those accounts that get flagged so that we can manage these in a less abrupt and more thoughtful way.” Thank you for listening to community. Greatly appreciate your willingness to listen & respond to concerns. — David Campos (@DavidCamposSF) Here’s a copy of the from Cox: I want to apologize to the affected community of drag queens, drag kings, transgender, and extensive community of our friends, neighbors, and members of the LGBT community for the hardship that we’ve put you through in dealing with your Facebook accounts over the past few weeks.
In the two weeks since the real-name policy issues surfaced, we’ve had the chance to hear from many of you in these communities and understand the policy more clearly as you experience it. We’ve also come to understand how painful this has been. We owe you a better service and a better experience using Facebook, and we’re going to fix the way this policy gets handled so everyone affected here can go back to using Facebook as you were.
The way this happened took us off guard. An individual on Facebook decided to report several hundred of these accounts as fake. These reports were among the several hundred thousand fake name reports we process every single week, 99 percent of which are bad actors doing bad things: impersonation, bullying, trolling, domestic violence, scams, hate speech, and more — so we didn’t notice the pattern. The process we follow has been to ask the flagged accounts to verify they are using real names by submitting some form of ID — gym membership, library card, or piece of mail. We’ve had this policy for over 10 years, and until recently it’s done a good job of creating a safe community without inadvertently harming groups like what happened here.
Our policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name. The spirit of our policy is that everyone on Facebook uses the authentic name they use in real life. For Sister Roma, that’s Sister Roma. For Lil Miss Hot Mess, that’s Lil Miss Hot Mess. Part of what’s been so difficult about this conversation is that we support both of these individuals, and so many others affected by this, completely and utterly in how they use Facebook.
We believe this is the right policy for Facebook for two reasons. First, it’s part of what made Facebook special in the first place, by differentiating the service from the rest of the internet where pseudonymity, anonymity, or often random names were the social norm. Second, it’s the primary mechanism we have to protect millions of people every day, all around the world, from real harm. The stories of mass impersonation, trolling, domestic abuse, and higher rates of bullying and intolerance are oftentimes the result of people hiding behind fake names, and it’s both terrifying and sad. Our ability to successfully protect against them with this policy has borne out the reality that this policy, on balance, and when applied carefully, is a very powerful force for good.
All that said, we see through this event that there’s lots of room for improvement in the reporting and enforcement mechanisms, tools for understanding who’s real and who’s not, and the customer service for anyone who’s affected. These have not worked flawlessly and we need to fix that. With this input, we’re already underway building better tools for authenticating the Sister Romas of the world while not opening up Facebook to bad actors. And we’re taking measures to provide much more deliberate customer service to those accounts that get flagged so that we can manage these in a less abrupt and more thoughtful way. To everyone affected by this, thank you for working through this with us and helping us to improve the safety and authenticity of the Facebook experience for everyone. |
A New App Called Offtime Helps You Unplug Without Missing Out | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 1 | Apparently, navel-gazing about how much time you’re spending on your phone is a thing now. We’ve already seen iOS apps like and appear to shame you into self-restraint by alerting you to how many minutes you spend staring at your little screen every day, or how many times per day you pull out your phone and take a look. Now, it’s Android’s turn. A new app called , however, takes things a step further – it doesn’t just identify your bad habits, it also helps you break them. Based in Berlin, the idea for the app comes from a psychologist, now Offtime CEO, Alexander Steinhart, and has been built in collaboration with the Humboldt University of Berlin, plus co-founder and designer Michael Dettbarn. The team is funded with governmental EXIST funding, but is planning a Series A round for later this year, or early 2015. Why the funding? Because unlike its earlier competitors, Offtime thinks it may have stumbled upon a business model. Its goal is to sell a white-label version of the app to partners, like businesses who want to demonstrate they care about their employees’ work/life balance. At least one licensing partner is poised to launch in November, but Offtime isn’t yet permitted to disclose the names of those licensing its technology. The app is designed to let you unplug without missing urgent matters. It lets you whitelist contacts who able to pierce through your downtime, like your spouse or children, but otherwise shuts down apps, calls, texts, and emails. It can also auto-respond to incoming messages on your behalf, while maintaining a careful activity log of everything you missed while away so you can quickly catch up. Offtime also provides similar insights about your usage of your phone, as its predecessors did, charting out hours spent on the device, and even detailing which individual apps are the largest time-sucks. [gallery ids="1064751,1064750,1064749,1064748,1064747,1064746,1064745"] And while in Offline mode, the app is smart enough to identify certain patterns – like someone who dials you six times in a row probably has an emergency and needs to get through. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaAB0pSxdZs] A study at Humboldt University found that users were “unlocking” their phones 63 times per day. After using the app, that number declines – users unplugged for at least two hours per day, the study found. Attempting to sell this app to companies is an interesting path for Offtime to pursue, especially because changing employees’ mentality around work/life balance is something that really needs to come from the top down. Though companies will often say all the right things when it comes to this topic, employees still feel pressured to work at off times for a variety of reasons. One, because their higher-ups do, starting discussions and responding to emails after-hours, and scheduling meetings that eat into personal time. But also because many companies’ cultures are infused with “work ’till you drop” spirit – it’s so bad in some places that new hires are being offered “pre-vacations,” . In other words, employees are asked to take a vacation before they start, because employers know they won’t be encouraging staff to do so afterwards. Americans, the Slate article noted, leave over 500 million vacation days on the table each year, as they take only half the time they’re entitled to. In addition, with the recession and high unemployment rates, employees often worry about taking breaks, concerned they’ll be seen as expendable for doing so. Meanwhile, culturally, we’re often sent messages that promote work as more valuable than personal life. Take for example, “Lean In”: those in positions of power that afford them with easy access to things like round-the-clock child care encourage others who want to back down from taking on more responsibilities at work to stop doing so. The undercurrent of the message is that somehow, it’s women who are unconsciously , not the corporate culture and policies that undermine a balanced life. (In theory, those things would change if only more women could climb to the top!) But even unlimited personal funds can’t solve this problem. After all, if , who can? Solving the work/life problem is too big a challenge to put a small app from Berlin, which won’t even be able to work in the same way on the iPhone due to Apple’s policies. But can we at least applaud them for trying? Offtime is a free download . |
#GapGate Widens As Samsung Responds Saying Some Space Is To Be Expected | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 1 | Korean owners of the new Samsung Galaxy Note 4 have noticed that their brand new devices sport an unusual feature – a . The Gal Note 4, which hasn’t reached our shores, sold out on launch day. Now the gap appears to be a perfectly normal occurrence. Samsung even addresses the gap in their documentation, noting that some space is to be expected. In their documentation, the company writes: Samsung also told AndroidCentral that the “issue does not impact the functionality or quality of the Galaxy Note 4.” As some wags have noted, the gap allows users to carry their business cards right inside the phone and, perhaps, collect a little dust in there over time.
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The Windows 10 Technical Preview Expires In 196 Days | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 1 | Downloading the Windows 10 technical preview? You won’t be able to use it . That’s jolly, because the consumer-facing preview that will follow the current build will be out long before then. But it’s worth keeping in mind: Microsoft is working towards a mid-year release of Windows 10, so the April date is in within that range, but doesn’t mean altogether too much on its own. You could speculate that the operating system likely won’t come out that date, but at some point you leave the arena of reasonable speculation and start talking to yourself. You can snag the new code . I’ve been ruminating on the Windows 10 name since , and have decided to call the operating system Windows Air Gap — the company couldn’t just go to 9 because it needed to , so it went to 10 so it could shoot to be . That, I think, highlights precisely how far from Windows 8 Microsoft is walking, even as it keeps large quantities of the its current Windows platform in place. What is new is old and the old is new and let’s 10, in other words. But upgrade to the consumer preview before April 15, or you’ll be in trouble. |
Fab’s Jason Goldberg Talks Design And The Art Of The Pivot At Disrupt Europe | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 10 | 1 | . You can grab your ticket . A free Hackathon kicks off the event, which . Then, on the following Monday and Tuesday, we’ll have Startup Battlefield and an awesome lineup of speakers and panels. Among them will be , co-founder and CEO of design portal Fab, and now Hem. Goldberg knows a thing or two about starting companies — he’s done it five times now — and he knows about the art of the pivot when things don’t go quite the way you planned for them to — there are several of these under his belt, too. And he knows about building businesses in the U.S. but also in Europe. Goldberg’s latest company, , is a prime example of how Goldberg takes lemons and makes lemonade. A vertically integrated, online furniture portal, Hem designs, sells and distributes a selection of tables, chairs and other pieces, inspired by simple, modernist aesthetics. Hem is not headquartered not in the U.S. — where Goldberg is from — but in Berlin, Germany. . It didn’t start out of thin air. Goldberg’s last/other company, Fab, saw rapid growth after it opened for business in 2011, reaching a $1 billion valuation by 2013. Goldberg rode his unicorn into Europe and built up the business there, fast. But then, Fab and Goldberg stumbled on to a problem. Scaling a marketplace — where you work with hundreds of third-party merchants and have to maintain consistent stock and meet fluctuating demands — proved to be too much of a challenge. Yet instead of shutting up shop, Goldberg rethought how to go forward. With the backing of his investors, he bought a few companies that had been leaders in the furniture space, pared down the older business massively, repositioned and rebranded. The result is Hem, selling hundreds rather than thousands of items, with a much tighter grip on what is sold and how it is distributed. It’s a new roll of the dice for Fab, which has now ceased to exist outside of the U.S. Goldberg is now basing himself in Berlin, doubling down on the new venture. Join us in London to hear from Goldberg about the ups and downs of the e-commerce, what happens next to Fab, and why furniture and vertical integration are his chosen way forward. Whether your particular interest is at the e-commerce end of the startup spectrum or somewhere completely different, Goldberg is a great talker with miles (ahem, kilometers) of experience, and someone you will want to hear. Before Goldberg takes the stage as part of the two-day conference, Disrupt will kick off with the . TechCrunch Disrupt Europe will also bring the and to London. Startup Battlefield competitors pitch their companies live and on stage to innovators, investors and influencers in the tech community. TechCrunch identifies emerging companies to demo and compete for a prize of £30,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup. Last year , the London and Berlin-based startup behind the world’s first smart bike lock, was the winner and has gone on to launch its product. Previous Battlefield competitions have launched companies such as Dropbox, Mint.com, Yammer and Fitbit. Startup Alley offers another way for early-stage companies to gain exposure with a format that encourages both exhibiting and networking, as well as high visibility. Roughly 200 invited startups make up Startup Alley with companies showcasing on the Monday and Tuesday of the event. Find all the latest information on the . Grab a ticket and . To request media accreditation, email tcdisruptlondon [ @ ] balloupr.com |
Google Drops Compute Engine Prices By 10 Percent | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 10 | 1 | Earlier this year, Google massive price drops for all of its cloud computing services that were quickly matched by Amazon, Microsoft and others. Today, during Google’s event, the company’s senior VP Urs Hölzle announced yet another — but smaller — round of price drops centered around the company’s cloud computing service. All Compute Engine instance types will now cost about 10 percent less than before. Today’s announcement will surely result in yet another round of similar announcements from Google’s competitors, too. If the last skirmish in these price wars is any indication, Amazon will be the first to match Google’s cuts. The current pretty much match Google’s old prices exactly (though Amazon has a far wider range of options). A few days later, Microsoft Azure will match Amazon’s cuts. That’s Microsoft’s policy, after all. “We believe that compute — the core of any workload — should be simple and fast to provision, scale without effort, and be priced in accordance with Moore’s Law,” Hölzle said today. He also notes that the company is able to make these price cuts thanks to increased efficiency in its data centers and lower hardware costs. |
Skylanders Trap Team Review: Good Storytelling And Simple RPG Mechanics Succeed | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 1 | The ‘Toys to Life’ category has been a much-needed savior for the gaming and toy industry alike, bolstering sluggish sales for both by anticipating a huge demand for real-life action figures that can be ‘brought to life’ for use in digital games. Activision’s series pioneered the concept, and the originator is back with Trap Team, a new installment with the unique game mechanic of allowing players to ‘trap’ key villains in special physical play pieces, which makes them playable in-game as characters. That’s not the only trick Skylanders Trap Team has up its sleeve, however – the game is being billed as the first to launch simultaneous, completely identical games on both tablets and dedicated gaming consoles. Trap Team is available as a starter pack either for the standard Wii, PlayStation and Xbox consoles you know and love, or for the iPad 3 and higher, along with select Android and Kindle Fire tablets. The tablet version works across devices from various manufacturers, and comes with a Portal and dedicated controller that both use Bluetooth LE to connect, and are battery-powered so you can use them anywhere.
Skylanders developer Toys for Bob assured me, during an interview with founder Paul Reiche, that there was no time at which they felt they needed to cut features or rein in their ambitions for the project in order to deliver a satisfying experience on both iPad and console, and one that offered the full experience in both places. I tested the game both on PlayStation 4 and iPad mini with Retina Display, and it definitely seems like the same thing on both, with a few caveats. On iPad, you have to download new content like additional Skylander characters and some worlds and environments, while on the console everything is instantly available. This can be either mildly or very annoying, depending on your connection speed, but even with my fast home Wi-Fi some things took longer than others. The waiting is made less annoying by the fact that once you’ve downloaded something, it’s available and loads quickly the next time around. What’s great about the iPad version is that Vicarious Visions, the team behind the mobile app for Trap Team (and sister studio to Toys for Bob) has delivered a near-perfect mobile gaming experience, in that it can work as either a completely contained title with just the tablet and software, or expand into something a little more robust with the accessory Portal and controller hardware. Vicarious Visions co-founder Karthik Bala explained in an interview that designing an experience that required nothing else, and that could be easily packed up, moved and used anywhere was a key part of their vision for Trap Team for tablets. With an iPad mini with Retina display, I could use the entire Trap Team setup on my desk next to my workstation with little to no interference on my main screen, and aside from some aesthetic differences I noticed (fewer background assets, mostly), the tablet experience was the same as the one on the PS4. My saved games didn’t cross both, but character progress did (it sticks with the toys, of course) and you can still enjoy both versions at the same time. As for the game itself, it’s my introduction to the Skylanders series, and I have to say I was impressed by both the storytelling, and the level of quality when it comes to character animations is fantastic. Skylanders actually beats some of its rivals with more experience in animated storytelling, like Disney, when it comes to the cutscenes and overall game progression, and the humor and likability of its characters. The gameplay is repetitive and simple, but then again, this is a title aimed primarily at the 6-12 age bracket, and the puzzles it does provide are just complex enough to avoid coming off as insulting. The fun is in the grind, for more advanced players, and in levelling up your Skylanders to the cap of 20, along with unlocking their powers along the way. One knock against Trap Team is that it doesn’t up the level cap beyond what was introduced in last year’s Swap Force, and older Skylander toys don’t get improved abilities. The game also requires you to use the new Skylander Trap Master figures to unlock a good chunk of the game’s extra content, which means you’ll have to invest in new toys as a completionist, but then again these are mostly Hats and accessories and don’t take away from the core experience. Playing as villains is a nice, but mostly shallow experience in Trap Team, with no progression available for the baddies. But the idea of redeeming them and their ongoing narration via the Portal’s speaker is charming, and each at least has a sidequest that can “evolve” the character. Activision has also shown some welcome restraint, here: you don’t need a separate trap for each villain, just one of each elemental type, and you can shuffle character off and on to those. Skylanders Trap Team ends up being a game that’s fun to play, either alone or with a friend, that just so happens to also encourage a huge amount of accessory purchasing. I’m of the school of thought that if you’re going to be buying toys for your kids anyway, they might as well have some lasting value (Activision once again says these will be forward-compatible with new software in the series). And while I value the appeal to my nostalgia and existing habits that Disney’s Infinity series, and especially its new Marvel line bring, the work Activision is doing creating entirely original IP and weaving it into an actual narrative is impressive. If you’re a fan of the series, Trap Team won’t disappoint, and if you’re new to the game, this is as good a jumping off point as any. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 8 | null |
Google Voice Finally Supports MMS On AT&T, Sprint, And Nearly 100 Other Carriers | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | If you’ve ever tried to receive a picture message with your Google Voice number, you might’ve noticed something rather crucial: it… probably didn’t work. For the most part, MMS heading into the service would just vanish into the ether. No longer! According to a Plus post , Google Voice MMS work now on “AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Bell Canada, and many more” North American carriers. Notice the omission? While the full list of now-supported carriers hasn’t been published yet, it seemed odd that Verizon wasn’t name checked. Sure enough, it looks like they’re the only major U.S. carrier that hasn’t hopped on board. Without naming names, Wiesen asks anyone who works at an unsupported carrier to reach out for the sake of “text messaging interoperability.” While Google Voice MMS support has popped up from time to time on select carriers, it’s always been a bit of a crapshoot. Sometimes you could send an MMS to someone, but not an MMS from the same person — or vice versa. Sometimes it’d work one day, but not the next. With today’s (albeit quiet) announcement, it’ll hopefully be a lot more reliable moving forward. It still seems to be a bit wonky in our testing (some people get the pictures as links; others as photo attachments; some still not at all), but it’s a nice step in the right direction after a pretty long stretch of silence from the Google Voice team. One catch: because of all the behind-the-curtain trickery Google is doing to pull this off, group MMS doesn’t work quite like you’d expect. You’ll still receive them, but as a bunch of individual messages. Which kind of defeats the point. [Via and ] |
Ambi Climate Gives Any Air Conditioner Nest-Like Powers | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | wants to democratize smart home climate control with a device that brings learning climate management to standalone window air conditioner units, central air systems, freestanding systems or the single room machines more common in Europe and Asia, so long as the existing system can work with an IR-based blaster or remote. It originally launched in , but now it’s looking to expand its audience in North America. The hardware startup is kicking off its product launch on , aiming to raise $25,000 to make its project a reality. The team already has a functional prototype built, with a near-final design that features a small hub device with micro USB power supply, IR transmitters for communicating with air conditioning units, and 802.11n Wi-Fi, plus BLE for iBeacon functionality. The hub unit can receive commands from your devices via Wi-Fi and beam them through IR to your AC unit, but it’s not just a remote – it’s a learning system that’s meant to pick up on your arrival/leaving times, temperature preferences throughout the day, sunlight, internal and external temperature, movement and more to automate your home climate control. The startup has built its own proprietary software algorithms to make this possible, in addition to creating the sensor-laden Ambi Climate device. It tries to maximize the energy efficiency of your system while keeping things comfortable, and the founders claim that it can cut your energy bill by up to a third when used constantly. There aren’t any tools for installation as with other options like Nest, and it works even with apartment window air conditioners, so long as they’re new. The IR method might actually not be compatible with a lot of central air systems that Nest would work best for, so Ambi Climate might be well-positioned to pick up the parts of the market not covered by the Google-owned firm. Early backers can also pick one up for just $49 per unit, which is $100 less than the company expects to charge when they ship in June 2015. If you can’t wait, there’s a beta edition available for delivery by the end of November of this year, which is rare for a crowdfunded project. Ambi Climate is the product of Ambi Labs, a startup founded out of Hong Kong hackerspace Dim Sum Labs. CEO and co-founder Julian Lee has a long history of executive roles in the startup space and at Accenture. Chief Software Architect Timothy Chang was a developer at RIM as a student before moving on to become a software developer at MD provider The Institution. And Chief Hardware Engineer Paul Sykes has a history of designing hardware and software for the pharmaceutical industry and radio and TV broadcast. |
RosterBot Launches Mobile Apps To Organize Little League And Pickup Games | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | Nearly six years after its , and five months after raising $1 million in seed funding, the online organizational tool for little league and pickup games, has launched a mobile app for and . The company’s founders and met in a pick-up hockey league and developed the service as an online tool to organize pick-up hockey games around their towns. After RosterBot’s TechCrunch debut, Ian left the site alone, but it kept growing. Now, he estimates there are tens of thousands of active users on the service. So, now as the world moves mobile, RosterBot is following its customers onto the app stores. “We’re not interested right now in adding any of the business model stuff,” says Bell in an interview. “We’re really focused on growth. We are generating a bit of revenue through the transactional stuff.” The reason? It’s actually really expensive to organize pick-up games. To bring the equipment, rent the space, ensure that people show up and that you can actually get a league or a game going, says Bell. “A shitload of money gets lost, and dealing with that is a huge hit.” PayPal fulfills transactions, and using that platform is helpful for a nascent company that has users in 60 countries around the world. “Our obligation is to chip away at all those tediums involved in organizing,” Bell says. He hopes to introduce a gamification layer to the events on the site, in much the way has done for running and racing. “We can do that for really cool sports.” Watch a fancy video about RosterBot here: |
Nintendo 3DS Hacked To Work With A Gamecube Controller To Make Smash Bros Less Blister-Inducing | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | The new Super Smash Bros for Nintendo’s 3DS is pretty excellent — but for anyone who grew up playing the series on a full-sized controller, the 3DS’ control layout isn’t exactly… optimal. Blisters and tough-to-reach shoulder triggers aside, some players have managed to within a few weeks of the game’s demo release. Fear not! Someone has figured out how to get a proper GameCube controller working with the 3DS. All you need is a steady hand, some damn fine soldering skills, an Arduino and an utter disregard for warranties. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seAI9W9SYjo?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] The good news? The mod is quite cheap. Assuming you’ve already got the GameCube controller, you should be able to piece the rest together for under 15 bucks. The bad news? There’s a of intense tinkering going on here. If you don’t have at least a few dozen hours at a solder bench and a console mod or three under your belt, you probably don’t want to go near this one. Just be happy knowing that somewhere out there, is playing on a proper controller. If our warnings haven’t spooked you off yet, you can find the . [Via ] |
HP Pops 4.7%, Picks Up More Than $3B In Market Cap On Breakup News | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | Unlock that value. Following news and confirmation that HP , investors sent its shares soaring more than 5 percent, to $36.87, at the end of regular trading. That’s a of around $3 billion. Investors are enthused that the company is working to unlock whatever value may have been hidden inside of the conglomerated firm. HP’s printing and personal computing businesses will go into one bucket, while its enterprise hardware and services work will end up in a separate container. HP is pulling a Nokia. Call me the cynical bastard that I am, but I am always skeptical of of transactions like this. Ask yourself the following question: Which do you want more, ? Right. Whenever want to bust up some large corporation, I presume that they are looking to invest into that firm’s brightest spot at a cheaper implied price. They are not buying weak margin and, therefore, EPS baggage at the same time. Don’t call it selfish. Call it business. But here’s TechCrunch’s : HP’s PC business had a very strong quarter, with its revenue rising 12 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. Unit volume was up 13 percent, while laptop sales up 18 percent in terms of unit volume. Printing, Enterprise Services, Software, and HP Financial Services groups all saw their revenue decline. Aside from the PC business, HP’s other division to post positive year-over-year revenue growth was its Enterprise Group, which expanded 2 percent. For recent historical perspective, the company of 2014, but . So which part is stronger? PCs? That , but hardly strong. So what piece of HP is being broken out? Your guess is as good as mine. TechCrunch’s : HP is in the process of pushing buttons and pulling levers and trying things and hoping something sticks. Spinning off the organization into two companies is such a move. It’s worth stating that disruption is not a fait accompli of course. Companies can and have come back and HP still has resources and moves to make, but it’s feeling the sting of change and finding a way to transform a company the size of HP in the midst of a major industry shift, is not an easy task and Meg Whitman is facing a monumental challenge as she attempts to guide the company through it. The appears to expect the smaller companies to be more able to quickly execute and, in the eyes of Shebly Seyfrafi fof FBN securities, be larger “M&A” “opportunities.” He used “M&A permutations” in . Presumably the implication there is that if you break HP into two pieces, the chance that someone buys one or the other increases. I think that not a damn person knows how well these individual corporations are going to be able to execute, so I’ll spare any more jargon on the matter. That said, no divorce is clean. |
Alleged iPhone 6 Prototype Fetching Over $100,000 On eBay | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | How much would you pay for an iPhone prototype? $1,000? $10,000? How about $100,000? A 64 GB iPhone 6 said to be a prototype model . The seller claims that Verizon shipped him the device by mistake. iOS is not installed on the device. Instead, the interface shows a proprietary developer’s mode. He claims (and his pictures show) that the device lacks any of the markings traditionally found on the back of an iPhone. “I am also giving a 110% guarantee on this being an authentic Apple prototype device,” the seller says, adding “I cannot guarantee that it will make calls or that the camera will work. The device comes with the box, charger, headphones and wall charger as well as all the paperwork. In the past, companies have successfully lobbied eBay to remove listings of prototypes, yet this could be a different case since the seller claims to have been shipped the device by mistake. The auction has nearly 3 days left so Apple has plenty of time to take action if it chooses. |
The Washington Post Is Now Free On Amazon Kindles | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | The Washington Post as a free app on Amazon Kindle Fire tablets. The announcement comes a little more than a year after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos the the newspaper. According to a in Bloomberg Businessweek, the app was developed by a group inside the Post called Project Rainbow. The project, led by , will offer a curated selection of news and photographs. The app is currently free for download now on all larger tablets. As with WaPo’s other digital offerings, subscription rates will eventually kick in. The new Fire tablets will already have the app installed. Snapping up the paper seemed a bizarre move over a year ago. With lagging interest in print news, WaPo’s own figures just before the sale. So plans were murky at best as to what exactly Bezos would do with it. The Amazon CEO’s infusion of cash and new hires (over 100 in all) have breathed new life into the legendary paper. The newspaper had an increase of 63 percent in readership from a year before this last July, . “Reporters need to know that they will be supported, that their colleagues aren’t going to disappear and that they can do their job without being worried all the time about losing it. Optimism, like negativity, can be infectious,” executive editor of the Washington Post, Marty Baron . There’s already an app for iPhone+iPod Touch, Android and iPad, as well as the mobile web. All of those already offer a pretty robust selection of free select content from the print version of the paper, as well as a subscription format. Digital subscriptions to content on the web start at $14.99. Kindle offers other major newspaper apps such as USA Today and the New York Times for free on all Kindle Fire tablets. |
Foundation: Foursquare’s Product Future | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | In our latest interview, I sat down with Dennis Crowley at Foursquare’s New York headquarters. Dennis was on our Foundation series , and we discussed some of the exciting changes that have taken place since then, including the . We also explored the direction consumer reviews are taking, and Foursquare’s focus on refining personalized local search. Dennis on his product vision: “The version of Foursquare we have now is probably the best one we’ve ever built. The unique opportunity for Foursquare is notifications. What does a personalized local search app look like when you don’t have to think about using it all of the time, one that teaches you a little bit about the world everyday?” |
Of Course There Is A Gold BlackBerry Passport | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | Nothing screams spreadsheets and secure communication more than . We reached out to BlackBerry to confirm the authenticity and availability of the device, but have yet to hear back. |
This App Avoided Being Made Useless By Using The iPhone’s Charger (But Not For Charging) | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | Remember Cycloramic? It was one of . It allows you to take hands-free 360-degree selfie panoramics by using the iPhone’s vibrating motor to propel it around your desk. A key component of this trick, though, was that the last few iPhones have had squared edges. Those edges allowed the phone to be placed upright for proper pano-selfie framing. Otherwise, you’re just taking a picture of your ceiling. But wait! The iPhone 6 has round edges. It can’t stand upright on its own. Cycloramic is doomed, right? Nope! As it turns out, people who come up with super clever ideas can also come up with super clever workarounds. The trick? Grab your iPhone charger, rest your phone between the prongs, and fire away. Ta-da! Hands-free, 360-degree selfies on the iPhone 6, rounded edges be damned. Is it just as slick as the iPhone 5/5s versions? Nah. Bringing a second piece into the mix ruins the magic a bit, given that you aren’t always going to have your wall charger on hand. But it’s a damned clever way for them to fight off the obsolescence that has been otherwise thrust upon them. |
Vistaprint Buys $25 Million Minority Stake In São Paulo-Based Printi | Julie Ruvolo | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | Global printing heavyweight Vistaprint has acquired a $25 million minority stake in Brazilian web-printing startup . The purchase marks Vistaprint’s entry into Latin America, after assuming market leadership in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Vistaprint bought out all of Printi’s investors’ stake and a portion of the founders’ stake in the company, but the founders still maintain a majority stake of the company and control the board. “They wanted to acquire us 100 percent but we wanted to make it closer to what a VC deal would look like,” said co-founder and co-CEO tells me on a call from Recife. “We’re staying on board and staying completely independent.” Vistaprint’s CEO Robert Kearne and VP of Portfolio Management Jeremie Profeta will join Pencz and his co-founder and co-CEO on the board. “Our investment is an important strategic step and we look forward to growing aggressively in Brazil,” said Profeta. The investment comes at precisely the time Printi is outgrowing its model of outsourcing fulfillment to large printing factories, and the founders decided to vertically integrate production and construct their own printing factory in São Paulo. “We had VC term sheets, but it came down to the fact that our business is a little unusual as a tech company,” says Pencz. “We have a large manufacturing component, and in a lot of the VC conversations we were having, they did not understand the factory component. We admire the manufacturing expertise Robert has developed at Vistaprint and thought this could be a valuable asset to us once Printi reaches a certain scale.” Printi made $3 million in revenue for 2013, and is on track to exceed $10 million this year, fulfilling about 6,000 orders per month. A source close to the company estimates gross margins at 40 percent. Pencz says business has grown gradually, with the help of high repurchase rates from loyal customers, and has been operating at more or less break-even since last year. Printi’s only prior outside investment (Pencz and Hagenbuch put in about $50,000 of their own money to build the first website) was a round with participation from Greenoaks Capital, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, serial Brazilian entrepreneur Fabrice Grinda and Groupon Brazil co-founder Florian Otto. Mate Penzc (l) and Florian Hagenbuch The $25 million investment capital from Vistaprint will fund the construction of their primary fulfillment factory in São Paulo and also go towards B2B marketing with a mix of digital advertising, direct mail, radio and sponsorships, as well as to scale production. They are also beginning to experiment with individual packaging solutions, like batches of private-label, customized boxes. “Over the next couple of years we have plans to expand to the rest of Latin America,” Pencz says. “And now we are Vistaprint’s exclusive partner for the region.” How did Pencz and co-founder Hagenbuch, London finance executives who met as summer interns at Goldman Sachs in 2008, decide to attack the B2B printing industry in Brazil? “It was opportunistic,” says Pencz. “Florian grew up in Brazil, and his father worked in the printing industry on the manufacturing side for Heidelberg Druck in Europe. What I found appealing is that it’s a niche market [$15 billion by Pencz’s estimate] but big enough to build a big business.” At a time of otherwise accelerated foreign interest in flashy viral-growth startups like Peixe Urbano, Groupon and Vostu in Brazil, Pencz says he felt uncomfortable going into something that felt too hot. “We just didn’t see the fundamental demand for these models down here. So we said, what’s the least sexy thing we can do in the least sexy, most backward-looking, anti-innovation market we can find?” When Printi launched in 2012, Pencz called Brazil’s printing industry “extremely corrupt,” and claimed it was “stuck in the 1980’s.” He says it hasn’t fundamentally changed in the two years since. “All of the same descriptions still apply.” Consumers with print needs are relegated to the neighborhood selection of mom-and-pop printers. Printing a single black-and-white page at one such store in Ipanema Beach will run you close to $0.50. “In B2B you also have a pricing issue and a transparency issue,” explains Pencz. “You can’t really call up the big printing company if you’re a small or medium-size business and get price quotes directly. If you’re Coca-Cola, then you can have a direct relationship to the printing company and decent pricing transparency, but not small/medium-size businesses. You have to go through a print broker. So you have middle-men managing client relationships and intermediating transactions and turning the process extremely manual.” Pencz says that the throwback status of Brazil’s printing industry is reinforced by the fact that “printing in general in Brazil is still growing at decent rates, so some businesses are hurting, but not enough to try to innovate.” Printi is the only player in Brazil’s web-printing space, although Pencz says a number of companies operating offline storefronts have launched websites. “But none of them have grown significantly because it’s an additional channel that competes with their main channel. So by definition, showing your prices online and being able to quote clashes with having hundreds of sales people running around and extracting highest price from your customers. It’s a massive channel conflict, and nobody is willing to sacrifice main sales channel to do volume online.” Printi takes about 5-6 percent of its annual revenue from such offline companies like print franchises and coffee shops, says Pencz. A partnership in 2012 with offline print network AlphaGraphics was expected to bring in as much as $10 million in revenue per year, but Pencz says they encountered too many barriers to getting an offline partner to bring them orders at scale. Printi currently services about 35,000 active customers in Brazil. While there are some big-name outliers like Santander, Netshoes, Baby.com.br and Intel, which send small or last-minute orders to Printi, Pencz says about 20,000-25,000 of their clients are small companies or independent professionals, and he doesn’t expect that to change. “It’s extremely difficult to change the purchasing behavior of the big guys. They want to pay later, or pay on different terms, and the bigger the company, the more bureaucratic it gets. Our path to least resistance is to find more small and medium-size clients.” Printi also has no foreseeable plans to expand to the B2C market — for example, Kinko’s services offline. “What matters to us is recurring volumes,” Pencz maintains. “You have to buy at least 100 of anything you order. And good customer service, he insists, is what drives a lot of the repurchase rate. “A lot of people call before or after they make a purchase. It’s a relatively complex product to sell online.” Of about 50 employees, six are dedicated to phone support. “The traditional market is fraught with bad service and a lot of resistance to attend to customer need, so we decided to offer exactly the opposite,” says Pencz. “Even if the problem occurred on the side of the customer, say they misspelled something on their business card, often we’ll simply reprint it. It’s part of our company ethos. We thought it would lead to a lot of customer complaints and fraud, but that has not been the case at all. We have a 2-3 percent complaint rate, and we take care of it. For us it’s a customer acquisition tool, and one of our cheapest acquisition channels.” Printi spends about 10-15 percent of its monthly revenue on marketing, including search campaigns targeting customers dissatisfied with offline print services. With the new investment round, Printi is the most heavily funded of a growing crop of startups making solid progress in unsexy, service-facing businesses in Brazil, including insurance comparison site , which , and travel meta-search engine Voopter, which . Now we can add print brokers to the list of disintermediated parties. “We’d be lying if we said we weren’t doing it for the money,” says Pencz. “We started Printi to make money, and did this round to make money, but the end goal is something bigger. We think the opportunity is very big, and we’d like to believe we’re helping transform an industry fraught with problems. On a day-to-day operational level, what drives me is seeing how small changes can lead to big improvements. How the flywheel starts spinning. Having tangible traction is super motivating.” |
What Is Happening To Bitcoin Right Now? | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | We’re back, baby! Almost! After a over the weekend, the price of is slowly inching up this afternoon after an interesting 31,000 BTC sell-off that blew up the market early this morning. The “wall,” which appears to have been instigated by a single owner or a group which they’re calling the “Bitcoin Whale,” appeared just as the price began hovering around $300. The sheer number of bitcoins and the swiftness with which they were snapped up suggests a few interesting things. First, it’s clear the whale had set a sell order at $300 and, in the end, walked away with about $9.3 million. This sort of dump is a perfectly fine investment strategy, especially if the coins were originally bought or mined at far lower prices. The speed with which it was snapped up also shows that the market was willing to let things fall far below the previous average price before acting. As one Reddit user, , notes: An alternative view of the move could suggest that the whale wanted to drive the price down by flooding the market, resulting in a crisis of market confidence, allowing them to purchase the coins at a lower price. At this point in the game we can’t know for sure which of the two strategies was being employed but unless we see an equal but opposite buy back to the same wallet in the next few days we’ll be able to tell just what happened. What we do know is that the price is inching up but it’s not out of the woods yet. And, unless another whale surfaces, the price could continue fluctuate, continuing upset the bitcoin herds as their investments pop up and down like a whack-a-mole. |
Tesla Wants To Sell You A Used Model S | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | The only thing better than a new Tesla is a cheap Tesla, and the company reportedly is set to unveil a program to address the sticker shock and it isn’t a cheaper car. It’s used cars. Certified pre-owned vehicles are big business for luxury automakers. Speaking to automotive News, Tesla vice president of communications, Simon Sproule, is developing a program to resell Tesla vehicles. Tesla would sell used Model S sedans under the “certified” moniker hoping to lure buyers who want quality at a lower price. BMW and Mercedes-Benz have done this for years, but Tesla’s entrance into this market would be a boon for consumers and the car company itself. Unlike BMW or Mercedes, Tesla owns its dealerships, allowing it to retain much more of the used car’s profit than a traditional auto maker. Elon Musk previously guaranteed the resale value of the Model S. Announced in April 2013, those who financed a Model S are allowed to return the vehicle after three years for 43 to 50 percent of its sticker price — just in time to buy a new Tesla vehicle. Tesla is set to unveil an updated Model S and another electric vehicle . The Model X SUV will hit the market and an inexpensive Tesla (somewhere around $35k) should be available late next year. If Tesla’s trade-in program is successful, it needs to be able to offer current Tesla owners something other than another Model S. This trade-in program would also serve consumers who want to forgo gas and buy a Tesla but cannot afford the high price of a new Model S. supposedly, Tesla dealerships would thoroughly inspect the returned Model S before reselling it, hoping to alleviate some anxiety with buying a used electric car. |
500px Announces Adobe Creative SDK Integration | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | Photo-sharing service that it’s one of the first developers participating in the , which allows app developers to integrate Creative Cloud services into their mobile apps. This will allow 500px iOS users to edit photos in 500px using tools from the Photoshop and Lightroom apps for iOS and upload them to the cloud for further editing on the desktop. Tools included in the 500px via the Creative SDK will allow users to alter photo temperature, tint, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, clarity, vibrance, sharpen and reduce noise. 500px users will also be able to connect to Creative Cloud to grab their photos from Lightroom and upload them to 500px. Using these features will require a paid subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud service. A 500px spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the new version of the app is currently being held up by the long App Store review times resulting from the release of iOS 8, so there’s no release date the service can give other than “in the next few weeks.” |
Beepi Gets $60M More In Funding For Its Peer-To-Peer Car Marketplace | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | Auto sales marketplace is looking to grow fast and it’s raised a bunch of money to do so. The company announced today that it closed on a fewer than six months after launch. Beepi wants to simplify the way pre-owned cars are bought and sold for a new generation of consumers. Rather than getting ripped off by a dealership or having to deal with the hassle of selling via marketplace like Craigslist, Beepi helps sellers make more money by listing their cars on its marketplace and taking a small portion of the sale. Meanwhile buyers get peace of mind due to the extensive inspection process Beepi does for vehicles before they’re listed. The new funding round, which was , comes from Foundation Capital and Sherpa Ventures, which join existing investors Redpoint Ventures, SherpaFoundry CEO Tina Sharkey, OLX founder Fabrice Grinda, IG Expansion co-founder Jose Marin, Homeaway co-founder Brian Sharples, former Loopnet CEO Rich Boyle, and Silicon Valley Bank. Beepi had previously . With the new funding, Beepi will no doubt be looking to expand. After launching in the San Francisco Bay Area in the spring, the company early last month. More importantly, the company added a ‘Prime’ shipping option that opens up sales of cars listed on its marketplace throughout California and neighboring states. By doing so, Beepi can draw from a greater number of buyers to purchase cars from its site. |
Gmail Gets An iPhone 6 And 6 Plus Update | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | In my initial review of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, I didn’t spend too much time dwelling on third-party app compatibility. That’s because A) I was content with the way iOS handled upscaling lower-resolution apps, and B) I was primarily spending time in first-party software. But using Gmail on both devices via the native app over a longer period of time has proved trying. Today, Google remedied the situation with an to their iOS app. Long story short, installing the update if you have either of Apple’s latest smartphones is like getting glasses for the first time and never realizing you couldn’t properly see before. You can now see a huge portion of your inbox via email previews, and opening individual emails reveals body text that will make you feel almost spoiled. Slowly but surely, most popular third-party apps are getting their iPhone 6 makeover. Facebook: You’re up next. |
Stream Live Video From A GoPro With Livestream’s Latest iOS App | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | Believe it or not, GoPro cameras just got a bit more functional . The company just added the ability to stream live video using its iOS app. Just think, now, thanks to Livestream, you can stream all of your hot skateboarding skillz live. It’s easy enough, too. The app is free yet Livestream charges for the most popular services. Using a GoPro’s WiFi network, the camera streams live video to the connected iPhone, which then in turn, broadcasts the video stream to Livestream’s service — just like other Livestream applications. The iPhone needs 4G service for the stream to work. The Livestream app should work with all GoPro camera’s equipped with WiFi connectivity. CNET that GoPro was not directly involved in the app’s development, but it speaks to GoPro’s growing fan base as more companies latch onto the popular camera. |
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Watch What Happens When Someone Dumps Tens Of Thousands Of Bitcoin At Below-Market Rates | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | Recently, an individual or group put an estimated 30,000 bitcoin onto the market at a price of $300 per coin. It isn’t clear who was behind the sale, or what their motives were, but the sale meant millions of dollars in revenue for whomever pulled the trigger. Given the number of coins that were made available at the $300 mark, then below the market price, it took quite some time for purchasers to chew through them. The sale didn’t flood the market and collapse it, as the coins were offered for a specific price and at a floating rate — $300 or go away, essentially. Following the sale, the price of bitcoin rose. It currently trades for more than $340 per coin. Why, then, dump the massive pile at $300? Liquidity and price stability. If the person or persons behind the sale had tried to sell them in chunks at market rates, they could have disturbed the price balance and pushed the value of a bitcoin below the $300 mark if they were aggressive enough. Instead, they made their own market with what appears to have been limit sale at a discount — the market was willing to bear the sale because they were buying at cheaper-than-normal rates, the sales person or group got to cash out, and presumably everyone walked away happy. Anyone who bought in the sale made a quick 10 percent or greater profit directly following. An accounting source of mine, after reviewing the charts and images, called it “blatant market manipulation.” Well then. Why sell tens of thousands of coins at all? If you had an immediate financial need, it might make sense. Or you simply lost faith in the currency and wanted out. That or you might have a total of, say 100,000 coins, and wanted to protect your downside. Now, no matter what, you have millions in cash to live on, the price of bitcoin be damned. Now, to the fun stuff. Ever seen an order book like this? (Image via on , .) Image via on , . And just in case you wanted to see the massive run in real-time, check the following video for even more: (Via on ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uX_bB_4VJk&feature=youtu.be Someone recently commented that it felt like the Wild West days were returning to bitcoin, with more dramatic price swings and shenanigans like the above. Let’s hope. |
eBay To Host Live Art Auctions On New Site | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | In July, eBay a partnership with noted auction house Sotheby’s to help bring its inventory of art, antiques and collectibles online via a new live auction format with real-time bidding. At the time, eBay said Sotheby’s was the “anchor tenant” to trial this new format on eBay.com. Today, the company is expanding on these earlier efforts with a number of other well-known auction houses, including Doyle New York, Freeman’s, Garth’s Auctions and Swann Auction Galleries, which will all now feature art auctions via a new section on eBay’s website. Ebay explains that its live auctions are launching in partnership with Invaluable, a technology provider for live auctions focused on art and collectibles. Invaluable’s software, including its online bidding technology are being used on eBay, while eBay – somewhat ironically, given it popularized the online auction in consumer culture – is delivering access to its large user base of 149 million active buyers. With the new auctions, buyers will be able to browse catalogs for upcoming sales, then bid for themselves at the online events or enter in absentee bids for those they can’t attend. The auctions will be hosted on a new site at eBay ( ), and will also be available via eBay’s search engine for discovery purposes. The company also shared a of auctions debuting this month, which include everything from fine art to furniture to jewelry, plus other collectibles like travel posters or medical books, for example. The first auction, debuting this Thursday, is one for African-American fine art from Swann Auction Galleries in New York. While not specifically mentioned in today’s announcement, the roster indicates the art auctions extend beyond the top houses in New York, and will include a variety of art and antique collectors from across the U.S., as well. A variety of upcoming events are from houses based in states like Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and California, for instance. Ebay says that it will soon also begin to offer live Sotheby’s auctions across 18 collectible categories, which coincide with events taking place at Sotheby’s headquarters in New York. The two companies are also exploring themed and time-based sales, says eBay. However, this deal is separate from those being announced now, and Sotheby’s doesn’t currently appear on the new auction site. |
ShipHawk Raises $5 Million To Provide Large-Item Shipping With No Sticker Shock | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | When shipping small items, it’s no problem to use services like FedEx or UPS, but what if you have a large, heavy, or unusually shaped item? When you have an item that doesn’t easily fit in a box, you need to work with specialized carriers, but they generally aren’t easy to find or very transparent with their pricing. wants to take the pain out of shipping those items, with a platform that allows users to get shipping quotes from multiple providers and pick the one that makes the most sense for them. The company just closed on $5 million in new funding to expand its business and get its shipping engine integrated with a wider range of e-commerce platforms. The new funding was led by DN Capital, with participation from existing investors Karlin Ventures, Rothenberg Ventures, and Wavemaker Partners (formerly Siemer Ventures). Along with the funding, DN Capital managing partner Steve Schlenker is joining the company’s board of directors. ShipHawk has been around for the last two years or so, and was actually the . Over the last year-and-a-half, it’s just been improving its service and signing up partners to integrate its shipping API into their own platforms. For many buyers and sellers on platforms like eBay or Shopify, buying a piece of furniture or other large item can be a guessing game when it comes to the price of shipping. ShipHawk simplifies that process by allowing customers to add the information they have about an item, as well as the origin and destination address, and get a quote from qualified carriers. The company works with hundreds of shipping partners to get the best quotes for its customers, which they can choose based on price or speed of delivery. It also provides a price guarantee against the quotes provided. ShipHawk started with a web app that users could manually enter information into, but increasingly it’s working to become the API for shipping prices on third-party e-commerce platforms. Rather than users having to find shipping rates themselves, ShipHawk can enable sales marketplaces to build shipping costs directly into their purchase flow, bringing transparency to both buyers and sellers. With its Series A round, ShipHawk has raised a total of $6 million in outside funding. The company, which is based in Santa Barbara, Calif., now has 20 employees on board. |
Sundar Pichai’s Ascension At Google Could Herald New Platform Unification | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | In a sweeping transfer of power, . Pichai, a well-known Google executive, will add control of Google+, search, maps, infrastructure and ads to his portfolio, which already includes Chrome’s browser and operating system efforts, Google Apps and Android. When Pichai took over Android from Google’s Andy Rubin, TechCrunch . Some expect the two to fuse completely. Bringing Android under Pichai wasn’t a subtle signal. To have both Chrome OS and Android ship, separately, on increasingly large screens makes little sense. It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to infer that bringing more product groups under Pichai will allow for increased harmony between the various efforts, and, when possible, coupling where integration would be too minor a goal. Chrome OS and Android remain distinct. Google is not alone in working towards a way to bring its touch-first, mobile-friendly operating system work in sync with its desktop efforts. Google’s position is merely the oddest as its desktop efforts are borne and shipped directly from its dichotomized, touch-first, mobile-friendly operating system . Apple is making similar moves, allowing its desktop-focused OS X and its mobile-first iOS to communicate with one another. On the more extreme end, Microsoft tried to stuff a tablet-friendly user interface on top of a bastardized version of Windows 7, work that managed to charm a grand total of no one. That company is attempting to pay for its past sins with a new operating system called Windows 10. Why Google might want a single operating system and product stack is simple: The more seamless its operating system setup can be, the easier it is for users to buy into it across device categories. That increases the reach of core Google services like search, and its app marketplace, things that bring the parent company direct and indirect revenue. Keep in mind that mobile isn’t a part of the future; it the future. And so Google’s Chrome OS efforts must be taken under the greater arc of Android, given that the latter ships a vast multiple of the former’s device volume and is truly the de facto mobile operating system. Pichai now possesses nearly all the tools that Google has built to conquer the technology world to use as he will. How he will knit the blend of hardware, software and services into something cohesive is a story not yet written. The niggling irony to this is that Picahai’s name was floated as a potential CEO candidate for Microsoft. Instead, an internal candidate got that job, and Pichai has now received a nearly-similar size boost in internal profile at his parent company. Anyone want to lay bets on who the next CEO of Google will be? That’s if Pichai succeeds at his task, of course. |
Sidecar Tests A New “Commute” Service, With Discounts When You Pay For A Week Of Morning Rides | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | Ridesharing service just invited me to beta test a new feature called Sidecar Commute. Here’s how it works, as explained on : You pay $35 for a one-week Sidecar Commute Pack, then you can request a ride every morning that week, and you’ll get a $15 credit for that ride. If I’m doing my math right, that means you could save up to $40 per week on Sidecar rides. So if you’re someone who uses on-demand ride apps to get to work on a semi-regular basis, those savings could be pretty appealing — if you use Uber or Lyft, it may be enough to make you switch over, and if you’re already on Sidecar, it may convince you to use the service more often. (If you don’t commute regularly, or if you don’t always commute in the morning, it’s probably not a good fit.) I emailed Sidecar about the test, and a spokesperson declined to comment, except to say, “We’re always experimenting with new ways to make Sidecar a great experience for our drivers and riders.” Again, this is a beta test, so it’s possible that the program or its pricing will change when and if it rolls out to everyone. But if Sidecar Commute keeps its current form and it’s adopted widely, those discounts could become costly for the company, particularly if it’s still paying the drivers full rates. Sidecar may be assuming that you won’t really use those credits every day — and even if you do, well, why if you’re not going to spend it? Anyway, if you’re interested in trying it out, . The invite email and landing page say Sidecar is looking for 100 testers in the North Beach, Chinatown, Haight-Ashbury, Castro/Noe Valley, Mission/Bernal Heights, and Hayes Valley/Tenderloin neighborhoods, and the deadline to sign up is 1pm Pacific on Sunday, Oct. 26. (I actually moved to New York a year ago, but I guess Sidecar’s customer database doesn’t know that yet.) |
Don’t Open Random PowerPoint Presentations From Strangers Right Now (Or Ever, Really) | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | Heads up! In what feels like a throwback to the late 90s/early 2000’s, Microsoft has discovered one bug in Microsoft Office. Executed properly, the bug could be exploited to take over your entire system running just about any version of Windows. You can find Microsoft’s on the bug here, but here’s the bulk of what you should know: So just how gnarly is this bug? Says Microsoft (emphasis ours): An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, But should you panic? Nah.
1) Play it smart about what presentations you open
2) If you’re on a build of Windows that has User Account Control as an option, enable it (it should be on by default, in most cases.) This won’t fix the bug outright, but it’ll throw up a big permissions prompt that’ll remind you not to open mystery files.
3) Check out from Microsoft, which offers up a temporary patch until Microsoft finalizes a security update. |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 10.24.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | – John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare and Steve Gillmor. |
First Look At 3D Camera App 3DAround | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | What if you could shoot those cool 360-degree, swivel-around photos you see on ecommerce sites or in The Matrix with just your smartphone? Then you’d be using the that launches next month from , which gave TechCrunch an early peek. Simply hit record, revolve your camera phone or tablet around an object, and 3DAround stitches together all the photos into a 3D image the viewer can spin at will. Dacuda is famous for its that lets you wave your camera over a document to get a digital image of it without a bulky scanner. Now Dacuda’s 25-person team and 5 years of experience are combining to make your phone a 3D scanner that always gets the perfect angle…because it gets every angle. For starters, it’s going to add some 360-spice to a ubiquitous but often boring type of photography: food porn. “It’s a really good time for this kind of tech because Apple just opened up the camera APIs” Dacuda founder and CTO Dr. Alexander Ilic tells me. “We need pretty low-level access to controlling exposure time, focus, and more.” That’s just what Apple allowed with iOS 8. Illic says the inspiration for the app came from watching food blogger friends take dozens of photos of plates of grub from different angles and struggle to decide which was best. He thought “Why can’t you just go around the whole thing, so you don’t have to worry about the perfect shot with a single angle.” Originally he figured that would require a camera with expensive 3D sensors, but in fact, newer iPhones are capable if given the right software. That’s where Dacuda comes in. Spun out of top Swiss engineering school ETH Zurich by students from the university and MIT, Dacuda’s expertise is in image stitching. It’s backed by Wellington Partners, Swiss bank Schwyzer Kantonalbank, and Austrian entrepreneur Hans-Peter Metzler. The 3DAround app extracts depth and structure information from a success of rapid-fire photos to create the 360-degree views. You’ll be able to interactively view the swivel-able photo through the 3DAround app or WebGL-equipped browsers like Chrome, and share some version of the images to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterst The app will launch for free next month on iOS 8 devices for the iPhone 5 on up. While some phones like the HTC EVO now have stereoscopic double cameras that can take slightly “3D” photos, looks like the real deal. We’ll have hands-on coverage once the app launches, so check back to see us spinning around some delicious food. |
Google Rolls Out An Invite System For Its New Email App, Inbox By Gmail | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | Good news, you don’t have to to . You just have to know someone who got in. Today, Google announced by way of its “Inbox by Gmail” that each Inbox user will now receive three invites they can hand out to friends. Hilariously, the invite button emoji is a golden ticket. If you aren’t seeing this option yet in your Inbox app, you soon will. To locate the invite button, just tap the red “Compose” plus icon at the bottom right of the screen. The “Invite to Inbox” button will be the first option above the red Compose button after doing so. Hey Inboxers, you can invite your friends. 3 invites coming your way soon. Look for the golden ticket in Speed Dial. — Inbox by Gmail (@inboxbygmail) The funny thing about Inbox requiring an invite in order to get in is that it’s such a manufactured attempt at creating a sense of exclusivity around Google’s new product. By limiting access, Google is mimicking the path its buzzy email competitor Mailbox once took. Mailbox, now owned by Dropbox, famously established a “queue” users had to join before they were able to try the product everyone was talking about. At the time, this would help it manage its growth without succumbing to a massive influx of users who joined all at once. But many also saw it as a marketing ploy designed to increase demand, or even an experiment in human behavior. And of course, the original Gmail product launch also had an invite system of its own when it first arrived years ago. Gmail invites were a hot item then, too, as everyone clamored for a way into this revolutionary email system that was offering a preposterous 1 GB of free storage and instructed users to archive, not delete, their emails. But Google isn’t some scrappy upstart anymore. It has access some of the most powerful, scalable technology that exists. As one TechCrunch colleague pointed out, “If anyone could scale any garbage to run for the entire planet without really trying, it’s Google.” In other words, Google doesn’t need to foist an invite system on would-be Inbox app users. Instead, it’s trying to re-create a sense of buzz around this new app, purportedly a reinvention of email, in hopes of being able to increase demand and grow a user base virally. Despite the sort-of fakeness to this methodology, I hate to say it, but it’s working. There’s a bit of FOMO going on. Those without Inbox invites are hitting up their contacts at Google, and bugging their friends. Or yes, selling invites on eBay. Guys, chill. It’s really just a prettier Gmail with some new organizational features, and a new workflow. It’s not even ideal for advanced users who get a lot of email, or who already use Gmail filters and rules. It’s a bit of an adjustment, and you might even decide it’s not for you in the long run. But time will tell if Inbox is the second coming of Gmail, I suppose. |
You Can Now Build Oculus Rift Projects In The Free Version Of Unity | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | guys how do I virtual reality send help — Greg Kumparak (@Grg) Hey, you! Yeah, you! The one with the awesome idea for something that to be built in virtual reality! Remember a few weeks back, when Oculus mentioned that its development tools would soon work with the free version of the Unity game engine, rather than just the $1,500 Pro Version? It’s done. Oculus has just released a new build of its SDK, complete with support for Unity Free (v4.5.5 and up.) If you’ve got a Rift dev kit and an idea, there’s seriously no reason to not start building now. The rest of the SDK’s changes are primarily behind-the-curtain performance tweaks, except for one big bullet point: Linux support. It’s labeled as “experimental,” so expect bugs galore. But if you’re on Linux and want to get in on the virtual reality fun without having to dual boot, it’s finally feasible. (You’ll still have to wait for devs to port their wares to Linux, of course.) Oculus devs can view the . |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: iPads, Disrupt London, And iPads | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | You might have heard that Apple released some new iPads last week. A lot of them. Plus, TechCrunch ventured across the pond for Disrupt London, where a number of incredible hardware startups debuted their wares. It was a long, but awesome, week. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
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Intro Music by . |
The Groups App I Wish Facebook Would Build | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | About once a week, if not more, I find myself typing these words or something similar on Facebook: Or, Or sometimes, just If any of these phrases sound familiar, you’re probably also a member of several Facebook Groups like I am. Over the years, has evolved beyond being a private place for a few friends to chat outside of a traditional Facebook post and comment thread scenario. Instead, today’s Facebook Groups section is a busy, semi-public area on Facebook’s network which resembles a Facebook-flavored competitor…or a competitor…or a competitor, depending on your use case. Here, users are busy selling on virtual yard sales, networking around topics of interest (health, parenting, politics, hobbies, etc.), helping each other find work, chatting with neighbors, and more. According to data on Facebook’s homepage, the Groups product, launched back in fall 2004, has over 500 million users. claim there are hundreds of millions of Groups on Facebook, and these communities continue to grow. Being involved with Facebook Groups sometimes feels like you’re on a whole different social network. In Groups, Facebook users are establishing connections with people outside of their personal “social graph” of friends, family and colleagues, and are more broadly connecting with the community at large, whether that’s others in their own neighborhood, with people city-wide, or with those who share your same beliefs or interests. Having largely ignored Facebook Groups for some time outside of a few one-off use cases, I became a more active participant this year after some gentle prompting from Facebook in the sidebar of my neighborhood’s group. The “Suggested Groups” module that Facebook on mobile recommended other groups I might like – and noted which of my friends had already joined. I finally took note of this section and started joining more and more groups. As of today, I regularly follow over half a dozen local “yard sale”-type groups where members are offering up everything from secondhand clothes and kids’ toys to furniture, appliances and even vehicles. I’m a member of a few special interest groups focused around who am I outside of work (e.g., a parent, a bargain hunter, etc.) as well as subjects I like to track, if not actively discuss. To stay on top of the most recent posts in all these groups, you have to click on each of them individually from the Facebook sidebar navigation on either web or mobile, and then scroll through the new activity, which is like scrolling through a News Feed. The problem with participating in Facebook Groups today is that it can be time-consuming and frustrating to do so. After you join, say, around a half-dozen groups or more, you stop being able to keep up. It would be like trying to track all of Craigslist by clicking around each section daily. There’s so much happening, that you become reliant on Facebook’s News Feed algorithm to surface the posts from your favorite groups for you. Unfortunately, that’s a bad idea. By the time Facebook has determined a post in a group to be buzzy enough to interest you, it’s often information that arrives too late. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve kicked myself for missing a great deal on a piece of furniture or other item that was quickly snatched up on a local yard sale group, or saw a post about a local community event pop up after the event had already wrapped. In many cases, Group activity is something you want to more actively watch – especially if it’s related to something timely – like information about new job openings, good deals or sales, a neighbor’s report of criminal activity a few doors down, a big wreck that’s causing road closures or re-routing traffic, and more. But the interface on Facebook today isn’t ideal for tracking your groups easily, whether you’re on either web or mobile. A dedicated mobile app for Groups would be better. If I could build one for myself, I’d make it so that I could organize groups into categories – that way I could pop into one section to track my favorite local yard sales separately from the mommy and kiddie groups, or the bargain hunter groups, or those related to technology news and startups. (Yes, I’m in a few of those too!) I’d also like to configure smarter, and more personalized notifications for my groups. Sometimes, after I view a post, I want the option mark it as read, and not be notified about additional comments. Other times, I’d like to track the post’s changes and comments. This should not a group-wide setting, but something I could enable on a per-item basis. In addition, if a post in a group about what’s happening around town contained a specific date and time, it would be great if Facebook’s clever algorithms could turn that into a reminder or event I could add to my Facebook calendar. And why can’t the search feature for groups be turned into an alerts function? If I happened to be looking for a great, but kind of cheap new coffee table it would be super useful to get a push notification when the keywords “coffee table” were mentioned on the groups I track. And most importantly – and I can’t stress this enough – a dedicated Groups app should have a private messaging inbox. Or even better, Facebook should stop putting communications in between Groups members into the “Other” inbox. In case you’re unaware, was created to help Facebook users cut down on spam and other unsolicited messages they’d receive from people who are not their Facebook friends. It arose from Facebook’s failed attempt to . When you launch the Messages section on Facebook.com, the “Other” inbox appears grayed out – an easy-to-miss home for all the unimportant messages you’ll probably just ignore forever. But when you’re communicating with Groups members – like to share a home address related to an item on a yard sale, for example, or to arrange a spot to meetup, or to share personal information like an email address or phone number, or for a variety of other reasons that regularly come up – those messages by default go into this “Other” inbox. Why? Because the people on the receiving end of those communications are not typically a Facebook friend. The issue with this process is that Facebook’s mobile Messenger app – the one it’s now forcing users to download – doesn’t support the “Other” inbox. In fact, there’s really no good way to access the Other inbox from your mobile phone, outside of a for pulling it up on the web. It’s beyond annoying. (Note that the “Groups” section in the Messenger app today is not about Facebook Groups – it’s for sending out a message to a “group” of your Facebook friends. In other words, same name, entirely different function.) So to sum up: the thriving, semi-public Facebook network that is Facebook Groups is difficult to track on web and mobile due to all the clicking around you have to do, prevents private communications between members from being easily accessed, and offers no help for those who want to participate in a larger number of groups with smart tools for group organization and personalized notifications. And yet, instead of rolling out a product that would solve a problem with a significantly sized, heavily trafficked portion of Facebook’s site, the company seems to be more obsessed with not missing out on whatever the new social networking craze may be. When it can’t set fire to to acquire its way further in to mobile messaging, which often then flop even when they’re well-designed. See for example, Poke, (a would-be Snapchat); Slingshot or Bolt (a Taptalk clone); Paper (similar to Flipboard); (inspired by Secret and ). And Facebook is currently a private photo-sharing app that looks like Cluster, we’ve heard. Meanwhile, Facebook has proven that when it pushes a dedicated product related to a particular feature or function on its existing site – as it did with , which is still in the on the App Store – it can establish a solid mobile foothold with an app that is Facebook proper.
Word was that Facebook like it did with Messenger, in order to launch standalone experiences for Groups and Events. This could still be happening. But where are these already? Why are we getting of me-too apps instead of something hundreds of millions of Facebook’s users already use, and would likely be thrilled to see improved on mobile? That’s not to say that won’t eventually hit it big, or aren’t thoughtfully envisioned or well-designed – they are. But they aren’t currently solving the ongoing challenges a large number of Facebook users encounter today – they’re trying to create new and different ways for people to network. But Facebook itself is new kinds of social networks through Events and Groups and communities of Page followers. If only there were tools that made these features easier to access and use on our mobile phones. |
AT&T Breaks The Apple SIM’s Best Feature, Locks It Down If You Pick AT&T | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | The idea behind the Apple SIM that comes in the new iPads : one SIM, many carriers. Whenever you want to switch carriers, you’d just pop into settings and pick the new one. If you want to bring your own SIM, you can — but otherwise, everything happens through software. No swapping SIMs, no ordering new SIMs, no hassle. Alas, someone had to go and throw a wrench in the gears. AT&T (who else?) is mucking up the whole thing. For now, the Apple SIM is compatible with four carriers: T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T in the US, and EE in the UK. (Note the lack of VZW support in the states; seems they’re not very into this idea just yet.) With three of those four compatible carriers, you’re free to stretch your legs, hop between the offerings, and find the carrier that fits your needs. Pick AT&T, however, and you get a nasty little prompt: “Once activation is complete,” it reads, “this Apple SIM can only be used with AT&T. You will need a new Apple SIM if you change carriers in the future.” As , an Apple notes this ugly little tidbit: Using Apple SIM, you can choose from different cellular carriers and their various programs. The data plans vary by carrier. For instance, in the United States, you can choose a domestic plan from either Sprint or T-Mobile and also pick an alternate plan from the other carrier as needed. When you choose AT&T on iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3, AT&T dedicates Apple SIM to their network only. I’ve received confirmation from AT&T that they’re doing this, though I’ve requested further clarification as to they’re doing it. No response there yet. Now, this only really applies if you’re buying a new iPad with an Apple SIM installed out of the box — which, confusingly, all new iPads. It depends on where you purchase the device. Buy it through Apple, it’ll have an Apple SIM. Buy it through an independent reseller, Apple SIM. Buy it directly through Sprint, for example, and it’ll come with a Sprint-only SIM. But when you get an Apple SIM, you expect it to work a certain way — and for it to working that way. AT&T — or anyone else, moving forward — doing this to an Apple SIM post-purchase is really just screwing up the whole idea. If this is its way of resisting the wave of change heading in its direction, then it’s just going to look like a jerk in the long run. As you might expect if you’re familiar with the guy, T-Mobile John Legere (who also posted the image above) seized the chance to declare a victory: On Ipad with@apple sim here is what u see..no , trying to lock u, with error page! wins — John Legere (@JohnLegere) |
Yep, Apple Will Shut Down Beats Music App And Roll It Into iTunes | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | Last month I reported that and likely add streaming music to iTunes. Apple denied, specifically, that Beats Music would be shut down. Shortly thereafter, ‘unnamed sources familiar with the matter’ conveniently surfaced to engage in about whether Apple might modify Beats Music over time, including its brand. As we noted at the time, that was another way of saying Beats Music would get rolled into iTunes. And that’s just what the , (I’m sure they just forgot to cite us) is reporting today. “Apple is rebuilding Beats Music and plans to relaunch it next year as part of iTunes, according to a person familiar with the matter.” Yep. As I reported before the Beats acquisition became official, iTunes executives wanted to acquire Beats Music because they knew that music download sales were plummeting, and it needed a way to . And lo and behold, the WSJ writes “Digital music sales at Inc. ’s iTunes store have fallen 13% to 14% world-wide since the start of the year, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring the fragility of the music industry’s nascent recovery.” With and streaming coming up quick, Apple needed to get serious about streaming before Spotify, Google Music, and Deezer got a bigger lead. So rather than pour investment into Beats Music, which only had for paid subscriptions as of May, it will roll streaming into iTunes, which has 800 million users and 400 million credit cards on file. . It’s just a loss leader for or way to entice sales of its high-margin iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, and iMacs. That, combined with its industry clout, means when it relaunches iTunes with streaming, it may be able to negotiate a much cheaper subscription rate, such as rather than the $10 Spotify charges. A cheap price, a massive built-in user base, and Apple hardware as a vector for distribution could make an iTunes streaming service tough to compete with. |
The Queen’s First Tweet Is A Royal Mystery | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | Think about your first tweet. Mine was sent from a desktop, but I’m sure plenty of people sent their first tweet from a smartphone. But before you can ever send a tweet, you have to sign up for an account. And, of course, you have to type out an actual message. Only then can you press that little blue Tweet button and begin your Twitter journey. The Queen, however, does things a bit differently. In her first tweet, she promoted the opening of the Information Age exhibition at the Science Museum, signing the tweet with her official signature: Elizabeth R. The R stands for Regina, which is the Latin for Queen. It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R. — The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) The tweet was sent from the British Monarchy’s official account, which has over 750,000 followers. At the time of writing, the tweet has more than 20,000 retweets and almost as many favorites. There was some controversy over whether or not the Queen actually typed out the tweet herself, as videos of the occasion only show her strolling up to an iPad on a lectern, removing a glove, and pressing a single button. However, pictures taken before show her typing on an iPad. Still, TweetDeck shows that the tweet was sent from an iPhone, as you can see in the picture below. The British Monarchy told the that this discrepancy was due to “processology” (whatever that means), and insisting that the tweet was sent personally by the Queen. They even tweeted about it. The last tweet was sent personally by The Queen from her official Twitter account @BritishMonarchy — The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) Personally, I don’t mind if the Queen has someone else type out her 140-character knowledge bombs. After all, Ashton Kutcher and he leads no empires. |
Terminal’s Containers Pioneer A New Way Of Developing Apps From The Cloud | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BukjPONmO1w] , a San Francisco-based startup founded by some ex-Facebook and Google technical talent, is trying to transform the way we do software development. They’ve built system supporting containers, or ultra-fast virtual machines that will let developers write, ship and collaborate on code directly from the browser. While there are other somewhat , which racked up $55 million in venture funding over the last year, Terminal’s co-founders and say that the promise of containers hasn’t been fully realized. Years ago, most apps ran on a single-server and were monolithic and long-lasting. But since then, developers have broken out their apps into separate virtual machines. Container technologies let developers build and run these distributed applications without writing additional code. Every user on Terminal’s app store basically launches their own private server per app, and scaling is automatic. User can publish a snap (or a frozen snapshot of a running server) in their app store. “Everyone is going to have a cloud computer and you’re going to be able to run and inter-operate apps in a secure and private way. You can basically rent this little slice of the cloud to do whatever you want,” Ganapathi said, pulling up one of Terminal’s several dozen public ‘snaps’ that support Debian and Ubuntu. Researchers have relied on Terminal to program and collaborate on Matlab projects directly from the browser. The company has already racked up clientele like RailsBridge and even our own Crunchbase. Terminal supports pair programming in a way that could make it easier to run physically distributed software development teams or companies. Ganapathi, who to Google, left about a year ago to work on this project. He teamed up with Perla, a former Facebook engineer, and two other co-founders, Danny Krause, who worked at Apple on the OpenGL team and former Googler Jeff Wu. Several of Terminal’s other employees have done stints at Palantir, Facebook and Google. With containers, Terminal lets you run multiple processes at the same time inside them, and the company says you don’t have to learn any new commands. They take a couple of seconds to start up, compared to 60 seconds with Amazon Web Services or Heroku. You can bring up a few dozen of these virtual machines and quickly network them together. The company says they can shrink down to 1GB of RAM or grow to 50GB of RAM in seconds with no reboot. “The dream is that I want to create supply chains out of code,” Ganapathi said. “What is the economic entity of a company? You have a bunch of people working together and cooperating in a distributed fashion. It could be interesting if you could take software and this system and use it to create a company-like entity out of a series of distributed agents.” Terminal charges by the hour for server access out of a balance that you keep in the system. You can link your credit card to top-up whenever your balance runs out. When their machines go idle, you can pause terminals and not be charged. Charges start at $1 per month for a micro setting with two CPUs and 256 megabytes of RAM, Perla and Ganapathi were hesitant to talk about funding, but they do have a good runway from notable investors that they didn’t want to disclose at this time. |
IBM Earnings Reflect Just How Difficult Transformation Really Is | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | The news came out this week that . Unfortunately for IBM it marked the of falling revenue, indicating that maybe something’s not quite right at Big Blue. IBM’s earnings illustrate the challenge they face as they transform themselves into a cloud-centric company. It could be that it will take some time for that transformation to bear fruit or it could be that it’s just harder for large companies like IBM to make big money in the cloud, a harsh lesson not just for IBM, but also for other big companies like HP, Red Hat, EMC and Cisco who are trying to make similar transformations. IBM deserves a great deal of credit, however for simply getting to where they are today as they put their cloud business front center. In just a couple of years, they have put together a 3-tiered cloud strategy starting with a catalogue of over 100 SaaS business applications. They also bought Infrastructure as a Service provider SoftLayer last year, then invested big money in building a network of data centers around the world. SoftLayer had 13 data centers when IBM bought them. A billion dollars in investment later, they have 35 with 5 more scheduled to come on board by the end of the year. Later they released a development platform called Bluemix built on top of SoftLayer, so customers can build their own applications on the IBM cloud platform. and hope to change the way they sell software from a team of sales people in blue suits to an online model where people, try and then buy (and it also provides a commercial outlet for Bluemix developers to sell their wares under the IBM brand umbrella). They have continued to develop Watson technology and commercialized it as a cloud platform with IBM and outside parties building a variety of applications on top of it. They’ve done all of this remarkably quickly What’s more, the company has made key partnerships with other large enterprise vendors such as SAP and Microsoft. for SAP HANA in the cloud and on Azure in virtual machines, in addition to running Microsoft software on SoftLayer. IBM is clearly doing whatever it can to move the company to become a cloud platform play. There is evidence in the latest quarterly report that the new strategy could be working, at least to some extent. Cloud revenue is up 50 percent year-to-date and “cloud delivered as a service [is] up 80 percent year-to-date with a third-quarter annual run rate of $3.1 billion,” according to . As IBM stated in the report, “While we did not produce the results we expected to achieve, we again performed well in our strategic growth areas – cloud, data and analytics, security, social and mobile – where we continue to shift our business.” After 10 quarters of falling revenue, that has to at least be encouraging. They are making money and showing growth in those areas where they are trying to make this transformation, but in today’s world where the cloud levels the playing field, it means it’s harder to make those huge markups they once had selling hardware that made IBM such a wealthy company. The nature of the cloud is such that it drives down prices and puts the customer in control and that’s not necessarily a comfortable place for a company like IBM. And IBM is still suffering as it tries to extricate itself from its older hardware businesses. and a valuable patent cache to take its Power processor manufacturing business. It’s not every day a sale involves the seller paying the buyer a substantial amount of money, but IBM needs these chips for its continuing mainframe business and for its growing Watson business –and according to an IBM spokesperson, the chip business generated a significant loss. Perhaps paying another company to continue making these chips was the best deal they could make. The deal also resulted in a one-time charge of $4.7B. As it deals with this transformational overlap, IBM and its fellow enterprise technology giants have to be wondering just what it takes to succeed in this brave new world because it’s clear that transforming in this fashion is not going to be easy for any of them and they all face a similar set of problems. All of these companies need to remember that while the cloud offers a path to the next generation of computing, it might not give them the huge earnings they have been used to in the past and that could be the toughest lesson of all. |
Amazon Quietly Launches A Functional App Store Within Its Main Android Application | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | Until recently, if you wanted to install an application from Amazon’s own Appstore onto your Android device, you would have to install separately. And this is a bit of a hassle, since from Google Play. But last month, Amazon quietly rolled out a new feature within its main Amazon application on Android which now includes a fully-functional Appstore that’s accessible directly through the Amazon app’s “Shop by Department” section. There, right at the top of the list of Departments, is a new category called “Apps & Games.” And this isn’t just a list of apps that Amazon has for sale elsewhere in its Appstore app – it’s actually a complete app store in and of itself, tucked away right within the main Amazon application. According to an Amazon spokesperson, this section launched on September 9th, and we were pointed to a for reference purposes. “Our customers want to go to one place to find all selection, whether it’s physical or digital, so we now offer the ability for customers to purchase videos, songs, audiobooks, apps and games from within the Amazon app,” the spokesperson explained. However, the press release in question doesn’t really detail the part about Amazon’s app now selling apps and games directly – instead, it’s focused on an update to the Amazon App for Android, which now enables purchases of digital goods. Mainly, the release refers to . But to make this work, customers are still required to download the Prime Instant Video player app from Amazon’s standalone Appstore. Additionally, said Amazon at the time, the updated app includes access to other digital purchases like movies to rent or buy, 30+ million songs, and tons of Kindle books and audiobooks. The new app also allows for free photo backup with Amazon Cloud Drive. Left out was any mention of apps and games now being sold directly through the main Amazon application. The move effectively turns Amazon’s flagship application – an app that has somewhere between 50 million and 100 million installs, according to Google Play’s data for the smartphone version – into an app store app that directly competes with Google Play, while also being sold on Google Play. (No wonder Amazon was trying to keep this quiet.) But before you get excited, be aware that Amazon’s “Apps & Games” section still requires users to uncheck the Security setting that prevents the installation of apps from unknown sources (i.e., anywhere that’s not Google Play.) This is the same requirement that’s in place for , but the process for making the change in the newly updated Amazon Android app is quite seamless. [gallery ids="1074842,1074843,1074845,1074846"] In the Apps & Games section, which is laid out like any other mobile app store with big featured listings at the top, various promotions, top free and grossing apps, recommendations, and more, you can tap on an app listing to be taken to the app’s page. From here, you’ll see a standard listing with screenshots, a video (if provided), a description, and reviews alongside a button that says “Free” or shows the price of the download, if the app is paid. However, the first time you try to download an app, you’ll be prompted to enable downloads if you haven’t already adjusted your Android phone’s security settings to enable downloads outside of Google Play. But Amazon’s app walks you through the steps with ease. (See above screenshot.) A pop-up appears explaining what you need to do, you press “Continue” and then the following screen tells you the three simple steps, and provides a button that takes you directly to your phone’s Security settings area. You then make the change, and are immediately directed back to the Amazon app which says “Set-up Complete,” and informs you that you’re now able to install applications from the Amazon app directly to your phone. Afterwards, Amazon’s app functions like any app store. You press the button to download the app, and the installation proceeds like any other. What’s interesting about Amazon’s quiet attempt to roll out an app store within its main application, is not only the expanded reach of its app store – though that’s significant – but also how the new section ties into your other Amazon activity and purchase behavior. For example, on my Nexus 5, Amazon was able to recommend other applications base on my “Book Interests,” pointing me to apps for preschoolers (as I’ve bought books for my daughter on Amazon.com), apps “inspired by” my “browsing history,” which ties together what I’ve been looking for on Amazon to apps I might like (e.g. a search for “Finding Nemo” at some point likely inspired the recommendation of “Nemo’s Reef”). The app also recommended games for me to try, again seemingly based on my interests and prior activity. The recommendations I saw were sort of hit-or-miss, but they’ll likely get better over time as I browse more on Amazon, shop, and download more apps. This access to a larger set of data gives Amazon’s app store – , the Apps & Games – a competitive advantage over other app stores, including Google’s, which rely more on prior app download behavior and lists of what’s trending across the app store as a whole. |
Nintendo’s Extended Amiibo Video Is Weird And Long But Good | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3c_JDDp99k&w=854&h=510] Nintendo has a new online ad for its Amiibo ‘toys-to-life’ mobile figures, and the spot depicts the lengthy journey of one young player looking to upgrade his collectible character in order to win over the favours of one of his older brother’s friends. The story arc and acting are weird and generally not good, but the video is mostly fun, and it gives you a decent look at how Nintendo’s Amiibo will work in action in the upcoming Super Smash Bros. for Wii U game. Plus it reveals that there are 50 potential levels you can attain for your Miibo, which, if that’s common to all games where they’re supported and not just Super Smash Bros. Wii U, means that Nintendo’s toys-to-life line will be introduced with a lot more potential in terms of progression than any other competitors, including the Skylanders line and Disney’s Infinity toys. The Wii U was made for these NFC-powered toys, but we’ll have to wait and see if it’s enough to turn around flagging sales of the console, which is so far way behind the competition from both Sony and Microsoft. The Amiibo, along with Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, arrive on November 21 in the U.S. |
How To Tell If You’re Burning Money Too Fast | Joe Floyd | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | Questions about cash burn have blazed through Twitter like wildfire. Entrepreneurs are asking us: How do I know if I am burning money too fast? Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer for an entrepreneur on what level of burn is appropriate for their startup. However, every entrepreneur should consistently assess their runway and revise spending against their strategic goals. I have designed this short quiz to help enterprise cloud startups analyze their spending levels. It’s critical to monitor your company’s burn rate so you can make those quick adjustments to increase your chances of success. a) Each sale is independent. If we sell to one customer it does not impact the likelihood of sale to another customer. b) Economies of scale are important in our market and we believe that only three or four solutions will achieve scale. Early movers have a small advantage. c) Every new customer increases the value of our product and becomes a source of new potential customers. Early movers have a major advantage. a) We are in a dogfight with a number of well-funded startups and large incumbents. Our sales team consistently sees competition for new customers, and we win as often as we lose. b) We are competing with one or two large, entrenched companies. Our sales organization sees competition more often than not, but we win most of the time. c) We are carving up a green-field opportunity. We sometimes face competition for new business but it is usually from consultants or internal teams building custom solutions. a) We estimate that we turnover 1 out of every 4 customers each year. We haven’t really started tracking churn yet, but I would guess that our net annual MRR churn is ~20 percent. b) We track churn and we know we retain 85-90 percent of our customers annually. We have increased our average sales price by 10 percent over last year. We also have a customer success team that upsells our most engaged customers, so our net annual MRR churn is only 10 percent. c) We track each cohort of customers on a monthly basis and our customer success team excels at deploying new customers quickly and getting them engaged. We have negative MRR churn, and each monthly cohort continues to grow over time. a) We spend $1 – $1.5 in sales and marketing for every dollar of total bookings (new and renewal). We do not worry about gross margins because we know they will increase with scale. We collect some contracts monthly, quarterly and annually. b) We achieve a 1:1 ratio of sales and marketing spend to new annual contract value (ACV) bookings. We analyze customer acquisition costs (CAC) by channel, and we tend to payback CAC with gross profit in 9 – 12 months. We try to get cash payment up front for annual contracts. c) We consistently receive $2+ dollars of new ACV bookings for every dollar of sales and marketing spend. We optimize CAC by allocating marginal spend to the highest performing channels. Gross profit pays back CAC in less than 6 months consistently. Our customer success team is deploying signed contracts quickly, and we always collect cash up front for our contracts. a) We have a group of angel investors or constrained institutional investors. It feels too early to pursue debt. We are heads down focused on sales and product right now and we will think about the next fundraising when we need to raise more money. b) We have one institutional lead investor with dry powder, and we think we can secure a small debt facility. Our investor can introduce us to venture firms so we can start a fundraising process pretty quickly if we need to do that. c) We have two or more institutional venture investors and we have a small debt facility with our bank that we can draw down if we need it. We keep a steady dialog going with investors that we would like to involve in future financings so we could start a process tomorrow if desired. Give yourself one point for each “A” answer, three points for each “B” answer, and five points for each “C” answer. : Pull the ripcord. You need to evaluate your spending immediately and consider pulling back drastically. You may be too early in a nascent market, and it would be wise to conserve capital until the market develops. You may be facing too many competitors which is forcing everyone to spend inefficiently. You may want to scale back sales and marketing while you pivot your product to find a more attractive competitive position. Lastly, you may not be able to raise additional equity if the current venture environment sours. You should look to secure a debt facility and reduce burn to give your team the longest possible runway to succeed. Pump the brakes. You are not in trouble yet, but you should quickly assess your situation. If you are targeting a large enough market, then you may be justified in continuing to spend on sales and marketing even if you are not that capital efficient. However, you should drill down and figure out why you are not efficient. Do you have a churn problem? Do you face too much competition? Do you have too many sales reps? Not enough good sales reps? Are you marketing in the right channels? Is your pricing right? Is your product truly solving a customer pain point? Once you understand the drivers of your current business, you can reduce spend in the areas that are not efficient. For example, if you do not quite have product-market fit, then you can reduce sales. If you do not have sales functioning perfectly, you can reduce marketing spend. Lastly, you should consider raising a top up round to give yourself 18 months of runway while the venture fundraising window is open or securing a debt facility to give yourself an extra 6-9 months of cushion. : Burn baby burn. Your sales and marketing engine is firing on all cylinders and you have proven you know how to engage customers and keep them renewing. Now is the time to pour fuel on the fire to attack your market while there is little competition. The viral effects are strong enough to justify the investment now, and investors will reward you for your efficient growth. Remember to keep monitoring your SaaS metrics so you can adjust your spend if your business slows down. Lastly, you should consider raising additional growth equity early while the venture window is wide open and valuations are aggressive. |
Looksery Launches A Video Chatting App That Makes You Look More Attractive | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | Want to look more attractive on video? Or just different? Earlier this year, a company called for a new kind of mobile video chat application that allows users to look more attractive on video using special effects that can remove blemishes, let you change your eye color, slim your face, and more. The app, which is live as of today on the iTunes App Store, also lets you transform your face into an avatar for a bit of fun, too. While there are several tools that allow you to add avatars on top of your face when chatting over webcams on the desktop, there are fewer that work on mobile. Meanwhile, those that do – like Tango’s – are focused mainly on being silly, not on truly modifying your image in a believable way. Of course, Looksery’s app lets you have fun, too – you can chat as a panda, a gecko, a grumpy cat, a zombie, a monster or even a flaming skull. (The kids might enjoy that one.) But for older users, Looksery’s bigger draw is its ability to let you chat via face-perfecting filters, including those that let you instantly remove any blemishes or zits, remove bags under your eyes, even out your skin tone, slim you face, remove lines, and change the color and size of your eyes. The company, which was founded in August 2013, is similar in some ways to the popular photo-editing applications that allow users to adjust their looks in their selfie photos, such as and . These apps offer tools to make your images look better through face slimming techniques, new eye colors, virtually applied makeup and more. But they’re limited to photos, not real-time video chats. Looksery, meanwhile, has been working on making a system that functions well without lagging, using software it developed that optimizes video files through its understanding of which parts of the face are moving and which aren’t. This allows Looksery to keep the file sizes smaller, and keep the video communication fast. But even if the technology works as promised, Looksery knows that it may have a hard time attracting users to yet another mobile chatting application amid a sea of competitors. Besides, users don’t necessarily others to know they’re adjusting their image – and that’s the main point of using this app. That’s why the company is working to make its filters available to other camera solutions, apps, websites, carriers, handset manufacturers, and call center operators. Victor Shaburov, CEO at Looksery (previously the founder of Handster), says the company is already in discussions with several brands around licensing deals. But Looksery has nothing to announce on that front at this time. In the meantime, you can give the Looksery app a try for yourself – it’s . |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 6 | null |
Socar, Korea’s Answer To Zipcar, Raises $18 Million But Isn’t Looking Overseas Just Yet | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | South Korea is known for advanced technology and hardware companies like Samsung, LG and others. But startups? Certainly the country has produced few fledgling tech companies, though there are increasing signs that things are changing: the latest being — a startup comparable to Zipcar — raising this month. That round is one of the highest funding deals for a South Korean startup to date. Most notably, it was led by a US investor: , a private investment firm with $80 billion in assets under management. Socar was founded in March 2012, and — like Zipcar — it has a website and smartphone apps that let users book cars for their own use. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Jimahn Kim revealed that the service has over 300,000 registered users, 40,000 of whom use the service each month. Socar sees around 60,000 transactions per month — that’s more than one car booking each minute, Kim said. Kim explained that demand for the service has developed quickly over the past 18 months thanks to the unique transportation culture in Korea, and primarily capital city Seoul. “Public transport is cheap and convenient here, so most people only use a car here and there. Perhaps just one or two times per quarter,” he explained. Added to the high rate of smartphone adoption in Korea, and Kim believes that the country is ripe for the development of vehicle and transportation services. “This sector is poised to grow significantly over the next five years in Korea,” he predicted. To help tap into that demand, Socar is using this funding to expand its fleet of “thousands” of cars to more than 5,000. Alongside other logistics and staffing investments, this is aimed at increasing its presence outside of Seoul and in the rest of Korea. Despite raising a whopping $18 million, Socar has no plans to expand overseas, for now. “Our priority is to be the dominant player in Korea, we need to be in more towns here,” he said. “But in two or three years we want to be dominant across Asia.” When asked which markets Socar might target, Kim said that the company would look to apply its experience and success to other locations with similarities to Korea. China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan are among the places with similar public transport networks, smartphone usage and tech adoption rates, according to the Socar CEO. “I don’t have an immediate plan for our next round of funding, but when we believe that it is time to expand overseas then it is probably time to bring in more investment,” Kim explained. Beyond offering car hire services, Socar also has an interest in expanding its service to offer ride-sharing and taxis-on-demand. But, with Uber having raised earlier this year, and rivals Easy Taxi ( ) and Grabtaxi ( ) both stocking up with big funding rounds, is there a danger that Socar will be too late to the party if it doesn’t expand for another two years at the earliest? Kim argues not. “The Asian market [for car hiring and transportation-on-demand] services is still emerging,” he said. “There is no one dominant service in Asia and we believe it will be another two or three years before these services are truly mainstream.” At that point, Kim believes Socar can provide better offerings than those of Uber and other rivals in Asia. Given Uber’s frighteningly aggressive approach to expanding both its geographical locations and its bevy of services, Socar may face a tough battle to differentiate itself if it enters overseas markets late, but Kim is resolute that his company must first truly dominate Korea. He also added that there is no definitive plan to expand the services offered, although the company believes that there are plenty of synergies that would make sense. Socar’s service is exclusively for Korea — as evidenced by the fact that there is no English language option on its website — yet the company was able to raise funding from US investors. Kim explains that an existing shareholder with contacts at Bain Capital made the intoduction, while he himself has a network in the US from previous employment as a banker. Nonetheless, contacts alone don’t create a funding round, Socar impressed investors with its progress and vision for the future. While funding rounds are just another milestone in the development of a startup, Socar’s investment — which is particularly high for Korea — may well be a source of inspiration for other entrepreneurs in Korea. “Korea is not small, but the potential to expand [tech services] here is high due to culture of technology and the sheer number of young people,” Kim said. “If you can succeed in Korea, then it can give you a chance to take your company and service overseas. Being able to satisfy Korea customers is no easy thing [and that can help when expanding to other markets].” |
Japanese Hobbyists Build A Working Transformer | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjr9Ert7K-Y] Eee-urrk-urrk-urrk-urk! A pair of Japanese hobbyists have built a transforming robot that can walk or, when in sports car form, drive around autonomously. It’s called the and is four feet tall. The goal, apparently, is to make a full-sized transformer… just because they can. The team consists of Kenji Ishida and Wataru Yoshizaki of and . The team has been working on transformers since 2012 when they released a table-top model. They hope to make a full, eight-foot model in the next year. Some specs, for those who want to know all the details on their future robotic overlords: That’s about half a mile an hour walking and about six miles an hour driving, which isn’t fast but I suppose it’s a start. That means Megatron and Starscream will be long gone before J-deite Quarter makes it to the scene of the crime (unless it rode on the back of Optimus Prime.) Now if they could only program it to explain the ridiculous Transformers movie storylines we’d truly be in business. |
Amazon Fire Phone Flops | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | Given that Amazon was tanking the price of the Fire Phone down to 99 cents after launch (leading to many a “Fire sale!” joke), this probably won’t come as much of a surprise: the Fire Phone isn’t a success. On the Amazon earnings call today, Amazon noted that the company was taking a $170 million writedown “primarily related” to overcommitting to the Fire Phone. They ordered too much inventory, and made promises to their suppliers that they couldn’t keep. So, just how many Fire Phones is Amazon still sitting on? Any guesses? $5 million? $20 million? The final count on Fire Phone inventory left at the end of Q3: $83 million. Who would have guessed a phone that existed pretty much solely to sell you stuff from Amazon while relying heavily on wouldn’t sell well? |
Here’s A Sneak Peek At MotionSavvy’s UNI Sign Language Interpretation Device | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | , the San Francisco startup working on tech to help the deaf communicate, has to commercialize its first product, UNI. The UNI app works with Leap Motion technology to translate each sign from American Sign Language into audible words on a tablet. We when it launched out of the program back in June. The team at MotionSavvy now has a rough working prototype of UNI. It currently works with the Dell Pro 8 tablet, which is housed within the UNI case and the Leap Motion controller. MotionSavvy hopes to raise a total of $40,000 on Indiegogo to help with manufacturing and to bring the UNI into final production. TechCrunch met up with the all deaf founding team behind MotionSavvy to get an idea of just how UNI works. Check it out: |
Australian Service Directory Site Oneflare Raises $876,000 For International Expansion | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | , a local services marketplace based in Sydney, Australia, has raised an additional $1 million AUD (about $876,000), bringing its total funding so far to $1.5 million AUD (about $1.3 million). Investors include Les Szekely of Equity Venture Partners, Garry Visontay, of the Sydney Seed Fund and Dr. Jeffrey Tobias of The Strategy Group. The startup says it will use the capital on hiring, sales and marketing, and international expansion. The site allows users to get multiple quotes from pre-vetted service providers, including cleaners, electricians, plumbers, painters, accountants and gardeners. Oneflare was founded in 2011 by Marcus Lim and Adam Dong and currently has 50,000 registered business in more than 200 categories, as well as 500,000 visitors per month. In Australia, Lim says that Oneflare’s market opportunity could be about $18 billion if it replaces the Yellow Pages and directories as customers’ preferred way to find services. In addition to the Yellow Pages, Oneflare’s competitors also include directory sites and . Oneflare differentiates, Lim says, by offering multiple quotes and checking for Australian Business Numbers (ABN), licenses, insurance and qualifications. Its customer reviews are also linked to completed transactions and are separate from customer testimonials. In addition, Oneflare, which is available online and through mobile apps, also provides a guarantee of up to AUD$500 for home damages by listed businesses, as well as an on-time guarantee so businesses can back themselves with a AUD$50 bond if they don’t arrive on time. The site currently claims 500,000 unique visitors per month and has had over AUD$55 million of jobs requested through the site so far. It also says it has tripled its revenue over the last year, and seen a 300 percent increase in total traffic over the past 12 months. |
Amazon Tanks 10% After Reporting Larger Than Expected Third Quarter Loss | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | Amazon lower than expected revenue in its third quarter, and a larger than expected loss. Analysts the company to lose $0.74 on revenue of $20.84 billion. Instead, Amazon lost $0.95 per share on revenue of $20.58 billion. That per-share loss works out to a net loss for the firm of $437 million. Shares in the firm took it poorly, as investors headed for the exits: That’s a pretty damn rough chart. However, it’s not the first time that Amazon has taken a whacking after its earnings. In January of this year, the company after it reported revenue and earnings per share that were both under expectations. Amid all the doom and gloom, it’s worth noting that net sales did rise 20 percent to $20.58 in the third quarter, up from $17.09 billion in the third quarter of 2013. On the whole, Amazon as a company remains healthy, well capitalized and innovative. However, investors had long valued it on its revenue growth, and not its short-term profitability. To see the firm miss on top-line expectations profits is therefore doubly damning. The company’s recent Fire Phone launch was not a success. And Amazon’s prime, respected cloud business is locked in a price war with Microsoft and Google, two companies that are both profitably, and more cash rich. Perhaps aggressive cloud pricing will cause continued, near-term pressure on Amazon’s margins. |
Microsoft Up 3% After Reporting Better Than Expected FQ1 Revenue Of $23.20B, EPS Of $0.54 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | After gaining more than 1 percent in regular trading, Microsoft its fiscal first quarter 2015 earnings: Revenue totaled $23.20 billion in the period, leading to profits of $0.54 per share. The revenue figure represents a 25 percent year-over-year increase, a large piece of which is due to the Nokia hardware acquisition. Analysts had expected Microsoft to report $22.02 billion in revenue, and earnings per share of $0.49 to $0.50. The company is up after its large earnings beat in after-hours trading. In the quarter, Microsoft had operating income of $5.84 billion. The company’s net income (after paying taxes) totaled $4.54 billion. The company ended the period with $89.2 billion in cash and equivalents. Microsoft’s GAAP earnings per share — $0.54 — include a $0.11 charge. The company’s per-share profitability is down more than 10 percent on a year-over-year basis. The company reported that its Surface line had revenue of $908 million. That number is damn good, . The total is more than twice what it reported in its preceding quarter. The Surface Pro 3, it seems fair to say, is selling well. Phone top line came to $2.6 billion, up from the preceding quarter. A total of 9.3 million Lumia handsets were sold. In the sequentially preceding quarter, Microsoft reported a partial-period tally of 5.8 million sold Lumias, $1.99 billion in revenue, and a loss of $692 million, or $0.08 per share. In that same quarter, the company reported revenue of $23.38 billion, and earnings per share of $0.55. On the cloud side of things, Office 365 for consumers grew to 7 million subscribers, up 25 percent from the preceding quarter. According to the company, its “Commercial” cloud top line is up 128 percent year-over-year. That figure does not include consumer Office 365 incomes. The company’s Devices and Consumer revenue was up 47 percent to $10.96 billion. Its Commercial revenue was up 10 percent to $12.28 billion. Windows volume liscencing revenue was up 10 percent, which is reasonable, given the recovering PC market. Consumer Windows revenue fell 1 percent. Windows OEM top line fell 2 percent. There is still slack and weakness in PCs, but they market segment is no longer in free fall. Enterprise upgrades to Windows 7, and improved consumer hardware designs appear to be helping to stabilize the category. All told, Microsoft had a strong quarter. The Surface revenue number was a surprise, and we have work to do to figure out how much money the Phone business lost in the quarter, but it seems that most Microsoft product categories are growing, which could indicate sustainable momentum in the medium-term. The Commercial business did better than expected, I think, but not outside of the normal bounds of reasonableness. Hardware was an obvious positive outlier. Microsoft did not report a new Xbox One sales figure, or a new cloud revenue run-rate statistic, annoyingly. I’m not sure why the company manages to, every quarter it seems, occlude a few important data points. There must be some sort of Ouija board in Redmond they use to make that specific decision. In the , Microsoft’s after-hours gains should keep it the second most valuable technology company, over Google, for some time to come. |
null | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 10 | 24 | null |
PlayStation 4 Update Coming On 10/28 Lets You Play Games With Friends Who Don’t Own A Copy | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | Back in August, Sony started teasing a new feature it calls “Share Play.” Though we’re still waiting to see just how well it works, the idea itself is wonderful: once enabled, you can let your friends play your games with you (or by themselves, even) from across the vast Interwebs without them actually owning a copy of the game. Up until now, Sony was pretty vague about when this feature would launch — noting only that it was coming “this fall.” Thanks to a quiet announcement on Twitter, however, we’ve now got a date: October 28th. PS4's next software update, Masamune, will be available on 10/28. Includes Share Play, USB Music player, and more! — PlayStation (@PlayStation) As the tweet above mentions, an update that Sony expects to ship on October 28 will include Share Play, along with the ability to play music (MP3, MP4, M4A, and, for some crazy reason, 3GP) off of a USB drive while playing a game. As for the “and more” that leaves that tweet oh so open ended, the update also brings the long-awaited YouTube app, a better voice command system, and the ability to tweak the background color of your PS4’s home screen. While Share Play sounds incredible, there’s a footnote or two that Sony seems to be downplaying a bit that might make it a less incredible. For example, the company has previously confirmed that Share Play sessions are limited to — so don’t expect to be able to blast through an entire game on a buddy’s remote console without shelling out for your own copy eventually. On the upside, the feature work with all PS4 games right out of the gate, so it’s not something that’ll only work on a title-by-title basis. |
Researchers Want To Send Us To The Moon Using Robots And Oculus Rift | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHz-g0omves&feature=youtu.be] A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, Daniel Shafrir, and his team want to do something incredible: they want to send a rover to the moon and then let us, the Earthlings, control it and look out of its stereoscopic cameras as it tumbles around that barren alien rock. The researchers are working to win a $30 million prize from Google to . The team, called , has to complete the Google Lunar XPrize, a mission to land a robot on the moon and send live video back to earth while moving it at least 1,600 feet. As you can imagine, this is harder than it sounds, given they have to help the robot escape earth’s orbit. Shafrir, game designer Ben Boesel, and astronomer Dan Arnett are working together to connect the robot to an Oculus Rift which, in turn, would control the robot. The team said that they hope to let children around the world see what “only 12 other people” have seen on Earth. To pull this off they will build their own lunar lander and fire their little robot, nicknamed Andy after Andrew Carnegie, into the stratosphere. |
Surface Revenue, Redux | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | In about an hour, Microsoft will release the results of its most recent quarter, the first quarter of its fiscal 2015. The company is expected to report revenue of $22 billion, and earnings per share between and , depending on which set of averaged estimates you trust. That will all come shortly. For now, let’s talk about Surface. Last quarter I was slapped in the face by my failure to realize that Surface Pro 3 revenue, for the large part, would not be recorded until the quarter to be reported today. That , and thus lose two beers to Valleywag’s Sam Biddle. In the sequentially preceding quarter, Surface had revenue of $409 million. That was, as you will note, below my $500 million expectations. So here’s a rough tally to help keep today’s new figure in place for the period: Anything more is gravy. The jump from $500 million to $600 million might seem more moderate than I’m making it out to be, but keep in mind that every $100 million chunk is a ~25 percent gain on the sequentially preceding quarter’s total. There is a lot at play here: The cancellation of the Surface Mini, the clear-out-the-revenue sale of old Pro 2 models, and the slow-fade of the Surface 2 are all factors. I’ve tried to take all that into account. Your estimates will vary. In the first calendar, third fiscal quarter of this year (2014), Surface had . Surely Microsoft hopes to beat that figure with its new and better-received Pro 3 device. Earnings time ticks closer, so we’ll know soon enough. Strap in! |
With 40 Million Downloads, betaworks-Backed Dots Gets A Refreshed Logo | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | , the betaworks-backed gaming studio led by Paul Murphy and Patrick Moberg, has today announced a rebranding for the company. The new logo takes inspiration from Charles Eames, according to a , and uses colors from the first iteration of Dots while incorporating the newer, and more popular, TwoDots game into the company logo. We decided it was time to differentiate our company from our games. We believe Dots is more than our first game, and wanted to create a brand that reflects that. Our designer Jak Horner created an identity that we feel perfectly captures our mission, and today we’re rebranding our studio accordingly. The company also announced that it has passed 40 million downloads across both of its games since launching 18 months ago. Dots comes out of a particular batch of betaworks projects that included Poncho and Giphy, among others, and started as a simple timed puzzle game. Connect the dots. When you get a square, you eliminate that entire color, and the dots drop down. It was . Since then, Dots has gone on to create skins for the game, (like Moves, Endless, and Challenges with friends), and even an . And beyond that, the studio launched , which saw more downloads in the first month than Dots saw in the first year and was number one in the App Store in over 70 countries. TwoDots currently has more downloads than the original Dots, which Murphy credits to “recency.” “People say they like buying things in our game,” Murphy told TechCrunch. “That’s really important to us, that they feel like they’re getting value for what they’re purchasing, which is obviously quite hard to do for an in-game purchase.” Murphy also told TechCrunch that TwoDots is coming to Android “soon.” You can check out the full blog post and check out the company’s new website . |
Join Me Tomorrow In Krakow | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | I’ll be speaking at an event held by , a group of amazing programmers who are working to bring everyone onto the STEM wagon. The event will be held at Przemysłowa 12 in Krakow, Poland at 7pm. You can . I’ll also be attending and judging , the biggest student Hackathon in Poland. This event will include “DARMOWE JEDZENIE I PRZEKĄSKI” which, I believe, are free Yoda masks and piggy back rides. If they are not then I am sorry if you’re attending with the intention of procuring either of these things. Both of these events are a great opportunity for Central Europe to spread its tech wings and, given my interest in technology and Poland, I feel you should join me. See you tomorrow! |
Jonny IV Wants To Be Nasty Gal For Men | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | Today marks the launch of yet another ecommerce brand focused on men’s apparel, as joins ranks with Buck Mason, Frank & Oak, and many others. Founded by Eugene Kang, the former head of ecommerce at Forever 21, Jonny IV is different from other brands in that it focuses on street wear as opposed to a single look, like the preppy Frank & Oak, basics-focused Everlane, or the always minimalist Buck Mason brand. Everything from Jonny IV is sold exclusively on the website, with the portfolio getting a refresh every week so that users never run out of new looks. It’s a full-stack company, with Jonny IV selling clothes from their own private label. The goal is to keep fashion-forward clothing for men at an accessible price point, according to the founders. In fact, Jonny IV promises a stylish outfit for no more than $50. “The greatest challenge is continuing to bring the latest fashion at an accessible price point, paying attention to users in a way that other people just aren’t doing,” said Kang. “As a startup we’re facing challenges with scaling and delivering to a mass audience, but on the other hand we have better access to our users and have a stronger finger on the pulse of trends, and as a startup, we’re able to rotate our collections accordingly.” Jonny IV has been in beta for the past four months, with month-by-month growth around 170 percent. The company has not disclosed funding, but expects to hit $1 million in revenue by the end of the year. It’s interesting to see the ecommerce space get excited about men. For years, brands like Nasty Gal and Net a Porter have been focusing on women. However, men are potentially more likely to prefer buying clothes online from a trusted brand that can help them with decision making. Jonny IV, along with its competitors, is looking to get in on the trend early on. To learn more about Jonny IV, hit up the . |
Slack Is Raising Another Round At Up To A $1B Valuation | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | , the enterprise collaboration platform co-founded by Stewart Butterfield of Flickr fame, continues to defy its namesake: we have heard from sources that the company is raising a new round of funding at a valuation of between $800 million and $1 billion, just six months after The total raise is said to be eight figures, and Sequoia* and KPCB are participating, our sources tell us, although the company has been talking to multiple other VCs. The Information reported the rumors. Asked for confirmation on the funding, Butterfield would not comment directly except to say that 2014 has been “crazy,” and that it would be very likely that his company would raise money some time “in the next six years.” (Butterfield is known for his sometimes with words.) Slack — which lets businesses plug in various other apps and then aggregate progress feeds and previews together in one place — has been growing rapidly since launching at the end of 2013. TechCrunch understands that the company is currently clocking up 250,000 daily active users, and that in its , about one-third of its “seats” are paid. As a point of comparison, at the end of April the company had 60,000 daily active users and 15,000 paid seats. It’s an unexpected successful turn for a platform that was created internally for Butterfield’s original company Tiny Speck so that staff based in different cities to communicate and collaborate on projects together. After its first product Glitch , Tiny Speck seized the moment to see if its internal platform could fare as a product of its own. Call it being in the right place (Silicon Valley is suddenly hot for API-based platforms) at the right time (a resurgence of interest in enterprise apps as they become less turgid and more consumer-design driven) but Slack has really taken off. If the billion figure we’re hearing as Slack’s valuation is accurate, it represents a real milestone in the market for enterprise collaboration and communication platforms. Yammer sold to Microsoft in 2012 for when it had 4 million users. When IBM acquired Lotus, makers of Lotus Notes, in 1995 , it was the for a software company. Slack’s not been without its own growing pains: witness the sign-on “feature” that let anyone see all the user groups created for each business ( ). And it has a lot of room to grow, with features like threaded comments and federated accounts, which cover multiple user groups from single companies, yet to be turned on. Prior to this, Slack and its umbrella company Tiny Speck had , including funding for Slack’s predecessor, gaming company Glitch. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, The Social+Capital Partnership, Accel Partners, Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman, Squarespace’s Anthony Caselena, Stripe’s John and Patrick Collison, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Google VP Bradley Horowitz, former Groupon COO Rob Solomon, and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Butterfield , and the official Slack Twitter account has tweeted out the below. We’ve double-checked with our sources, and have heard that Sequoia did not formally engage with Slack, and is not participating as we originally reported. KPCB is in the round, we’re still hearing, in addition to other VCs including existing investor Accel. As reported in Techcrunch earlier today, it is likely that we will raise money "sometime in the next six years." (Crack reporting, btw.) — Slack (@SlackHQ) |
Charlie Briefs You On Your Upcoming Meetings By Emailing You One-Pagers On Attendees | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | A new web application called has raised a seed round of $1.75 million led by Lightbank Capital. The product emails you short, automatically generated one-pagers detailing what you need to know about the people you’re about to meet with, based on your Google Calendar entries. If this idea rings a bell with you, it’s because Charlie is not the first in recent months to come up with a tool for keeping you up-to-date via mini dossiers on those you’re preparing to meet on any given day. Another product, , does something similar, but is a mobile-first product designed to alert you on your phone with your meeting reminders. Refresh not only tells you who you’re meeting with, but also why – the app pulls from hundreds of sources, and it resurfaces your past conversation history, too. Charlie takes this concept, and turns it into a product that works over email. That’s not a bad idea, given that email still remains the dominant “social networking” and communications app of all time. , and Google’s reinvention of Gmail this week via its new “Inbox” app is one of the hottest tickets in town. To use Charlie, you just connect the app with your Google account so it can access your calendar, as well as your accounts at other social networks. Then, an hour before your meeting, the service will send you a digest with information drawn from over 100,000 sources, including social sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, plus news via Google News and more. It will show you things like that person’s latest blog posts, which connections you have in common, company and competitor news and stats, and even common interests, in case you have a need to make a more personal bond. To some extent, the service competes with email add-on tools like Rapportive (now owned by LinkedIn) or Discoverly, both of which put social networking links and data in your email sidebar. [gallery ids="1074546,1074550,1074549,1074548"] The company claims its automated digging saves you the equivalent of 57 Google searches, if you were to pull up the same amount of information. You can also manually request reports based on a person’s email and name, even if you don’t have a meeting on the books. It’s obvious why something like Charlie and its competition would be useful, but the question now is whether this makes sense as a standalone product that people will (presumably) one day pay for, or if it would succeed better as a feature within a larger app or suite of apps — whether that’s a network like LinkedIn, work tools or CRM provider or something else. The new funding will help Charlie grow its business, integrate more data sources, and bring its product to other platforms, including Outlook. I can’t speak yet to its effectiveness when compared with Rapportive, because I don’t have meetings scheduled for the next hour, and the sample one-pagers on Charlie’s website seem to be broken, meaning I can’t run tests. (Not a good sign, but it launch day and the servers may be challenged to keep up with demand.) Chicago-based Charlie is headed by CEO Aaron Frazin, previously of Prezi, and CTO Rob Volk, previously from diet and nutrition company Beyond Diet, where he was also CTO. Additional participants in the new funding round include Hyde Park Venture Partners, Confluence Capital Partners, Hoovers CEO Patrick Spain, and Lon Chow and Armando Pauker of Apex Venture Partners. |
Twilio Project Turns 2048 Into A Multiplayer Game That You Play By Text | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | Remember all of the wonderfully entertaining frustration that was Twitch Plays Pokemon? Take that concept and turn it on its head. Wrap it around a puzzle game instead of a side-scroller, and have players text in commands rather than input them via chat. The end result: The idea? Many players, all trying to play the same game of 2048 — and all of them playing by text message. TwilioPlays2048 won’t blow up the way TwitchPlaysPokemon did, of course. It’s missing the kitschy nostalgia that Pokemon inherently brought to mix, and convincing people to text some strange number is going to be a whole lot tougher than getting them to sign up for a relatively disposable Twitch account. Plus, no chatroom means no sense of camaraderie/endless arguing about what to do next, and that’s half the fun. Is it a little bit pointless? Absolutely! Hell, it’s a bit pointless. But it’s still worth noting, if only because it’s a damned clever way to do multiplayer that hasn’t really been showcased much before. Imagine if they allowed you to create your own private rooms, rather than having one big universal lobby. You could throw the game’s visuals up onto a TV, gather all your friends around the set, and have everyone participate regardless of smartphone platform. No complicated screencasting necessary, no syncing up everyone’s devices — just grab a laptop, and have everyone whip out their phone of choice. A trivia game like that would be a hit. So far, players have managed to rack up a high score just shy of 5,000 before collectively playing themselves into a corner. TwilioPlays2048 was built by (a highschooler!), with a few small additions contributed by others. |
TestFlight Beta Testing Goes Live For All iOS Developers | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | Apple has pushed its TestFlight Beta testing service live for everyone, the company revealed on its developer news portal today. Registered developers can now invite up to 1,000 beta testers to try out their iOS apps, using emailed invitations sent via the iTunes Connect portal. TestFlight, the , allows developers to build teams to try out software before it launches, and report bugs in order to prepare apps for a public launch. TestFlight had still been usable by devs between Apple’s acquisition of the service and now, but this marks the completion of Apple’s transition of the service to a built-in part of its developer tools. Now, TestFlight invites are distributed via iTunes Connect, as mentioned, and a dedicated TestFlight app provides the central resource for testers in terms of providing feedback and getting new builds as they’re released by developers, instead of the web portal TestFlight used pre-acquisition. Once external testers are invited to TestFlight, they’ll receive a link to download the official app from the App Store. There’s no longer any need to install provisioning profiles on tester devices with this shift, and there’s no need for users to manually find and send their devices’ UDIDs to participate. The official app will also send notifications when new builds of an app they’re testing are available, which is much more convenient than getting an email, as was the case before. To make an app available for the 1,000 external testers that this launch enables, an app has to pass a Beta App Review, which means it’s subject to the same App Store Review Guidelines that apply to final releases. New versions with big changes require a new review before being pushed to testers, and developers can test up to 10 apps at a time, both internally (which requires no review approval, and which is available to 25 admin or tech level team members in iTunes Connect) and externally. Apple has shared more about how to get , and developers who are looking to get more help can head over to the (developer account and login required). The new TestFlight offers a lot of convenience features that should make it easier for developers to gather feedback from actual users, instead of just tech-savvy early adopters, but that review requirement might add some time to how fast builds can go out. At any rate, it’s nice to see wider beta testing options finally built directly into the platform. |
Q&A With Facebook’s Josh Miller On Why His Rooms App Isn’t Anonymous, It’s The Early Web Reborn | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | Is the anonymous Facebook app people were ? “No. Unequivocally No…because you cannot be anonymous in our app,” tells me. The Branch founder turned Facebook product manager’s new forums app Rooms launches today, and he says lessons from Tumblr, Twitter, Snapchat, and the early days of the web guided its construction. Rather than a one-size-fits-all social network or anonymous app with a single, collective feed, Rooms is modeled after distinct websites with different rules and purposes. In this Q&A, Miller explains his goal to give a mobile-only app the flexibility and self-expression of the web 1.0 era when we were screen names, not real names. For a closer look at how Rooms works, . Basically, the iOS and Android app lets you create a “Room” or forum about any topic, customize its look and feel, choose your screen name for that Room, and decide how widely to share the QR code invite that lets people join. Members then share around a Room’s topic through an Instagram-style vertical feed of text, photo, and video posts plus their accompanying comment threads. From geeking out about “Game Of Thrones” to creating a safe space for cancer survivors to support one another, Rooms is designed to spawn communities around whatever subjects people want. Rooms looks chic and new, but its roots trace to before Facebook, and even before Myspace. |
Facebook Launches Pseudonymous App “Rooms” That Lets You Create Forums About Any Topic | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | It’s not quite anonymous, but forums standalone app is Facebook’s first product that allows you to ditch your real name. Rooms lets you set up a mobile-only in-app discussion space about any topic, customize the look and moderation settings, set a screen name for the room, and choose who to invite to share text, photos, videos, and comments with others in the Room. It’s a bit like forums inside an Instagram-style vertical feed. Rooms doesn’t require a Facebook account or even an email address to sign up. It employs an innovative QR-code invite system where people take a photo or screenshot of a Room’s code to gain entry. lets you share things that might not fit in the News Feeds of your friends, from nerdy niche culture topics to serious discussions about health or other sensitive subjects. The earlier this month that Facebook was launching an app that allowed anonymity, which isn’t exactly right, but Rooms does allow people to discuss topics in forum-like spaces as the Times wrote. Rooms and his team from Branch, which . (Read for more insight into how Rooms was modeled after the early Internet, with its distinct spaces, customization, and option to call yourself whatever you want.) Miller brushed off comparisons to other apps, saying “Secret and Yik Yak are very different products” than Rooms. Rather than being a clone of something like Secret, Rooms could host a global forum similar to Secret where people share revelations and don’t include any clue to their real name. But it could also host disease support groups, book clubs, politics discussions, enthusiast communities for sports or tech products, or giant collaborative feeds dedicated to certain types of art or poetry. The standalone app from initiative follows newsreader and ephemeral messaging app . neither of those has seen blockbuster traffic, but that hasn’t stopped Facebook from growing the Creative Labs project to test out different social app experiences without messing with its main app. Where Rooms is truly different from Facebook is that it doesn’t import your social graph from either your phone’s contacts, Facebook, or anywhere else. Its invite system is designed to make you build a community based on interest instead. Each Room gets a unique QR Code that can be shared with whoever its creator and members want to join them. That could mean keeping it super-private to just a few others interested in the topic, posting it publicly so anyone can join, or printing it out so people in a specific geographic area in the real world can add themselves. There is the issue that members could share the invite QR code or publicly post it without permission, blowing up a Room. To keep trolls from overrunning Rooms, moderators can ban anyone, and their device will be permanently banned from rejoining. Facebook will also be applying its standard community guidelines to content on Rooms. So, if something is flagged for hate speech, bullying, threats, spam, nudity, or other disruptive behavior, Facebook can unilaterally delete posts, ban members, or even take down entire Rooms. In that way, the app strongly differs from the early web, which was more of an “anything goes” wild west. That could be considered a limitation on free speech, but Miller believes it’s the only way to keep Rooms from devolving into a dangerous cess pool of hatred. Moderators have more control over the room, beyond just banning unruly users. They can also set a nickname for their room, add a background image and even select an emoji that room members can use in place of the “Like” button on posts. For example, a Room for a Farmer’s Market in the city might choose to use a Strawberry emoji instead of a Like button. Moderators can also make rooms 18+, in order to host rooms with topics not fit for minors. (However, it’s worth pointing out that users only have to say “Yes, I’m over 18” to get in – there’s no actual check.) Users can optionally associate an email address with their Rooms account, so if they lose their phone or change devices they would have a way to recover that account, if need be. But this is not required. At launch, there will be no native discovery tool for finding Rooms, which means you’ll have to get invite codes from other people in order to get in – a move which could potentially limit early adoption. Eventually, Miller’s team may add Room suggestions to the product. That’s why it’s asking Room creators if they want to turn on discoverability. Explains Miller, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox asked him how he was going to make sure people’s Rooms didn’t get overwhelmed with new members too quickly, and this was the result. The Rooms team is also now accepting applications at teams@rooms.me from Room creators who want to help with community growth. Miller says he won’t judge Rooms based on user count. In fact, he purposefully wants it to grow slow rather than have people’s Rooms suddenly swell with members and become diluted or unintelligible. Instead, he’s hoping the app finds some obsessively loyal users who come back every day to discuss important topics to them. Not even Miller can foresee exactly what will happen with Rooms. He tells me, “I think the coolest rooms will be things we haven’t thought of yet. The Twitter guys didn’t know what Twitter would be good for. The Snapchat guys didn’t know what Snapchat would be good for.” If Rooms fails, it will have taught Facebook a lesson about micro-sharing that it could use to inform its News Feed and Groups products. But if it succeeds, it could spawn wide-reaching, active communities that could never live on Facebook. Rooms is , and is available in the U.S., U.K. and a few other English-speaking countries. An Android version is tentatively planned for early 2015. |
Hardware Battlefield Applications Close In A Week | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | Stop procrastinating and fill out your application for . The show is set to be even better than last year with participating startups getting free exhibition space at the 2015 International CES and competing for $50,000 and the coveted Metal Man trophy. For the first time, TechCrunch has partnered with the CEA to be an official media partner of the tradeshow. This means companies selected to participate in Hardware Battlefield will get even more attention from the press, investors and hardware distributors. The complete list of rules can be found , but essentially, if you’re a hardware company looking to launch your first product around CES, we want you to launch on our stage. But first you have to . And you only have a week left. The application deadline is October 30th. Entry is free and is open to all hardware companies planning to launch (crowdfund or ship) product in a 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. Email , or TechCrunch’s Battlefield editor, with any questions. |
Android Wear Update Adds Offline Music, Bluetooth Headphone And GPS Support | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | Android Wear is getting its , with features that make smartwatches using Google’s wearable operating system more standalone devices, including music syncing and GPS location support. That means if you leave your watch at home while you go out for a jog, you’ve still got access to sweet jams, and your watch can still tell you where you are, and how to get home. The GPS features will work so long as an Android Wear device has the necessary hardware, which means no current shipping Android Wear watch can take advantage of them yet. The first Wear-powered smartwatch coming to market with GPS support is the Sony SmartWatch 3, which is up for pre-order starting today at Verizon’s website, and which lists a shipping date of October 30. Google says it’ll start selling the SmartWatch 3 via the Play Devices store soon, too. Offline music storage is a feature that everyone can enjoy, and it’s also bundled with support for audio Bluetooth accessory connections. That means you can take your wireless headphones with you when you hit the trail, and your tunes, and leave your phone behind. Those features require the updated version of Google Play Music to work, but that’s also now available for download. Google is also doing a discovery push to help surface more Android Wear software to users. It introduced eight new app collections to make the process of finding software for your wearable easier, and these include Health & Fitness, Travel + Local, Tools, and more. A breakdown of apps by category is a sure sign of maturation for any software marketplace, which means that either the volume of apps has increased enough to warrant a need for this, or a desire on Google’s part to make discovery easier in order to spark downloads. Likely, both are motivating factors. This Android Wear update was , alongside official support for developer-created watch faces, which is still coming at a later date in a separate update. Even though both were already on the roadmap, there’s no question that adding as many features as possible to Android Wear ahead of a competing platform launch from a certain fruit-logo’d competitor is very much to Google’s benefit, and to the benefit of Android in general. Apple’s Watch platform will support activity tracking and workout data, but it won’t have dedicated GPS built-in, and statements on Apple’s website specify it . The Apple Watch will be able to store music on your watch for play independent of the iPhone, however, and will be able to connect to a Bluetooth headset, as revealed by Apple CEO Tim Cook in an from September. Android Wear updates like this one will help Google turn the platform into a better draw both for hardware partners and for consumers, and the ‘iterate-in-public’ approach could help existing Wear device owners feel like they’re getting device upgrades without additional investment. If you’ve got an Android Wear device currently, Google says the update should be rolling out to Moto 360, LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live hardware soon, so keep an eye out for a software update notification card on your wrist in the near future. |
Mint’s Aaron Patzer Launches Beta Version Of An On-Demand Answers App With $4 Million In Funding From Shasta And First Round | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | , the founder and former CEO of Mint is placing his next bet with the on-demand info space. He and co-founder (another former Minter) are launching the beta of , an app that gives you advice from a curated set of experts. The app is currently focusing on the home improvement space and in alpha testing phase with a bunch of friends and family, but Patzer tells us the beta version will be ready for a few hundred TechCrunch readers and others this Saturday. Fountain already has its first Series A locked up with $4 million from and . Both Shasta and First Round invested in every round of Mint since it won the first Disrupt back in 2007. Patzer pulled in a bunch of other Mint talent to work with him on Fountain as well, including Stew Langille who just left Visual.ly as the co-founder and CEO, and Jason Yiin who worked on the original Mint iOS and Android apps as well as the original Facebook app. Patzer’s been quiet for a number of years, spending time on various projects and home improvement for a house and 22 acre farm right on the ocean in New Zealand. He says this actually led to the idea for Fountain. “I had all this cedar wood and one guy said I didn’t need to treat it and another guy told me I definitely did need to do that every year and he’d be happy to do it for a certain price. I didn’t know who to believe,” explained Patzer. That’s a common problem for sure, especially with potentially expensive home improvements, mechanical issues or a number of other things we deal with in everyday life, but it seemed to me as Patzer and I discussed his new idea over coffee that this was all Googleable. “Couldn’t I just whip out my phone right now and search for the answer online?” I ask him this as he’s in the middle of showing me how to choose the right color scheme for the coffee shop we are sitting in. Patzer pulls up the app, snaps some picks and starts thumbing through a myriad of interior design experts. “What you have online is all general,” Patzer explains. “It’s not specific to your situation and it’s not right when you need it” Gretchen, the interior design expert pops up on Patzer’s phone. We’re now in a video chat and she’s ready to help us with our color questions. “Hi Gretchen. I just took some pics of the colors in this coffee shop and sent them to you but you don’t have to do anything at the moment. I’m just demoing Fountain for a TechCrunch reporter,” Patzer tells her. “Uh, okay,” Gretchen says as she and I wave to each other via phone chat. Patzer didn’t expect her to actually pick up. “No one is really on call until Saturday when we launch beta,” he explains. He’s been busy gathering folks on the expert end before the beta launch. We can add notes and send more info to Gretchen, if needed. The whole process is quick and seems easy enough. The app allows use of voice, video or texting. The app allows you to draw on the pictures you take to point out specific things you are concerned about or to show the person on the other end exactly what you are getting at. The experts are available 24/7 in theory and the whole thing should take about 5 minutes, according to what it says on the app. You can ask about that weird hum in the fridge, how to fix a toilet, or why all your terrarium plants seem to die on you. Categories are all focused on home improvements for now, though Patzer does plan to expand to more categories as the app grows in user numbers. He pulled up the app again to demo that it could already theoretically do more. “I’m stuck on MySQL,” he voiced into the mic. Programming help is not something the app currently offers, but the app told us one expert was ready to help us out on our problem anyway. Patzer tells me his monetization plan is pretty simple, too. Ask an expert or get a second or third opinion for just $5 a pop. Fountain is free during the beta period. That will most likely end in January, according to Patzer. A lot of people have tried to do this same sort of thing in one form or another. There’s the completely horrible advice on Yahoo Answers, Quora or the tried and true asking of friends on Facebook. Many startups in the on-demand answers via smartphone space and a handful of what’s out there now seems to focus mostly on what ails you. and let you have a back and forth video convo with a doctor of your choosing. Doctor On Demand is $40 per “visit”. HealthTap used to be $100 but has recently reduced it’s price to $44 and let’s you invite your own doc to the service now. is and get advice on what to do next. That’s also for $40 per assessment but it’s not in real-time. hands out business advice for for a price set by each expert on the platform. You ask a question via the site and within 72 hours you get a conference call code that allows you to speak with someone. But it’s not when you want it. Nothing really exists in the home improvement space. And Patzer points out that not all of the expert advice is given right when you need it. Clarity, as we mentioned above, takes up to three days, First Derm takes about 24 hours to get back to you. Patzer plans to roll out more than just home improvement advice but would like to just stick with that category for now. “It’s a pretty broad category that touches everyone. The right advice can save you a lot of money, too,” he points out, “Your home is one of the most expensive things you will ever put money into. I know this from first-hand experience,” he says. The first 300 TechCrunch users can skip the wait list and get straight into the beta test this Saturday by clicking . You can actually get in a bit earlier by going to that link, but Patzer cautions that experts probably won’t be online till the Saturday launch. He didn’t expect Gretchen to pick up when we summoned an interior design expert. She just happened to pick up while out to brunch with friends. |
Sequoia-Backed Behalf Buys Stuff For Small Businesses Looking To Grow | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | Between small loans needed to pay salaries in a pinch and those raised by entrepreneurs looking to open a new store in a franchise or move to a bigger office, small businesses often need a bit extra capital to expand. Despite when small businesses have reliable income, lenders want to charge high interest rates on loans that banks aren’t interested in — a few thousand dollars for new equipment, inventory, or services the company needs — leaving small businesses with high rates and only a few months to pay. -backed wants to fill that niche, offering small businesses loans of about $10,000 with interest rates “close to what someone with good credit would pay on their credit cards,” according to Behalf CEO Benjy Feinberg. Looking at factors outside of just a business owner’s credit score (like, “does this business make money?”), Behalf decides whether a loan is likely to be paid back. If things look good, Behalf works with the small business to determine the optimal payback term for the small loan. Behalf can take on this extra risk while still offering lower rates because of those other factors it looks at and because it handles paying vendors for the things the loan is intended for — so no funds can be misspent. Vendors they work with benefit from the arrangement, as they bring in more sales without negotiating loans or payment terms with myriad small businesses. With $10 million in funding, Behalf can afford to make quite a few $10,000 loans, and its ~120 day payment terms mean that it’ll have that capital back (and then some) to offer rather quickly after giving it out. Of course, that’s assuming its risk model works out at scale. If it does, I assume we’ll hear about them raising a bigger round sooner rather than later. |
Will.i.am’s New Wearable Can Call And Text Without A Phone | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am revealed his new wearable device and company to the world in a keynote today. He’s been talking about this device for a while now, referring to it as more of a fashion technology than a watch. And he’s right. The device, called the PULS, is much more than a watch. It’s definitely a wearable that has a watch in it, but it also has a GPS map system, a music player, fitness tracker that tracks your steps, weight and calories burned, social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, can hold 1 GB of memory, 16 GB storage, bluetooth connectivity, and runs on a proprietary OS. Unlike many other devices in the same space such as the Apple Watch or the Moto 360, the PULS can call or send text messages, without the need for a phone. Here’s a first look at what this device can do: Will.i.am’s new wearable technology company i.am+ will also carry a jacket that powers the PULS, a backpack with a sound system, glasses that will take pictures by tapping on the PULS and shoes that tell you how much you weigh and how many steps you’ve made per day. All wearables hook in with the PULS to either help you track information about yourself or power the device. The device itself has a built-in mirrored sim so your phone and the device can use the same number. Developers can also build apps for the PULS. Apps like and already work with the device. We don’t know exactly what the retail price will be but will.i.am did say it was less than the cost of an iPhone without a plan and that it was “affordable.” Those in the U.S. will need to purchase a data plan through AT&T and those in the U.K. will go through O2. The device also comes in a variety of colors. Will.i.am revealed a luxury black and gold version, encrusted in bling while on stage at Dreamforce. [gallery ids="1070543,1070547,1070546,1070545"] |
Will.i.am’s Plan To Bring Fashion And Technology Together With The Creation Of i.am+ | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | Many know will.i.am as a musician and frontman for the Black Eyed Peas, but he’s more than embedded himself in technology in the last several years. He’s invested in several startups, appeared at the FIRST robotics competition, Intel made him the Director of Creative Innovation, and he just revealed his new wearable technology company on the Dreamforce stage for the first time. He sat down with me to talk about what he’s built and why it’s important to get inner city kids involved in tech and engineering. Tech pervades nearly everything we interact with in the modern world. Will.i.am is certainly working with the kind of technology that fits in with our lifestyles. “The reason I started i.am+ and moved into the tech world is because of what the tech world is calling Wearables,” he starts off in a blog post for the .”Success in wearables isn’t going to be driven by the giants of yesteryear. Instead it is going to be developed and brought to market by the unlikely candidate,” he says. Will.i.am spent two and a half years and his own money to create i.am+. The main product is a wearable wristband called PULS that holds a music player, fitness tracking, GPS, pedometer, and popular social apps like Facebook and Twitter. It also can also email, call and text, sans phone. |
The New Mobile-Cloud Enterprise | Sravish Sridhar | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | Enterprise IT is undergoing a platform shift from web-based, client-server systems to a mobile-cloud platform. This shift has caught the attention of all the major tech vendors who have either acquired or launched Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Backend as a Service (BaaS) technologies to address this growing opportunity. Facebook Parse, PayPal StackMob, Salesforce launched Salesforce Platform Mobile Services, AWS released a suite of their own mobile tools, Pivotal Pivotal CF Mobile Services and RedHat just recently FeedHenry. PaaS has long been heralded as the future of application development. It provides developers with self-service access to an app server and scalable infrastructure, freeing them from dependency on their infrastructure teams. BaaS, however, takes this to the next level (or two) by providing mobile-specific features with context and abstraction, such as push notifications as part of “out of the box” apps. In addition, BaaS provides an identity database, data and file storage, as well as an environment in which to run custom business logic. Put another way, BaaS is a cloud computing category of companies that make it easier for developers to set up, use and operate a cloud backend for their mobile, tablet and web apps. What makes them different? What’s the driving force behind these changes in enterprise ? Why is there so much activity happening ? I can think of two (interrelated) reasons: PaaS only gets you halfway there and PaaS is becoming commoditized, and mobile toolset providers can influence which cloud their customers run on. PaaS is a blank slate that needs to add the mobile feature layer (whether built in-house or purchased from a vendor) to enable enterprise IT to start building next-gen apps. But with a BaaS platform, you skip that part and go straight to development. BaaS provides the full client device mobile feature set (caching, data sync, encryption, location, etc.) and the mobile backend features required for every next-gen app: identity management, data services, engagement services (push notifications, analytics, etc.), and business logic — in the form of a full PaaS — to tie it all together in context for a good user experience. The first generation of mobile tools – MEAPs and mobile SDKs – provided lines of business with tools and services to launch these one-off apps. Now enterprise IT is starting to realize they need a standardized platform across the business to enable any app for any use case, and to provide this platform to the individual business lines on a self-serve basis. Mobile is driving the adoption of cloud in the enterprise. The two are a perfect fit. As organizations struggle to simultaneously gain a competitive advantage with innovative mobile applications and use cases while keeping up with the relentless pace of change in the mobile world, they are increasingly turning to cloud-based mobile services providers for help. At the same time, infrastructure and platform providers are seeing their offerings become increasingly commoditized. is available as open source, is free, and the well-publicized Google and Amazon price wars are pushing infrastructure prices to incredible lows. Throw in that there is often low friction to move between cloud providers, and it’s easy to see why PaaS vendors want to make their offerings “stickier” with value-add mobile services. It also explains the acquisition frenzy – an independent BaaS can be configured to run anywhere, which the big PaaS players don’t want. I see BaaS players continuing to build out their mobile toolsets, in order to make their offerings more attractive for lines of business (enabling any use case), developers (providing ease of use and elegance), and IT (ensuring they can maintain security, scalability, and control). PaaS providers with BaaS offerings will attempt to lure organizations in to secure them on their own cloud, while independent BaaS vendors will choose whatever cloud provider best meets their clients’ needs. For enterprise IT, we will start to see a new internal development ecosystem emerge, with BaaS as the backbone. The ecosystem will include integration services like , source control management software like , issue-tracking services like , and more. The difference will be that, instead of purchasing an entire application development suite from giants like IBM or SAP, the modern, effective mobile enterprise will purchase modular, best-of-breed solutions to create an environment that best suits their specific needs. |
Reddit Acquires Alien Blue, The Most Popular Unofficial Reddit App | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | If you’re even active on reddit, you probably know of . As far as perusing reddit on iOS goes, it’s pretty much the undisputed champ. It seems reddit would agree. The company has just taken Alien Blue under its wing, acquiring the project assets and hiring its sole developer. We heard whispers of this deal going back a few weeks. While reddit isn’t disclosing terms, they’ve just confirmed to me that they’ve acquired the Alien Blue project and that its Melbourne-based developer, , will be joining their team. Curiously, reddit seems to hesitate in calling the app their “official iOS reader” — they’re keeping the “Alien Blue” name, for example, rather than changing it to just be called “reddit” or “reddit reader” or something. If they’re not taking Alien Blue and strapping their name on it, why buy it? “Our whole philosphy has been to give our users choice. We’ve got the reddit AMA app, and alienblue coming out… but we really want users to use whatever they want.” says Ellen Pao, reddit’s head of Strategic Partnerships. “We think Alienblue is great, and it’s the most popular reddit app on iOS. We wanted to be able to offer it as a reddit app, and we wanted to help Jase with additional resources to do everything he wanted to do with it.” So is reddit going to run in there and change everything and wreck the app that its users love? So far, it doesn’t seem like it. Only two things are changing at this point: One thing to note: if you’ve already downloaded the app, you’ll need to download it again — a side effect of them transferring the app from Morrisey’s App Store developer account to reddit’s. That also means that if you’ve already purchased the pro upgrade, you’ll need to buy that again, too. To help take the sting off a bit there, reddit is making the Pro upgrade free for the first week after today. “But wait!” you say. “Doesn’t that mean can get the Pro features for free as long as they download it this week… even if they didn’t pay for it to begin with?” Yes. Yes it does. This post will be updated with App Store links as soon as the newly published app goes live. |
Never Trust A TechCrunch Writer With An AOL Email Address | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | About a week ago I wrote about a sales and marketing company called . It wasn’t a particularly in-depth article — just . But anyway, it happened. Well, apparently the Infusionsoft PR team received this email on Monday: From: Anthony Ha (anthony.j.ha@aol.com)
Date: October 13, 2014 at 9:14:26 PM MST
To: (sales@infusionsoft.com)
Subject: Hi Clate… Support: To Clate Mask, CEO, only. Please forward to him
________________ Hi Clate! I hope you are doing amazing! As you know, I wrote up about your company in our TechCrunch only recently. Periodically I’ve followed you and am thrilled with your leaps forward. I know our page is getting a lot of hits and I direct people often to you. I am contemplating another write up (can’t promise anything as the editor often rejects me, and am not allowed to promise). I hear you have new things which is fantastic and a new platform By the way, can you set me up with my own complimentary lifetime Infusionsoft Complete. I’m going to play with it and test some of my own ideas out. [I understand that you can close/yank it anytime if you’re not happy for any reason!] Thanks buddy and keep it up! Anthony Just to be clear: I didn’t write this email. Luckily, the folks at , Infusionsoft’s PR firm, realized that something was fishy, so they double-checked with me and I could confirmed that it was written by an impostor. (Apparently my doppelganger sent the same message to at least one other Infusionsoft employee.) I asked other TechCrunch writers if they’d been in similar situations, but , all I got was one story about someone pretending to be John Biggs in the hopes of obtaining free RAM. Plus this variant: People who don’t impersonate a specific TechCrunch writer but claim that they work for us, when they really really really don’t. The crisis was averted, but I’m still pretty annoyed, and I sure hope this doesn’t happen again. (Or if there another Anthony Ha impersonator, I hope he’s less of a tool.) With that in mind, I’d like to offer a few easy ways to spot a TechCrunch and/or Anthony Ha impostor: Actually, Jon still uses an AOL address for some reason. I apologize on his behalf. |
Y Combinator-Backed Greentoe Now Lets You Haggle Prices On Your iPhone | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | The online shopping experience is usually one of comparison: You visit numerous sites to find the best deal. Today, e-commerce negotiation site puts a spin on that process with an iOS app that lets you name the price you’re willing to spend on that camera or watch you’ve had your eye on. With the app, you search or flip through categories to find the item you are interested in purchasing and then click the “Make an Offer” button below the item. You then visit the “My Offers” section to see if a retailer has accepted your price. Greentoe launched out of this summer and has since raised $1 million in seed from , , , and . Neither founders Andrew Kurland or Joe Marrapodi have a background in retail, but the platform seems to be doing well. According to Kurland, Greetoe is consistently undercutting the prices seen on Amazon by 12 percent. It’s not the “everything” store like Amazon is, though. The platform only lets you haggle for home theater systems, photo gear, household appliances such as refrigerators and dishwashers, musical instruments and baby products for now. The founders plan to sell many more products in more categories in the future. |
Incubated: Highway1 Takes Hardware Startups From Prototype To Production | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | A few years ago, consumer electronics specialist PCH International decided that it wanted to that has emerged. To do that, it created , an accelerator focused specifically on guiding early-stage hardware companies through the process of building their products and getting them from the prototyping stage to actual production. Of course, hardware isn’t easy, and few first-time entrepreneurs know all that goes into building a new product. From finding the right materials to sourcing the parts they need to getting the final assembly through a production line, Highway1 has the connections most startups will need to get the job done. But first, the accelerator helps companies simply refine their prototypes and get them ready for production. With dedicated shared office space in San Francisco and access to on-staff hardware engineers, startups are able to get their cost of materials down and make their prototypes as cost-effective as possible. Toward the end of the program, founders take a trip to Shenzhen, where they source the parts they need and meet with factories that will be producing their hardware. Leveraging PCH’s ecosystem of suppliers and connections there, founders aren’t alone in trying to figure out the ins and outs of building product and shipping it back to the U.S. And at Demo Day, Highway1 graduates are able to show off their final product to investors who have an appetite for new hardware products and ideas. The connection to PCH also helps startups as they look to do pre-orders through the company’s sales platform at . Highway1 might not be for everyone, but for many hardware startups, the program has been invaluable in terms of getting them off the ground and into actual production. |
The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Is A Nearly Perfect Mini Tablet | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | zeppelins of old, nobody expected the Galaxy Note to fly. The phones were too big, the embedded stylus too silly. I reminded us all of the bad old days when PIMs were black and white and bulky. But Samsung persevered and Apple followed suit and now we enter the era of the phablet, a time of strange portents and weird UIs. A time where a phone that makes all other phones seem comically small can become a crowd favorite and an unexpected hit. Buy why? And how does this new model stack up? Let’s start with the bad news. Samsung still has not perfected the art of mixing the high with the low. While not all of Apple’s materials are high end, they are harmoniously put together to suggest an organic thing rather than something assembled. This is not the case with the Note 4. The beautiful front screen – and I don’t use that term lightly – is connected to a black bezel and, while not exactly # -worthy, there is a small space between the two. The nice metal band around the entire thing is the best part of the phone because once you turn it over you find Samsung’s tried-and-true plastic leather. Like the fake birds-eye wood grain that some car makers still stick into their dashboards, Samsung just can’t get enough of the fake leather. This, thankfully, is the worst I can say about the Note 4. It is, in short, just about the greatest “big phone” or “micro tablet” I’ve used and can easily replace either of those items in the mobile arsenal. [gallery ids="1070350,1070354,1070355,1070356,1070357,1070358,1070359"] The Note 4 is very usable. It fits in my large hand without problems and the buttons and the screen are intuitively placed and easily accessed. The stylus is almost invisible until you pull it out and swipe-to-unlock works equally well with two hands or one. If you’re looking for Samsung’s traditional removable battery or SD card slot you won’t be disappointed. The thin back slips off like a snakeskin and exposes the massive 3220 mAh battery and a small slot for a MicroSD card. Once the back is off you learn just how flimsy it is – it feels like a piece of thick paper. Presumably it’s enough to keep things safe back there, but wouldn’t drop it on a sharp edge. The screen, which is a full 5.7 inches, displays 2,560 x 1,440 pixels at 515ppi. It is the best I’ve seen and is great for reading, drawing, and general mobile chicanery. The screen, in fact, is the best part and if the phablet is aimed at people who just can’t see the font on smaller phones, this is the phone to get. The iPhone 6 Plus screen is slightly less exciting when compared to this model and Samsung deserves praise for packing so many pixels onto such a small surface. Making calls on the phone often led to issues. For example, if you don’t hold the speaker right against your ear you run the risk of listening to dead plastic. While there was some resonance in the case, the device is packed so tight that you need to position your ear properly to get anything down. It’s not a deal-breaker but it’s something to remember. In all this is the phablet refined. Apple is an upstart in this market and while I’m not about to I will say it is definitely at the top. The model I tested has a Snapdragon 805 processor that runs a Quad-core Krait 450 CPU at up to 2.7 GHz per core. This means that everything about this phone is fast. While I saw some minor lag during multi-tasking and bringing up processes, the fact remains that everything loaded and ran quickly and smoothly. Luckily the battery can stand up to abuse. I saw about a day’s worth of use out of it, about 30 hours if I used it sparingly. There are a number of battery-saving methods available as well, including a system that turns off the color screen and leaves everything dim and dark. That’s hardly an ideal experience but it’s helpful if you’re hurting for battery. One odd UI choice is Samsung’s multi-window system. Initially available in some of their higher end tablets, this system allows you to minimize an app in a window and even shrink it down to a Facebook Face-sized coin that floats on the desktop. This allows you to edit a document and make a call, for example, or look at your calendar and a web page at the same time. For example, below is the calendar app in a window: And then you see it shrunk down to a nubbin: It’s an interesting concept but I didn’t use it once while testing and it is normally turned off by default, making it hard to access when needed. It’s a clever idea if not a bit of overkill. I also rarely used the stylus. However, the “Air Command” feature – a little arc of commands that let you take notes on the screen or send data to the cloud, was always there, appearing like Clippy the Paperclip in Microsoft Word. Again, I didn’t have to use this feature but it was there to a fault. The camera on the Note 4 is particularly nice. It has image stabilization and it is not full of goofy modes like “Birthday” and “Fireworks” mostly because it works well in most lights. It was fun to take video and slow-motion shots and family snaps were clear and bright. Compared to the iPhone 6 Plus the Samsung shots – unadulterated – were a bit brighter and the colors a bit different but the resulting photos, shown side by side, are sufficiently nice for a cellphone camera. [gallery ids="1070325,1070326,1070327,1070328,1070329,1070330"]
The front camera is nothing to write home about but it works. The little flash on the back of the phone also doubles as a heart-rate monitor which, although useful, I did not find a compelling enough feature to return to it while I used the device. In short, however, you will like this camera and it does take great photos. Samsung has packed an entire laptop’s worth of features into this little package. This makes things both exciting and infuriating. Do we need multitasking, at least using Samsung’s windowing method? Do you really need a way to cut out portions of a screenshot? How many AT&T apps does this thing really need? At the risk of alienating fans, I will say that Samsung’s version of Android is full of doodads and whatsits galore and can often seem overcrowded and fiddly. A few good features well done are all I ask from a phone and having an army of AT&T apps and help screens march across my phablet is frustrating at best. Again, this is not a deal-breaker but it is a deal-bender. I would love a cleaner version of Android but I suspect Samsung needs to keep innovating in order to stay fresh. There is nothing sadder than a simply boring device, and the Note 4 is anything but boring. I will admit that I did enjoy using and carrying the Galaxy Note 4. I liked it better, in fact, than the Galaxy S5. While the devices are essentially the same – screen size and processor excepted – the Note 4 was speedy, bright, and very usable and the stylus adds a bit of benefit for those used to writing things down. This phone, like all phablets, is not for everyone. I myself have only just hopped on the phablet train and while I’m an iOS man at heart, I could be swayed by Samsung’s wiles. Samsung did a good job. It’s a solid, useful, and usable phone designed for folks who need a bit more real estate or at least folks with big hands. I have become a phablet convert and this is the best of the breed. Would I recommend it? Take a look at the iPhone 6 Plus and decide. If you can’t live without the stylus than this is the phone for you. However, if that’s not a deal-breaker I would argue both phones have their benefits but are, oddly enough, very much the same. Samsung could have added fewer bells and whistles and still made a great product and Android is a bit confusing to the uninitiated but all in all you’re dealing with two very different answers to the same question namely how to make a big phone that doesn’t seem big and an Android device that doesn’t frustrate. In this case, Samsung succeeds on both fronts. |
Netflix Stock Price Crashes In After-Hours Trading | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | UPDATE: On 10/16/2014, the stock . Netflix today reported a third-quarter profit of $59 million, up from $32 million a year ago. But the company failed to attract as many new subscribers as it had predicted, calling it “over-forecasted” on membership growth. In after-hours trading the stock ( ) plunged more than one hundred dollars (over 23%) to 339 on the news. “We over-forecasted membership growth,” Netflix said in a letter to its shareholders. The company added just one million new members in the US, with an additional two million coming from international markets. In all, Netflix now has 53.06 million members in both domestic and international markets. Netflix attributes the miss to new prices and the fading of the positive reaction to its hit series “Orange is the New Black” before the third quarter. “As best we can tell, the primary cause is the slightly higher prices we now have compared to a year ago. Slightly higher prices result in slightly less growth, other things being equal, and this is manifested more clearly in higher adoption markets such as the US,” the company said. Going forward, the company has factored the higher prices into its Q4 member forecast, but that hasn’t stopped Wall Street from selling off the stock in after-hours trading. The news HBO is the streaming space probably didn’t help anything either. UPDATE: On 10/16/2014, the stock . |
Netflix Says Standalone HBO Was “Inevitable,” Claims Both Services Will Prosper | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | Netflix , but hey, it managed to keep up with today’s news cycle — specifically, next year. CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells managed to squeeze the news into , where they say that HBO’s move was “inevitable and sensible.” The letter acknowledges that Hastings has long portrayed HBO as Netflix’s , a statement that has . But they also suggest that since there’s not much overlap in content, “many people will subscribe to both Netflix and HBO” and that the services will “both prosper.” This was actually a subject of debate within the TechCrunch team this morning — after all, consumers are only going to subscribe to so many streaming video services before they feel like they’ve got enough video and/or they’ve exceeded their budgets. On the other hand, if you’re really excited about on HBO, and you’re just as excited about on Netflix (or, to sneak in a plug for my favorite of the Netflix Originals, ), there’s a good chance you’ll subscribe to both. Netflix also addresses the competition issue at another point in the letter, noting that “per-member viewing and retention in the US are as strong as ever.” As a result, it argues that “increased competition from piracy, TV Everywhere, Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu, etc.,” wasn’t a factor in its disappointing subscriber numbers. Anyway, here’s the full comment about HBO: Starting back in 2011 we that HBO would be our primary long-term competitor, particularly for content. The competition will drive us both to be better. It was inevitable and sensible that they would eventually offer their service as a standalone application. Many people will subscribe to both Netflix and HBO since we have different shows, so we think it is likely we both prosper as consumers move to Internet TV. |
Fly Or Die: Motorola Moto X | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | The is a welcome addition in a world full of big phones. It’s relatively slim and compact and, just like its predecessor, comes with options for customization for the back panel. But going beyond that, the $500 phone comes unlocked and is spec’d to impress, with a 5.2-inch 1080p display, a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera. Plus, it offers interesting features like the ability to access Google Now through voice alone, but simply talking to Google. When it comes to Android phones, John and I are difficult people to please. He far more than I did, and found it to be an excellent option for those in the market for an Android handset. He spent a few weeks with it paired to the Moto 360 and seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. I also found it impressive in terms of initial impressions, with the voice activated Google Now option filling a hole in my heart that Siri has yet to address. |
EBay Beats On EPS Of $0.68, Misses On Sales Of $4.35B; Shares Fall On Lower Forecasts | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | E-commerce giant , soon to be , today its third-quarter earnings. The company reported revenues of $4.4 billion (or, $4.353 billion, to be exact), growing 12% on a year ago, on non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.68. This beat estimates on EPS but narrowly missed on sales (but, yes, beat if you rounded up, as eBay has). Analysts were revenues of $4.37 billion and earnings per share of $0.67. This met on sales and beat on EPS eBay’s own expectations that it announced: it had been anticipating sales of $4.3 to $4.4 billion and non-GAAP EPS between $0.65 and $0.67. The company is currently seeing shares falling, currently down 3.46% in after-hours trading, on the back of the revenue miss and lowered forecasts for the fourth quarter and the full year. Full-year sales it says will be between $17.85 billion and $17.95 billion; versus earlier estimates of $18 billion to $18.3 billion. Q4 sales will be $5 billion; analysts . “Rapidly changing competitive environments in commerce and payments underscore the opportunities for eBay and PayPal, and highlight how each business will benefit from the focus and agility of being an independent company,” said eBay Inc. President and CEO John Donahoe in a statement. “As we prepare to separate eBay and PayPal in 2015, our teams are focused on strong execution to ensure each business is set up for long-term success.” Nevertheless, the company is now bracing itself for a trickier holiday season. Breaking out performance of the company’s two main segments: — PayPal continues to put its best mobile foot forward. It is now on track to process 1 billion mobile transactions in 2014, with mobile payments this quarter at $12 billion, up 72%. Its net total payment volume for the quarter was up 29% and revenues were $2 billion. It now has 157 million registered accounts, growth of 14%. Mobile is still very small, regardless, with only 2.9 million active mobile accounts. — Marketplaces gross merchandise volume (GMV) was up 9%, with the international leading that at 11% and U.S. up 7%. Revenue was at $2.2 billion. Marketplaces now has 152 million active buyers, up 13%.eBay Enterprise gross merchandise sales (GMS) grew 14%. Revenue grew to $259 million. Enterprise enabled its clients to grow same-store sales 13%. In the last quarter, Q2, eBay had mixed results, with sales of $4.366 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.69 — missing on revenues but beating on profits. eBay announced at the end of September that its payments division PayPal would become a publicly traded company separated from Marketplace and eBay Enterprise to give the divisions “sharper strategic focus,” targeting the process to be completed by the middle of 2015. Activist investor Carl Icahn had for the split, arguing that it would help the two parts of the company grow faster. While eBay regularly resisted his calls, in the end it announced the decision itself. There is some logic to the argument that as a very large company, with two distinct parts, eBay was not very good at growth. As a point of , Amazon’s business growth rates have been at around 25%, while eBay’s have been around 10%. “eBay and PayPal are two great businesses with leading global positions in commerce and payments,” said eBay Inc. President and CEO John Donahoe in a statement at the time of the announcement. “For more than a decade eBay and PayPal have mutually benefited from being part of one company, creating substantial shareholder value. However, a thorough strategic review with our board shows that keeping eBay and PayPal together beyond 2015 clearly becomes less advantageous to each business strategically and competitively. The industry landscape is changing, and each business faces different competitive opportunities and challenges.” |
Gaming Company Razer Is Now Valued At $1B+ | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | , the San Diego-based high-end gaming tech company, is on a roll. In the wake of the latest models of its thin , a , and preparing for the sale of a new wearable, it has recently closed a round of funding with Intel on at least a $1 billion valuation. The details come by way of a leaked internal memo to staff that was passed to TechCrunch by an anonymous source. “We’re already one of the billion dollar unicorns in the tech start-up world and now, we’ve got more resources than ever to allow us to focus on designing and developing the best experiences for gamers worldwide,” the memo notes. The company and Intel are not commenting on the memo’s contents to TechCrunch; sources have indirectly confirmed it as correct. Intel has backed a number of gaming companies by way of and directly. Related investments include , , (acquired by Sony) and more. It’s also been an active investor in wearables and adjacent technology. This may be the first round raised by Razer in years. The last round reported by the company was a from IDG and Accel, from their joint China fund. In the years since then, Razer has grown in popularity on the back of its range of products from high-end gaming peripherals like mice and keyboards; full systems (like the Blade); and wearables like its Nabu smartband, which has yet to launch officially but should be coming “in weeks.” Razer also offers a range of software to run on different platforms. The memo notes that the company now has over 10 million users of its software, with over 2 million logged on daily. While Razer — whose slogan is “For Gamers. By Gamers” — has raised its profile among the gaming community through sponsorships of professional gamers through Team Razer, the company is also making a push to bring its products and gaming in general to a more mainstream audience. That’s where the Nabu smartband will come into play — literally speaking. Razer’s deals with companies like Tencent will integrate into the Nabu services like WeChat, as well as gamification elements — your activity while wearing the Nabu will translate into points on Tencent games. “We expect to see the Razer Nabu convert more non-gamers to gamers in the months to come,” the memo reads. There are other interesting details in the memo, including the appointment of three new board members for the San Diego, CA-based company — a prominent investor and two others based in Silicon Valley — which will be officially announced in the near future. |
Motorola Announces Which Of Its Phones Will Get Android 5.0 Lollipop | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | Given that Motorola is building Google’s just-announced , it’s probably also a given that Motorola knows their way around , Lollipop. It makes sense, then, that they’re pretty much the first out of the gate to announce which of their phones are getting the update treatment. Though they’re mum on timing, Moto has just promised Lollipop updates for around half a dozen devices: Motorola is promising to announce more phones after they’ve worked with their “various partners” — which, in other words, means they’ve still got to figure out which carriers are willing to support which phones for a bit longer, and which will work with them on the update distribution process. No mention yet of what’ll come running on when it eventually ships — but given that the phone is kinda-sorta still unofficial (in that just about everything around it has already leaked, but nothing has been announced), we’ll forgive ’em for now. |
Vusay Keeps Eyeballs Glued By Adding SoundCloudy Timed Comments To Any Video | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | null |
ISIS Tactics Illustrate Social Media’s New Place In Modern War | Jillian Kay Melchior | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | anxiously in his family’s refugee camp in Ainkawa, Iraq, in late September. In just days, he said, he would leave them and return to the front line as a Kurdish peshmerga soldier to fight the self-declared Islamic State. During his last battle, in Aiyrash Village near Qaraqosh, Majid endured heavy fire from snipers and mortars, the combat continuing day and night, uninterrupted for nearly a week. The memory haunted him. More than combat kept Majid awake at night. He said his sleeping problems persisted because he couldn’t forget the graphic propaganda images posted and publicized online by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Iraqi men, women and even children — nearly everyone has seen the pictures of crucified enemies, the snapshot of the headless corpse of a little girl in a party dress, the videos of victims moments before a knife cuts through their necks. “Maybe the peshmerga are strong, but they’re also afraid,” Majid told me. “The strong media that the [ISIS] uses affects people.” Welcome to modern warfare, where online propaganda plays a central role. In the past year, ISIS has used social media and the web to control the narrative of the conflict in Iraq and Syria. And though it borrows some tactics from propagandists like Vladimir Putin, ISIS has also proven a macabre trailblazer. Despite its grand ambitions of establishing a geographically transcendent caliphate, the terrorist group is not recognized as a nation-state, occupying a swath of territory stretching across Iraq and Syria conquered by brute force. Its decentralization has proven to be a big boon for its propaganda efforts, allowing ISIS to push out its story in a novel way. Because ISIS’s propaganda originates from thousands of individual sources, it’s much harder to counter. In 2011, the year of the Arab Spring, we saw how the Web and social media could be used to push back against tyrants and organize protest and revolution. In 2014, we’re learning that this powerful tool, like all others, can be used to spread lies and misinformation as easily as it can spread the truth, and it can be used to suppress and discourage free speech just as it can be used to promote it. Propaganda has long been a tool of war, employed with increasing savvy. For example, as Russia pawn Viktor Yanukovych dispensed armed forces on peaceful protestors, and as the Kremlin invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine this year, Vladimir Putin made clever use of state-owned media. He claimed the protestors at Maidan were extremists, nationalists, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites — a smear campaign that worked. Western leaders and media outlets hesitated to throw their full support behind the Maidaners, and in the name of balance, many even further circulated the false Russian claims. So Putin plugged along, employing the same tactics to falsely assert Crimea needed annexation because of the oppression of Russian speakers. He also claimed that Russians had no involvement in the supposedly organic separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine — a “fact” proven demonstrably false, but often repeated last spring to international confusion. Such comprehensive propaganda strategies have unfortunate repercussions for journalists, especially those who question the spin. Where once both sides relied on reporters to cover the story of war, affording them relative safety, propaganda is increasingly crowding out independent journalists who pose a threat to warped narratives. Consequently, reporting on conflicts has become much more dangerous. A drawing by a 12-year-old Kobani refugee in Turkey. Already, Russia has a history of killing journalists who offend the Kremlin. The case of Anna Politkovskaya, shot execution-style after publishing stories critical of the Russian government, caught Western attention, but 35 other journalists have also been murdered in Russia since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. When things heated up in Eastern Ukraine, alleged “separatists” — who actually enjoyed the full support of the Kremlin — began kidnapping several journalists there, enough to make many reporters think twice about making the trip. Like Putin, ISIS recognizes how independent journalists can undermine propaganda. But Putin, as head of a nation-state, needs at least some claim at legitimacy, so his propaganda focuses on white-washing his illegitimate behavior. In contrast, ISIS believes it derives its legitimacy from a mandate from Allah to establish a caliphate. The West’s approval offers it no benefit, which frees its propagandists up to be rawer, more graphically violent, and more unhinged. Where traditional states like Putin’s Russia threaten journalists implicitly, the Islamic State does so much more aggressively. The videotaped beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff sought to rattle the West and grab attention, but they also sent a clear message to other reporters: Stay away or pay with your life. With journalists presumably out of the way, ISIS crafts two messages, one to the Muslim world and one to the West. For its “domestic” audience, ISIS uses propaganda to persuade recruits to join its fight. It seeks to make jihad seem manly, cool and strong, posting highly produced, . It has even posted pictures of terrorists with and . So far, the propaganda looks to be succeeding: Today, ISIS is estimated to have more than 30,000 members from around the globe, the CIA estimated in September after reviewing intelligence reports collected since May. Members hail not only from Arab nations but also Britain, the United States and Australia. Content targeted at an international audience differs vastly. ISIS wants to scare frighten its enemies, both to deter counterattacks and to coerce conversions. It’s working, one influential Kurdish commander fighting against the Islamic State told me as I for “They started this almost one year ago, [using] all the media — social media, Facebook, the Internet — [to show] how they are killing the people, how they are taking their kids, how they are killing children, how they are taking the women, females, so it’s really psychological war, and I can say that they are succeeding. . . Most of the peshmerga, you know, they are from [this] same region, so when ISIS came, some of them [said they had to first] take their families and kids to the safe area [before they could join the fight]. . . . That’s a challenge for us.” For both markets, ISIS makes use of its decentralized structure. One of its most powerful propaganda tools is an app called “The Dawn of Glad Tidings,” or “The Dawn,” for short. As J.M. Berger, an expert on terrorism, , users consent to allowing ISIS to post to their social-media accounts. To avoid Twitter’s spam-detection algorithms, Berger noted, the app even spaces out its posts. In August, Staffan Truvé, the co-founder of social-media monitor Recorded Future, and his team tracked 27,000 Twitter accounts that mentioned the ISIS positively. They also found the ISIS had succeeded in creating hype — a total of 700,000 accounts discussed the terrorist group. Twitter has tried to counter ISIS, suspending more than 1,000 accounts it suspected of terrorist links. But that hasn’t been too successful; because the ISIS propaganda arm isn’t rigorously structured, it can be much more flexible than, say, Russia. “When an account gets shut down, a new one is immediately created, and they use other guys to promote the [new] account,” Truvé tells me. “It’s kind of a whack-a-mole thing.” Coupling The Dawn app with a sharp hashtag strategy, ISIS tries to get its content to trend globally. During the summer’s soccer games, it diverted attention and inspired fear by using a #worldcup2014 hashtag. Likewise, after President Obama approved airstrikes, it fired back online with a #MessageFromISIStoUS hashtag threatening revenge. Perhaps most notable, when the ISIS took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June, it revealed a calculated social-media plan, pumping out a record-breaking 40,000 tweets in a single day, Berger reported. It followed promptly with tweets depicting an ISIS flag erected over Baghdad. “The volume of those tweets was enough to make any search for ‘Baghdad’ on Twitter generate the image among its first results,” Berger noted, “which is certainly one means of intimidating the city’s residents.” In such a literally cut-throat environment, real journalism is not only dangerous; it’s essential. For all its strategic value for bad guys like the Kremlin and ISIS, propaganda has one crucial deficiency: It’s not the truth. “I think that journalists have to adapt to the new media environment — everyone does,” says Courtney C. Radsch, advocacy director for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “There’s no going back. … You have governments and extremist groups and factions creating their own outlets for communication strategies, so journalists will have to try to carve out a space for themselves that’s adding value.” Finding that space shouldn’t be hard, though it will require courage. National Review |
Apple Leaks The iPad Air 2 And iPad Mini 3 | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | After months of speculation and rumors, Apple just released details about the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3. Unintentionally. A day early. Someone is getting fired over this. The devices were supposed to be announced at an Apple event tomorrow, but noticed the two devices listed in the iPad User Guide for iOS 8 within iBooks. Whoops. According the iBook, , the upcoming devices will sport a TouchID sensor and look identical to their current form. Of course pricing and availability wasn’t mentioned in the iBook. Those details will likely be revealed tomorrow. Apple is also new Mac hardware along with officially releasing OS X Yosemite at tomorrow’s event. Look for a new iMac and maybe a retina MacBook Air. Of course there will be two new iPads too. Strangely, this leak was discovered just minutes after and . Coincidence? Maybe. But Apple generally doesn’t do coincidences. |
Facebook Open Sources More Of The Tech Behind Its Paper App | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | It doesn’t look like Facebook’s ever with users, but many developers looked toward it as of what a modern mobile app could look like. To write Paper, Facebook developed a wide variety of proprietary libraries, and it’s slowly making some of them available to outside developers. Earlier this year, for example, Facebook open sourced the , which powers much of the user interface of the app, for adding a shimmering effect to apps and a couple of other libraries it developed for Paper. Today, it is making the AsyncDisplayKit library available to developers, too. That’s a bit of an unwieldy name, but it’s the technology that allows an app with lots of complex animations like Paper to run at 60 frames per second. It’s essentially a drop-in replacement for some of Apple’s own technologies. Apple’s own UIKit views for working with text and images can often take tens to hundreds of milliseconds to render. That makes it very hard — and sometimes impossible — to still render smooth animations in an app. Over time, developers have found ways around this by hacking their own solutions, but as Facebook notes, these “individual workarounds tend to behave differently, making it difficult to reason about higher-level improvements and application behavior.” That’s where AsyncDisplayKit comes in. It builds on Apple’s own technologies, but while Apple’s standard technology runs in an application’s main thread and hence blocks the application from responding to user input, Facebook’s solution doesn’t block the main thread. Unsurprisingly, AsyncDisplayKit works very well in combination with the Pop animation engine, but there is no requirement to also use Pop. Indeed, as Facebook notes, “it’s just as powerful with and conventional app designs” The code is now available on . |
null | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 23 | null |
Bag Week: Hex Onyx Origin Laptop Bag | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 15 | You might say, “It’s a bag! How much can someone say about a single bag?” A lot, it turns out, because the Hex Onyx Origin isn’t just any bag. As a staunch backpack fan (not shoulder bags or briefcases), this is the only backpack I’ve ever worn that made me feel like a grownup. It comes in a black canvas color with leather trim, and has a structured design so it doesn’t flop around on your back. Even with a nicer outfit on (but not a suit, seriously) this bag still manages to look professional and put together despite the fact that it’s the same kind of bag that small children take on the school bus. But the Onyx Origin isn’t just about style. The backpack can fit up to a 15″ MacBook Pro with a protective sleeve, as well as pouches for an iPad mini, a notebook, and other professional accoutrement. The smaller front pocket, with openings on the exterior, can fit a full-size iPad and also comes with an added layer of protection for your nearest and dearest gadgets. Plus, the whole thing has a water-resistant coating. [gallery ids="1070259,1070260,1070261,1070262,1070263,1070264"] My single complaint has to do with the placement of the straps. I am but a dainty female, and feel like the straps are slightly too wide for my frame. But at the end of the day, that’s a me problem. Super small folks should maybe try this bad boy on before purchasing, but everyone else should be good to go. There are no special hiking strips for your chest or shoulders, and fitting a laptop and a full set of camera equipment in this bag isn’t likely possible. However, this isn’t the right bag for a hiker or a pro photographer. This is a bag for someone who carries a backpack every day, doesn’t want to let go of that bit of youth, but needs to look a bit more grown up than they do wearing a Jansport. It’s a bit expensive, at $145.99, but if you rely on a backpack to get through the day and need something small, functional, and stylish, the Hex Onyx Origin is definitely worth a second look. Check out the Hex Onyx Origin laptop bag right . |
Salesforce Hopes To Ride Analytics Wave With New Business Intelligence Service | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 10 | 12 | will unveil a new analytics service tomorrow morning they have dubbed Wave. The product will be introduced by CEO Marc Benioff at the company’s Dreamforce customer conference in San Francisco, but according to a Salesforce spokesperson, it is already available in the AppExchange now. It was one of the worst kept secrets in technology as just about everyone I talked to knew about this even before today’s release, but the general consensus is that this is something that Salesforce had to do, even though the market is crowded with competitors and they are very late to the game. As one CEO told me, it was a gaping hole in the Salesforce product family and they needed to fill it. All that said, Wave is a graphical tool for viewing business analytics in an attractive and visual way on mobile devices and larger PC screens, but like many of Salesforce’s services it will be rolled out slowly over time, and according to Forrester Analyst Boris Evelson, while it’s impressive in its own way, it has ways to go before it can compete with established business intelligence vendors. Make no mistake, this is a big market and a company like Salesforce wants some of it, but how large that piece will be is going to depend on many factors including how well they actually implement the product. Pretty demos always look nice, but it really depends on what happens when the rubber meets the road. Salesforce claimed when they showed this tool to business users, they were giddy because it was so easy to use, but the competition is fierce and Salesforce is just getting started. Still, IDC analyst Dan Vesset says you can’t dismiss Salesforce easily in what he estimates is a $10B market. In a market that large, he says, there is certainly room for Salesforce. “I think it can compete. Obviously, first and foremost it’s for existing SF.com customers. They now have an option to get their BI/analytics needs met by the same vendor instead of having to seek out another product. That will be attractive to some (not all),” he wrote in an email. In the demo I saw, you can slice and dice the data to create different views as you would expect and create a variety of connections between data, but it still uses standard database language like “join” and has database-style labels, and you still needed to build the connections to view the data. In other words, although it didn’t require IT involvement to use it, neither did it appear to be dead simple, and users would still need some training or knowledge to use it effectively. The company emphasized in the demo that they wanted to make this a consumer-like experience, and they actually brought in game designers to make it more fun to use the product. While they succeeded to an extent, it’s important to remember this is still 1.0 technology and it’s going to require refinement over time. They also brought up the slew of third-parties who could be involved in this analytics play with everyone from OEMs to consultants to third-party developers. For a product that’s supposed to be so easy to use, it seems as though they’ve lined up a lot of outside help. To be fair though, they say the third parties will help customers connect to external data sources in other systems inside and outside the company and build more complex apps on top of the platform. Salesforce obviously wants a piece of the BI market badly and they are going to make a strong push to get it, but just because Salesforce enters the market, doesn’t mean it can have its way with it. If you recall, everyone thought Salesforce would blow up the enterprise social market when they introduced Chatter a few years ago, and it never really happened. Like everyone else in this space, it will need to earn its marketshare and that will take work and commitment. Today’s announcement is just the first step. |
The iPhone 6 Plus Wins The Longer Race | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 12 | Apple’s new iPhones have been available for around a month now, and something interesting has happened with this generation: I’m forced to revisit my and change my initial impression based on later experience. After further testing of the two devices, I find the iPhone 6 Plus has become my smartphone of choice, as a surprising first choice over the iPhone 6. The 6 Plus initially struck me as too large for normal use; it definitely feels more comfortable to use as a two-handed device than as a single-handed gadget, which is what you’d typically expect from a smartphone. But after subsequent weeks of additional testing, I find that the 6 Plus ends up being the one I’d choose for almost any situation, despite its additional size and not-so-pocket friendly dimensions. Why does the 6 Plus end up prevailing? Mostly the screen size, which provides you with a lot more viewing area in general applications like browsing the web or reading e-books. The screen is also amazing for viewing pictures, and the 6 Plus is also just a far better mobile camera than anything else out there, partly because of the optical image stabilization technology that Apple has built into it, but mostly just because the huge display gives you lots of viewfinder advantages and more space for working with the picture UI. Pocket size ends up being a minor concern when you take into account using the 6 Plus in the car, as a veritable in-car entertainment system replacement. It’s not so important when you work with the device in landscape mode, giving you additional options for working with Message and Mail apps to deal with more communication quickly. It’s less of a concern when you’re watching media apps like Plex and Netflix and taking advantage of the additional viewing real estate. My initial set of reviews put the iPhone 6 on top, and the 6 Plus as a close second; further testing suggests they might actually be better characterized as reversed in order – the 6 Plus ends up being a better mobile computing device for my everyday use habits, even if it isn’t necessarily as mobile as its other new companion. Sure, it doesn’t fit quite as nicely in the skinny jeans I generally favor, but it still fits, and it’s a much better device for typing out a post on the go, if I end up needing to do that. Apple’s event next week will show us what’s next for the iPad in the world of the iPhone 6 Plus, and I’m very curious to see what else Apple brings to the table for its tablet, in a world where its flagship smartphone offers a lot of tablet-style love for the mobile worker. |
Facebook’s Internet.org Works With Carriers To Speed Up Networks, Indonesia First | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 10 | 12 | has long been promoting the the idea of in emerging countries to drive more Facebook (and wider mobile data) usage. Now, its Internet.org initiative has crafted another way to promote growth: by working with directly with carriers to analyse and fix their networks, with a recent trial in Indonesia — the fourth-biggest country for Facebook usage — speeding up mobile network speeds by up to 70%, the company says. Facebook says that the project in Indonesia will be a template for further markets. “Thanks to this research, we now have a replicable model for analyzing, measuring and improving network performance that can be applied to any mobile network,” the company says. “Unfortunately, no additional details to share right now on future projects.” With Internet.org’s free access app , this could be one country on the list to tackle. It highlights an interesting evolution in Facebook’s role abroad. While helping make its service more accessible in developing markets, and investing in , Facebook is also positioning itself as an ally to carriers. And whether you look at Internet.org cynically or not — it does, after all, feed into Facebook’s growth plans — there’s a place for more attention to better data access. Working directly with carriers to fix their networks will help raise Facebook’s profile with them, and potentially give it more negotiating power when talking with those carriers about turning on services like zero-rating. This highlights a of how internet companies appear to be working ever-closer with carriers to grow their reach. The social network, now with over 1.3 billion users globally, carried out the project in Indonesia via its Internet.org initiative, along with Ericsson (another Internet.org member) and Indonesian mobile operator XL Axiata. You can see the full results in a it has published. This was not a random choice of country or carrier: Indonesia is the fourth-largest country for Facebook usage, and XL Axiata says that Facebook is by far the most popular service among subscribers who use mobile data (over half their base is currently paying for mobile data services). The idea behind the work in Indonesia is that zero-rated Facebook access may lower the gates for people, but it doesn’t tackle one of the bigger problems that prevent zero-rating from working: many carriers in emerging markets simply lack the infrastructure or funds to invest in the fastest data networks. According to a recent study from McKinsey, there are some 4.4 billion people offline in the world today, with 3.4 billion of them concentrated into 20 countries (a target list for Facebook, perhaps?). Facebook, working with Ericsson and XL Axiata, created a methodology to “analyze, monitor and improve end-to-end network performance” — not on the live network but using simulated Facebook application use cases. The tests and improvements, incidentally, were all carried out on Android devices (a signal in itself of just how dominant the platform is for smartphone usage in emerging markets). Over the first six months of 2014, the three developed a process to simulate app use: “using a test agent developed by Facebook, typical Facebook interactions were triggered and measured on different mobile devices in urban, suburban and rural regions across the XL Axiata coverage area,” the white paper on the project notes. It also developed a series of metrics that measured activity and bottlenecks in XL Axiata’s radio access network, core network, and content delivery network. After seeing the results, the three made network-wide “adjustments” that sped up the network by 70%. The idea here is not to lay on more infrastructure investments, but to work on fine-tuning what is already there. “We now know that it is possible to increase network performance using existing network resources, which is key to helping close the connectivity gap,” the company notes in a . Facebook is also trying to tackle the connectivity from another angle: the company has hosted a hackathon in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, focused specifically on creating apps that are more data-efficient for markets where decent data connectivity is in shorter supply or is too expensive. The Internet.org work is being made public as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and current Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo (first stop on the trip: the temple at Borobudur; pictured above, Zuckerberg photographing other tourists at the site). It’s part of a wider trip Zuckerberg has been making in Asia, which also included a visit to India last week and the for new app developers. Image: (via Sarah Wynn-Williams) |
T-Mobile’s Free International Data Is Slow, Frustrating And Incredibly Useful | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 10 | 12 | It’s been almost exactly a year since T-Mobile launched its but I never had a chance to give it a try until recently. Before my vacation earlier this month, however, I decided to give it a try and got myself a T-Mobile SIM card with a monthly contract to have data during my road trip through New Zealand and — now — while in Europe ahead of . Before this, I’d always try to get a local SIM with a pre-paid plan. That works great in some countries like Germany, where you can just get a really cheap plan from or a similar provider at the airport, but cross the border into France and things get much more complicated (though I hear it’s a bit easier now than even a year ago). Most of the time, I’d just put my phone into airplane mode and use free WiFi hotspots. By default, T-Mobile (the only U.S. carrier who offers this kind of service) caps data rates at a very, very slow 128kbps (the equivalent of what 2G networks used to deliver a few years ago). You can always buy up to a faster plans for a day or a week with uncapped speeds (but capped download limits). In my travels, however, I never felt the need to do so. Sure, you’re not going to stream any music over such a small pipe or make a video call, but it’s more than fast enough to read your emails, use a messaging app, browse the web (as long as you are patient) and use a hotel booking app so you have a place to stay at night. Even more importantly for a road trip, Google Maps’ turn-by-turn directions sometimes take a while to load, but once they are up and running, they work perfectly. No need to pay Hertz an extra fee for a dedicated GPS unit. In Europe, where I tested the service in England, Spain and the Netherlands so far, the experience was pretty much exactly the same, too. It’s slow but works. Apparently I’m not the only one who feels like those slow speeds are good enough during travel. In June, T-Mobile about 2 million customers had already used its free global roaming feature. Of those, fewer than 1% upgraded to a faster speed. I’m not surprised. For basic day-to-day use during a short business trip or a vacation, even those slow speeds are all you need. |
Google Adds European Search De-Listing Requests To Its Transparency Report | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 10 | 12 | Google has published some new details about the search index de-listing requests it’s receiving in Europe. The information is being put online in a new section of its where it also details link removal requests it fields from governments and courts, and also copyright requests — the latter forming the vast majority of Google link removal requests. The new section is called . Here Google is breaking out the number of URLs and removal requests it has received and processed per European country, along with the proportion of URLs that it has and has not removed. Overall, Google says it has received 146,357 requests for de-indexing across Europe, with 498,737 URLs evaluated so far. The proportion of requests granted overall is just under half (41.8%). In the U.K., the page reveals Google has so far received 18,486 requests for de-indexing covering a total of 63,616 URLs — and has granted just over a third (35.4%). While in France it has received some 29,140 requests covering a total of 89,277 URLs — granting 51.5% of these requests. In Germany 53% of requests have been granted thus far, with 25,206 total requests covering 88,973 URLs. The figures reflect cumulative requests Google has processed, dating back to the European Court of Justice ruling in May — which triggered the requirement for Google and other search engines to accept search de-listing requests in the region. That ruling deemed search engines data controllers and therefore required them to start accepting and processing requests from private individuals wanting to de-index links to outdated or irrelevant information about them. It requires the search engines to weigh up requests, to ensure privacy rights are balanced with any public interest in the information remaining associated with a search for an individual’s name. On the page, Google is also listing which domains are most impacted by the removal decisions it is making — currently Facebook.com tops this list; followed by directory profileengine.com; and then Google-owned youtube. This mix broadly tallies with from search de-listing helper service, Forget.me, which also found that social networks and online directories were top targets for link removal requests. Google’s European search privacy page also provides a small smattering of sample requests (with generic details and specifics like names removed), to illustrate the types of requests it is granting and refusing. Samples of currently listed by Google include: Samples of so far include: |
Tech Stocks Show Weakness Amid Uncertain Global Economy | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 12 | Tech stocks fell sharply on Friday, setting a somber mood for the industry this weekend. The carnage was widespread, with giants taking a stumble — Microsoft, -3.97%; Google, 2.92%; Facebook, -3.95%; LinkedIn, -3.84%; Yahoo, -3.65%; and Alibaba, -3.28% — and newcomers joining in the general mayhem. MobileIron fell 6.92%. ZenDesk was off 8.06%. GoPro dropped 4.63%, Twitter fell 8.84%, And Arista Networks shed 8.96%. (Data: .) If you were holding tech stocks on Friday morning, and didn’t sell, you were far less wealthy by the end of the day. As BusinessInsider , the NASDAQ lost over 4% last week, a sharp contraction. Given the breadth and depth of the Friday selloff in the industry, it’s worth asking where we stand. If the shedding continues, it could at least partially close the IPO window, and sour incumbents on expensive acquisitions as their equity declines in value, and, therefore, potency. Diminishments of that sort could rattle down the capital structure of private investment, causing an industry-wide slowdown. You already know this, but in the context of Friday’s massacre the fact becomes all the more salient. Recent could lessen the medium-term potential of a hawkish Fed. That could help keep money cheap, assisting venture capitalists and startups to raise easily. But if the Fed is only holding back because the global and domestic economy are weak, how bullish is that, really. Not very. It has become in the to . That’s still not true in the short term. But if the above losses are not recouped, and especially if they are furthered, we could see the first part of the correction that is largely expected. If you are a startup that is raising, I’d get along with it. And if you are contemplating taking up your burn, you might want to reconsider. In 2013, a company that was . I am not sure that market is still with us. |
Facebook’s Anonymous App Could Kill Trolls With Secret Identity | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 12 | Wack-a-mole. That’s what it’s usually like fighting trolls, bullies, and spammers in anonymous communities. Ban them and they just start new accounts. That’s why the fact that Facebook knows who you really are could be the key to its . You could stay anonymous to other users, but Facebook login on the backend could track the jerks and keep them out. Powered by its anti-thesis, Facebook could unlock the potential of anonymity to let people open up and be vulnerable. Facebook’s original value was that it knew who you were. Years of pseudo-anonymity on MySpace fostered openness but also a total distrust that anyone was who they said. Demanding people use their real names and verifying them by their college email ushered in an era of authentic identity. With it came more civil discussion. People could be held accountable for their comments and actions. When your reputation is on the line, people typically exhibit less bullying, trolling, spamming, sexism, racism, homophobia, violent threats, and other disruptive behavior. That permits rational conversation, even about polarizing subjects. Facebook eventually built an embeddable commenting widget to bring authentic identity to the comment reels of blogs and other websites. It worked. At TechCrunch we saw a marked decrease in dirtbaggery when we switched to Facebook comments. But what authentic identity curtails is the expression of polite but controversial and unpopular opinions that people might not want connected to their name. It can also discourage participation in threads about sensitive or deeply personal topics like health, sexuality, relationships, and religion. That’s unfortunate because these are exactly the types of conversations susceptible to trolling and hate. So anonymity enables vulnerable sharing but also disruption of this sharing, while authentic identity safeguards but also encroaches on open-hearted discourse. The potential of Facebook’s anonymous app is to combine the best of both. last week that Facebook is close to launching an app that permits pseudonymous discussion of interests or other topics. Josh Miller, the Facebook product manager running the team, of this nature but that it’s about more than just anon for anon’s sake. It’s not the first to try this, but perhaps it’s the best equipped. Anonymous app Secret, for example, verified people by their phone number. This way if someone gets banned, they can’t easily delete the app, reinstall it, and just sign up for a new account. That is, unless they set up a second phone number, which is a cinch for veteran trolls or spammers with a financial incentive. The opportunity for Facebook here is enormous because it’s got a way to check if someone is real that’s extremely tough to fake: Friend count. Facebook has spent years working on fake profile and phony friend request detection. The result is that it’s quite hard to get a fake profile to have more than a handful of legitimate users as friends. It also takes time. Both this effort and delay deter bad actors. So here’s how I imagine Facebook could create a well-mannered anonymous discussion app. Users sign up with their existing Facebook account and perhaps a verified phone number as well. Facebook assesses their profile and only allows them in if they meet a threshold of legitimacy, such as having 15 friends or more and having joined Facebook more than a few months ago. Inside the app, the user is totally anonymous or pseudonymous to others on the app. Only Facebook secretly knows who they are on the backend. If the user gets flagged by their peers for being a nuisance or is abusive, Facebook can ban their account. But to sign up again, the scoundrel will need a Facebook account that meets the legitimacy threshold, which they can’t generate overnight. They’re locked out. No more wack-a-mole. This all sounds dandy on paper but there’s one big problem: . Privacy setting switches, Beacon, dangerous defaults, and doubts about big companies have led to a perception of Facebook as being selfishly concerned with “making the world more open and connected” rather than protecting users. That will really come back to bite Facebook here. People may be apprehensive to connect their anonymous discussion to their Facebook account, even If promised that no one else will know who they are. This distrust could seriously hamper growth of whatever Facebook does in its anonymous app. Even if it doesn’t use the it unveiled at f8 and just relies on phone numbers like Secret, people still may be weary of saying anything controversial or sensitive on a Facebook-controlled service. Facebook’s challenge will be building an app valuable enough that people are willing to suspend their skepticism and sign up. If it can, it could permit intimate discussion that breeds compassion and shared understanding. If not, we’ll have definitive proof that when it comes to privacy, karma is king. |
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