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Snowden Attacks “Anything Goes” Privacy Intrusions Of British Spy Agencies | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 10 | 12 | In what amounts to a wake up call directed at a British public generally considered apathetic on privacy issues, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned that U.K. spy agencies are using digital technology to conduct mass population surveillance without any checks and balances at all — overreaching and encroaching on privacy rights in a way that he characterized as even worse than the U.S. National Security Agency’s inroads into citizens’ rights. Snowden was making his first (virtual) appearance in the UK since blowing the whistle on the NSA last year, speaking at the event being held today in London. The live videolink that looped Snowden into the event from where he has was not trouble free. At one point Snowden even suggested technical hitches that were preventing him from hearing interviewer John Naughton’s questions could be the result of U.K. government attempts to block his appearance. In the event, the twenty minute interview proceeded with questions being relayed to Snowden by text. Asked whether U.K. spy agency, GCHQ, is a bigger player in mass surveillance than the cache of NSA documents he leaked suggests, Snowden said this is indeed the case, and went on to explain why — pointing specifically to the lack of constitutional protections in the U.K. as an enabler for what he deemed a ‘limitless’ government intrusion into citizens’ privacy via digital channels. “We have an extraordinary large, secret and unaccountable mass surveillance system in the United States — and that’s when we have constitutional protections that prohibit even the passage of any laws that might enable those programs. Despite this we have something extraordinary going on over there. Now in the United Kingdom where you don’t have the same constitutional limits on the sort of laws that parliament can pass what we’ve seen is the creation of a system of regulations where basically anything goes,” said Snowden. “GCHQ and other British spy agencies can do anything they want. There are really no limits on their capabilities. What they do is they collect everything that might be interesting to them — which includes basically a five year backlog of all the activities of citizens in the U.K., for example by the collection of their metadata records, which is who they call, the locations that they travel where their cell phones are associated with towers.” Back in , a legal challenge to the U.K. government by a group of privacy rights organisations yielded corroborating detail, from a witness statement made by Charles Blandford Farr, Director General of the UK Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism. Farr’s statement suggested a proportion of internal comms being sucked up by U.K. spy agencies would be necessary — and he claimed legal — collateral damage to the ‘greater good’ of snooping on potential terrorist chatter. Even though U.K. law requires public agencies to have a warrant to intercept internal comms. The basic modus operandi sketched out in the statement is to gather everything and sort after the fact for points of interest. Snowden said the U.K. spy agencies’ claim that they protect harvested surveillance data information “on the backend” — by using policies or rules about which bits of captured information can be parsed by security agency analysts — basically boils down to saying: “Although we’ll watch all of you all the time we won’t look at what we’ve gathered on you… unless we go through a certain procedure”. “Even if you thought it was reasonable for [governments] to collect this information, the reality is that these policy restrictions and these rules and regulations for accessing this data is not uniformly applied,” argued Snowden. “There are exceptions, and it’s basically open season at these spy agencies,” he continued. “For example the GCHQ goes far further than the NSA in the United States does because they use unlawfully collected information to pursue basically criminal prosecutions. And they use this to share with other countries, where they will use intelligence powers — foreign intelligence powers — to gather information that’s then used for law enforcement purposes. And this is very dangerous.” He argued that unlawfully gathered intelligence poses a danger to the U.K.’s legal and justice systems because evidence is being collected against individuals who don’t have the ability to challenge it in courts. “If judges are not aware of where this information, where this evidence originated from, it undermines the system of laws and the system of justice upon which we all rely,” he said. Snowden of course reiterated the mainstay of his argument — that it is for governments to trample over individual privacy rights by setting up systems that spy on entire populations. The onus should be on governments to justify any intrusions into citizens’ rights — or those ‘rights’ effectively no longer exist. “That’s not how rights work, right,” he said. “You don’t have to say why you deserve privacy, you don’t have to say ‘I need the right to privacy for this reason or for that reason’, it’s up to the government to justify its intrusions into your rights, you as a citizen never have to justify why you need a right, or it’s not a right at all, it’s something circumstantial.” Snowden was also asked for follow up on , at the New Yorker Festival, in which he suggested people should steer clear of popular commercial services that don’t protect their privacy — like Dropbox, Facebook, and Google. Was he seriously suggesting people should avoid using services from those companies, asked Naughton? “What I’m trying to say is not that these services are the worst thing on planet Earth, what I’m trying to say is when we as consumers have an option between two services where one protects your privacy very strongly — it values it very highly — and another that is actually hostile to privacy we should support the one that supports our rights, that encodes that into their policies and into their technologies,” said Snowden. He conceded it is now “very difficult” to find an alternative to Facebook which provides the same service but asserted there are “many, many clones of Dropbox-style services” — pointing to alternative services such as SpiderOak which don’t hold encryption keys themselves and therefore can’t be forced to hand over user data to governments requesting access. “Any government in the world, from the United States government, to the U.K. government, to the Chinese government can request access to your files and [Dropbox] can provide it,” he said, adding that warrants requesting information should be served not to commercial companies holding users’ data but against the individuals whose data is being sought so they have a chance to challenge a government request. Snowden was also asked to comment directly on the challenge posed by public apathy when it comes to privacy rights — and how government intrusions can be combated if populations aren’t mobilized to demand change. He argued that the chance for change still exists, despite regional political apathy, if technologists mobilize to bake privacy protections into their products. “If there’s even one part of the world — one region; it could be Germany, it could be the United States — where we have a technical community that believes this is a real problem, that believes that mass surveillance — the GCHQ strategy of amassing a haystack of human lives and then sorting through it whenever they want to try and and find needles — is contrary to the values that we as a society hold, they can institute protections on the technical level that enforce our rights in a way that’s not dependent on national laws,” he said. Indeed, he went further — arguing that technology solutions may actually be required to safeguard individual rights in an increasingly connected world. “If things are not encoded on a technical level, if things are not enforced on the level of systems, rather than just words on a page, they’re not really going to be meaningful when all our systems are reliance on cross border, international communications,” he added. “We need international solutions for global problems.” Naughton also asked whether Snowden was surprised that other whistleblowers have emerged since he came forward — a reference to the apparent revealed in Laura Poitras’ documentary about Snowden. “I’m not,” said Snowden. “I actually think it was inevitable.” “We should praise the act. I’m an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances. This other individual, whoever they may be, it’s extraordinarily courageous that after seeing the whistleblowers that have come before, people in the United States, people that have had their lives destroyed, they’ve had their careers destroyed, they’ve been thrown in prison for 35 years, that this person would stand up and put their life on the line because they believe that they have a civic duty — that they hold to more closely than they do to their self interest — and that is something that I don’t care who the individual is,” he added. “I don’t care whether they are the deepest darkest criminal. That is something we should respect. That is something we should value. And it is something that we should promote. Everyone has a role to play in their government, everyone has a role to play in their society, and if you believe in something you have to stand for something.” |
Raspberry Pi Microcomputer Still Selling Like Hot Cakes | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 10 | 12 | The UK designed microcomputer, which has triggered all sorts of creative single board computing projects — most recently being repurposed as the heart of a — continues to sell in far greater quantities than its creators ever imagined. Sales of low cost, open source microcomputer have now passed 3.8 million, according to . And while that pales in comparison to sales of consumer electronic devices such as smartphones, it’s a seriously impressive figure for a bare chunk of electronics, especially given the creators of Pi over its entire lifetime. In the event the , and some two-and-a-half years of sales are evidently continuing to track upwards. This summer the Foundation released a beefed up version of the model B Pi, called the , which keeps the same $35 price tag but improves aspects of the design to support richer use-cases, such as adding in more USB ports and expanding the number of GPIO pins. A more capable Pi is evidently helping to keep Pi sales tracking up. For more Pi goodness, TechCrunch at in London on Tuesday, October 21 at 2:50 p.m. where we’ll have co-founder Eben Upton on stage to chat about the new B+ boards and talk more generally about the road ahead for Pi — now that it’s no longer a road less travelled. |
Swipe And The Silicon Valley Idea Machine | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Three years ago, a few months after the Arab Spring demonstrations forced a collapse in the Egyptian government, twenty-year-old Marwan Roushdy spontaneously entered a Startup Weekend competition in Cairo and won. It was a mobile app that connected users to emergency hospitals in the immediate area, and it was called Inkezny, the phrase for “rescue me” in Arabic. The win turned Roushdy, then a construction management major, into a bit of a tech celebrity in Egypt. He ended up being and about the promise of entrepreneurship in transforming and revitalizing Egypt’s economy. The Arabic-speaking world is an enormous opportunity; with close to 300 million speakers globally, there are nearly as many Arabic speakers as they are English-speaking ones. At the same time, many online business models taken for granted in the West have yet to be localized for Arab markets. Three years later, everything is different (or not). The Arab Spring ended up petering out, with Egypt electing this year. And Roushdy has moved to Silicon Valley, where he’s launching a company called with $1.7 million in funding from some of the Valley’s best-known investors, including Greylock Partners, SV Angel, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, CrunchFund (which is owned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington) and Khosla Ventures. His co-founder is Addison Hardy, who has worked with startups like Everest and Connect. Their first high-profile product is a photo-sharing app called . (Yes, a photo-sharing app.) The app is a mash-up of several different trends right now. It’s “anonymish.” Your friends share different photos but you won’t know exactly who took them, even if you have a pretty good idea (like Snoop Lion, pictured above). It’s got a Tinder mechanic where you swipe left or right to like things. Or up if you want to comment on something. It’s ephemeral. You only get to see photos once. How did Roushdy and Hardy end up here? They wanted to build something fun that would be universally recognized; they structured Complex Polygon as a startup where they could spin out idea after idea to see which one stuck. Swipe is their second one, and it had enough promising engagement metrics that they decided to do a bigger launch. “There is something incredible about creating a brand that everyone recognizes: Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram are probably more recognized than the most popular movie or song out there,” Roushdy says. And then there’s this very stark reality about building consumer Internet and mobile products — So that cancels out a lot of really good, worthwhile ideas that might attract only infrequent, if important, use. If people only need to use Inkezny a couple times in their entire lifetime, how will it spread from user to user? In another example, I met a month or so ago at San Francisco’s City Hall that was working with seismologists to provide earthquake warnings that give people up to two minutes of advance notice ahead of quakes via text message. It’s a product that is sorely and clearly needed in the earthquake-prone state of California, and it could actually save lives. But realistically, the only way a product like that would get distributed is probably through state law or a federal system like the AMBER Alert, because it would be too hard to get 38 million Californians to collectively download one app that provides no immediate entertainment or benefit. Such is human nature. Y Combinator partner Garry Tan recently affects startups in the travel-planning space. He said travel-planning software is one of the most common bad startup ideas he gets pitched: This points to the deeper problem that underlies every product or service: obscurity. I only have a finite number of slots in my brain. If I don’t remember it, I won’t use it. And I only remember things that I use often. Just like I order Coca Cola whenever I get a cheeseburger… the consumer web/mobile services I use need to be things I use all the time. Which leads us back to trip planning. How often do people really plan trips? For the typical working adult, probably once or twice a year if you’re lucky. In fact, Americans are notorious for shirking vacation, clocking the lowest rates of vacation on the planet. Twice a year just doesn’t cut it. This constraint is why so many founders seem to end up working on totally silly, seemingly trivial things in the consumer space. Once every several years, one of those trivial ideas happens to turn into something like Twitter, which transforms the way in which society consumes news and spreads information. That so many small teams of founders seem to be working on photo- or video apps is just evidence of how insanely high the failure rate can be. Everyone is looking for that small, simple fun mechanic that can just explode unexpectedly. It’s a totally different set of constraints than in the enterprise space, where startups tend to generate revenue sooner in their lifecycle and grow more gradually. Or in bioinformatics or energy startups, where there are high upfront capital costs. Even so, Roushdy was a bit sensitive about being a photo app. “I don’t think anybody should be hated for working on something they like,” he said. Well, no, I don’t disagree with that. Swipe is a simply, easy-to-learn app that all the right investors seem to be using. Hell, even Snoop Lion is using it. , which has you swipe left or right to add new people to network. It’s a pretty smart viral growth mechanic. And while Roushdy didn’t want to publicize growth numbers, they’re promising. That said, it can be frustrating at times to see so many talented people focusing on mobile-social apps. However, I’m probably more disappointed in founders who have already professionally or financially working in this area, as opposed to newcomers like Roushdy, who are coming from countries like Egypt to try their hand at the game. “When I was growing up both Addison and I really wanted to build games,” Roushdy said. “That’s how we both started programming. We realized that games waste people’s time, but something like this is both entertaining and helps people stay connected. We were both also very interested in design and psychology and creating brands that iterate really fast.” |
US Government Says No Single Entity Or Nation Will Control The Internet | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | The U.S. in favor of a multistakeholder model for Internet governance today. Speaking before the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker the United States will “not allow the global Internet to be co-opted by any person, entity, or nation seeking to substitute their parochial worldview for the collective wisdom of this community.” At a minimum, the United States appears cognizant of the risks at hand. Earlier this year, the United States’ National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to “transition” parts of managing the Internet to the “global multistakeholder community.” The decision has . Could the change lead to an Internet takeover by an authoritarian government, or perhaps a stultified bureaucratic entity that bends to the will of incumbent powers? Pritzker’s firm language was supplemented by the following section of her remarks, which stated, flatly, that the United States will not allow any single nation to control the Internet: “Next week, at the International Telecommunication Union Conference in Korea, we will see proposals to put governments in charge of Internet governance. You can rest assured that the United States will oppose these efforts at every turn.” Control of the Internet is no small matter, but it is one that is perhaps best left to bodies who work in cooperation than to any single national, or international entity. With whom would you trust this task? (Your Gandalf joke involving the ring scene with Frodo in Bilbo’s house is quite welcome here.) That lesson was brought to bear in the wake of the Snowden revelations that detailed how deeply the United States was willing to subvert the core structure of the Internet in the name of national defence. Condemnations , calling for a away from U.S. leadership of the Internet’s governance. Pritzker continued: “I am ‘all in’ when it comes to the global debate over Internet governance. And we will preserve and protect a free and open [I]nternet.” Her comments today reprise what the head of the NTIA . As such, it seems that we have internal coherence in our government in terms of our plan for the Internet. No matter what the final outcome may be, in no way should the United Nations — or any such organization — or league of nations be allowed control over the Internet. The powers of moral conservatism cannot be allowed to vote into place controls over the free speech of the world. The Internet is too precious for that. Oddly enough, . |
Dorian Nakamoto Is Suing Newsweek | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, the man Newsweek claimed was the mysterious founder of , has created a asking for donations in his fight to sue the magazine after he was allegedly “targeted and victimized by a reckless news organization.” The site, , is an effort to hold the magazine accountable for “confusing” the 65-year-old unemployed engineer and, according to the site, misquoting his friends and family. “In some cases, words were attributed to them that were never said. In the chaos, his mother believed that the authorities were planning on removing her from her home to put her in a care facility,” Nakamoto’s supporters wrote on the site. “His estranged wife and children were alienated by the story, which portrayed a person and situation different from their understanding of their husband and father.” From the site: The first time Dorian heard the word “bitcoin” was from his son just prior to the article’s publication, who called him after speaking to the Newsweek reporter. In an AP video interview in March, after the article’s publication, he clearly mispronounces “bitcoin,” calling it “bitcom,” and denies “communicating with bitcoins.”Dorian suffered a stroke in October 2013. His recovery is ongoing. He is separated from his wife, lives with his 93-year-old mother, and has been unemployed as an engineer for at least ten years. Though he continues to look for work, he is experiencing “severe financial distress,” in his own words, and has significant trouble meeting his basic needs. He cancelled his internet service in 2013 because he couldn’t afford it. Donations, obviously, can be made by bitcoin. It will be interesting to see how far this goes. Nakamoto never admitted to creating bitcoin, and the Newsweek story remained sufficiently vague, allowing the publication to argue that their fishing expedition was an effort at exploring a juicy story rather than identifying the actual creator of bitcoin. “Standing before me, eyes downcast, appeared to be the father of Bitcoin,” wrote Leah McGrath Goodman in her Newsweek piece. It will be hard for Nakamoto to convince a judge to agree that “appeared to be” is the same was “was.” |
Popcorn Time Finds A New Home After The EURid Pulled Its Domain | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | When your product streams pirated content, it’s safe to expect some complications along the way. The Time4Popcorn fork of the popular Popcorn Time project recently had to find a new domain following the sudden removal of time4popcorn.eu. But the developers tell me this latest kerfuffle won’t stop the development of the program and they have already found a new domain. The project can currently be found at . That is, of course, until this domain is pulled. According to the developers, the removal of the original domain did “tremendous damage” to the project, most notably by killing the project’s SEO with Google and other search engines. True enough, Google Popcorn Time and the top link directs to another Popcorn Time fork. The team tells me that the original domain was taken down because of some sort of legal investigation taking place in Belgium. Apparently, according to them, the domain was removed without any notice. noted a few days ago that the domain was removed “on suspicion that it was registered using inaccurate contact details.” Since the rise and fall of the original open source Popcorn Time, several groups of developers have taken up the standard and charged forward with the project. This particular fork quickly rolled the program onto new platforms — , which can be installed on non-jailbroken devices . The various forks of Popcorn Time shouldn’t expect to survive forever. The program streams pirated content, which for the user, isn’t particularly illegal; yet Hollywood would likely love to find ways to shut down the distribution of the content. |
Anki Drive Finally Works With Android | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Good news! works with Android. Bad news! It only works with a few Android devices. This update comes just in time for the holiday shopping season. Since its high-profile launch last year, the clever Anki Drive has only worked with iOS devices because, mainly, the product requires Bluetooth Low Energy support, which isn’t widely available on Android devices. Currently, Anki is only officially supporting the Samsung Galaxy S4, S5 or Galaxy Note 3, 4 or 10.1 (2014 Edition), and Nexus 5. Owners of those devices should be able to download the Anki Drive app from the Google Play Store later today. Sadly, it lacks cross-platform play so Android and iOS users cannot play together at this time Last month to $149.99 and released a new car. Earlier this year, Anki rolled out a significant update to the platform, adding an improved AI and a new race mode, and started selling two new tracks, thus demonstrating its core strength of reinventing and updating its physical products. Since the processing power of the Anki Drive is outsourced to a connected mobile device, the company can push firmware that updates and addresses bugs and features. You can’t do that with the slot cars you had as a kid. |
Nobel Peace Prize Winner Malala Yousafzai Urges Girls To Participate In Code.org’s Hour Of Code | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Young Pakistani activist and winner Malala Yousafzai has thrown in her support for Code.org’s program to get young women and girls into computer science. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFdncBMDtP8] Just days after becoming the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner in history, Yousafzai took to YouTube to implore young women and girls in every country to do one hour of code. “You can do it, even if you don’t have a computer,” she tells the audience. The program was backed with support from President Obama and a slew of other politicians, celebrities and tech giants such as Microsoft and Google . The idea was to get every student to try their hand at coding. Code.org founders Hadi and Ali Partovi expected to reach about 5 million students at the beginning of last year’s campaign. Hour of Code has now reached 40 million students in over 200 countries over the course of the year. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates provided some of those online tutorials, and many prominent tech companies pledged their support with time, money and general messaging about the campaign. The goal this year is to train 10,000 computer science teachers and get 100 million students to do one hour of code. Code.org is stepping up efforts to include more diversity in the program, too. About 48 percent of this year’s participants were girls, and the program is now available in over 30 languages. “Computer science is foundational for all students, not just the ones who want to be software engineers,” says Hadi. “The Hour of Code is introducing tens of millions of girls of all ages to this historically male-dominated field, and millions of these girls will continue learning beyond their first hour.” The Partovi brothers have launched a to raise $5 million in order to now reach those students and teachers on a global level. Many of the same donors from the previous year have pledged to promote the program and to match dollar-for-dollar every amount of money raised on Indiegogo. A donation of $500 will get you a . There are 63 days left before the end of the campaign on December 14. The total raised is currently just over $85,000, including matching donations. |
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Flickr Now Lets You Turn Your Photos Into Wall Art | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Flickr as of late has been making moves to compete with newer startups, like 500px for example, that cater to professional photographers. This summer, it to get photographers’ work featured on news sites, including Yahoo’s own properties, and today . For now, this program is about allowing users to turn their own photos into wall art, but it could easily set the stage for a future marketplace where top Flickr photographers sell their work to the service’s broader consumer user base. Previously, Flickr allowed users to , but this new print offering involves two types of Wall Art products: Premium Photo Mounts ($59 and up) and Gallery Canvas Wraps ($49 and up). The Premium Mounts are printed on Fujicolor Color Archive Paper with a lustre finish, says Flickr, and are mounted on a 1-inch black mounting board with wood-textured edges. These also have pre-drilled holes for easy hanging. Meanwhile, the Canvas Wraps have a professional wood frame and resemble an artist’s canvas with 1.25-inch stretcher bars. The frame has square corners and a solid back and comes with hinged hardware for hanging. Both products are available in a range of sizes from 8×10 up to 20×30. They currently ship either Standard or Express in the U.S. only. On the updated website, you can customize your Wall Art by selecting an image from your own photo collection and sets, then choosing the mount type and the size. You can also zoom in on photos and drag them around to center the part of the image you want to print before proceeding to checkout. As noted above, the service is not about allowing professional photographers to sell their work to other Flickr users, but that makes sense as the next step for this sort of business – after all, many of Flickr’s users would be interested in higher-quality prints than those of their kids or dogs they took with their own smartphones. (In fact, this is already , as it turns out.) You can get started with your own Wall Art creations . |
Facebook Stickers Are Now Available In Comments On Timelines, Groups And Events | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Facebook Stickers – the Facebook Messenger users take advantage of to spice up their conversations – are now rolling out to a wider audience. Facebook announced today that stickers will be available on comments found on people’s Timeline posts, Group posts and Event posts. To access the stickers, users tap the smiley face icon in the bottom-right of any comment field on Facebook in order to pick the sticker they want to share with the others on the thread. The engineer on the project, Bob Baldwin, shared his thoughts on stickers when the news on his own timetime this afternoon, explaining that “stickers will allow people to reply to a variety of posts in a more fun way than words alone.” “You can now easily show your excitement for a post with good news, cheer up a friend who’s feeling down, and express a variety of more nuanced reactions,” he says. Stickers and emoji are sometimes seen as silly things — and, well they to some extent. After all, you can’t take a picture of a dog eating a cheeseburger or a cat riding a scooter all that seriously. But they also allow users to express their tone in a way that may not always come across in a digital format where interactions historically have been text-based. Many times, we’ve seen threads where one friend makes a sarcastic comment and others jump on them in a viral mob of Facebook abuse – but the original commenter was only making a joke, as it turned out. It just fell flat. And they were attacked. A sticker could have diffused the situation at the forefront by letting others know the poster was not serious. In a world where cyberbullying is now rampant, I’d actually argue that anything that can prevent comment threads from turning ugly is fairly important – even if it comes in the form of a bird with a lampshade on its head. (Yes, this is an actual sticker.) Stickers also allow social networking and messaging users to engage in conversations more easily from a mobile phone since they can sum up an emotion or thought with just a picture. That’s obviously another key area for Facebook to focus on as it continues its shift to mobile. However, enabling stickers in comments could also make scrolling through longer threads — like those on public pages — more time-consuming. The stickers are now available to Facebook users across web and mobile, the company says. |
Microsoft And Salesforce Promise Windows, Office And OneDrive Integration | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | It turns out that Microsoft and Salesforce were serious when the two firms to integrate their products earlier this year. Today at the Dreamforce conference, the companies announced that a Salesforce1 app for Windows Phone will be released the second half of 2015, that Office will see integration with the Salesforce suite, and that OneDrive will also garner a connection to the CRM company’s products next year. The promised integration between the two companies was a surprise. Salesforce was famously early to the software-as-a-service model, while Microsoft was not. The two companies have . But when it comes to more top line, the two firms appear ready to set aside their previous acrimony and drill into the existing customer base of the others. Microsoft will get a chance to offer easier-to-use products to Salesforce users, who might not be that aligned with the Redmond universe, and Salesforce will be able to better sell its SaaS product into the more conservative, enterprise channels that Microsoft currently controls. Specifically, in the first half of 2015, Salesforce will integrate into Office, SharePoint, and OneDrive for Business on Android and iOS. Also in the first two quarters of the new year, a Salesforce app for Outlook will ship. After that, in the second half of 2015, a Salesforce1 app for Windows Phone will touch down along with a Salesforce app for Excel. Taken as a whole, Salesforce will extend itself into nearly every nook and cranny of the larger Microsoft platform, bringing the rival products together into something approaching functional harmony. How well the work to bring the two product galaxies into cohesion will bear out remains to be seen. |
Former Millennial Media Exec Marcus Startzel Is The New CEO At Ad Attribution Startup MediaGlu | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Marcus Startzel has held some big roles at big companies — he was most recently the chief revenue officer at Millennial Media, a mobile advertising company that , and before that, vice president of sales at AOL Advertising. Now he’s taking the reins at a startup that’s a bit smaller. In fact, that’s the entire six-person team in the photo above. (Startzel is the one on the right.) was founded in 2009 by Sundar Nathikudi, Stephen Williams, and Justin Musterman. Nathikudi and Williams remain on-board as CTO and COO, respectively, and Musterman will continue to advise the company — but he’s stepping down from his full-time role as CEO. Startzel said he actually left Millennial at the end of last year, and he said he’s been consulting with MediaGlu since March. The company has built what he calls a “cross-device map” that takes advantage of user behavior to determine when multiple devices are being used by the same person. That way, advertisers can tell if you see their ad on your smartphone and then buy their product on your laptop, or vice versa, and they can also target ads across devices. It’s a big issue in the mobile ad world — that’s why there are some well-funded competitors, , and it’s also have been moving into this area as well. So how can a bootstrapped, six-person startup compete? Well, Startzel said he was impressed by the technology that the MediaGlu team has built so far, which he said will serve as “an incredible foundation” for further improvement. He added that while other companies are using their cross-device capabilities to improve their own ad businesses, MediaGlu is focused entirely on its technology: “We are going to be a technology company that helps our partners and our clients sell their advertising solutions and monetize their data across screens.” And yes, he does plan to raise some outside funding, too. “There is a time window here and there are people going after this — some of them have many millions of dollars,” Startzel said. “I’m going to try to compete with them [by raising] some millions of dollars, and a laser-sharp focus.” |
Flight Attendants Union Sues The FAA Over Use Of Electronics In Flight | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | About a year ago, the regarding the use of portable electronic devices during takeoff and landing. For the first time in years, travelers could boldly and proudly listen to music or play Two Dots or mindlessly click into social apps (forgetting there’s no service in the sky) without fear of reprimand from flight attendants. Turns out, the largest flight attendants union in the country aren’t enjoying the change. The Association of Flight Attendants argued in court on Friday that the FAA didn’t follow the proper protocol in changing guidelines around use of portable electronic devices during takeoff and landing. According to the AFA, portable electronic devices are distractions during safety announcements and can become dangerous projectiles. In response, a lawyer for the FAA (Jeffrey Sandberg) told judges that PEDs are no more dangerous than books that passengers have had out for years. Beyond concerns around safety distractions and flying smartphones, the Association of Flight Attendants also argued that the FAA didn’t properly handle the process of changing its guidance. According to the lawyer for the flight attendants union, Amanda Dure, the FAA didn’t follow the guidelines of the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires government agencies to give public notice and allow time for commenting when a rule is changed. A report from the suggests that the three-judge panel presiding over the case didn’t seem swayed by the flight attendants’ argument. Since announcing last year, the FAA has approved 31 different airline operators (covering the vast majority of the market) to allow passengers to use approved portable electronic devices. That process includes outfitting the plane to protect against electronic interference and approval from the FAA, as well as changes to the airlines’ own PED policy. Remember, the decision over whether or not passengers can use their cellphones during flight has, since the announcement of the change, always been in the hands of the airlines themselves. In other words, the announcement from the FAA to approve use of these devices is not the final say. |
For Two New Apps Called “Push” And “Drop,” The Push Notification Is The App | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Two new applications, and , want to save you from having to download multiple news apps or browse dozens of websites just to keep up with the topics that interest you. But what makes these two apps different, when compared with news aggregators or other mobile news readers (aka RSS readers), is that they primarily function via push notifications. The apps themselves, once installed and configured, are somewhat invisible to end users. You interact with the push notifications themselves, and never really return to the apps unless you want to subscribe to more channels or delete existing ones. Both apps are simplistic — minimalistic, in fact — in their design. They each offer a way to subscribe to channels from a suggested list of news sources, along with the ability to enter your own topics. And that’s about it. , a product from two-year old, bootstrapped mobile app development shop called Munkee Apps, creator of photo editor , fitness timer , and others, allows you to follow topics across channels that include breaking news, fashion, social, weather, retail deals and more. According to co-founder Omar Arambula, who created Push along with Hector Lopez and Eddy Homez, the team decided to develop the app because they were annoyed with having to launch multiple apps and websites to receive information. “Having a centralized location of information, especially if you don’t need to swipe open your device, makes it really useful,” he tells us. While Push recommends a number of well-known news sources, such as CNN, the BBC, Drudge, The Economist, HuffPo, NPR and many others (including tech sites like this one), it also lets you subscribe to other types of news and information, e.g. Reddit’s front page, new releases on Netflix, popular videos on Vine, trending topics on Twitter, iTunes’ top song of the day, Google Trends, daily forecasts, and several other channels that you may have previously accessed via standalone mobile apps. When you see the push notification on the lockscreen of your iOS device, you can simply delete the notification if the text of the pushed message is all you care to consume, or you can swipe to go directly to the URL of the website with more details, like a news article or a series of hashtagged tweets, for example. Similarly, another app called , created by , offers an experience much like Push, but is available on both iOS and Android. Drop’s interface is a bit more colorful, as each channel you subscribe to is color-coded to make it easier for those with longer lists to locate a subscription. And the user interface first prompts you to enter any topic of your choosing rather than starting you off with a list of suggestions. (This is available instead by pushing the “No inspiration?” button which then takes you to pre-configured topics.) But the overall concept is the same: instead of downloading a ton of news apps, you just interact with the push notifications that Drop provides. Drop co-creator Charles Ganem says a new version of the app is roughly two weeks away and will include an improved user experience plus other features. But for now, Drop’s suggested list is a bit shorter than Push’s. It includes news sites as well as other types of “breaking” information, like the option to receive a push when there’s a new episode of a favorite TV show (like “Game of Thrones”), or you can receive pushes when a product reaches over 100+ upvotes on ProductHunt. (Drop itself on ProductHunt around a month ago, and received 535 upvotes — a more than decent showing). As one commenter on ProductHunt noted at the time, the app seemed a lot like which also let users receive news alerts as push notifications. That never really took off, which could imply that a majority of mobile users aren’t that interested in push-based news and alerts, and still prefer visiting news sources and standalone apps on their own. Or it could just be a timing issue. After all, we are now starting to see a trend toward lightweight apps, , or even . TechCrunch co-editor Matthew Panzarino In a post referencing Foursquare’s Swarm, he noted that we’re now entering an age where apps function as service layers. No longer battling for a ‘homescreen’ position, new apps are emerging that are only meant to be used when they have something to explicitly tell you, rather than functioning as time-wasters you browse idly during your downtime. Push and Drop fit into this larger trend, and even go further than Swarm as they really never need to be launched more than once. Both apps are available as free downloads and require no registration. Future business models could involve sponsored pushes, though Apple may not permit such a thing. for iOS and Android. |
We’ve Got Questions For Tim Armstrong At Disrupt Europe | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Yes, we’ve invited our boss to our conference, but he has a lot to say for himself. I mean, we too want to know if Aol, and by transitive property TechCrunch, is being sold to Yahoo, am I right? , CEO and Chairman of TechCrunch’s parent company, , will be joining us for a fireside chat on Monday, October 20th. Armstrong has been the Chairman and CEO of AOL since March 2009, and played a major role in the company’s push into content. Armstrong helped orchestrate AOL’s of The Huffington Post , as well as the 2010 acquisition of . He could also be considering or orchestrating a partnership/merger/whatever with Yahoo, though as we’ve pointed out already, it probably . Armstrong was one of the main seed investors in , the hyper-local news service AOL . Because of his obvious conflict of interest, Armstrong recused himself from the negotiation process and, instead of profiting from the deal, asked to get his initial seed investment back in the form of AOL stock. Outside of the content arena, AOL has made some significant investments in the video and ad tech space, most notably with the company’s $405 million acquisition of Adap.tv in 2013. AOL also acquired in January 2014, and both and advanced TV audience targeting platform in May 2014. AOL has seen steady growth under Armstrong in recent years. In 2012, AOL posted its in eight years, and has seen revenues in each quarter since. Yet, it has no coherent story about the future of its sundry businesses, and a lot of very disparate properties. How do you go from a dial-up company to a nimble new media property in this day and age? Beats me. Prior to joining AOL, Armstrong presided over Google’s North and Latin American advertising sales and operations teams, which provided customers with local partnerships and centralized sales operations. Before that, he was the VP of sales and strategic partnerships for Snowball.com and was a Director of integrated sales and marketing at Starwave’s and Disney’s ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures. We want answers to our burning Tim Armstrong questions, and so do you. Well, you can get them at at the Old Billingsgate in London. Tickets are still available but going quick, so buy them today to secure your spot. You can purchase your tickets , and the full agenda for the conference has been posted to . We’ll see you there. |
What To Expect From Apple’s iPad And Mac Event | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Apple has a second big event planned for this fall, and it’s happening . The event promises to deliver a few different new product announcements, likely including new iPads, and new Macs, as well as the public introduction of OS X Yosemite, Apple’s next major desktop operating system. What we know so far suggests the new iPad updates will focus primarily on a new iPad Air model, which according to rumors and even some reported prototype leaks, will be thinner than its already very thin predecessor, at a boggling 7 mm, which is right in between the thickness of the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus. Other updates in store for the iPad include the addition of Touch ID, Apple’s unique fingerprint-based authentication and login technology. Touch ID made its original debut in the iPhone 5s last year, and is now common to three different iPhone models, including the 5s, the 6 and the 6 Plus. Apple bringing it to iPad makes sense not only as a way to increase the login security of the iPad, but also as a way to help the iPad take part in the company’s Apple Pay roll out. Apple Pay is set for an October launch, and this event could be a good chance for Apple to tell us exactly when it’s coming, to the iPhone 6, and likely to new iPad models, too. We’ll also see Apple add gold to the color options for the iPad line, according to early reports, which would make sense give that it now offers a gold color way for both its iPhone models. We have yet to hear much about an iPad mini update, but a few leaks show a case with Touch ID added, which is a likely upgrade if Apple wants to make Apple Pay available on as many new devices as possible. It’ll likely also get a bump up to the A8 processor, as should the iPad Air, and could also get slimmer, although I think the focus will be on Air this update cycle as the iPhone 6 Plus begins to cannibalize some iPad mini sales. Apple is also reportedly working on a 12.9-inch iPad, but most reports agree we won’t see this new hardware launched until next year. New Macs are definitely on the way for this event, but the question is which models will get the update nod for late 2014. Apple is reportedly working on a number of new Mac machines, including a 12-inch Retina MacBook of some kind, but the most likely updates to the Mac line this time around will be new iMacs. Apple’s all-in-one is due for an update, and this year should prove one in which we get more than just spec and processor upgrades. Apple’s iMac has long been pegged as a place for Apple to start rolling out Retina-caliber displays on desktop Macs, and this could be the year we see that happen, according to reports. Retina remains a question mark, though I’d lean towards anticipating it’s coming, but the iMacs are likely to get new models either way. We might see a body redesign this year, too, although the tapered, slim-edged design is still plenty modern. That new Retina MacBook in a 12-inch form factor is probably going to be held until next year, according to most sources. Apple might also introduce new Mac minis at this event, as those haven’t been updated in a while. The future of that lineup in general is worth watching, as it remains a category Apple seems not to prioritize overall. Apple will definitely launch the consumer version of Yosemite at this point, given that it’s been in preview mode since it was launched at WWDC in June, first for developers, and then as a special company-first consumer preview beta. Yosemite has a lot of features that work together with iOS 8, which also debuted in September alongside the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, so it’s about time we see it get its general release. The update will be free, Apple has already announced, and made available through the Mac App Store. It runs on any Mac that can run OS X Mavericks, which is great news in terms of those running older hardware. We have yet to peg down exactly when Yosemite will be available, but users should probably begin getting their machines ready for the update process. Apple might take this chance to give an update on the Apple Watch, which is launching next year, but which has been shown off at Apple’s September iPhone event and at Paris Fashion Week. Maybe we’ll hear more about how developers can take par in the software platform, or get a better idea of a launch timeframe. Other possibilities include new Apple TV hardware – Apple hasn’t updated its media streamer in a long time now, and while it keeps iterating on the software side, some recent rumors suggest that there will be a version with a mic to facilitate Siri voice control features. A pre-holiday release for an Apple TV with greater integration into iOS 8 services like HomeKit could make a lot of sense. The event is just a few days away now, and we’ll be there live to tell you exactly what’s being announced as it happens, so tune in right here on Thursday starting at 10 AM PT. |
Windows 10 Attracts 1M Testers In Two Weeks | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Microsoft that it crossed the 1 million tester mark for the technical preview of its . I had expected a higher number would opt for the new code, given how extensively the media (guilty) covered the rollout of the nascent operating system. According to the company, more than 200,000 “pieces of user-initiated feedback” have reached its ears. The breakdown of builds that are run virtually and natively is about one-third and two-thirds, respectively, according to Microsoft. Microsoft has a long way to go with Windows 10, but with 1 million current registrants and several beta cycles yet to go, things seem to be off to a decent start. You will have to vet the strength of the million figure yourself. I’ve been using Windows 10 as a daily driver at home for a few days now, with a docked Surface Pro 3 hooked up to a 24-inch external screen, and an external mouse and keyboard. It’s a decent operating system in firm need of debugging, and the unshackling of its Metro alter-ego. But all things told, I am roughly as happy with it in desktop mode as I was Windows 7. And like with Windows 7, in Windows 10 I don’t use the Start Menu much. If you haven’t gone hands-on with the code, it’s worth a spin. How long until 2 million people are using Windows 10? |
Lyve’s New App Lets You Access All Your Photos And Videos From Any Device You Own | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Accessing your entire photo and video collection from any device can still be a challenge today, especially if you have your media spread out across a variety of local hard drives as well as various cloud services where you have to pay for storage – potentially limiting how much of your collection is hosted online at any given time. , which launched its first product – a home storage box for digital archives – earlier this year, has been working to change that. Now, the company is rolling out its latest solution, in the form of a new application called “ ” which works as a tool to combine your disparate libraries, de-duplicate images, and more – with no need for additional hardware. Lyve Minds was founded by Tim Bucher, a tech industry vet who has held a number of roles at major companies over the years, including engineering director at Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer, SVP of Macintosh engineering at Apple, lead architect at video game maker 3DO, lead engineer and architect at Sun Microsystems, and VP of engineering and operations at WebTV, sold to Microsoft. In May, his a hardware device, called “Lyve Home,” offering consumers a way to store their photo and video collections locally on Lyve’s own hardware, then view those images via a suite of free apps designed for iOS, Mac, or Android devices. Beyond simply offering a means of accessing your photos without necessarily having to host them on today’s sometimes pricey cloud storage services, the Lyve software is also capable of eliminating duplicates when you’re viewing your images on a remote device, as well as rendering them in a format that’s designed for the screen size of the device you’re using to view them at the time. But with the debut of the new Lyve application, you can bypass the need to purchase one of Lyve’s hardware devices and instead back up your media collection just by installing the app on the devices you currently own. The product sounds a lot like Loom – the – which also offered a cross-platform suite of apps that made all your images from desktop, tablet and smartphone devices accessible in mobile-optimized formats. (Loom was shut down after its acquisition, as Dropbox now offers its own photo storage app .) With Lyve, , you simply install the app on all the devices you use, and the photos and videos are collected and organized on your behalf. As new content is added, it’s presented in a single library, organized by date (newest first) and viewable as one timeline. The main homescreen displays your collection in a tiled format that somewhat resembles Windows Phone’s “live tiles” look-and-feel. It’s made up of differently sized photo squares and thumbnails that animate, flipping around to show you other items in that date’s gallery. Next to each gallery, is a brightly colored tile displaying the date for that collection. Lyve also includes a “timeline” section, where photos are laid out in a horizontally scrollable format, again organized by date. You can also star photos and videos to favorite them, view their metadata, delete them, view your “just added” items, and share photos and videos via email, SMS or social media. The company continues to offer its hardware-based devices for those who want to store their collections on locally attached hard drives that are accessible by Lyve’s mobile apps. (Lyve Home is the larger of the two drives at $299, while another called Lyve Studio is $199. They offer 2 TB and 500 GB, respectively.) The Lyve app, however, is free, and imports from your various personal devices, in addition to online services like Dropbox and Google Drive. “Other companies offer free solutions only up to a certain amount of capacity,” explains CEO Tim Bucher. “Lyve’s free solution is unlimited though. You can have as many devices, as many photos, and as many videos as you want. The difference is that we don’t store the originals in our service – we only store the mobile-optimized versions,” he says. Consumers, of course, can store their original photos elsewhere – on local hard drives, within folders or media applications like iPhoto; (optionally) on Lyve’s own storage devices; or on other cloud services. Lyve’s app simply makes the photos accessible in optimized formats, for free, wherever you are. The Lyve apps are . |
Google Sheets Gets Smart Autofill To Predict Unknown Values | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | Google Sheets, the company’s online spreadsheet, is getting quite a bit smarter with the launch of the . Smart Autofill can look at the existing values in a spreadsheet and then, with the help of the Google , automatically divine the data for missing values in a column. Essentially, the algorithm learns as much as it can about the information that is already available in a spreadsheet and then it looks for patterns to build a model based on this information. Say you have a spreadsheet with a number of data points about vehicles (this is Google’s default example). Maybe you have pricing for some, but not for all. Google will look at the data in the spreadsheet and then try to predict the right values for the missing prices. Or maybe you are slightly OCD and keep a spreadsheet for the restaurants you visit with data about their cuisine, ambiance, cost and other data. Now when you add a new place, Google will try to predict how much you will like this one. Google admits that not all datasets will work well for this, but this is going to be a fun feature to play with if nothing else. It’s definitely a cool example of what you can do with the . If you want to give this a try, head over to the and install the Smart Autofill add-on. After that, take a look at , which walks you through an example for how the add-on works on a relatively simple spreadsheet. |
Loopd Launches Location-Tracking Tools For Conferences, With Backing From Tim Draper And Marc Benioff | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | If you’ve ever finished a busy day at a conference — either manning one of the booths or just as a regular attendee — and then found yourself struggling to remember who the heck you actually talked to, a startup called may be able to help. The company is officially launching its proximity-based marketing platform today, and it’s also announcing that it has raised $1 million in angel funding. That funding comes from Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (apparently the company emerged from ), Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and Vuclip co-founder Xinhui Nui. According to co-founder and CEO Brian Friedman, Loopd combines bi-directional beacons placed around an event space, chips that can be included in conference badges, and a mobile app. The system then tracks an attendee’s location throughout the event, and at the end of the day, attendees can open the app and see where they spent their time, then access related documents, videos, and other content. Similarly, marketers can see who visited their booths, and they can direct their follow-up efforts accordingly. You can also use the app to take notes, and export information from the app to your sales software. Draper said this could make conference-going much easier, because he’ll no longer need to have an associate or analyst tagging along to take notes as he made the rounds. And for those of us who don’t come to conferences with our own analysts, it’ll be less necessary to constantly swap business cards and collect marketing brochures. “The idea is that we don’t want to change user behavior — it’s really an amazing passive experience,” Friedman added. In other words, there’s no phone bumping or QR code scanning. You can just walk around and have conversations the way you normally would, and the information is automatically tracked for you. The risk, of coursed, is that Loopd opens the door to getting bombarded with messages from companies you really don’t care about. But Friedman said attendees can control the information they share through the app, and they can also set their badges to anonymous mode. Asked about the platform’s reliability, Friedman said different aspects of the technology have been tested at “internal events.” While I don’t know much about beacon technology, I was also curious about how the platform deals with limited cell phone reception and slow WiFi speed can take a hit, which are a pretty big problem at crowded events. Friedman said that if the WiFi goes down, the chips will continue tracking your location and update your data once the signal returns. Some other details about the chips — they cost less than $5 each to produce, and they can last for up to two weeks. Oh, and Draper also suggested that conferences (specifically the corporate events that Friedman said he’s targeting initially) are just a good starting point for Loopd’s vision — the device could eventually become a much broader source of location data, as devices and applications that need such data proliferate. “This is a big idea,” he said. |
Wayfair and HubSpot IPOs Could Be Just The Beginning For Boston Startup Scene | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | While Silicon Valley firms hold back on their IPOs and there’s , two Boston-based startups had highly successful IPOs less than a week apart. Just over a week ago, furniture shopping service in its IPO, then of its own a week later. I think it’s safe to say the Boston startup scene is on its way. Scott Friend, a managing director at Boston-based venture capital firm Bain Capital says these successes bode well for Boston’s startup community. “For sure, the HubSpot IPO, alongside other great IPOs and exits in town in recent years like Wayfair, DemandWare, Endeca and Kiva Systems (sale to Amazon.com for $775 million), enhances the credibility of the Boston start-up ecosystem for fledgling entrepreneurs as well as engineers and sales people, and investors. As we’ve seen in Silicon Valley for several years, the big exits create a virtuous cycle in the local market that is contagious.” Of course, many outside the Silicon Valley might not know it, but Boston has an active startup scene even without the success of Wayfair, HubSpot and the others Friend mentioned, but these kind of big-number IPOs shine a spotlight on the city’s startup system. In fact, there’s a lot of action bubbling up in the Boston area right now and there is money there. The Boston Globe started a website last year called to cover the burgeoning scene. I’ve met with Bain Capital, which has funded many enterprise startups, many which now have offices within in blocks of its posh Hancock Tower offices. General Catalyst started in the Boston market, and has an office in Cambridge. And . There’s also Fidelity Investments and Putnam Investments on the public market investment side. Private investors are also getting in on the act. For instance, I wrote about in August, which is headquartered in Boston and got early stage seed funding from , wife of Red Sox and Boston Globe owner John Henry. And that just scratches the surface of the money supply of things. MIT and Harvard are huge engines for innovation and Kendall Square near MIT is busting at the seams with startups. There are incubators like MassChallenge and TechStars, and there is an area near South Boston previously all-but abandoned waterfront that the city has made into an innovation district with lots of startup action including the Mass Challenge headquarters. In short, there’s a lot happening. As TechCrunch writer Danny Crichton put it in , “…there are many here in Boston who believe that the region’s best times remain in its future, and that there is an opportunity to reinvent the city around deep, engineered technologies.” Mark Andreessen once famously talked about a thousand Silicon Valleys. What he meant was there should be more than one place in the world with a startup ecosystem and we are certainly seeing that in Boston, New York, Berlin and other cities throughout the world. Each of these cities has its own startup scene complete with incubators, funders, startup spaces and of course lots of companies vying for fame and fortune (looking for a pot of gold). They may not be as large with as much money as the Silicon Valley, but they have the pieces in place to grow. Boston is one such scene, but let’s not forget though that Boston has always been a hot-bed for this type of innovation in large part because of the first-class universities here. It has just ebbed and flowed. Early on there was Polaroid and don’t forget that for a time Route 128 was the mini computer capital of the world as companies like Digital Equipment Corporation, Wang, Apollo, Data General and Prime ruled the day. EMC came later. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer met at Harvard. Dan Bricklin developed the first spreadsheet at Harvard. Mark Zuckerberg wrote the first version of Facebook at Harvard. Companies launched by MIT graduates include Bose, Akamai, iRobot ZipCar and the aforementioned HubSpot. On and on it goes. And that’s just the two of the more famous universities. There are 35 colleges, universities and community colleges within the city limits and many more spread throughout the state including 5 University of Massachusetts locations along with . And that provides a lot of smart young people with great ideas, and much like you see in Silicon Valley as groups like Y Combinator and others try to encourage the next group of entrepreneurs, that’s exactly what MassChallenge is doing, a group that gives young companies space and resources for a few months in a competitive environment that encourages these companies to grow up in a hurry with the lure of cash, services and funder recognition. MassChallenge CEO John Harthorne says he’s hopeful the two big IPOs are the beginning of something much bigger for the Boston startup scene. “Maybe the rest of the country will finally realize what we’ve known all along –that Boston is the best place in the world in which to launch a high-impact startup,” Harthorne wrote me in an email. One sign of a vibrant startup is how many of its alumni are working at other startups, and HubSpot actually brags about this on . In sports successful coaches breed successful coaches and the same goes in startups. HubSpot alums are working at 25 startups and now that HubSpot and Wayfair are flush with their IPO cash, it’s possible that they could start investing their own money in other Boston startup projects –and keep the innovation cycle going. Boston has a lot going for it and as we see more companies join HubSpot, Wayfair and others in successful exits, it’s only going to build on itself as more money and talent flow into the area. But the success of the last two weeks could be a sign that one of those alternative Silicon Valleys is already here. |
Bono Apologizes For Putting Free Music On Your iPhone | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Were you one of those people that U2 would ever dare give you free stuff that you didn’t ask for? Bono is sorry. Blaming it all on a “drop of megalomania, a touch of generosity, and a dash of self-promotion,” Bono admitted in a Facebook fan interview today that they probably crossed some previously undrawn line when they teamed up with Apple to push their new album onto just about every iPhone around. “[There was] a deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years might not be heard,” he says. “There’s a lot of noise out there — I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.” You can see the ; the relevant bit begins at 2:19. If you’re still bummed about the presence of a U2 album on your iPhone and haven’t figured out how to give it the boot, that Apple built just for that purpose. |
Moolah, The Divisive Startup Heavily Involved In The Dogecoin Community, Is Closing Down | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | , a digital currency startup that had a particularly prominent role in the development and demise of dogecoin, has that it will shut down at the end of October. The company, which is just 10 months old and provides a range of services for virtual currencies like bitcoin and dogecoin — including a currency exchange — will close on October 31. Moolah says it will file for bankruptcy and dissolution thereafter, but its existing customers will need to remove all currency from their accounts before the end of this month. Moolah is best known for its controversial role in the dogecoin community. Initially the company was seen as a force that helped grow the virtual currency, which was started as a joke but for ‘Internet tipping’ and microtransactions. But later tension between Moolah founder Alex Green and the team that started dogecoin, caused a major rift among its supporters and users. recaps the history and suggests that the aggressive tactics of Moolah (and Green) were directly responsible for the virtual currency’s demise. Jackson Palmer, one of the founders of dogecoin, — which included an effort to trademark the phrase ‘dogecoin’ — to TechCrunch’s John Biggs earlier this year. Needless to say, to see the company disappear. Called it: — Jackson Palmer (@ummjackson) So why is Moolah closing down? Essentially, it has run out of money, according to what Green said in a blog post: While we have a solid consumer and merchant platform, our monthly costs to cover support, legal and operational expenses now greatly outweigh our incoming cashflow. In the space of a single month, we have rapidly burned through our reserves and are now in the position of having a negative balance sheet. Losing certain clients that we relied on for revenue, means that we do not have the funds to continue paying staff, or pay our suppliers. Our costs over the first year have been astronomical in terms of legal and operational expenses, and our staffing costs now greatly outweigh our incoming funds. The trademark efforts almost certainly weighed on the startup’s finances, while the up-and-down nature of virtual currencies in general makes it difficult to build a business in the space. Bitcoin, the most notable cryptocurrency, saw its in 2013, but today it is worth proving just how volatile things remain. Moolah handled the transactions for a fundraising campaign that raised enough money to buy a dogecoin wrap on NASCAR racer Josh Wise’s car Green says that a last-ditch effort to save the company by winning business in Asia was unsuccessful, but it isn’t quite curtains for all of Moolah’s properties. MintPal, an exchange that in July, has been transferred to new management, though that new team is focusing on “handling the resolution of issues surrounding missing balances” — which suggests that the service has not been without its problems, too. Many from the dogecoin community will not mourn the passing of Moolah, given its divisive role, but its downfall is yet another example that success in virtual currencies is reliant on a solid business plan and execution. Mismanagement led to the fall of early bitcoin leader Mt.Gox, and there are elements of the same maverick style with how Moolah has been run — chasing after a trademark, for example, seems like a financial drain for a company that is not even a year old. Companies like Coinbase, which has and recently , are the power players with the best shot at taking the virtual currencies mainstream. |
Meet The Disrupt Europe: London Hackathon Judges | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | The Disrupt Europe Hackathon kicks off this weekend at Old Billingsgate in London! Coders and designers will have precious few hours to hack a project together before presenting to our illustrious group of judges. And just who are these judges you may ask? From developer geek to investor chic, these judges are ready for anything, and don’t think they’ll be holding back. They will assess hackathon participants on a scale of technical difficulty, usability, usefulness and creativity. In sum, aim for a “wow” factor and you’ll be in good shape. The winning team gets a $5,000 prize from TechCrunch, but there are a multitude of sponsor prizes also up for grabs. As previously announced, only teams earning a score of 3 or above will receive two tickets to the conference. Without further ado, this year’s Disrupt Europe Hackathon judges: Camille Baldock ( is a software engineer. She has spent the past years writing code and making APIs, web and mobile applications for a development agency, a startup and now works at the Government Digital Service. In her spare time, she coaches junior developers and is a 3D printing enthusiast. Eric Brotto ( ) is currently the Partner & Program Specialist for Startupbootcamp. Eric cut his teeth in the tech world as a iPhone App Creative Developer at the digital production studio Smile Machine where he built apps for brands such as Ford, Nike and Ubisoft. Today, Eric is the Co-Founder and Principal of Creative Bytes, a monthly networking and panel discussion which revolves around creative technology and digital marketing. He is also a Global Facilitator for Startup Weekend and Decoded. Claudia De Antoni ( ) is an investor at Virgin Management, the family office of Sir Richard Branson, where she focuses on technology, media, telecom, education and health & wellness sectors. Among other projects, she is currently supporting the development of the first Virgin-branded mobile application – expected to launch in 2015. Prior to Virgin, Claudia founded Popup Supper, an online marketplace for catering and entertainment services. Tak Lo ( ) is a Director at Techstars. Previously, he spent over 5 years in the London and NYC startup communities, having founded and mentored several startups on both sides of the Atlantic. He was formerly a management consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, an investment banker at Nomura, and an US Army veteran. Tak dabbled at London Business School and the University of Chicago. He writes regularly at taklo.co Melinda Seckington ( ) is a developer at FutureLearn, a social learning platform offering free courses from a wide range of university partners and cultural institutions. She loves attending and hacking at Hackdays, BarCamps and other tech meet-ups, and since 2009 has been organising them at Geeks of London, including HACKED at the O2 last year. She also runs MissGeeky.com, a blog about all things geeky and girly. |
TechCrunch Is Hiring A Product Manager | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | If you’re a product-oriented person who has always wanted to work on a product that is all about other products but at the same time is very much a product of its own that needs a great product vision — you’re in luck! TechCrunch is in the hunt for a product manager, one who knows the difference between Product Hunt, Cool Hunter and a Fred Dryer procedural from the 80’s, if you know what I mean. Kidding aside, TechCrunch is a product, and we’re looking for someone with the drive and vision to slice out new ways to report and opine. We cover the bleeding edge of products every day and we believe this site should reflect that in its nimble and progressive presentation. Some of that we’re already getting right and some of it is up to you — yes, you. If you’re a product leader who has experience with the tech and procedures of a media site including content management, publishing, video, advertising, audience growth and performance then we’re looking for you. TechCrunch is growing by leaps and bounds every month, and we need people who can track that growth using analytics as well as boost it using tools like SEO, product updates, media partnerships and more. You’ll be heading a great product team, so you should be prepared to be a strong, thoughtful leader who can tackle major products like redesigns as well as smaller, more agile experiments that help us to create and share great editorial content. Projects to be managed will include collaboration between internal development teams at TechCrunch as well as external contractors, and often taking input from the editorial, events and business groups inside the company. TechCrunch is an extremely progressive organization with a blistering fast pace, so any candidate for the job will need to be able to collaborate and communicate well in the face of pressure. If this sounds like you, feel free to or over . We look forward to working with you. |
Facebook And Apple Offer To Pay For Female Employees To Freeze Their Eggs | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Facebook and Apple are making it easier for female employees to delay having kids and focus on their careers instead. Both companies have now offered to pay to freeze their eggs. Many tech companies offer wild perks such as unlimited vacation, a casual work environment, and meals from five-star chefs. Google even offers massage and on-site laundry services to keep employees working. This appears to be the first time any major tech company has offered freezing a woman’s eggs as a perk. The procedure can cost up to $10,000 plus the $500 per year to store the eggs. Facebook already offers up to $20,000 in coverage for an egg freezing procedure as a perk to all female employees and Apple will offer to cover the cost starting in January. Egg freezing is not the only perk offered for women at Apple. “We continue to expand our benefits for women, with a new extended maternity leave policy, along with cyropreservation and egg storage as part of our extensive support for infertility treatments. We also offer an Adoption Assistance program, where Apple reimburses eligible expenses associated with the legal adoption of a child. We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families,” an Apple spokesperson stated in an email. We have also reached out to Facebook about its coverage of the procedure but have not heard back yet. The idea behind offering this option to female employees seems innocuous. It gives women an option to delay childbirth to focus on their careers. But while some are embracing the idea as a step toward closing the gender gap, not everyone is warm to it. Critics say this is just one more way to put the workplace before having a family. https://twitter.com/Freyamsr/status/522113786103476224 Would much rather FB/Apple give me $20K towards a robot nanny — Jenna Wortham (@jennydeluxe) Facebook and Apple have not come out and said this was an attempt to narrow the divide between opportunities for male and female employees. However, there is a . It’s easy to see the connection between the perk and the two tech giants who offer it. I would personally be more apt to want to work for a company that takes into account what I want out of my career and life. Women in their 30s reported feeling “empowered” by the prospect of being able to delay a family through cryopreservation in a . One out of five of those same women in the study cited workplace inflexibility as the reason for delaying having a child. However, believing that this could close the gap dismisses some underlying problems for women in tech. First, there’s the actual procedure. It’s not a bullet proof solution. The success rate per cycle is about 35 percent, . Second, the problem is not solved by women not having children during their working years. They still earn , childless or not. Further, most workplaces in the U.S. don’t give women ample time to recover from childbirth or accommodate in ways that would make it easier for them to juggle both children and work. The recently documented the cultural practice of the “lie-in” or the act of women caring for other women to give them time to recover. Most customs around the world give women at least 30 days to recover postpartum. The average paid time off for new moms in America is two weeks. The implemented in 1993 is known for a scarcity of benefits. It gives new moms at least 12 weeks of unpaid leave – severely cutting into her earning power for a three-month period. Offering a way for women to ‘delay’ having children while advancing their monetary position definitely adds options, which is a good thing. But there is the question of what kind of precedents that this enforces. Is it the employee’s responsibility to make every concession for the company — or does a company bear a responsibility to commit to an employee, even if that means letting them take some time off to give birth. |
Bag Week: Herschel Heritage BackPack Plus | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Chances are, you’ve seen someone wearing a Herschel backpack. They have signature leather elements including zipper pulls and straps, depending on the series, and they always bear the company’s old-timey logo in a small white patch somewhere you can reasonably expect it to get seen. The Heritage backpack is one of the company’s standards, as it likes to work with a limited number of different models and then change up the materials, patterns and colors in varying combinations to give shoppers ample choice. This fall, the , which offers ample padding, both a dedicated iPad and a dedicated 15-inch laptop sleeve, and a mesh organizer pouch for easy visibility of its contents. The Heritage also has a dedicated separate shoe compartment, which is great for keeping your gym runners separate from your other stuff, and which folds flat if you want to use the full capacity of the bag’s main compartment for other gear. Herschel has created a quality bag with the Heritage Plus, but that’s no surprise given its track record. The model we reviewed featured the eye-catching “geo” print, which is a little like camo but less obnoxious and far more appealing. The contrast black pocket sets off the look. The bag is comfortable when worn, even with a full complement of random gadget gear, a full-sized 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, an iPad Air and a pair of shoes. It’s also a fairly travel friendly bag, and should give you plenty of space for a couple of nights worth of stuff, without the checked baggage fee. [gallery ids="1069849,1069850,1069851,1069852,1069853,1069854,1069855"] One thing Herschel doesn’t provide in its backpacks are the kinds of cross-chest and waist support straps you might be used to from hiking bags. It’s likely an aesthetic decision, and provided this isn’t a 60L hiking pack, or a camera bag, it’s not going to make much difference to your general comfort level. Herschel’s padded back and straps have a lot more of an impact on general comfort, and they succeed here. The Heritage Backpack Plus is $74.99, which is more than your average JanSport, but there’s an attention to detail here that shines in overall product durability, having used Herschel backpacks for longer periods in the past. Their unique look is also a big reason to buy, but the features and comfort back up the asking price, in addition to the fashion aspects. |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 13 | null |
Ubooly Acquired As It Rebrands To Focus On Building Smarts Directly Into Toys | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Ubooly is demoing on stage at , but it’s not the company it was when it entered the program. The startup has renamed itself to “Smart Toy,” which better encompasses its vision of interactive toys with computing intelligence beyond just its initial product, which was also called . But it’s also no longer a startup – or at least, not one operating solo. The company was acquired by , an 18-month old venture founded by a group of top talent from Disney and elsewhere that has had great early success creating dress-up and costume-based toys licensed from existing kids brands. The original Ubooly was a crowdfunded toy, which was plush and huggable, but which could also house an iPhone or iPod touch within to give it not just a face, but a whole computer-driven intelligence. This allowed for personalized, interactive play with a child using it, and since the platform was app-based, it could grow and “learn” new tricks through updates and downloadable content. The new vision includes a range of smart toys, and Smart Toy co-founder and CEO Carly Gloge explained to me that the price pressure on components also means they’ll be able to build the smart hardware right into the toys while keeping things affordable, eliminating the need for an iPhone or iPad, and freeing up those gadgets to interact with the toys in new and innovative ways. One of the perceived advantages of the original Ubooly was its animated face which was displayed on your iPhone’s screen, but Gloge says that despite what they thought, it wasn’t that integral to the overall experience. “Only one kid out of a group of thirty actually noticed that it wasn’t animated,” she said, talking about the prototypes of the new toys. “Kids really don’t care because they’re filling in those details. We tried to start doing things with animating, but it increased the cost, and you ran into uncanny valley issues […] also, a lot of parents don’t want another screen in front of their kids.” The new toys can recognize other screens, so if you’re playing a game on your iPhone or iPad, and the toy’s nearby, it can provide helpful hints. In this way, the toys can become second-screen experiences, deepening interaction on the tablets and devices that so many kids these days are using anyways. The key is that the tech angle is invisible, and that it works, Gloge says. This is something borrowed from Apple, but it’s important in creating any kind of tech, where anyone beyond the early adopter crowd just wants something to work right away. “Consumers don’t care about technology, especially parents – they care about it feeling magical,” she said. “If you truly look at it, toys have not really innovated since the eighties. The nineties were a bit of a ‘dark ages’ for toys. The toy industry moved away from inventors, and tried to do everything in-house. What it’s going to take is these small, scrappy companies to make things interesting again.” The smarts that Smart Toy is building into its products are also a new kind of intelligent, with software that’s cloud-based and constantly improving, and that can truly interact with and respond to its users in a meaningful way. Cloud connection also means that these can be contextually-aware devices – they can work with other smart home elements, like the Phlips Hue lighting system. Gloge says future versions could adjust lighting while reading a story to a child to set the right mood, for instance. New owner Cartwheel Kids explained that Smart Toy made sense for them as an acquisition because they felt the toy industry was ripe for innovation, according to SVP of Sales and Marketing Sunny Laurisden, who also said that their focus on a solid end-user experience above all else was key. For Smart Toy, the acquisition was on the table alongside raising further funding, but Cartwheel’s ability to provide the resources needed for mass production and distribution of a new toy won out. The new toys are set to make their official debut at this year’s CES, and feature embedded accelerometer, NFC, 8GB SSD and Wi-Fi chip hardware, as well as a speaker and microphone. |
EMC Cloudscaling Purchase Is One More Attempt To Stay Relevant | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | While rumors have been flying that with fellow computing giant HP, it threw a bit of a curve this week when it bought cloud startup . Just when you’re thinking EMC might be irrelevant, it makes a move that suggests the company is still forging ahead. While is at its core a storage company, it owns lots of enterprise pieces and works in such as areas as the cloud, big data, security and content management. Yet a substantial percentage of the company’s market cap derives from its 80 percent ownership stake in VMware. In other words, if EMC joined the parade of companies breaking in two, and it spun off VMware, it would be left a modest sized company. Cloudscaling is one more attempt to stay current giving it a company that provides an OpenStack infrastructure play, one that is in heavy demand. Much like its partnership with and its a couple of years ago, Cloudscaling gives EMC some cache with IT folks who are looking for something different, something you typically don’t find at a large, established enterprise vendor like EMC. As Andreessen Horowitz COO Scott Kupor pointed out in a recent blog post, with slower organic growth, and these companies are using their cash reserves to buy the pieces they need, rather than developing them in-house. But in a market where the cloud evens the playing field and companies born in the cloud have far greater agility than these larger companies, suddenly being bigger isn’t better anymore and these companies are stuck in a very difficult position. They can split up as HP, eBay and Symantec have done in recent weeks or they can try and move to the cloud, however clumsily, as all these players are doing. It’s no coincidence that HP, IBM, Oracle and EMC have all turned to OpenStack as a life raft of sorts. They see the game changing and they are trying desperately to find a way to play along. As Kupor pointed out in his post, this transition will not happen over night because these companies can live on their maintenance contracts for years and years and no large customer, whether it’s the government or a large corporate entity is going to rip and replace over night –but the future is clear for anyone willing to look. The cloud and digital transformation has become so compelling, it’s impossible to ignore –and their customers are beginning to make the transition. These large companies see it, but they are big and slow and it’s hard to move a company from what you know to something entirely different, and while many are making the move, you have to wonder how many of these companies will be around in their current form by 2020. I wrote about t and pointed out several waves of glory days that have come and gone in Massachusetts as whole generations of companies have disappeared that were once the stalwarts of the state economy, whether we are talking Polaroid or the entire mini computer industry including Digital, Wang, Data General, Apollo and Prime. They are all gone now. Could EMC be next? As I’ve written before, disruption is not a fait accompli. Large companies have come off the mat, but we have also seen tidal waves of disruption wipe out companies that were once industry giants, and the thing about the cloud and digital transformation is it moves so much faster and the change comes so much more suddenly. Companies that can’t move quickly can and will disappear at a startling rate. EMC could be one of those companies at a crossroads. If it can’t figure out how to become a different company (whatever that is), it may not be around forever, at least as we’ve known it. Buying a company like Cloudscaling is one more move on the chess board and one more attempt to avoid the disruption steamroller. |
Uber-For-Weed Startup Meadow Lights Up In San Francisco | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | That’s because as a longtime medical marijuana user, he has an almost weed sommelier-like care and taste in finding quality product. His new company lets medical marijuana users quickly order and receive medical marijuana in less than an hour through a mobile app. Meadow and other startups like are emerging as the United States undergoes a rapid shift in cultural attitudes and regulation around marijuana. Since the 1970s, about 37 states have liberalized marijuana laws by either allowing medical usage, full legalization or through decriminalization. The New York Times, whose editorial board finally called for legalization over the summer, says that this is a for legalization with half of the states in the country deciding on relaxing prohibitive laws. With proof that other on-demand service startups seem to be working, it’s creating a unique opportunity to apply the business model to bud. Unlike some of fast-emerging rivals, Hua and his startup work closely with local dispensaries like The Vapor Room Collective. In the app, you can browse through specific varieties of medical marijuana with names like “Jack Diesel” or “Blueberry Kush.” The company lets people join partner collectives online by uploading their California identification card or driver’s license and then a physician’s recommendation letter. They connect that with a secure, HIPPA-compliant database where the collective can quickly verify their credentials. Hua envisions expanding to other states with a similar model. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK__lEZTEKM] He says the hard part about this business is making sure all of the unique laws and guidelines are followed. “This is not some get-rich-quick scheme; we’re playing the long game on behalf of the medical movement,” Hua said. “Our overarching goal is to implement and publicize a lawful marketplace to demonstrate to medical cannabis opponents that patients can obtain access to necessary treatment without endangering public safety or the rule of law.” While Meadow isn’t fully integrated with a dispensary’s inventory, that’s the long-term goal. Hua says one of the issues with ordering medical marijuana is that the collective might not know what they have on hand. So Meadow connects with a collective’s up-to-date menus. By providing door-to-door delivery, patients don’t have to wait in line or have to keep getting their eligibility checked. They charge the dispensary a $3 fee for each delivery and all of their partners accept either cash or debit cards. As for Hua, he has been involved in startups for years. Before Meadow, he was head of mobile growth and marketing for Sincerely, a mobile gifting company that was acquired by Provide Commerce. Before that, he was head of content at HealthCentral.com. Meadow is currently bootstrapped. |
Unsticker.Me Rids Your Facebook Of Stickers | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Remember the good old days? Back when posting a funny image or doodle in a Facebook comment thread meant having to go for one, rather than just opening up Facebook’s sticker catalog? It feels like it was Hah. Just kidding. I love these damned stickers. I put them on everything. I’d put stickers on my stickers if I could. The world demands a Pusheen/Hamcat mashup sticker. But I can understand why some people would maybe prefer their Facebook feed look like a Lisa Frank trapper keeper. Maybe you’re worried that having a tiny icon of two hamburgers high-fiving on screen will make you look super unprofessional when you’re Facebooking at work; maybe you just hate fun.
Whatever the case: if you want to rid your Facebook feed of stickers, an extension now exists to get it done. Built with friggin’ speed by self-described fun hater , Unsticker.me …unstickers you. It instantly slays the army of Stickers that has likely taken over your Facebook news feed, events pages, and groups, replacing each instance of a sticker with a simple “[sticker]” gravemarker to indicate where a clumsy hamburger or hot-dog-eating Yeti once stood.
One thing to note: while the extension will remove stickers from much of Facebook, it leaves them untouched in chats. Because no one hates fun much. The extension is available in three forms: , , and one in its |
King Digital Falls To 50% Of Its IPO Price | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Today , progenitor and purveyor of the formerly ubiquitous game Candy Crush closed at $11.25. That figure is precisely half of its IPO price of $22.50 per share. The company , and has had a rough life in the intervening period. A implies that the company has only managed to trade above its IPO price for the briefest of moments. For public investors, it’s been a rough ride. Partially caught up in the , King stands out: While most tech shares managed to hold their own today, or even recover some of their losses, King fell a fresh 6.79 percent. In after-hours trading, the company has shed another fraction. Commentary has run sour on the company. I’ve heard privately from investors that King should not have been allowed to list at all. I’ve publicly today that mirror the sentiment. This is also a pretty decent point: https://twitter.com/howardlindzon/status/522047908380938241 King, ironically, makes money, and announced a $150 million dividend during its . However, compared to its per-share declines, the cash disbursement is minor, and does little to undue the damage that the company has caused to some portfolios. Now down 50 percent from its list price, what’s next for King? Investors are bearish. It’s up to you to call the bottom. Here’s the chart: |
Former Motionloft CEO Jon Mills Pleads Guilty To Two Counts Of Wire Fraud | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Motionloft founder and former CEO Jon Mills has , according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. In doing so, Mills has admitted to spending $765,000 of investors’ money while telling them the company was about to be acquired. As we reported last year, Mills , offering them an opportunity to take a stake in the company while he was CEO. At the time, he told many of them that Motionloft was in acquisition talks and they would benefit from the closing of the deal. Meanwhile, Mills invited those same friends to party with him at Coachella and Las Vegas, where he racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses on penthouse suites, trips in private jets, and a private performance by R&B singer Miguel. The whole thing came to an end when Mills was and charged with two counts of wire fraud and four counts of money laundering. He’s pled guilty to the wire fraud charges, each of which carry a maximum statutory penalty of 20 years in prison, a fine of $250,000, plus restitution. |
Teen Social Network Let Raises $600K | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | , a teen social networking app with a focus on gamification, is announcing that it has raised $600,000 in seed funding. That’s not a huge amount of money, but the funding is interesting in the context of Let’s history. When I first met founder Pascal Lorne a few months ago, he told me that when , it wasn’t reaching the right audience, so he turned down outside investment and bought out his co-founders, while the developers continued working on the project part-time in exchange for equity. A revamped version of the app launched in March of this year — allowing users to post photos, videos, and other content, and to give each other stars for updates that they like. The posts and users with the most engagement are then featured on Let’s leaderboard. The company has also been recruiting what Lorne calls “the long tail” of teenage social media celebrities. Let isn’t sharing any user numbers, but Lorne sounds pretty happy with the growth so far (and presumably his new investors are, too). He did say that 13- to 18-year-old girls make up about 75 percent of the Let’s user base. Lorne also said that while the company offers both iPhone and Android apps, the iPhone is clearly more popular among Let’s users, particularly since the release of iOS 8. (iOS devices accounted for 96 percent of downloads in the past two weeks.) As a result, Lorne said he’ll be “betting everything on Apple,” and he’s debating whether to shut down the Android app entirely. The new funding comes from French firm Breega Capital, David Graham (owner of talent management company PressPlay), and friends and family. Lorne said he employs a full-time team of 13 people, split between France and the United States, and he plans to raise a larger Series A soon. |
Hailo Says There Won’t Be Any Licensing Deal For Toronto, New Focus Will Be On Growth In Asia | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Earlier today, Hailo revealed that it would be closing its North American operations. The closure announcement from Hailo included its operations in Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Montreal and Toronto, but Hailo North America President and Toronto office lead Justin Raymond told TechCrunch that in the Canadian market, it and keep the doors open. Hailo has now responded, saying that such a deal definitely won’t happen. A representative for Hailo says the company is shutting down all markets completely, and won’t be striking a licensing deal in Toronto. Based on what I’ve heard from sources close to the operation, the efforts to keep the Toronto office up and running stemmed from a management disagreement, but with Hailo not extending either its brand or its software to the splinter group, it doesn’t look good. Hailo also says that rather than simply turning tail and running from Uber and Lyft, it’s actually refocusing its growth efforts on the Asian market, where it has had great early success in Tokyo and Osaka so far. A huge percentage of the taxi business actually exists outside the U.S., a company spokesperson explained, and a return to North America is far from off the table. Hailo would indeed contemplate a re-entry is the U.S. and Canada a few years down the road, depending on how well its current focus succeeds. |
Intel Reports Better-Than-Expected Q3 Revenue Of $14.55B On Strength Of Recovering PC Market | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Following the bell, Intel its third quarter financial performance, including revenue of $14.55 billion and earnings per share of $0.66. Analysts and the street had expected that Intel would earn $0.65 per share on total top line of $14.45 billion. In its , Intel earned $0.55 per share on revenue of $13.8 billion. The company’s revenue rose $1.1 billion compared to its year-ago period, or 8 percent. More positively, its operating income rose 30 percent to $4.5 billion. In after-hours trading, following its earnings beat, Intel is up several points. During regular trading, Intel rose around 2 percent. An inadvertent headline from a news organization sent a thrill through its shares earlier in the day. Intel, a key player in the PC market, could be enjoying increasing stability in the sector. Recent IDC and Gartner numbers indicate that the PC market itself is now . According to IDC, PC shipments fell only 1.7 percent in the most recent quarter, compared to the year ago period, to 78.5 million units. In the United States, again according to IDC, PC sales were up more than 4 percent from the year-prior. Intel’s PC group had revenue of $9.2 billion, up 9 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. On the other extreme, its mobile group had revenue of $1 million in the period. Intel called that “consistent with expectations.” Intel lost more than $1 billion on its mobile efforts in the quarter. There is a certain historical irony that Intel is recovering, and even growing on the back of PCs, a market segment that many have tried to write off as irrelevant for some time. At the same time, its mobile business remains nascent. The company’s Internet of Things business managed a 14 percent year-over-year decline in the period, to revenue of $530 million Next to PCs, only Intel’s Data Center Group managed to crack the billion dollar mark, reporting $3.9 billion in revenue in the third quarter, up 16 percent from the year-ago period. For its fourth quarter, Intel expects revenue of $14.7 billion, with a $500 million margin of error, and a gross margin of around 64 percent. The revenue number feels conservative. — Microsoft reports its earnings next week. A strong quarter at Intel like this one could imply that other players in the PC space, of which Microsoft is a stalwart, might have positive results from the product category as well. |
Snapchat Reminds Us That Users Are To Blame For Photo Leaks | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | In response to —now called “The Snappening” in homage to the recent leak of celebrity nudes — a has been posted on the company blog regarding the unlawful use of its unofficial API. And in classic Snapchat fashion, the company is taking almost zero responsibility. Last week, a third-party application called Snapsaved that uses a reverse engineered Snapchat API was hacked, leading to . While Snapsaved is most certainly and responsible for the latest breach, the Snappening (among ) has raised the question of whether or not Snapchat has done enough to prevent third-party applications from accessing its API. As explained Snapchat has never officially allowed a third-party applications to access its API, though it isn’t difficult to reverse engineer. An official API or application programming interface, is often used to allow third-party apps to access services like Twitter or Facebook, but Snapchat doesn’t provide one — so programmers figure out the characteristics on their own and create unofficial clones or utilities that send data over Snapchat’s network. What matter is that third-party applications have access to Snapchat photos, and Snapchat can do almost nothing about it. Snapchat’s photo security will always be in question while these third-party apps take advantage of an un-regulated API. This is the curse of many social services that make it to the big leagues. That is why many of these services, like Twitter and Facebook and others, have developed official APIs, giving them the ability to track third-party applications and police their own platform with complete control. Snapchat, as a young app, has yet to do that. In the past year, major announcements from the company focus on the expansion of their “Stories” product, which is most likely going to turn into a main source of revenue for the highly valued, non-revenue generating company. According to the statement from Snapchat, the company is “excited by the interest in developing for the Snapchat platform” but “going to take [their] time to get it right.” No hint of a timeline or even mention of actively working on a private API, which, again, is the only way to actually solve the problem of third-party applications accessing user data and ultimately, taking responsibility for Snapchat’s community of users. Snapchat seems almost reluctant to do so. Snapchat has urged users to stay away from any third-party application that claims to use or modify Snapchat services. They say that “a combination of common sense and security countermeasures” is the best way to keep the community safe. Again, no mention of responsibility for the mess. Unfortunately, even users who never downloaded or use a third-party Snapchat application can still be punished or violated by other users who have made the unfortunate mistake (or malicious decision) of using a third-party app. These apps are viruses in the ecosystem, such as it is. Even if the apps themselves have no ill intent, crappy decisions about storing images or security can expose user data — in this case photos that they would have liked to have remained private or disappeared forever. In a statement to yesterday, Snapchat made sure to iterate that it’s totally against the rules to use a third-party app (something they have zero control over). Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users’ security. We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed. So, remember, you’re actually a rule breaker and probably a bad person if you’re using third-party Snapchat applications. You’re risking your own security and the security of others. It’s . Not Snapchat. It’s also against Snapchat’s Terms of Service to unofficially access the Snapchat API. It’s interesting how, with the right product, and the , Snapchat users who are by definition a group of people interested in sharing disappearing content feel that Our Stories is more of a feature than an advertising channel. In any case, security become a top priority for Snapchat. The service is by no means built with security in mind. But people still do use it to send confidential and sensitive materials, even if those are a silly selfie. It’s most certainly designed and marketed as a “safe” space. Here, the difference between safety and security is paramount. Snapchat is based around living in the moment, and sharing real experiences with other users no matter how close or far away they are. It’s about having a digital identity that matches up to your real-life identity and the way you really communicate. After all, conversations in the real-world aren’t tracked or recorded. The point is not to make users feel like they can send highly classified documents and files over a secure, encrypted channel. The point is that users need to feel safe. If you want to read Snapchat’s full statement regarding the Snappening, you can check out the or read the transcript below. It’s my hope that this won’t be the last we hear about Snapchat security and I also hope these guys will finally do the right thing. Over the past few days we’ve fielded a number of questions about our API and third-party applications after a website that offered to save Snaps indicated that their database had been breached. We are grateful that the service provider acknowledged that Snapchat was never compromised, but we wanted to use this as an opportunity to reiterate the unfortunate threats these third-party applications can pose to our community. A third-party application is any application that accesses the Snapchat API, but hasn’t been built and maintained by our company. Given the popularity of Snapchat and the size of our community, it’s no surprise that a cottage industry of app-makers has popped up to provide additional services to Snapchatters. Unfortunately, these applications often ask for Snapchat login credentials and use them to send or receive snaps and access account information. When you give your login credentials to a third-party application, you’re allowing a developer, and possibly a criminal, to access your account information and send information on your behalf. It takes time and a lot of resources to build an open and trustworthy third-party application ecosystem. That’s why we haven’t provided a public API to developers and why we prohibit access to the private API we use to provide our service. Don’t get us wrong – we’re excited by the interest in developing for the Snapchat platform – but we’re going to take our time to get it right. Until then, that means any application that isn’t ours but claims to offer Snapchat services violates our Terms of Use and can’t be trusted. Snapchat has always been a fun place to share Snaps with friends. The best way to keep our community safe is a combination of security countermeasures and common sense. We’ll continue to do our part by improving Snapchat’s security and calling on Apple and Google to take down third-party applications that access our API. You can help us out by avoiding the use of third-party applications. Team Snapchat |
Investors Say Logistics Companies Are In For The Long Haul | Christine Magee | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | In a world where consumers are increasingly expecting frictionless, tech-enabled services, snail mail is just not cutting it. Just about anything can be ordered from a smartphone, but shipping it across the country takes days and often costs a small fortune. A variety of logistics startups have cropped up to tackle shortcomings in various sectors of the shipping industry, from local delivery to international delivery via . The past year has seen more early stage rounds than ever before, with seed rounds accounting for nearly three-quarters of all deals recorded in 2014. In the first quarter, relatively large rounds and topped past totals for venture investments in shipping-related startups – but it seems investors have yet to place any big bets.
This is not because the opportunity is not there. The generates over $600 billion in gross freight revenues and employs 6.8 million people. And companies worldwide spend billions every year on shipping expenses. “It’s a popular space because these gigantic billion-dollar budgets are allocated to this, and it’s a pain in the ass to deal with at all stages,” says of . SoftTech has invested in both Postmates and shipping API provider Shippo. has built a SaaS infrastructure that commerce and marketplace operators can integrate into their website to provide easy shipping options for customers. Smaller businesses that generally don’t qualify for shipping discounts can benefit from Shippo’s bulk rates, which continue to improve as the company scales and accumulates more shipments. “We have tiny e-commerce companies reaching out but also monstrous companies doing the same,” says Clavier of Shippo’s customer base. “It’s a real pain point that exists in every stage.” Shipping providers face their own set of pain points as well. Shipping companies spend to reposition empty containers, which accounts for 15% of all operational costs related to container assets. Trucks hauling empty containers are nearly as expensive to operate but not producing any income, facing shipping companies with losses that they make up for with higher charges for consumers. in LA, in NY and Cincinnati-based are a few startups that have received early-stage funding to tackle this issue by facilitating direct communication between shippers and truck drivers. By removing the middleman, both parties benefit from reduced expenses and wait times. “Repositioning happens in all kinds of industries – there’s a real problem, there’s a lot of wasted resources there,” says , Managing Partner at LA-based . “So if you can aggregate this excess capacity properly, it’s great for consumers.” , Wavemaker’s latest investment, provides an Expedia-like aggregation and search dashboard that users can filter by price, time and efficiency to determine their preferred method of shipping. This is just the beginning of a revolution in the logistics and shipping industry. Automated vehicle startup has created a vehicle-to-vehicle communications system that enables trucks to keep close formation on the highway, saving fuel and reducing collisions, while Mercedes is currently developing the – a self-driving semi truck that aims to cut down on the 330,000 annual large truck crashes in the U.S. that have resulted in nearly 4,000 deaths. Clavier has his sights set on a futuristic model of shipping as well – he’s already looking forward to the day when portfolio companies and Shippo can partner to facilitate cross-country drone delivery.
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Tune Into TechCrunch Radio On Sirius XM 102 Indie Tonight | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Tonight, John Biggs and I head uptown to the Sirius XM headquarters once again for the live airing of our latest media venture, . We’ll be live for an hour discussing the latest trends and topics in tech news, and then we’ll be joined by FirstMark Capital partner Amish Jani as we dig into our weekly TC Radio Pitch-Off. Five companies will have sixty seconds each to deliver an amazing pitch, one so complete in its eloquence, poignancy and content that it awes and inspires myself, John, Amish, our faithful band of listeners. We urge you to tune into the show tonight on Sirius XM 102 Indie at 6pm ET, 3pm PT, with another airing on the west coast at 6pm PT. Oh, and if you want to participate in the TC Radio pitch-off, showing off your product on the radio like a boss, just keep reading for instructions:
1. You must have a product that is available to general users. No sign-up pages or pre-orders with a TBD ship date. There must be a link we can give to listeners/readers where they can access your product, service, what have you.
2. You must be an early stage company. If you have raised a Series A or later, you are disqualified. Bootstrapped or seed stage startups are welcome.
3. You must be able to pitch your product with your words only.
4. You must be able to operate a telephone.
It’s going to be a hoot! |
HighQ Takes On The Enterprise Collaboration Space With An Eye Toward Data Sovereignty | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | London-based is opening a new data center in Australia, growing its bid to provide locally supported enterprise collaboration and file-sharing products. The company has quickly expanding revenues, and a key offering: If you use HighQ, the U.S. government will likely have a harder time than usual getting its hands on your data than if you use a U.S.-based provider. The enterprise collaboration space is hot and crowded. Microsoft wants Office 365 combined with Yammer and OneDrive for business to win. Box wants its large company-focused file-sharing and storage service coupled with BoxNotes and Office integration to win. Google is betting that its collection of productivity software and Drive storage will win. And Dropbox is pivoting to the enterprise as well, after long dominance in the consumer cloud storage market. HighQ is competing with companies that are larger and wealthier. Note that HighQ’s aforementioned competitors are all based in the U.S. That means that the United States government currently deems that it has the authority to command user data from each using a domestic search warrant even if that information is stored in an overseas datacenter. Microsoft is that legal view in court, but for now it appears to remain in effect. HIghQ, headquartered in the U.K., has a different corporate makeup that gives it an advantage. Since it is not incorporated in the U.S., its data stored on overseas data centers is far more removed from the reach of the United States government than the data of companies based in the country. However, HighQ does operate in the U.S. HighQ Inc. operates in this country, but has no legal connection to HighQ Ltd, the British company. The two entities share common shareholders but are distinct. So when HighQ Ltd stores data in the United Kingdom or Australia, the United States has to employ a separate legal method to command data access to the information — the mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) here is a common instrument. The CEO and co-founder of HighQ, Ajay Patel, told TechCrunch in a phone interview that the legal framework at play is “evolving.” For now, HighQ has a potential edge on its competition. It’s been around for more than a decade, has been bootstrapped to date — leaning on an initial £20,000 injection from its founders — and it’s considering outside capital. According to Patel, it has “healthy” cash accounts and is profitable. Patel told TechCrunch that HighQ has a current revenue run rate — forward 12 months — of around $10 million. He expects that figure to rise to $15 million by April. Presumably some of the company’s expected rising marketing spend will assist in that growth. The $10 million and $15 million figures put HighQ at the smaller end of the enterprise collaboration space. The two revenue figures, it’s worth noting, only encompass recurring revenues, and not one-time fees or other incomes. The company’s growth, this far into its history, appears to have legs. It has more than 50 percent growth over the last three years. Its margins, however, are unusual. The company operates with an earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) margin of 35 percent, and it’s profitable. Given, according to the CEO, “no interest payments or amortization” and “minimal” depreciation, the company has net profits of around 26 percent of revenue. What is the company worth? I spoke to several venture capitalists who have knowledge of the space that HighQ operates in, and received varied estimates between $100 million and $200 million, depending on its ability to demonstrate evidence that revenue growth will continue, and that its margins will hold up. That’s a big “if.” One venture capitalist I spoke to, quoting the company’s numbers, called its profitability “impressive.” If Microsoft loses its to protect data stored abroad from the hands of the United States government, the government of its home country, it could bolster HighQ’s market position. That could mean more growth for the smaller firm. However, given that HighQ is a mote compared to the companies that it is competing with (Box spent more than four times HighQ’s current run rate in its last fiscal quarter on sales and marketing alone; Google and Microsoft are worth a combined $730 billion), it could be a simple acquisition target. |
Hillary Clinton Urges Community To Close The Tech Gap In Our Own Backyard | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | Hillary Clinton took to the stage at Tuesday to discuss the economic divide around the world and in San Francisco’s own backyard. “We need to make sure the benefits of tech outweigh the pitfalls, and that tech is most evenly distributed,” the potential 2016 Presidential candidate and former Secretary of State told the audience. Clinton rattled off grim statistics about Oakland’s “word gap,” which show there is just one book for every 300 kids in that area. “Imagine that, 300 children all passing one book around,” she said. She then discussed a joint program with Marc Benioff, Co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, to help close that gap in the Bay. The campaign is also supported by UCSF, , the Clinton Foundation and San Francisco-based advertising agency . Dreamforce is giving back this year with the , where each day emphasizes different charitable organizations and giving efforts. Benioff integrated a 1/1/1 giving model within Salesforce. This is a model in which the company gives 1 percent of profits, 1 percent of equity and 1 percent of employee hours back to the community. Google and other tech companies have adapted portions of this same model within their own culture. Clinton also sat down for a one-on-one chat with Klaus Schwab from the World Economic Forum. The two discussed bringing technology to the global masses. Clinton emphasized the importance of keeping the Internet open, especially in countries that need that access during civil unrest. "It is absolutely clear to me that we have to keep the Internet open," says Hillary Rodham Clinton at . — Matt Soleyn (@MattSoleyn) Schwab asked Clinton if she was going to run for president, reminding her he’d asked the same question back in 1999 when she first contemplated doing so. “I don’t want to make any news today,” Clinton demured. She did say she “Hopes the U.S. joins the ranks of countries that have overcome the hurdle of gender equality.” “Please stick to the answer in 1999, all those years ago,” urged Schwab. Benioff to the Ready for Hillary super PAC – the maximum amount allowed – and Clinton and Benioff appeared outside afterwards to stuff bags full of books and school supplies for Oakland school children. |
How Product Hunt Hopes To Avoid The Pitfalls That Wounded Quora And Buried Digg | Dan Kaplan | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | When Ashwinn Krishnaswamy and two of his buddies were living with their parents and working out of a basement in the suburbs of Philadelphia, they had only their development skills, a solid sense of product design, and a simple idea in their heads. The way friends and peers discuss articles and web pages, they figured, is broken. Despite the rise of Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest, email and instant messaging are still the de facto tools we use when we want to share a link and talk about it privately. And let’s be real — those are some old-ass technologies. Along with this insight, Ashwinn and team had a problem: They had no connections in the Valley or among the technical community in New York. In fact, they were total unknowns. But they had a solid idea for a simple app, they thought. Out came , an elegant Chrome extension that makes it easy and fast to share an article or webpage with one or more of your contacts and then have a discussion about it on the page itself. But remember the problem: Ashwinn and his teammates are outsiders. They believe they’ve built something cool, useful, and well-designed, but they don’t know anyone at TechCrunch or on Sand Hill Road. The 1,200 beta testers Point had at NYU weren’t about to change that. But the three co-founders had a card up their sleeves. This card was a buzzy new site called . At the end of July, a friend of Ashwinn’s went to Product Hunt and posted a link to Point with a simple one-line description: “Awesome link sharing/commenting with friends.” “There was an immediate, visceral reaction,” Ashwinn recalls. “Responding to emails and tweets became a 24/7 role.” With no other press coverage, and no other efforts at distribution, Point added 8,000 new users, more than quadrupling its user base. While 8,000 new users is a pittance on the consumer web, these new users weren’t just some fly-by randos. They were technology insiders: product people, developers and investors. And lots of them had a thing for Point. Developers from all over the world started reaching out, saying that they’d love to help bring the concept to Android and iOS. A handful of interested investors got in touch. By the end of the day, Point had become the most up-voted product the Product Hunt community had seen to date. “When we launched,” Ashwinn says, “inbound interest from potential hires, investors, and users was our main goal. Product Hunt nailed all three.” Today’s era of app mega-proliferation has created a catch-22 for new startups. Without relationships with press and investors, it is remarkably hard to get noticed. But if you aren’t already getting noticed, it is remarkably hard to score coverage and cash. This catch-22 was not the problem was hoping to solve when he started curating his favorite new tech products and sending them out every day to an email list, but it is one of the problems that Product Hunt is beginning to address. Product Hunt, in case you’ve missed it, is what you’d get if Hacker News, Reddit and a product geek had a baby. Like Hacker News and Reddit, Product Hunt’s core mechanic involves sharing links and upvoting the ones that impress you. But unlike those two sites, where links generally point to articles and images, the links you share on Product Hunt can only point directly to the websites or app store locations of newly-launched products. Most importantly, Product Hunt treats contributing and commenting as a privilege: You only get to voice your opinion on the site if you’ve been hand-selected and approved — usually by Ryan, himself. In part due to Hoover’s product and marketing savvy, and in part due to his thoughtful curation of contributors, Product Hunt struck an instant chord. When Ryan moved Product Hunt beyond its email newsletter roots and onto the web, he had an email list of only few hundred subscribers. Now, he has over 80,000. 30-50 new products are submitted by approved contributors each day, and hundreds of thousands of unique visitors come to the site each day. Meanwhile, founders of startups regularly go to Product Hunt to participate in discussions about the new products they’ve launched. Mike Krieger of Instagram was there to promote Hyperlapse. Dave Morin was all over the thread for Path Talk. Even the venerable Ray Ozzie got down — writing long, thoughtful responses to questions about Talko, his new voice collaboration app. This is not crazy: For a certain class of products, launching on Product Hunt is now a reasonable tactic, and a couple of startups have about the results and insights they got from doing exactly that. Only about a year since it appeared, Product Hunt has become a daily destination for the early adopter, product-minded, and investor crowds. Hoover was the youngest founder to ever be interviewed at TechCrunch Disrupt. And Andreessen Horowitz has . Of course, this is where things start to get really hard. In a lot of key ways, Product Hunt right now feels like the early days of . When Quora launched in June 2009, it began as an invite-only community, seeded with the networks of co-founders and early Facebookers and . For members of the startup world, the content was outstanding. Asking questions and getting long, in-depth answers from people like Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel and Dustin Moskovitz in response was a regular experience. Before he became Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong dominated the scene, writing thoughtful content on an impressively wide range of subjects. The quality and authenticity of the dialogue was also remarkable. For the most part, when someone like Andreessen answered a question, it didn’t feel like a PR move. It just felt like he had something to say, and was using Quora to say it. I was heavily active in the early days of Quora — when the early community was passionately engaged — and it was unlike anything else on the web at the time. And man, it was buzzy. In 2010, Quora was the toast of the town. The parties it threw in Palo Alto and New York City were packed, and the team won best new startup at The Crunchies. Facebook even made a clumsy attempt at a clone. But then, something changed. Though it’s never completely accurate to attribute a decline to any one factor, my guess is that Quora felt pressure to accelerate growth and opened up contributions too broadly, too soon. When the floodgates opened on this buzzy, hot site, a seething mass of fly-by randos poured in, looking to be a part of the next new thing. Over the next 6-12 months, the attrition of the early adopters took hold. The intense concentration of exceptionally strong content followed them, and while Quora still produces gems (see: ), the magic and buzz of the early days has never returned. I have no visibility into what was going on inside Quora during that frothy, tumultuous time, but I have to think they could have avoided this reaction with a more thoughtful, slow-paced, and empathic approach to the insanely tough challenges of community-building at scale. But it’s easy to say that from my armchair. Ryan Hoover is actually living it, and he hopes to sidestep the same mistakes. Like Quora, was once a hot property, with an active, passionate community built around posting links and upvoting the ones you liked. At a certain point, landing your site on Digg’s homepage meant a huge, sudden rush of traffic — enough to crash your servers sometimes. At the height of its arc, Digg was valued at something like $200 million, and Kevin Rose was on the cover of BusinessWeek. But then, something changed. Hoover thinks that Digg made a few major blunders. “They hired really fast, and for what they were building, they probably didn’t need that many people. But most importantly, they built the wrong culture in the community. They started empowering heavy users and giving them more and more influence,” says Hoover. “At first, it kind of makes sense, because these are the people curating the best stuff. But then the heavy users started creating voting rings, where the influential people would have everything on the homepage. If you’re a new person coming to the community, you had no say.” Though Digg had lost a fair amount of steam by the time it launched Digg 4.0 in August of 2010, that launch seems to have been the death knell. As Hoover says, “With Digg 4.0, they introduced this giant change without making the community a part of the decision, and there was just a huge backlash.” 11 months after Digg 4.0, the company was sold to Betaworks for a rumored $500K. It was a long fall from $200 million, and it ended with a splat. Could Digg’s implosion have been avoided? By comparison, Hoover looks to Reddit’s slow-and-steady approach to scaling its community as one of his models. “The biggest distinction between Digg and Reddit is reflected in the subreddit. With subreddits, Reddit built autonomous, independent communities around specific topics. People can talk to each other and they can post things and it doesn’t impact any other sub-communities. It took longer to grow, but it made each unique community stronger, and also allowed Reddit to expand to different categories of people,” says Hoover. Hoover has big plans for Product Hunt, and they include expanding the company far beyond its roots in the early adopter/Silicon-Valley-echo-chamber community. Possibly into video games. Maybe someday into fashion. Along the journey out of the echo chamber of tech, he intends to walk in Reddit’s footprints. “Our current thinking involves going the Reddit approach and having autonomous communities that are independent. As we go into video games, for example, the experience will be a little bit different than Product Hunt today,” Hoover says. “Longer term, fashion will be significantly different. We want to enable those people to have their own space.” This is where things get really, really hard. As John Borthwick, the founder of Betaworks and a seed investor in Product Hunt, told me in an interview, “The voice of the founder of a community is really important to the success of that community.” If you are going to build and maintain a community-driven startup that scales into a meaningful return for you and your investors, you have to navigate a thin, perilous line, somehow balancing between attracting new users and not alienating the OGs. Take the wrong path or make a big enough misstep and you will fall down, bleed out slowly, and die. As Quora’s dimmed star and Digg’s demise demonstrate, avoiding these pitfalls is a challenge that even remarkably bright people can easily fail to overcome. Anyone who has observed the rise of Product Hunt would agree that Hoover’s voice has been all over it—in everything from the tenor of conversation on the site to the straightforward-but-thoughtful UI design. Every day, Hoover is a fixture on Twitter, encouraging founders, developers, and designers to participate in the discussion happening around the products they’ve built. When drama starts to break out, as it threatened to when someone observed that Product Hunt was dominated by the voices of white males and accused the community of being “zero-sum,” Ryan handles it with empathy and caution, instead of reactionary defensiveness. He also takes a first-hand role in moderation: When I submitted an app that had already been posted the day before, Ryan was there within minutes, pointing out the redundancy, but doing so gently, with a smile. But this kind of involvement from the CEO becomes incredibly difficult—if not impossible—at scale—especially if and when Product Hunt makes moves into areas that aren’t within Ryan’s wheelhouse…like fashion. Though the word “authenticity” gets thrown around a lot, it is an important concept here: authenticity is critical to making a community interesting, different, and worth paying attention to. “Product Hunt is bringing the authenticity back to the discussion of startups…and to a degree that you don’t see in the media,” says Borthwick. “It reminds me of the early day of the tech blogs: you were getting right into the veins and spirit of the entrepreneurs.” The biggest challenge facing Product Hunt is that this sort of authenticity is remarkably difficult to maintain as you grow. And without growth in Silicon Valley, what do you have? But Hoover has spent a lot of energy studying the Internet communities that made wrong turns during their ascents and fell off a cliff. While knowing the mistakes others have made in the past does not guarantee that you will avoid mistakes of your own in the future, it’s better than flying completely blind. is the CTO type. Though he considers himself a hustler who will do any job it takes to win, he also knows that his product design, visual design, and marketing experience are approximately nil. Last March, Or was in Israel, working with a team of 10 on a stock trading startup he co-founded. One weekend, he decided to throw together a really stupid iPhone app. But the thing about this really stupid, haphazardly-designed app is that it did one, unbelievably basic thing really well: it nudged. The way it nudged was simple: it said “Yo.” In April, Robert Scoble was visiting startups in Israel when Or’s friend Moshe showed him this app. After playing with it for half a day, Scoble proclaimed on Facebook that Yo was the “stupidest, most addicting app ever.” Soon after Scoble’s proclamation, someone posted Yo on Product Hunt. Shortly after that, notable people from the startup community started tweeting it out. The initial buzz convinced Or to quickly put together an API. That got posted on Product Hunt, too. Dave Morin reached out and told Or that Yo’s API was brilliant. “We had no idea that we were going to do Yo full time,” Or says. “But after visiting San Francisco and meeting product people and seeing people talking about Yo and using Yo, we said to ourselves ‘We are not the only crazy ones.'” Or ditched his stock-trading startup, raised $1.2 million from Betaworks, packed up his life in Israel, and moved to the Bay. “Product Hunt,” he says “was the big first step.” For years, the popular story among eager entrepreneurs has said that the best way to score early adopters and investors for your startup is to land your launch on TechCrunch. This notion has simultaneously helped TechCrunch remain the most influential producer of technology news on the internet and made life for its writers an . The result of this inbox hell, unfortunately, is that unless you have a good relationship with someone on the inside or a blatantly incredible story, it has become quite challenging to get the media attention you think you need to launch your startup. And without that media attention… In some ways, the modern tech entrepreneur’s catch-22 appears to give the lie to the Valley’s notion of meritocracy: if you are smart and built something but don’t have access, why can’t you get any? But in reality, the catch-22 actually proves that the meritocracy exists: if you’ve built a product that the market wants AND have the hustle to get it in front of the right people, you WILL find a way. And once you find that way, the rewards of media attention, traction, and investment follow. Product Hunt struck a chord in part because it accelerates the path to those things for the products that resonate. Sure, you could argue that the attention and investment bestowed on Yo and other apps that rise on Product Hunt indicate that we’re in an echo-chamber of a bubble, and that the reign of lightweight apps will continue until it pops. But you’d be missing the point. Product Hunt matters right now because merit, quality, and authenticity are, in fact, important, and they—not access to the right people—should be the delimiters of the attention a new product gets. The notion that TechCrunch is the primary launchpad to startup glory has always been wrong. Interesting products (the ones that actually have a shot at meaningful traction) have an intrinsic spark, and if they solve a real problem, meet a deep need, or get us hooked on our own dopamine, they can catch fire and spread. As Greylock’s Josh Elman told me, “the atomic unit of growth is two people talking to each other about a product.” If you don’t have that (or, at least, a product that could produce the effect), it’s time to iterate, pivot, or go back to the drawing board. But if you do have that, Ryan Hoover’s got a site for you. It won’t send your user growth to the stars. It won’t necessarily get you the flashy glamor of your name in TechCrunch lights. But if your product is good and your story is tight, it will get you the attention of some pretty interesting people, and who knows where things go from there. As Or of Yo said: “Product Hunt is a great launchpad. If your product is interesting, it will get noticed by some of the most important people in the industry. If your startup has potential, this is the place to be.” |
Ant Financial: The Greatest Victory Is That Which Requires No Battle | Christoffer O. Hernæs | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | Not long after the Alibaba IPO, eBay announced that it aims to spin off PayPal as a separately traded company. The rumors of , and one of the contenders is Jack Ma’s Alipay, now called Ant Financial. A deeper insight into Alipay is interesting in light of the potential changes similar players like . Enough has been written on Alibaba to elaborate any further on the parent company other than restating that analysts describe the company as a combination of , but the potential jewel in the crown in the Alibaba-ecosystem is the payments- and financial services company Alipay. and established as a Chinese national company controlled by Jack Ma and other Alibaba executives. Since its inception in 2004, Alipay has shown a tremendous growth curve, aided by the transaction volume from Alibaba, Tabao and Tmall. Alipay currently has a user base of 300 million and controls half of the Chinese e-commerce market. Not long after receiving a private banking license on September 29, Alipay consolidated all financial services and According to Alibaba executives, the name ‘Ant’ was chosen to symbolize the potential strength of a number of . Ant Financial also plans to expand its overseas businesses, with the aim of providing the infrastructure . What makes Ant Financial stand out from the majority of other technology-based challengers to the financial industry is the fact that Alipay has a much broader focus and a more aggressive approach where it approaches the core business in banking apart from other challengers that focus on payment solutions. Alipay was created as a payment solution for online shopping and has become the dominant player on the Chinese market with $519 billion processed in 2013, . With transaction costs as low as 0.3 percent, Alipay has become an alluring choice for many online retailers apart from Alibaba, as well. Within traditional retail, Alipay Wallet has secured its position as the world’s most widely used mobile wallet with over . To strengthen this position, Alipay Wallet recently entered a that will allow Alipay users to use fingerprint recognition to verify payments similar to Apple Pay in Huawei’s next smartphone. This collaboration will undoubtedly strengthen Alipay further in physical retail in both the Chinese and Asian markets. What sets Alipay apart from other contenders in the payments area is that Alibaba like Amazon has quietly . This business was sold in its entirety from the parent company Alipay prior to the IPO to refine Alipay as a financial services company apart from the logistics focus of Alibaba. But what makes Alipay revolutionary is neither the payment solution nor its lending portfolio, but last year’s launch of Yuebao, a mobile deposit and investment platform. In just eight months Yuebao acquired through of almost double the returns compared to traditional Chinese banks. For incumbents, this represents a major threat, as Alipay creates an expectation of much higher yield than the banks are able to provide without compromising the interest margin and ultimately the profitability. The combination of this makes Ant Financial able to operate as a with deposits, investments, lending and payment platform. While we all are waiting for the next move from Apple, PayPal, Amazon and Square, Alipay is steamrolling the Asian payments ecosystem. With the IPO in mind, it is clear that China is not big enough for Jack Ma, and it is my belief that it is just a matter of time until Ant Financial becomes a challenger to both incumbents in the financial sector, as well as disruptive technology companies in the U.S. and European markets. Through the divestment of Alipay from its parent company without the , and the sudden consolidation of services and rebrand, Ant Financial has shown a trend of letting its plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when it moves, falls like a thunderbolt. With this in mind, the next move from Ant Financial is worth watching. After all, some claim that all warfare is based on deception. |
Chicago And Big Data | Nick Rojas | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | As a civilization, we may not be getting smarter. However, the technologies we use certainly are. Since the introduction of the smartphone, we’ve witnessed the emergence of smart homes, smart power grids, and even smart for helping fans find parking spaces. Lately, the trend has been to go big. Infrastructure applications are ever increasing in size and scope for transmitting, collecting, and processing big data in an effort to better understand and navigate our surroundings. Examples of scalability with regard to smart technology now include “smart cities” like Chicago. It appears that the third largest city in the United States will become a leading model for collecting and managing big data from sensor nodes and cell phones throughout the area. That’s 237 square miles and 2.7 million residents participating (knowingly or not) in an experiment expected to yield some impressive enhancements. Examples include: Chicago’s calling it “The Array of Things” (AoT). Temperature, humidity, light, sound, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, motion, low-resolution infrared, cell phone signals, and foot traffic (via Bluetooth) are among the metrics being used to better understand the city and the interaction which occurs among its residents and visitors. It will be done with about 500 sensors installed cumulatively over a period of three years. The data, hardware and software will be open source, which is expected to promote transparency and invite independent developers to come up with their own applications. There will be no surveillance devices incorporated into the array. Of course, data alone has little value until it’s analyzed. This is where we see some overlap between AoT and more conventional models of processing data which are mined from the Internet. The and SmartData Platform will be avenues through which the raw data is processed to make data-driven predictions for many public departments and services ( ). In , the city of Chicago stated that “Chicago’s SmartData Platform is a tool that will provide leaders the ability to analyze millions of lines of data in real-time; this helps make smarter, earlier decisions to address a wide range of urban challenges.” The concept of utilizing big data to augment a city’s infrastructure required some technological evolution. When we include the communications technology that we now take for granted, we can appreciate AoT as an amalgam of seemingly countless technologies combined in a concerted effort to create an information infrastructure. After phones began to digitize the human voice, they expanded to include ways to collect, store and process data; and the term “smart” was coined. Developments in integrated circuits, wireless communications and software make smartphones possible and are represented by over 250,000 patents ( related to telecommunications connectivity alone). As smartphone technology developed, so did sensors. Sensor nodes, mesh networks, and similar techniques for collecting and transmitting environmental data have been quietly developing for applications in agriculture, for example. That along with open source controllers like Arduino have not only provided user-friendly off-the-shelf solutions for projects like AoT, it makes both the data and the means for collecting it accessible to the public, right down to the circuit board. Go into any Radio Shack and you’ll see Arduino products available with peripherals and user instructions. That’s an example of what kind of technology is being used in this endeavor. Patents expire and enter the public domain. And as with other products, economies of scale demonstrate how advanced technologies mature and become more accessible to the public. IT has become so pervasive that you see kits that offer for hobbyists, giving them the ability to develop numerous applications. Likewise, geared toward data acquisition are also quite accessible. It’s actually within the budget of an individual with modest resources to develop their own “smart home”, nearly from scratch. This is an indication that technologies have matured to the point that local and state governments can now create an infrastructure on a larger scale to collect big data based a broad array of data types. More importantly, it can be done with transparency, so that everyone has access to the data, hardware, and software. If one so desired, they could develop their own devices and utilize the data directly from AoT in ways that benefit their personal needs. The least predictable aspects of smart city models are the policies that control them. Will it be implemented in a way that explicitly adheres to the laws of the land? There may also be competition in regard to where resources are directed and what problems should be solved first, if/when the project proves successful. One size fits all? Whether or not Chicago will be a model for the world to follow remains to be seen. As every city is different, so are their analytics. , India for example, will not be tracking road salt as they pursue their own ambitious plans for a smart city. No doubt, people interested in smart cities will be keeping a watchful eye on Chicago. It has one main attribute that is sure to promote public acceptance and even participation. The emphasis on open source is not found in most cities, which makes it an example to others as the concept matures and develops. As trends suggest bigger concentrations of people in urban areas, it’s also projected that smart cities as an industry will become a . What about civil liberties? Relatively speaking, it’s not a threat. Data types like temperature and gas composition are not exactly the stuff of Orwellian conspiracies. We live in a time when most people are unaware of the privacy they voluntarily forfeit or how book burnings are made obsolete by having data simply erased from Google search results. The open-source Chicago model, if accompanied by robust policies and oversight, are a much smaller threat than the things we see happening with cell phones every day. Raising the question in the context of this article is necessary but in the grand scheme of things, there are certainly bigger fish to fry. All things considered, we should look forward to a time when a mobile device can find a good parking space, or can reduce spending in government. It may be the first time in history that your government doesn’t ask you to wait in line at the motor vehicle department. OK…so that may be a stretch. In any event, it’s sure to change the way we think of cities. |
Tim Armstrong Doesn’t Say The Wrong Thing About Women In The Workplace | Fara Warner | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | In the past few weeks and months, conversations about women in our industry have run the gamut from companies such as Apple and Facebook so they can put off having children and Satya Nadella’s to the data-rich, but solution-poor disclosure of just how few women are at the top of tech. But Tim Armstrong showed other tech CEOs how to speak with respect and admiration about women in the workplace at TechCrunch Disrupt London. The comments came after Josh asked him about his own missteps when he talked about women and how “distressed babies” had been at the heart of a reason to make changes in Aol’s employee benefits. Not a proud moment for any CEO. This time around, he spoke about women and diversity in a way that didn’t condescend (no karmic wheels of life to come back and kick you as they did Satya) or put us on a gendered pedestal with talk of our eggs and biology. Nor did he ask us to lean in, lean back or lean anywhere to solve these issues on our own. Instead, what I heard as a woman working at Aol is that I have an open invitation to excel and take risks, and that my success will be measured by my accomplishments, not my gender. Moreover, my gender isn’t going to hold me back from being rewarded for excelling and — to put a sharp pay-parity point on this — if my risk-taking pays off, I’ll get rewarded for it. That’s a big contribution to this never-ending conversation about women and work and, importantly, pay parity. As my boss put it so simply, everyone wants to get paid for the talents and skills we bring to a workplace, which is at the heart of pay parity whether you’re me or you’re a black man, transgendered or somebody over 60 — basically anyone who doesn’t fit the norm in tech of the white 30-year-old male. We should succeed or fail on the merits of our work, the sharpness of our minds and our ability to add value to the world, not the shapes of our bodies or the color of our skin or who we know. (Full disclosure. As I mentioned above, I work at Aol albeit farther down the org chart than the women Tim mentioned in the last few minutes of his 20-minute conversation. I am the editorial director for Aol Tech, which means that the editorial teams for TechCrunch and Engadget, Joystiq and TUAW report to me. I know right! Big surprise, the co-editors have a boss. One thing I’m hugely proud of is that women and all kinds of other people who aren’t white and male are well-represented throughout Aol Tech, and we’re better for that diversity and viewpoint.) This conversation, as Alexia noted when we discussed this via text and email, brings us to a reasoned point of inflection in the conversation. And I hope that the inflection is strong enough to push us toward smart, insightful conversations and solutions instead of what we’ve heard recently. I know it’s never that simple. Discrimination happens no matter what a leader says or does. But Armstrong planted a flag and said why women are important to Aol and overall to the workplace. Whatever happens after this, I believe an open conversation can flow about career advancement, pay parity or discrimination at Aol and perhaps beyond. The other big contribution Armstrong brought to this conversation was this: Work should be a place where you have the opportunity to learn and grow. Okay I’m pretty sure Aol isn’t that place completely — or that any corporation will ever be able to achieve that. But I’d be happy to help it get closer to that place because I don’t want to work somewhere where the conversation is always about my gender when it comes to getting what I need or want from work — or not getting what I want and need as the case may be. Beyond discrimination and fighting corporate cultures that don’t support diversity, I think this very lack of learning and growing may be at the heart of why we leave the corporate world and start our own things. Work becomes too much about getting ahead or keeping our head down, getting the next raise (not that we don’t want or deserve that) and climbing our way up the ladder. Instead, shouldn’t work — for everyone — be a place where you’re learning and growing? And yes getting paid fairly. It’s what I once loved about journalism–and most days still do. No matter what story I was working on, no matter how tough my editor, I was learning something new every day. So now that this discussion is on the table — it’s up to all of us — and me personally now that we’ve opened up this conversation at Aol — to figure out how I make work a place that’s less about what gender I am and more about what I can accomplish. |
SOSVentures Takes On Y Combinator With A Pure Biotech Accelerator | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | International VC firm is capitalizing on the now buzz worthy biotech investment trend with the creation of , the first accelerator to focus on just life sciences. raised a few eyebrows when it accepted five biotech companies out of the 80 startups in its program this last summer. That was a first for the Silicon Valley accelerator. But IndieBio partners tell us they were already thinking along those lines when Y Combinator started making in-roads with those life sciences startups. “I think it’s far more likely than not that the YC for biotech will be YC.” President of Y Combinator Sam Altman told us when we reached out to him about the new biotech accelerator. “We’ll be doing more here in the future, and I think at this point we have the kernel of a critical mass of biotech companies,” he explained. More than has been poured into U.S. life sciences companies this year and we’ve seen biomedicine making some truly remarkable breakthroughs as well. Tack on the use of laboratory robotics, machine learning, cloud computing and reduced costs and you get a much more lucrative investment with some nearly miraculous results. , an investment fund out of the Thiel Foundation, has made it a mission to find and fund early-stage startups involved in biomedicine and food science. Google Ventures, Founders Fund and several other VC firms have started to take a keener interest in biotech investments in the last year as well. That sent a signal to co-founder of IndieBio and SOSVentures partner Arvind Gupta that it was time to take on YC with a separate accelerator that could be devoted solely to biotech. “Writing genetic code like we do software will usher in a completely new way of living for all of us,” Gupta tells TechCrunch, “When this happens, our society will be as fundamentally changed as we have seen from the invention of computers.” IndieBio has nabbed Naveen Jain, co-founder of and CEO of Elizabeth Iorns as mentors. Both have been heavily involved in Y Combinator. Jain was in the last batch and Ilorns is a current partner there. A strong cast of life sciences experts join them, including famed Harvard University genetics expert , 23andMe co-founder , , the CEO of Glowing Plants, and from Autodesk. Also of note, IndieBio is acquiring Berkeley BioLabs and bringing in Ryan Bethencourt, a pioneer in the DIYbio movement and helped found , and , all three biotech incubators in the Bay Area. “What few investors in Silicon Valley have yet to realize is that the billion dollar startups of the future won’t be limited to just the tech industry. Meaningful applications of biotechnology will positively impact the lives of everyone on this planet and with advances in biotechnology, we can now build these companies for the same investment as an app startup.” explains Bethencourt on why he jumped the XPrize ship to help build out this new accelerator program. Bethencourt also believes out that it was only a matter of time before an accelerator like this came along and that this is the culmination of many movements happening concurrently. He points out that SOSVentures can reasonably ensure the long-term success of IndieBio with a backing of $250 million in funding. “This is really similar to the way Y Combinator started,” he says. The accelerator program will run three batches a year. The first one starts off in SF in the middle of January. It then travels to Cork, Ireland in the spring of next year. This is where SOSVentures first tested the idea this summer, under the name Synbio Axlr8r. It then returns to SF again in September. Those accepted into the program get $35,000 in seed, key mentorship from those involved in XPrize, Berkeley BioLabs and 23andMe and the use of lab space for a couple of months, in exchange for 8% equity. Compare that to YC, which offers participants $120,000 but no place to set up lab experiments. “The first batch of six companies who completed the Cork program have exceeded all of our expectations,” says Bill Liao, a partner at SOS and co-founder of IndieBio. “From synthesizing cannabanoids in yeast to cow free milk, we believe this is the right time to invest in independent synthetic biology.” Those interested in becoming a part of the first batch have until November 7th to apply. |
When Should Startups Hire A CFO? | Christian Gheorghe | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | Many founders and CEOs of startups don’t spend a lot of time thinking about CFOs. When it comes to finance for a startup, founders focus on more pressing needs: What’s my burn rate? How long is my runway? How does our annual recurring revenue (ARR) look? How much more money do we need? As an entrepreneur who has sold two companies over the past decade, I can speak from experience that it isn’t until a startup reaches some success — systematic product launches, lucrative partnerships, international expansion and reliable revenue growth — until they inevitably begin to ask The CFO Question. So when is the right time to bring on a CFO? Until recently, this was a relatively easy question to answer. Hiring a CFO doesn’t make much sense for most startups until they achieve “meaningful revenue”; annual revenues hit about $100 million or more; until the founders and board started planning seriously for an IPO; or other significant liquidity event. The old rules suggest it wasn’t the right time until you were 12 to 18 months away from an expected IPO roadshow, that you started looking for a finance chief. But the old rules for when to hire a CFO don’t apply like they used to. One reason is that the job of the CFO and finance organization has changed. If you haven’t noticed, it is much more difficult in today’s climate. It seems like everyday we’re reading about CFOs getting fired or removed from their positions; case in point and the . Reliant on traditional methods, the “bean counters” of the company are struggling to adapt into today’s world. Nowadays, businesses are looking for their finance departments to do more than track and report results, close the books every quarter, and establish guardrails for spending. Today’s finance executives are expected to recognize that planning involves data, decisions and people – not just spreadsheets and budget mandates. They’re now expected to work across the organization to model the business for growth, develop potential responses to likely scenarios (good and bad), align new initiatives with monetization, and deploy resources and investments where they’d drive new revenue. As an example, look no further than Twitter CFO Anthony Noto, who took the helm over this past Summer but for the burgeoning company. The CFO’s role is changing because modern companies like Twitter are competing in an increasingly data-driven, real-time environment. This imposes new pressures on finance to be more collaborative, to move its core financial planning and analysis (FP&A) process beyond the rarefied, highly trained domain of finance – which I call – and bring it to the front-line managers whose activities and decisions directly impact revenues and expenses. That calls for much more than counting beans or simply new technology. It requires a change in process. These shifts suggest a change in hiring strategies for companies looking to bring on a finance guru. When it comes to hiring a CFO, don’t wait too long – and don’t hire too high. If you’ve held off on hiring that finance guru until the moment you have an IPO or other milestone in your sights, you’ve waited too long. You’ve missed at least a year’s worth of strategic planning that likely will benefit your business for years to come. You’ve missed crucial months that could have been spent identifying where you should place your biggest bets, your most valuable resources, and your most significant investments. You’ve let decisive opportunities pass by to structure your organization so it can scale as you bring on new customers, partners, business units and distribution channels. Wait too long, and you’ll make your new CFO’s job even harder once he or she comes on board. Startups too often set a trap for themselves by thinking only a CFO-level individual has what it takes to create a well-run finance organization. (They’re also not anxious to pay CFO salaries, which averaged in 2013.) But these days, you can bring strong finance talent aboard – a controller, perhaps, vice president or even director of finance – to lay the important groundwork needed to establish a high-performance environment. You need someone who understands the very unique relationship between data, decisions and people. Even a mid-level finance pro can move an organization’s planning, budgeting and forecasting processes beyond Excel spreadsheets so managers have the data and analytics needed to understand those “what-if” scenarios and utilize predictive analytics and forecasting – the kinds of things that historically were stuck in The Office of the Few. Armed with the right technology, the right person can help shepherd their organization through the process of integrating data from internal sources like Salesforce.com, NetSuite or Marketo with external customer sentiment information from Facebook or LinkedIn, and even pull in supply-chain updates or weather forecasts to get a real-time picture of the factors that really drive the business. Every day, I see companies achieve this without an IPO (or CFO) in sight. They trust in the person who understands the connectivity of data and individuals — someone who aims to make everyone in the organization play a little . And when it finally comes time to bring on that CFO, you can bet he or she will have plenty of thanks for the team who enabled them to inherit a finely tuned machine, not the spreadsheet-driven mess they’re used to seeing, and that likely factored into their decision to leave their previous company and join your startup. |
Vint Launches A Monthly Subscription Service Offering Unlimited On-Demand Fitness Training | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | Two months after , is introducing a new way for users to set up 1-on-1 or group workout sessions with trainers in the form of a $120 monthly subscription that lets you arrange as many meetups as you’d like. The subscription service, known as , encompasses all of the workouts available on Vint today. That means you could go meet a trainer who specializes in pumping iron on Monday at a location that lets you hit all your major muscle groups and meet a CrossFit instructor in the park on Tuesday or Wednesday. Vint Unlimited won’t come online until November 1 (and that will only be in, though users who sign up now can get a week free to try it out. On a phone call, Vint CEO Louise Eriksson told TechCrunch that the idea behind the new subscription is to eliminate the friction involved in fitness — committing to a contract at the gym, making time to go, and sticking with a routine. While I certainly believe that workout schedules and gym membership are daunting and a turn off to many that would like to get in better shape, I’d say the biggest “friction” when it comes to fitness is shear human laziness — Vint isn’t going to convince many people who aren’t willing to get up and go for a walk or jog and maybe do some body weight exercises to commit to spending $120 per month to get training that still involves meeting someone and putting themselves through intense exercise. But for those who already pay a monthly fee, Vint Unlimited seems like a pretty great deal. Doing the same routine every week kind of sucks — that’s why I tend to give up on my fitness plans every few months, at least. Being able to switch between tennis, boxing, and ballroom dancing (I am not brave enough to pick up pole dancing just yet) keeps things fresh. And with the new Recommendations feature, Vint lets you say what times are best for your workout on a given week and the kinds of routines you’d be willing to try and then suggests a couple of trainers you might like — or, you can use the new Social Feed to take up the same routines as your friends using the app. There’s bound to be some overlap anyway, given the fact that there are only 60 or so trainers in the San Francisco at the moment, so you might as well work out with friends when you find someone you all like. |
Apple Pay’s First TV Ad Is A World Series Spot From MasterCard And MLB | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvzdvf7rzQ8&w=640&h=390] Apple’s new payment system is live, and Apple Pay has already garnered more attention than most mobile payment efforts to date. It also has a new ad, which aired yesterday during the opening game of the 2014 World Series, from payment partner MasterCard. MasterCard’s ad accompanies its new rollout of contactless payments at food and beverage purchase points in MLB ballparks across the U.S. The program supports a range of NFC-powered mobile payment options, but MasterCard is pushing the Apple Pay angle specifically, touting the fact that it brings Apple Pay to pro sports facilities for the first time, at ballparks in both Kansas City and San Francisco. MasterCard says that the Apple Pay system works well in the ballpark setting basically because people want their franks fast. Apple Pay/MLB partnerships don’t end there, however – the company is also offering in-app purchase support for Apple Pay users for single-game tickets once those start going on sale in November, via the MLB.com At the Ballpark app. The first ad features MBL Hall of Famer George Brett making an Apple Pay purchase. Remember, this is a MasterCard ad, not an Apple ad, meaning this is yet another sign that payments providers think Apple could be the company to make mobile payments really take off, and are investing resources and backing accordingly. |
Hands On With Google Inbox: Useful Email Triage Tools For A Mobile Workflow | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | Google’s is now available, and we have access to the limited release, which is being distributed via Google’s tried-and-true invite system. While many will have to wait to check it out for themselves, our first impressions might help you decided whether you want to even try chasing down an invite. First, this is a good-looking app that benefits from Google’s new commitment to Material Design principals across its apps. Animations are pretty, there are bold primary colors everywhere that let you know exactly where you are in the app, and icons and controls are both well-designed and very clearly indicative of what they represent. My only complaint as to the look and feel are that the “Done” section header had me clicking on it repeatedly, as it’s often used as a button in mobile software to let users exit back to a main page. [gallery ids="1074221,1074220,1074215,1074219,1074218,1074216,1074214,1074213,1074212,1074210,1074209,1074208"] As to functions and features, I was able to test this on a personal account only, since it isn’t yet enabled for Google Apps deployments, which means it wasn’t exposed to the full hell that is my work account. Still, the benefits were immediate and apparent – Google easily separates ‘real’ and automated emails, into several categories using functionality similar to the ‘Categories’ it launched for Gmail previously. These are color- and icon-coded, making it easy to survey at a glance and find exactly what you need, and to dispatch with the rest in a single swipe for each category. You can also swipe on any individual message or group to send it to either your Done pile (akin to Archive) or snooze them for addressing later. You can set the snooze to remind you of the message or group at a predefined time and date (the app offers quick suggestions and full custom scheduling) or at a place of your choosing, using geofencing. Three sections define your email, including the main Inbox, the Snoozed section and the Done group, and you can reach these using a pull-out sidebar menu. Here you can also access all the new categories, as well as your legacy email folders. A Plus icon in the bottom right corner lets you quickly compose an email or a reminder, and comes complete with quick access to your most recent inbox contacts (either those you’ve emailed, or those who’ve emailed you). My first impressions are that the above features are genuinely very useful – the client got the emails I care about to the top of my screen without me having to mess with any settings, and the compose button’s smart contacts list meant I could address stuff that needs addressing without even digging in. The Snooze and Done functions give you a smart single swipe email management system, which is better than those present in other apps like Mailbox in my initial experience. Snooze is particularly useful, since it’s a very granular “later” button that might actually result in me addressing them in due time. Time and more email volume are needed before I can truly pass judgement on Inbox, but it already seems a worthy competitor to the native Gmail app for managing Gmail on my iPhone, which qualifies as an impressive start. |
Verizon Leads Flint Mobile’s $9.4M Round As Payment Service Comes To The Web | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | , a point-of-sale mobile payments solution originally built around snapping photos of your credit card instead of dongles or using other hardware to make payments, is today announcing that it has raised another $9.4 million in funding led by new, strategic investor Verizon via its Verizon Ventures arm; as well as an expansion of its service to the wider internet in a new service called Sell Online. The Series C funding round includes follow-on investments from earlier investors Digicel, Storm Ventures and True Ventures, and also had participation from new investor Peninsula Ventures. It takes the total raised by Flint Mobile to . Flint CEO Greg Goldfarb would not go into too much detail about the reasoning behind Verizon investing, but it sounds like this is more than just a pure financial interest. “They see our strategy to focus on mobility for business as interesting,” he said in an interview. “I can’t talk about their strategic thinking and I can’t disclose things that are not yet announced.” For its part, mobile carriers have long been trying to come up with initiatives to raise their profile with small and larger businesses to get them to take more enterprise services; and they also have taken many stabs at trying to figure out how to play a key role in the mobile payments industry — but with very mixed success. Working with Flint, which has merchant and business customers in the “high tens of thousands” with average transactions in the range of $120, Verizon could have some hopes of tackling both of those. When I first wrote about Flint in 2012 (at the time of a ), I noted that the absence of any kind of dongle, or needing to rely on merchants investing in any kind of new hardware at all, was part of what made Flint’s services stand apart from some of the other point of sale solutions out there. And indeed, this case proven to be the case, Goldfarb says, with its customers coming in large part from the class of independent business people like fitness trainers and accountants who want to minimise the amount of equipment they use as they travel from client to client, but also want to have solutions help them take prompt, on-the-spot payments. Yet just as payments alone have proven not to be a natural fit for a standalone business for the likes of Square and others, the same has applied to Flint. It has also included being one of the first companies to integrate Apple’s Passbook into a loyalty couponing service. (“We are looking at Apple Pay, yes,” Goldfarb says in answer to my question about Apple’s newest expansion of Passbook into commerce.) And this is where Sell Online, which lets Flint businesses add a payment option straight into their websites, fits in, stemming from requests from customers who want to offer basic payments from their sites that integrate with the rest of what they are doing with Flint. e’ve evolved from simple payments on the spot to giving people a way to run their businesses from the palms of their hands,” he says. “Later, we might start to look at booking services and appointments,” he adds. “It would be great to that through Flint as well.” Sell Online is priced at the same rate as Flint’s mobile payments service — 1.95% for debit card payments and 2.95% for credit card transactions. |
Boostable Gets $3.2M, Its Ads Get More Sales For Your Event, Crowdfund, Or Online Store | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | doesn’t have to sell its ads. Marketplaces sell them for it. Ticket, crowdfunding, and ecommerce marketplaces make money when their users sell things, so they’re incentivized to route traffic to the listings they host, which is exactly what Boostable’s easy-peasy ad-buying tool does for marketplace sellers do. So the marketplaces do the legwork of recommending Boostable’s ads to their sellers, the ads drive sales, and everyone makes money. If that sounds lucrative, you know why Morado Ventures, Omidyar Network, and SV Angel invested in Y Combinator alum Boostable’s $3.2 million seed. The funding will help Boostable seduce more name-brand marketplaces. Most people say you should start a company with people you like. Selcuk Atli started Boostable with his arch nemesis. Boostable Co-Founder and CEO Selcuk Atli Originally from Istanbul, Atli came to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship and eventually ended up in California where he raised $4 million for an ecommerce ad company called Social Wire. One of its biggest competitors was Social Amp, founded by Alex Chang. The bitter rivalry turned into a fruitful partnership years later when the two co-founded Boostable, raised $500,000 from SV Angel, and went through YC. Keep you enemies closer, right? Marketplaces make a lot of money, but on a small margin. Etsy makes just 3.5% per sale. That means they know who potential repeat customers are, but they don’t have much to spend on ads to reach them. But the sellers who list on them can earn serious profits. The problem is they aren’t savvy enough to reinvest those profits in effective ads, and these sellers are so scattered that they’re tough for ad tool developers to track down. Boostable has solved the puzzle, though. Marketplaces give it customer targeting data and promote the tool to their sellers, who simply set a budget and paste in the URL of their ecommerce store, room rental, crowd funding project, or event. Boostable auto-generates creative for their listing and runs optimized ad campaigns on Facebook targeting previous purchasers on that marketplace or other potential customers. Ideally, these drive sales ROI-positive sales for the sellers, which earn fees for the marketplace, and Boostable takes a cut. Boostable now has about 10 marketplaces on board, including “unique” ecommerce portal OpenSky. For example, if a jeweler wanted more sales for a necklace they’re selling on OpenSky, they’d just punch their OpenSky URL into Boostable, which would buy it ads and earn the jeweler, marketplace, and itself money as long as the ads are effective enough to get enough people buying necklaces to offset the ad budget. The scheme isn’t new, at least offline. It’s called cooperative advertising. A product maker like GoPro will help a retailer like Best Buy sell more of its devices so they both earn money. Boostable wants to bring the whole thing online. Atli tells me “It’s a $150 billion business and 98% of it is offline.” To chase that market, it’s now thanks to a “seed” raised partially before it joined YC and completed now from Morado Ventures, Omidyar Network, SV Angel, Digital Garage, Vast Ventures, Fuel Capital, Lightbank, and heavyweight adtech angels like Ric Calvillo (Nanigans), Auren Hoffman (LiveRamp), David Marcus (Facebook), Hiten Shah (Kissmetrics), and Linda Rothenberg (Endeavor). That will help it expand beyond its six-person team, sign more marketplace bigwigs like Ticketmaster and eBay, and add more advertising channels like Twitter. Sellers can paste in one of their listings, like their ecommerce store on OpenSky, and start running auto-generated ads through Boostable So why wouldn’t the marketplaces just build these ad tools so they don’t have to share a cut with Boostable? Atli says “it’s a whole other competency. They already outsource all of their advertising tools.” Plus, Boostable has an advantage as many sellers operate on multiple marketplaces simultaneously, so it could help them get more sales across all their storefronts, which a marketplace itself couldn’t do. One problem is that many marketplaces are designed to promote comparison shopping and discovery. If a seller buys an ad pointing to their listing, they don’t want the visitor to instantly click to a competing seller on the marketplace and buy there instead. That’s why Boostable is working with marketplaces to either strip out some of their comparison shopping promos from the seller listing landing pages for the ads, or include coupon codes in the ads that incentivize customers to buy from whomever paid for the ad. Marketplaces are weary to change their product, though. Good thing Boostable has a big carrot to dangle. If it can get sellers from competing marketplaces to be loyal to its ad tool, it can promise to get them aboard a new marketplace if they play ball. Commerce used to be strictly professional. But now, almost everyone is selling something on the side — a free room in their house, a handicraft, tickets to an event they’re throwing, or contribution spots for their Kickstarter. could be the company that turns a new generation of merchants into lucrative new advertisers. |
Foundation: Biz Stone On Moving From Artist To Entrepreneur | Contributor | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | In our latest Foundation interview, I sat down with CEO and co-founder Biz Stone. We discussed his entrepreneurial roots, leaving college to jump into the world of art and design, and embarking on a social startup in the early days of the web. Biz on shifting from an artist to a tech entrepreneur: |
Progress Software Buys Telerik for $262.5M As Buying Spree Continues | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | In a deal today involving two companies with links to the Boston area, which helps companies build business software, announced it was buying for $262.5M. Telerik’s portfolio includes a .net toolbox, a mobile development platform and a CMS called Sitefinity, as well as access to a developer community of over 1.4M people. According to Karen Tegan Padir, president of application development and deployment at Progress, her company has been around for 30 years providing tools for application development and data connectivity, and has been profitable, but they weren’t growing, so a couple of years ago the company developed a strategy to return to its core development roots and began purchasing companies to help it modernize and grow. This began last year when in June, 2013. A year later, it purchased Modulus, a company that gives it play in Node.js. , “Running JavaScript on the server, allows developers to use the same language for the front-end user interfaces and the back-end processing. Node brings JavaScript to the full stack.” Today’s purchase of Telerik is another step in that strategy to modernize the company. Padir said while her company has offered some front-end creation, it’s fair to say that Telerik gives Progress some serious UI chops it had been lacking and builds on these other tools. What’s more, she told me combining the companies isn’t just about tools, it’s also about growth. She said Telerik had $60M in revenue last year and is growing at a rapid 20 percent per year. And Progress gets access to Telerik’s community of more than 1.4M developers. Plus it gives Telerik a different way of selling. Whereas Progress has been a traditional sales and marketing company, she said Telerik gets 50 percent of its sales online without anyone ever talking to the customer. They want to develop more of that non-traditional sales style and Padir said this could be particularly useful when combined with other online properties like Rollbase. Al Hilwa, an analyst who covers software development for IDC says it’s a good deal for Progress and gives them access to a new set of tools, but they’ll need to tread lightly with their acquisition. “Telerik’s offerings do not overlap with Progress and mostly allow it to expand its reach to other areas of development and specifically to the Microsoft ecosystem of developers. This is new for Progress, though many of its traditional users use .NET technologies, it has not typically addressed that space. To keep this growth going, Progress has to execute well on this acquisition and essentially operate Telerik with a high degree of independence,” he wrote me in an email. Progress describes itself as “simplifying the development, deployment and management of business applications on-premise or in the cloud, on any platform or device, connected to any data source.” The company claims 4 million users and 47,000 businesses in over 175 countries run applications on the Progress OpenEdge platform and database. Progess works on the back end providing tools to build applications, while Telerik provides tools for building the interface on the front end. The two companies together compliment one another as Telerik combined with their other recent purchases, gives Progress front-end mobile development tools it was lacking, giving them a strong portfolio of products across platforms and locations providing customers with a comprehensive development platform in mobile, cloud, on-premises or the web. Progress is based in Bedford, MA and Telerik’s US headquarters are in Waltham, MA with it’s world headquarters in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo Credit: |
Twitter Launches Digits, A New Way To Sign In To Apps Without Using Passwords | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | Today, Twitter announced the launch of a new service called , aimed at application developers looking for a simpler, password-free login option for their mobile applications. The news was revealed this afternoon at Twitter’s first annual developer conference called Flight, which served not only as the launchpad for , but also an apology of sorts to the developer community as a whole after years of pushing them and their ideas away as Twitter tried to reassert control over its product and platform. is one of many new products announced today, which also included a tool set called , and new features for other Twitter products like MoPub, its advertising platform, and crash reporting service Crashlytics. However, Digits is a timely offering, as the world of messaging apps has exploded following the high-profile acquisition deal which saw Facebook buying Whatsapp, and the larger trend toward simpler, and even anonymous messaging, as well as “ephemeral” messaging, such as that provided by Snapchat. In many, if not most, of these apps, sign-up is different from what you’d see on the web. Instead of creating a user name and password, users today often only use their mobile phone number as the sign up and authentication mechanism. Apps then verify they’re in possession of the phone number entered via a SMS-based confirmation code. With the launch of Digits, Twitter is providing a tool that can handle this process on behalf of developers’ apps, even for those outside of the “messaging” space. It can also power web application sign-up, too, when need be. (Web APIs to be available as of this fall.) Digits provides the initial login screen that appears to users, the screen where users type in their phone number, and it then handles sending the SMS confirmation code. In the end, it’s a 2-step process for users. This process makes more sense on mobile, not only because a username and password combination is something that’s a bit of holdover from the days where web was king, but also because in many parts of the world – and especially developing regions where smartphones are people’s only “computer” – many users don’t have email addresses to use as their “username” or logon ID. But they have a phone number. Twitter notes this on its developer site for Digits, adding that emerging markets today account for over 70% of the world’s mobile population. 300 million people are buying a smartphone this year in the U.S. and Europe, noted Twitter’s Michael Ducker, Digits Product Manager, on stage at Flight this afternoon. “But if you’re not paying attention to emerging markets, you’re missing out on a lot more people,” he added. “There are 940 million phones – smartphones – that are going to be sold this year in emerging markets. That’s three times the market for your apps.” Additionally, for end users, phone numbers are easier to remember and use for sign-up and sign-in, and they also work well at keeping out spammers, without forcing users to decode CAPTCHAs (which have frankly become quite difficult over the years.) And finally, Digits offers a “find friends” mechanism for apps, but it will not create a universal, Digits-based “social graph” that’s shared in between apps. Instead, you can find those who are in your address book and vice versa, and then add them if you choose in each Digits-powered app. Digits, which is launching now in 216 countries and 28 languages, represents a serious move in terms of owning a piece of the mobile landscape. It’s also a big bet on Twitter functioning as something that powers mobile applications under the hood, as opposed to solely functioning as a standalone social network of its own, where it’s struggling to get a relatively passive audience to not just read the tweets of celebs and other notable people and organizations, but also tweet themselves. Instead, Twitter can branch out to plug itself into dozens – or, it hopes, hundreds – of new mobile applications, while saving money and time for smaller developers who may not be able to afford the associated costs with SMS-based sign up systems, or who want to speed their application concepts to market. To implement Digits, developers only have to put in a few lines of code into their apps, and then they have a viable alternative to password-based logins, or even Facebook or Google’s authentication mechanisms, if they choose. Twitter even alludes to Digit’s advantages over Facebook, coyly writing on its that Digits “won’t post on your behalf, so what you say and where you say it is completely up to you.” That remark is clearly aimed at Facebook’s developer platform, which allowed app publishers to build apps that posted to users’ walls and timelines, and send messages to friends, often without user’s understanding – even if it the app technically had their “consent” to do so. The question is now, whether or not the developer community is ready to forgive and trust Twitter after the company , and its rules on the fly , putting many of Twitter’s earliest developer supporters out of business. At launch, Twitter’s Digits homepage lists a few apps planning to implement the new system: Fitstar, Resy and OneFootball. The homepage in the near future will also serve as a resource for end users who want to manage their security settings, including 2-factor authentication. |
Twitter Introduces Fabric, A Toolkit For Developers To Build Apps On Its Platform | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | At Twitter’s Flight conference this morning, Dick Costolo’s introduced Fabric, a set of APIs aimed at developers to encourage them to build apps and services on top of the Twitter platform. In the build up to introducing the new APIs, Costolo said that Twitter “wanted to approach this not from the perspective of what would be best for Twitter, but what would help [developers] be most productive.” Fabric is built upon Twitter’s social platform, but also ties in features from Twitter acquiree Crashlytics’s crash reporting software and fellow acquiree MoPub’s social targeting. But it’s not *just* about making apps that let you sign in with Twitter so they can shove ads in your users’ face. Twitter Mobile Platform Director Jeff Seibert showed off a TestFlight-like solution for distributing pre-release builds to testers without requiring account creation, letting you send particular builds with specific links. Of course, the Twitter social platform wasn’t totally ignored. There’s now a native Twitter SDK for mobile, letting developers create Twitter clients that show rich media from the service as well as integrate universal Twitter logins in mobile apps. This solution also helps developers integrate MoPub to increase revenue by routing ads through the highest-bidding network. |
Google’s Inbox is A New Email App From The Gmail Team Designed Not To Be Gmail | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | Google has introduced a , from the same team that builds Gmail, but intended as something completely different from Gmail. Inbox is the app, and it looks like it might owe some inspiration to Mailbox, and to Google Now. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzNTjpUMOp4] The new Inbox app is available to a limited user group only, and will be expanding its user pool via an invite system similar to the one that Google used for Gmail. It is available cross-platform, however, as an app for iOS, web and Android. You can also email Google at inbox@google.com to request access, if you don’t like your chances of getting an invite from a friend. What Inbox does differently than Gmail is present you with your information in a way that’s aimed at making content contextually relevant, instead of just presented as it comes in. Email’s evolution has resulted in an unwieldy system – what began as system for occasional correspondence from a single virtual location is now something with take with us everywhere, with a volume that can baffle users. Inbox has a number of features to try to help email users stay on top of things, including Bundles (a way to group similar types of email together automatically, for instance all receipts); Highlights, which brings up flight information, event details, and media from close friends and family so you don’t miss them; and a variety of Google Now type features listed as Reminders, Assists and Snoozes that act as a built-in todo list, complete with contextual information finders, like listing opening hours next to a restaurant when you have a meeting there booked. Inbox looks like a project with some promise, but it begs the question of why this needs to exist outside Gmail proper. Perhaps it’s a bit too experimental, and Google is worried about these features turning off longtime users, so it’ll keep experimental bits in this sandbox before rolling them back in. |
Amazon Gets More Enterprise-Friendly With Launch Of AWS Directory Service | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | Amazon has been moving into the enterprise world with , its own , its , and not to mention the cloud computing behemoth that is Amazon Web Services. Today, the company is making the combination of on-premise and cloud resources, easier to manage with the launch of . The service can additionally support the needs of those who need a simpler, standalone directory in the AWS Cloud. This new offering allows for two different types of directories, depending on the company’s needs. If the organization is already running an existing directory – which many are, AWS Directory Service provides an “AD Connector” directory type to connect to the directory that’s already in place. That’s a big benefit for organizations that are running a directory like Microsoft’s Active Directory, which is what allows computer to join domains, authenticate users, locate and connect to equipment on the domain, like printers, and access other network services, like SQL Server databases. When companies introduce cloud-based services, they’ve sometimes been forced to set up a separate cloud-based directory in parallel to the one they run on-premise. That’s where this new “AD Connector” comes in. It’s a gateway technology that serves as a cloud proxy to the existing directory, without the need for complex sync technology or federated sign-on Amazon explains in an announcement of the news on its this morning. Instead, all communications take place over or a secure VPN connection within a . This means that end users can log into Amazon , , instances running Windows, and the using their existing username and password associated with the Active Directory account. The second option provided with the new AWS Directory Service is a Samba-based directory in the cloud, which is set up via the “Simple AD” directory option. This supports common AD features like joins to Windows domains, management of Group Policies, and single sign-on to directory-powered apps. This option would let system administrators and developers sign into the AWS Management Console with directory credentials to manage resources, and it would allow for the administration of EC2 instances running Windows to be managed en masse. Zocalo and WorkSpaces could also take advantage of the directory, in this case. Amazon claims it’s simple to set up and administer either directory type, but it has oddly chosen to go with hourly pricing based on directory size. (Small directories of either type are $0.05/hour, and large directories are $0.15/hour in the U.S. East region. Other supported regions may have different pricing, including , , , and regions. That makes it more difficult for admins who are used to thinking about paying for cloud services on a monthly or even annual basis, (as I.T. budgets are created for the upcoming year.) Both directory types are available today in the above regions. |
Amazon Rewards Visa Card Will Support Apple Pay In The Future | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | Amazon has confirmed to TechCrunch that its Rewards Visa Card will indeed support Apple Pay, and that the company is working on making this happen. The Rewards Visa Card is powered by Chase, which is already one of the payments companies working with Apple on Apple Pay at launch. While Amazon has confirmed that it is working to bring Apple Pay to its credit card, there is no specific timeframe for that to happen at this point. Some customers were disappointed to see that their Chase-provided payment cards didn’t support Apple’s new contactless payment system at launch, and in fact it was the only consumer card from the bank that didn’t offer support on day one, leading some to speculate that some kind of competition between the two companies had prevented Apple Pay support from happening. So far, response to Apple Pay’s launch seems to indicate that things are going mostly smoothly. The system worked well for our own Kyle Russell when he tried it at , and there haven’t been any major reports of errors in the system, save for some double charges for Bank of America customers that are being reversed, and that a fix is being pushed for today, . We may never know the full story behind why the Amazon credit card’s Apple Pay support didn’t launch on day one, but at least customers can reassure themselves that it is on the way. |
Glamsquad Raises $7 Million For On-Demand Hair Styling And Beauty Services | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | New York-based , an on-demand beauty business now headed by Gilt Groupe co-founder Alexandra Wilkis Wilson as co-founder and CEO, has now raised $7 million in Series A funding in a round led by SoftBank Capital. The company launched in January of this year in New York, and is now one of several services that bring professional hair stylists and makeup artists to wherever the customer is – at home, at work, at your hotel, or elsewhere. Glamsquad competes with startups like , , and more, and less directly with online beauty services such as or . It exists in the so-called “Uber for X” category which involves on-demand services that you can order spontaneously at the push of a button on your on mobile phone. Arguably, this is a better model for meeting consumer demand when it comes to services that involve transportation, like Uber or Lyft, as advanced technology on the backend can more efficiently route drivers to where clients are located. However, it’s still early days in proving that a similar model can profit at scale for more “luxurious” services like professional hair styling – especially because you’re not necessarily receiving an instant result as you are when ordering a taxi or black car – you’re still “appointment setting,” but now the business comes to you. The advantage, of course, is that the business no longer has to deal with the overhead of running a brick-and-mortar storefront – in Glamsquad’s case, a salon. Others participating in the new round include Lerer Ventures, AOL’s BBG Ventures fund (disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch) an d Montage Ventures. Glamsquad had previously raised $2 million in seed funding, according to . The additional capital comes at a time when the company, currently operating in New York and L.A., is expanding nationwide with plans to launch in other cities in the near future, starting with Miami. The launch there is being timed with the Art Basel event in December, the company notes. To date, Glamsquad has completed over 10,000 services and events, and is now working to grow its core team and add more beauty services to its menu. The company’s pricing is actually pretty competitive, given what styling at the salon costs, with hair services that range from $50, and makeup applications at $75. Glamsquad is now serving thousands of customers per month in its New York market and has seen 100% quarter-over-quarter growth in appointment bookings since its debut, the company tells TechCrunch. SoftBank’s Marissa Campise speaks to Glamsquad’s potential to grow beyond affordable, on-demand services in the long-term, however, when speaking of the firm’s investment. “…the team has a clear strategic vision on how to use their platform to continue to make their clients’ lives easier by offering them great products, lifestyle content and new verticals,” she says in a statement. |
U.K. Government Keeping An Open Mind On Bitcoin, Says Digital Economy Minister | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | Ed Vaizey, the U.K.’s minister for the Digital Economy, has said the government is keeping an open mind about digital currencies as it continues a review of Bitcoin and its ilk which kicked off this summer. The minister was speaking during a wide-ranging on-stage interview with TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher, taking place yesterday at Disrupt Europe. The U.K. government announced a review of unregulated digital currencies back in August, at the same time as launching a new financial trade body for the fintech sector, called . Asked whether the Bitcoin review will result in legislation or policies to actively encourage cryptocurrency technology companies, Vaizey said the government is still looking at the tech, but sees potential for e-payments to bring multiple benefits to consumers and businesses. An uncertain and globally uneven regulatory environment around digital currencies injects an additional risk factor into this category of startups.
“We want to make these e-payments faster, quicker, we want to make it as safe as possible. And we want to look at the kind of technologies that the digital currencies use to allow end systems to operate in a de-centralized way, with no intermediaries. We want to look at how the new technologies can benefit consumers and the wider economy. So that’s something the Treasury is very interested in.” He added that the Chancellor’s focus is on using payment systems and digital currencies as a way to push forward financial technologies in “innovative ways”. “We are passionate about the sector. We’ve got research going on about what kind of work we can do to turbocharge fintech so along with other areas of innovation — whether it’s 5G or the Internet of Things — we are very strongly of the view that London and the UK can take a lead in fintech. So again it’s about focusing our research, looking at the opportunities and government working as a partner of the financial industry to see if we can grow those opportunities.” On the Internet of Things, Vaizey said the government is especially interested in how the proliferation of connected objects can play a role in enabling smarter cities. “We want to do a lot of research but also practical work in terms of looking at if the Internet of Things can make an impact on how we live in cities, as well as across all the other sectors where it’s going to have an impact — whether it’s education or health in particular. So these are all areas where we want to be a world leader,” he added. Vaizey noted the government’s chief scientist will soon be publishing a report that will detail the various factors that need considering — such as standards — in order to smooth the rollout of the Internet of Things. “Banging on about tech is one of the first things a government should do, even before you introduce the policies. Tell people you’re interested and want to have a conversation,” he continued. “Internet of Things — we’ve said we’re interested. The Prime Minister when he went to announced, I think, £25 million of investment in the Internet of Things research. We’ve got Glasgow as a future cities demonstrator where they’ve got lampposts that talk to each other. Milton Keynes is another one.” “We regard the U.K. as one of the best places to start a tech company — and that is something we’ve achieved over the last few years. And part of it comes from talking about it — which I know sounds a bit trite, but actually if you keep talking about how you want to attract technology investment, how you want people to come here and start up companies,” added Vaizey. “When we started I wasn’t involved with it. I was very nervous. I thought it was going to be some kind of 1970s style government intervention. But actually I was convinced when an investor came and said what Tech City did for us was it sent out a signal to us and the rest of the world that the U.K. was interested in supporting tech.” |
null | John Biggs | 2,014 | 10 | 14 | null |
Fitness Tracker Moov Raises $3 Million For Its Wearable A.I. Coach | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | The crowdfunded fitness tracker , built by former Apple engineer and HALO game designer Nikola Hu, Microsoft Research vets Meng Li (now Moov CEO) and Tony Yuan, has raised $3 million in new funding in a Series A round led by Banyan Capital. The additional capital follows Moov’s earlier raise of $1 million via a crowdfunding page on its own website. There was early buzz around Moov’s new hardware-based fitness tracker shortly after its debut – and then went on to greatly exceed that. The device the company is selling is designed to go beyond the usual “step tracking” data other fitness trackers collect, and instead uses a combination of hardware (9-axis sensors) and software algorithms designed to pinpoint a body’s movements without using a camera. That means the device aids wearers who participate in other types of activities outside of running or walking, including boxing, cycling, weight lifting, swimming and more. Moov’s hardware includes a waterproof watch-like gadget with a round face that can be worn on the wrist or ankle, depending on the type of activity you’re currently engaging in, for best results. More importantly, Moov’s system includes more than just the tracking of data – it also offers real-time coaching and feedback based on how you’re moving, which can help users perform better while also protecting themselves from injury. In other words, it’s an attempt at putting a “real” fitness trainer in gadget format by offering a service that responds to your movements and then pushes and encourages you during workouts via Moov’s mobile applications. The company is working toward offering a suite of applications designed specifically for the activity being tracked, including apps for running and walking, cardio punching, swimming, cycling, and more. The first two in that list are live now on the iTunes App Store, and others are in the works. Moov is also working on bringing its software to Android next month, along with the launch of several new apps. By year-end, Moov’s list of apps will have more than doubled. Moov CEO Meng Li won’t disclose the exact number of units sold to date, but would confirm that the company raised the $1 million in presales during the first 2 weeks of crowdfunding, with unites sold for $50/each. (That’s 20,000 units sold in the first few weeks, to give you an idea.) Today, the company is selling Moov for $79.95 via its website, still on pre-order. This price includes one tracker, 2 bands and a charger, though those engaging in activities like boxing may want to order 2 devices for better analysis. The 11-person team is now growing, as a result of the raise, Li notes, and the remaining funds are being put toward expanding the number of activities the Moov device supports, decreasing manufacturing time, and developing an SDK (software development kit) so other developers can build Moov-compatible apps. |
Security Will Need Big Insight, Not Just Big Data | Neill Occhiogrosso | 2,014 | 10 | 25 | In looking for new opportunities in security and many other sectors, we look for the echoes of the current IT mega-trends: cloud, mobile, big data. These trends, and especially the interactions between them, are dramatically changing security needs. Add to that the changing profile of would-be hackers — now a frightening mix of international organized crime and employees of enemy governments — and we see the potential for several new solutions that can each be the foundation of one or more successful companies. The first is the application of big data technologies to produce security insights. This is a classic example of “Applied Big Data,” the application of new analytic technologies to a current business problem. Security professionals are drowning in log files, vulnerability scan reports, alerts, reports, and more, but the data is not actionable. This isn’t an idle observation: Several high-profile breaches happened through vulnerabilities that had been documented months or sometimes years prior. The future lies in analyzing this data to give security professionals a comprehensive view of their security posture. Tell them what is at risk, how severe the risk, how important the asset is, and how to fix it. We see tremendous promise in Risk I/O’s approach to this problem, and we’re proud to have led their most recent investment. Another area for exploration is security solutions that follow assets to protect them wherever they are. With cloud infrastructures (both public and private) and bring-your-own-device mobile enterprises, there is no perimeter and every layer of the stack is dynamic. Security professionals need to be able to apply security policies to applications, data, and users wherever they are, and those policies need to adapt based on the changing context. There’s an increasingly popular saying that there are two types of organizations now: those that have been breached, and those that just don’t know it yet. As attacks have become too sophisticated for signature-based detection, there is a need for solutions that quickly notice anomalous and potentially dangerous behavior (likely leveraging machine learning) to prevent breaches or — failing that — detect malicious behavior once a breach has occurred, and minimize its impact. Guardian Analytics, another Costanoa investment, applies behavioral analytics to data already resident in online banking platforms to prevent a broad range of fraudulent activity. This is just one example of applying data science to existing data sets to address more nebulous threats. There will be more opportunities looking at different applications and different types of attacks. Finally, there is also the need for efficient data capture and analysis that can look broadly and historically across an infrastructure, sometimes trailing several months, to see when and how a breach occurred, and what the consequences were. This is a prototypical big data problem. It involves great volume, variety, and velocity of data. It now may be tractable, and we are on the lookout for solutions. We live in an exciting time, but unfortunately in the case of security, that is a double-edged sword. New technologies present new opportunities for criminals. We are optimistic that great new companies are emerging to rise to the challenge. |
CurrentC Is The Big Retailers’ Clunky Attempt To Kill Apple Pay And Credit Card Fees | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 10 | 25 | Long before , big brick-and-mortar retail chains were conspiring to sidestep the typical 2% to 3% fees they’re charged by credit card companies when consumers pay with credit. A company called (Merchant Customer Exchange), spearheaded by Walmart, was started to build a mobile payment solution that would become an app called that’s preparing to launch, but is already in the . Rather than NFC, CurrentC uses QR codes displayed on a cashier’s screen and scanned by the consumer’s phone or vice versa to initiate and verify the transaction. The system is also designed to automatically apply discounts, use loyalty programs, and charge purchases to a variety of payment methods without passing sensitive financial data to the merchant. Retailers including CVS and Rite-Aid were planned partners for CurrentC. Now those businesses have pulled unofficial support for Apple Pay through their existing NFC readers, according to a report from and a memo obtained by . This implies they’ve established exclusive deals with MCX to use CurrentC as their mobile payment option. Thanks to research shared with TechCrunch by Stanford student and developer sleuth , we have more details on MCX’s plan and a closer look at the CurrentC app. Originally incorporated in 2011, MCX spent years in a sort of stealth mode working on the payments user experience. The company is run by merchants including Walmart, Target, Best Buy, CVS, Shell Oil, Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden), HMSHost (airport restaurants), Hy-Vee (supermarkets), Lowes, Michaels, Publix Super Markets and Sears. Wal-Mart VP and Assistant Treasurer Mike Cook is considered the MCX group’s de facto CEO, with some joking that MCX stands for Mike Cook Exchange, as . Together, the companies operate over 110,000 retail locations and process over $1 trillion in payments annually, with a significant chunk coming in the form of credit card payments that cost the retailers fees. Walmart has long voiced its disdain for credit card processing fees that drain its slim margins, and even against Visa and MasterCard over them back in 2003, but rejected the settlement they offered because it wanted more. The idea behind MCX was that if enough retailers teamed up, they could convince consumers to adopt their mobile payment system that would let retailers avoid paying credit card fees in the 2 percent to 3 percent range by processing payments through Automatic Clearing House transactions through bank accounts that have much smaller fees. MCX’s app could also help retailers by encouraging loyalty to participating merchants and possibly provide them additional intelligence on their customers. If MCX’s app caught on, partner retailers could escape tons of fees, which could directly increase their profits. Alternatively, they could use the leverage of MCX and the threat of sidestepping the processing fees to negotiate lower fees with the credit card companies. Former Walmart CEO Lee Scott “I don’t know that MCX will succeed, and I don’t care. As long as Visa suffers.” To speed up development, on the backend that works with ACH to reduce fees, which was announced in February 2012. has raised around for its payment solution’s development. In January 2013, reported MCX had been asking retailers in 2012 to pay a big upfront fee from $250,000 to $500,000 to get on board, and sign three-year mobile payment app exclusivity deals with MCX. Retailers who signed up may have had a one-year grace period from the start of their exclusivity contract to bail out of the deal. If Apple Pay gains steam early, some retailers might look to take advantage of this option to ditch MCX. However, if deals were signed in 2012, that grace period is long gone but retailers may be coming up on the end of their exclusivity agreements even though CurrentC hasn’t launched yet, Those exclusivity deals may be why for Apple Pay on their NFC readers. In a memo to employees, obtained by SlashGear, Rite Aid wrote: “Please note that we do not accept Apple Pay at this time. However we are currently working with a group of large retailers to develop a wallet that allows for mobile payments attached to credit cards and bank accounts directly from a smart phone. We expect to have this feature available in the first half of 2015. If customers attempt to pay for a transaction with Apple Pay, a message will prompt both customer and cashier for a different form of payment. Please instruct cashiers to apologize to the customer and explain that we do not currently accept Apple Pay, but will have our own mobile wallet next year.” Until then, Apple Pay may gain steam with more graceful NFC payments, which could make CurrentC’s QR code method seems clunky and undesirable when it finally launches. CurrentC’s app is now in the and app stores, but can only be used by those with an invite code. Luckily, was able to attain these screenshots and information. When you sign up for CurrentC, you’re supposed to add your bank account. This lets CurrentC process payments for you without retailers having to pay the steep credit card processing fee. You can also add retailers’ loyalty credit cards or gift cards as payment methods. It’s possible that if you already have your bank account connected to a partner retailer’s loyalty or credit card, you may be able to automatically link that bank account to your CurrentC account rather than going through the clumsy standard process. When it’s time for a user to check out, they request to pay with CurrentC. The consumer then unlocks their phone, opens the CurrentC app, opens the code scanner, and scans the QR code shown on the cashier’s screen. In some case, the reverse may happen where the consumer’s CurrentC app displays a payment code and the cashier scans it. If a QR code can’t be generated, a manually entered numeric code may be offered. Rather than sending the customer’s financial data over the air, transactions trigger the transmission of a token placeholder. This is then securely converted by the financial institution to process the ACH payment and charge the user. CurrentC also has a method in place for paying at gas station pumps. It shows the consumer a code on their phone that can then be entered on the pump keypad to initiate a CurrentC payment. CurrentC includes a merchant map for finding participating retailers. Discounts and coupons will be automatically applied to the purchase, and any loyalty program points will be automatically pegged to the customer’s account. CurrentC users will also be able to check their receipts in the app. These loyalty and discount programs may be the main selling point retailers use to try to convince customers to sign up for CurrentC.
One refreshing inclusion in the app is a visual breakdown of what data CurrentC receives from users, who it can be shared with, and what data sharing is optional.
CurrentC notes it may share info with your device maker, app store, or developer tool makers. Oddly, it will collect health data. Precise location information is used to verify you’re at the retailer where you’re making a transaction, and if you opt in it can be used for marketing or advertising. CurrentC notes that you can opt in to be able to capture and store photos in the app for a hypothetical visual shopping list or other features down the road. After his investigation of the app, told me “CurrentC borders on the creepy line” due to it pulling health info. He also that found that its Terms Of Service leaves high liability for fraud to the user if someone else is able to get access to a user’s phone and make CurrentC payments. CurrentC is now being tested at some retail locations in Minnesota. Before CurrentC can rolled out, point of sale systems at retailers need to be modified, which can take time and explains the early 2015 launch date cited in the internal Rite Aid memo obtained by SlashGear. CurrentC doesn’t rely on new technology like NFC or Bluetooth LE, so it will likely be compatible with older iPhones and Androids, unlike the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus-only Apple Pay. That could give it some broad appeal. MCX will also tout the automatic discount and loyalty programs that could appeal to bargain hunters. The problem with the CurrentC system, as points out, is that it’s based more around solving the retailers’ credit card fee problems than the consumers’ payment friction problems. Users have to open their phone, open CurrentC, open the scanner, scan the code from the cashier, and wait for the transaction to be confirmed. That may present more friction than simply paying with a credit card, and it’s certainly harder than a . The only way CurrentC has a real chance is if it can organize some big discount for all CurrentC payments across retailers. For example, if it said you’d get 5 percent off for paying with CurrentC, some people might be willing to use it. In the short-term, this would eradicate any savings on credit card fees for the merchants. But eventually, if the app gains a loyal user base it could scale back those fees to start reaping the benefits of sidestepping credit cards. If CurrentC doesn’t offer a vivid value proposition to consumers, it’s likely to go the way of the dinosaur while Apple Pay pushes the evolution of the rest of the mobile payments industry. |
Twitpic Data Will Stay Alive “For Now” Thanks To An Agreement With Twitter | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 25 | And in a somewhat happy turn of events, Twitpic has that it has reached an agreement with Twitter to keep Twitpic photos and links alive, giving Twitter control over the domain and the full photo archive. However, the agreement also states that Twitpic will no longer be taking any new photos or data and will exist in a read-only mode. Apps on the App Store and Google Play have been removed, but users will still be able to log in, delete content or the account itself, and export and/or download data. This comes after a “roller coaster ride” of the past few months. In September, Twitpic founder and CEO Noah Everett after Twitter came after the service over the Twitpic trademark, threatening to remove the service’s access to Twitter’s API. “This came as a shock to us since Twitpic has been around since early 2008, and our trademark application has been in the USPTO since 2009,” Everett wrote in a blog post. Shortly thereafter, rumors circulated that Twitpic might be bought in order to save the service and the data that lives on it, until Everett once again admitted defeat and that he had given up on finding acquirers. It’s with a heavy heart that I announce again that Twitpic will be shutting down on October 25th. We worked through a handful of potential acquirers and exhausted all potential options. We were almost certain we had found a new home for Twitpic (hence our previous tweet), but agreeable terms could not be met. According to the from today, which you can read below, it seems Everett won’t be staying on at Twitter or Twitpic. Today marks the end of a difficult battle for Twitpic, whether it’s a happy or sad ending. First off I want to say thank you to everyone who has used Twitpic over the years and for your patience with us over the last couple of months. As you know it’s been quite the roller coaster ride. We weren’t able to find a way to keep Twitpic independent. However, I’m happy to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to give them the Twitpic domain and photo archive, thus keeping the photos and links alive for the time being. Twitter shares our goal of protecting our users and this data. Also, since Twitpic’s user base consists of Twitter users, it makes sense to keep this data with Twitter. What this means for Twitpic users: This will be my (@noaheverett) final chapter with Twitpic, and again I want to say thank you for allowing me to be a part of your photo sharing memories for nearly seven years. It has been an honor. |
Top The Charts With Your Mobile Game App This Holiday Season | Xavier Bourlard | 2,014 | 10 | 25 | The holiday season is fast approaching, and for mobile gaming studios it’s make or break time. How can you earn one of the coveted spots in Apple Store’s Top 10 list without exhausting your marketing budget? Below are five steps to help you develop an effective strategy for getting your mobile game apps noticed by consumers this holiday season. Before we get started, just a brief warning. As the holiday season advances, expect to see lots of mobile ad companies promising you a spot in the Top 10 list in any and every country you desire. Beware of such claims – they may be scams. Many, of course, are quite legit, but you should always question their sources and methodologies before turning your burst campaigns over to them. By now you should have your contours of strategy in place (i.e. OS release, app title, countries to launch in – all benchmarked by market). Plan a soft launch for early November. That means you need to choose the right icon, keywords, pictures, text and video trailer to display in the online stores. Here’s where your A/B testing skills come into play. Additionally, consider engaging a few cost-per-install ad networks that specialize in mobile installs. These early learnings will help you define your quality metrics. How will you measure success? Lifetime value? Percent of spenders? Retention rate? A good strategy is to select a mix of short- and long-term indicators. For instance, start with a short-term indicator such as a three- or seven-day retention rate. For the long term, consider the total amount of in-app purchases after one month. These metrics can help you assess profitability, as well as identify the best pay per install (PPI) partners for acquiring new gaming users and high quality downloads. At this step, you’ll need to have a good handle on the performance and profitability of your mobile-ad campaigns so you can determine the maximum cost-per-install (CPI) you’re willing to offer mobile-app traffic partners. The goal of this step is two-fold. The first is to select the partners for your burst campaign, the second is to choose who you’ll engage long term. Select at least five partners to drive traffic to your mobile game, generate reviews and ratings in the stores, and monitor the performance (as measured by quality of gamers) of each. Compare results with the KPIs you’ve established. The perfect posse will include a social network, a gaming monetization platform, a programmatic platform with advanced targeting criteria, and one or two mobile gaming ad networks. Now it’s time to schedule your burst. To create a burst in the store, you’ll need a massive number of installs to occur for several days in a row. The post-burst lift in rankings will lead to plenty of organic users due to your position within the store. Keep in mind that some 20+ million devices will be activated on Christmas Day, so the competition will be fierce (and probably cost-prohibitive). In 2012, some Japanese gaming studios paid up to $10 CPI to enter the U.S. market during the Christmas week. Insane? Yes, this is why the best strategy is to book and execute your burst in advance, perhaps one or two weeks before Christmas, in order to secure a lower CPI. So what’s the point of doing a burst a week before Christmas if you’re not in the Top 10 on the day when 20 million consumers will open their tablets and mobiles? The strategy I propose is simple: Drive up your ranking when it’s more cost-effective to do so by working with the partners you’ve tested in November and found to deliver strong results. Next, consider less costly re-engagement campaigns during the holiday week to drive revenue and retention. Remember, consumers will have more time on their hands to play with their new devices, so you’ll want to remind them of the fun they had with your game. With endurance and strategy, your mobile game just may be one of the winners of the burst holiday race. Follow these steps to control your ad costs, maximize your profit, and amass a healthy volume of qualified gaming users. |
Gillmor Gang: Room to Grow | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 10 | 25 | The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, October 24, 2014. A heavy news week crescendoed with Facebook’s release of its Rooms iOS app, topping Twitter’s Fabric platform , Google’s InBox, a big Microsoft quarter, and the refactoring of the TV business. The mechanics of Room’s camera roll authentication may be less than intuitive, but the ease with which an @borthwick tweet turned into viral on boarding turned us into believers — of what we’re not sure. Instagram for Adults, UberNotifications, or Room Service Plus? @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @borthwick, @dbfarber, @jtaschek, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | TechCrunch | 2,014 | 10 | 25 | As we return from Disrupt London, we give you the stories you won’t want to miss from the past week (10/18-10/24). 2. Columnist Jon Evans explored the concept of : the crippling sense that the software industry is evolving so fast that no one person can possibly keep up. There are so many options for developers now, and there are just too many programming languages and devices. How can one hope to be innovative when the industry is growing so quickly? 3. On Monday, Apple released iOS 8.1 along with the ability use Apple Pay. at two nearby businesses that already accept Apple’s NFC-powered mobile payments: Walgreens and McDonald’s. Google announced two new pieces of shiny goodness, the and the . We were finally able to get our hands on these devices and review them for you. The consensus? The Nexus 6 – which runs with Android 5.0 (Lollipop) – is undeniably more polished than its predecessors and has a similar feel to the iPhone 6 Plus. The Nexus 9 has a new multitasking view and a guest mode, and it feels like a truly top notch tablet. During an interview at the Tsinghua University business school in China, as he started responding to the questions in Mandarin. While Chinese entrepreneurs are expected to be fluent in English if they try to break into Western markets, it’s certainly rarer to see American executives returning the favor. This gives Zuckerberg some extra points in my book. After a larger-than-expected third quarter loss, . The company lost $0.95 per share on revenue of $20.58 billion. And, not that this came as much of a surprise, the . They ordered too much inventory, and made promises to their suppliers that they just couldn’t keep. On the other hand, . After gaining more than 1 percent in regular trading, the company reported its fiscal first quarter 2015 earnings: Revenue totaled $23.20 billion in the period, leading to profits of $0.54 per share. Google rolled out a new email service from the Gmail team, but it is not supposed to be like Gmail. , and the goal is to present you with your information in a way that’s aimed at making content contextually relevant, instead of just there as you receive messages. So far it operates with an invite only system, but you don’t need to search eBay for codes to get invited. . Here’s a . It’s rare to see a company raise so much money and remain secretive, but that’s exactly what Magic Leap has done. This week , featuring investors led by Google, Inc., and including KPCB, Andreessen Horowitz, Obvious Ventures, Qualcomm, and Legendary Entertainment. What is Magic Leap? We’re not entirely sure, but it sounds like a wearable that can project artificial, but extremely realistic images onto a user’s retina to create an immersive effect. We’ll have to wait until an official reveal to learn more. 10. Facebook launched a that lets you create forums about any topic. Josh Constine did a about how this app is reflective of the early Internet. 11. We threw Disrupt Europe in London, and it was a huge success. , but Crate ended up taking home the grand prize. is an easy-to-use service that lets you set up big data backend servers. Highlights from the Disrupt fireside chats included a conversation with about the incoming “Pi Pad” touch panel, an , and a conversation with Fab co-founder Jason Goldberg about how the company was at one point . You should also check out this (hint: they still aren’t saying much). You can catch up on . Prior to the main Disrupt event, we held a hackathon. The team behind built a cross-platform web app to model how diseases spread, earning themselves first place. That’s all for this week. |
Google’s New Skybox For Good Program Gives Real-Time Satellite Imagery To Nonprofits | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 10 | 25 | On the heels of acquiring satellite startup , Google and Skybox have the Skybox for Good program, which will provide real-time satellite imagery to organizations and programs that save lives, protect the environment, promote education and positively impact humanity, according to the official blog post. The program launches today in beta with a small group of partners. The images provided to these organizations will be publicly available under a Creative Commons license. This will allow organizations like Sky Truth and Appalachian Voices to keep an eye on “mountain-top removal mining,” which threatens to devastate the forests of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia. Another example given in the announcement was images of a Northern Sri Lanka village called Nagarkovil, which were given to HALO to help them verify that the area was safe, after previously removing land mines. The initiative comes from the Google Earth Outreach team, the main goal being to give extra knowledge and resources to nonprofit organizations that need help in telling their stories or achieving their intended missions. While the program will undoubtedly benefit its nonprofit partners in their quests for a safer, happier, healthier world, it’s also an interesting juxtaposition that puts surveillance (at least at the satellite level) in a positive light. That’s a problematic proposition, considering what the . In any case, you can check out all of the currently available images from the program on . |
U.K. Startup Swytch Is Building An App To Open Up The ‘Burner’ Phone Number Market | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 10 | 25 | The telco industry has resisted change for years. That anti-innovation attitude, coupled with the rise of smartphones and fast data networks, provided ample opportunities for over-the-top startups to circumvent moribund and expensive telco offerings with VoIP and messaging apps that were both less expensive and more feature rich. No surprise, then, that . And things are only going to get more moveable on the phone front as telcos start to wake up to the need to sanction their own disruption where they would previously have dug their heels in. Really they’re playing catch up now. Case in point, U.K. startup — founded in April this year — is bootstrapping a cloud based mobile network and dialer app that will let you use multiple phone numbers on a single SIM, so doing away with the hassle of juggling multiple physical SIM cards. (Which in turn has led to phone makers offering devices with dual SIM slots to make SIM switching easier — albeit, that’s only good for two numbers. And is mainly a feature of lower cost devices targeting emerging markets.) The Swytch app will support the use of different phone numbers on the same SIM so the user can have what amounts to multiple phone lines for incoming and outgoing calls on a single device. It will also — at a later date next year — offer additional call management features such as call forwarding or blocking for individual numbers. “Swytch provides you with additional numbers on your existing phone. So you don’t change your phone, you don’t change your SIM card, you don’t change your network operator, we can add lots of numbers on top of that that you can make and receive calls on, and texts. And they’re all live at the same time,” says co-founder Chris Michael. “The big use case, obviously, is business people, so breaking out business and personal communications,” he added. “But because of the nature of not having a contract or a commitment with your number we’re opening up the temporary number market.” Another target here is offering international customers the ability to buy U.K. numbers they can use in their home country to circumvent roaming fees. The startup was showing off its as yet unreleased app at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe’s startup alley last week. They’re working to a launch date of the end January at the moment. The service will be piggybacking on the mobile network of an existing U.K. carrier, much like an MVNO, although they’re not disclosing which network will be their partner at this point (but obviously the service will work across all networks). “We will work on iOS and Android. And it will also work on tablets as well so, in effect, you can take an iPad and turn it into an iPhone because the only difference between an iPhone and an iPad is that you can make and receive calls and text messages… on the phone. And we can do that now on an iPad as well,” Michael added. “The vision is that you have one app, where you have any number, from anywhere in the world — as many as you like — on a short term basis. Because, our U.K. numbers, there’s no contract on them at all.” So, in other words, if you’re — say — in the process of trying to buy a house and need to register a phone number with lots of estate agents you could use a ‘burner’ number for the weeks/months of your search. And then stop taking any calls on it once you’re done. Which sounds like bliss. Swytch is using recycled numbers to power the service — which are also used for the pay-as-you-go mobile market. In the same way as happens with PAYG Michael explained it will quarantine numbers to check they’re not getting calls and texts before putting them back into circulation (albeit, so it will be interesting to see how effective that quarantining process is). Usage of Swytch numbers will then come out of the user’s bundled minutes and texts, i.e. with their existing carrier. Although there’s also a small added cost (see below) to using their numbers. Swytch is looking to replicate its service with numbers abroad and Michael said it’s currently speaking with network operators in the U.S. and Europe who are interested in giving it numbers to expand the service scope — so, for example, a U.K. Swytch user could buy a U.S. number. “There’s a very big pain point here for people. They get it very, very, very quickly. Even if they’re not a business user,” he said. “If you frequent eBay, Gumtree, Craigslist, Match.com, anywhere where you have a transaction with somebody you really don’t know very well and you don’t want to give them something that’s so personal as your mobile number you can switch on a temporary number for a week, give it to them and when you’ve finished that you can switch it off as well.” Obviously that ability cuts both ways. So people being given a mobile number thinking they now have a permanent line in to someone else’s mobile device may well get a nasty shock when they find the number wasn’t so permanent after all. Although that can happen anyway if someone is using a secondary SIM that they discard. Another interesting potential security consequence from making temporarily mobile numbers more accessible is that increasingly mobile apps and digital services are using mobile phone numbers to authenticate the identity of someone signing up to their service — but if a burner number can be used, that arguably makes it easier for people to create fake accounts to spam or scam others. Michael said to sign up to Swytch someone has to register a “legitimate mobile number”, as well as provide an email address. He also points to the fact it’s a paid service as a factor that will be off-putting to scammers. “There’s a payment mechanism involved. Our numbers aren’t free so there’s even more anonymity in a pay as you go phone because I can buy a SIM card and buy scratch vouchers and top up without giving any network any details about myself. Whereas with us we’re using iOS for in-app billing, and we’re using a credit card provider for Android billing. There is a number of tracking [measures],” he noted. There are some services which already offer multiple phone numbers per SIM in the U.S. but the U.K. market has not yet been opened up in this way. Michael, who has worked in the mobile industry for the past 12 years, said it’s been a pretty long road to getting telcos to buy in to the idea. “I was banging on doors for two and a half years trying to get numbers,” he said. “It wasn’t until I spoke with the right network operator but also the right person that really understood that the market’s going OTT. Whether they like it or not.” “They did the same with Skype when Skype first came out and then they embraced it. The same with WhatsApp and then they embraced it. We’ve been very careful to make sure the relationship we’ve got with our network operator, they’re very clear on what they want from it. That we can achieve something that’s beneficial for them, as well as for us,” he added. The big advantage Swytch is offering domestic carriers is the opening up of the temporary market number — ergo, expanding their potential customer base to overseas mobile users, for example. Average voice call revenue per user has been declining for years so anything which appears to offer a route to rekindle voice growth domestically — and indeed expand the pie by opening up to overseas users — is going to look attractive to an open-minded carrier. “Where we really open up the market for a network operator is this temporary number market where they don’t have a solution for that,” said Michael. “Pay as you go is still very, very expensive for these solutions. But also we are able to sell a U.K. mobile to anybody anywhere in the world. “So if I’m a Spanish manufacturer and I have distributors in the U.K. I can give my sales staff a U.K. mobile number in Spain which they can distribute and then people calling them don’t even know they’re abroad necessarily, don’t pay any roaming charges, and vice versa. When my staff call or text out they’re not paying any roaming charges either.” In terms of pricing, he said Swytch will be free for a week for one number with £1 worth of credit so a user can trial the service. After that the cost per number will be around £1 per week per number. Swytch will also charge for outgoing calls, layering on top of your existing operator services. The pricing for U.K. calls will be around 1.5p per minute for a landline call, 3.5p for a mobile, 4p for a text — on top of whatever you’re paying your carrier. “Internationally it’s going to be just as competitive as Skype,” he added. “We can scale what we do here in the U.S. and any other country so we are actively seeking network operators for these countries. And building out the features and the functions further down the line to really differentiate ourselves from any network operator anywhere in the world. “We are already talking with manufacturers, especially Android manufacturers, about pre-loading our app on their devices. It differentiates their offering to others.” Android’s customizability would allow for Swytch to be used as default dialer on the phone. Whereas on iOS the user has to fire up the app in order to make outgoing Swytch line calls. On both platforms the dialer app integrates with the user’s phone book so it can correctly identify any saved contacts to ID who’s calling and so on. Some screenshots of the forthcoming app are shown below: [gallery ids="1074504,1074503,1074502,1074501,1074412"] |
Bitcoin 2.0: Sidechains And Ethereum And Zerocash, Oh My! | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 10 | 25 | Strange, interesting, and wildly ambitious things are afoot in the world of Bitcoin and blockchains. I give you Zerocash, a completely anonymous currency; Ethereum, a blockchain platform designed to decentralize much of the Internet; and , a proposal to accelerate the evolution of Bitcoin itself. Any one of these could conceivably become a very big deal. All three? Prick up your ears. If you’re not with blockchains, your head may already be swimming. Some background: Bitcoin, the infamous cryptocurrency, is built on a new kind of distributed-consensus technology called a , which allows transactions to be securely stored and verified without any centralized authority at all, because (to oversimplify) they are validated by the entire network. Its success has spawned scores of variant cryptocurrencies, known as “altcoins,” the most famous of which is . But Bitcoin remains, by far, the big dog. If you control more than half of the computations that power any cryptocurrency, then you can spend the same money more than once: a “51% attack.” Altcoins are especially vulnerable. But the stunning amount of computing power being poured into the Bitcoin network renders it (probably) effectively immune to such an attack, as per this mindboggling graph from blockchain.info– The Bitcoin is currently performing some hash computations to secure and verify Bitcoin transactions. (If you think that’s environmentally wasteful, .) Meanwhile, despite its much-publicized decline of late, Bitcoin still has a collective market capitalization of , twice what it was a year ago. Bitcoin is only mildly interesting as a store of value; there are many good alternatives. It’s more interesting as a means to transfer money to anywhere and anyone, with greater speed and lower transaction fees than most alternatives, with no ID requirements. But it’s interesting because it’s the world’s first form of money. Many people don’t appreciate that Bitcoin supports a simple scripting language which can orchestrate transactions. (In fact all transactions actually run as scripts.) This language already supports : deposits that automatically revert after a period of time, escrow transactions, transactions which rely on some external condition (albeit in a complex way that requires a third-party “oracle”), and more. What are all of the potential applications of fully programmable money? Especially if the capabilities of that scripting language are expanded? I don’t know, and neither do you. It’s the proverbial whole new ball game. But progress is tricky. Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency powered and secured by a truly gargantuan mining network, but because it’s worth so much, and its network is so widespread, changes to Bitcoin itself are necessarily promulgated very slowly, and experimentation is done with extreme tentative caution. So we can try out new kinds of blockchains and cryptocurrencies (like Ethereum and Zerocash), or we can rely on the value, scarcity and (technical) stability of Bitcoin, but we can’t do both. Right? …Wrong, says Adam Back. The “three hundred quadrillion hashes” mentioned up above refer to attempts to satisfy the that Adam Back invented way back in 1997, used today to verify Bitcoin transactions. Now Back is back with a new proposal: , which would allow Bitcoins (and other blockchain assets) to be transferred blockchains. Back and co. are not acting purely out of technical benevolence. He and a group of co-founders, including several core Bitcoin developers, headed by former CEO Austin Hill, have a launched a startup called . According to Coindesk, they have in an ongoing funding round, and added Reid Hoffman to their board. Their exact business remains mysterious, but is built around sidechains. (The sidechain code itself will apparently be open-source. See Blockstream’s .) To quote the sidechains (PDF): The creation of independent but essentially similar systems is problematic … the most visible projects may be the least technically sound … discourages technical innovation while at the same time encouraging market games … We desire a world in which interoperable altchains can be easily created and used, but without unnecessarily fragmenting markets and development. In this paper, we argue that it is possible to simultaneously achieve these seemingly contradictory goals … participants do not need to be as concerned that their holdings are locked in a single experimental altchain, since sidechain coins can be redeemed To quote, er, : “You could in principle have thousands of sidechains “pegged” to Bitcoin, all with different characteristics and purposes … and all of them taking advantage of the scarcity and resilience guaranteed by the main Bitcoin blockchain, which in turn could iterate to implement experimental sidechain features once they have been tried and tested.” Blockstream has many other influential fans, including Vinod Khosla and Gavin Andresen, chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation (who also recently did ): "Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains" may make Bitcoin system more pragmatic and more trustworthy! — Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/524975947356061697 There are critics, although , from Peter Todd, still stresses that “90% of the ideas in sidechains are good ideas.” His chief complaint is that either sidechains will still be vulnerable to 51% attacks, or Bitcoin miners will become more centralized, more powerful, and more dangerous. (There is also some criticism.) It’s worth noting that while one form of sidechain — a so-called “federated peg” — can be created today, for sidechains which require no external trust beyond the blockchain, some form of change to the core Bitcoin protocol will be required. At this point, though, such a change seems (to me) an inevitability. Sidechains are far from the only “Bitcoin 2.0” project, although they do have the unusual feature that, as far as I know, all other such projects could be built atop sidechains. The two which interest me most are Ethereum and Zerocash. (And not just me: to quote Back in the AMA, “ “.) Bitcoin is not anonymous. Every transaction’s sender, receiver, and amount are recorded in the blockchain’s public record. The “sender” and “receiver” are Bitcoin addresses, not names, but if anyone connects your identity to an address, its entire Bitcoin history will be apparent to everyone. (There are workarounds, but they’re flawed.) , authored by , is a blockchain protocol wherein senders, receivers, and amounts are all kept entirely anonymous. In a world where privacy is withering away like ice in summer, a little more anonymity would be a welcome development. is another project scheduled to launch its “genesis block” this winter. You have to admire its creators’ ambition: its blockchain supports a full Turing-compete programming language intended to power not just programmable money but also financial derivatives, voting systems, identity registries, reputation systems, decentralized file storage, decentralized autonomous operations(!), and more. They recently raised 30,000 bitcoins, or some $14 million at current prices, by selling their own currency, “ether,” and its blockchain’s “genesis block” is due to launch this winter. Ethereum already supports sidechains, too, out of the box. But also–you could take a Bitcoin sidechain and clone Ethereum on it! Sorry if this all hurts your head. If you’re thinking: let me assure you: it’s possible that you may ultimately be proved right. But I don’t think so. Blockchains, and the new monetary applications that blockchains make possible, seem to me to be a sufficiently powerful and interesting innovation that cryptocurrencies–as a class–do in fact have inherent value, not least because you can do things with them that you can’t with traditional fiat currency. This is highly anecdotal, but at a Blockstream event this week, I spoke to multiple people working at startups with transaction-based business models, whose companies are already up and running using traditional currency … who are now beginning to move towards Bitcoin’s blockchain as a substrate for their transactions. Not because they’re True Bitcoin Believers, but because it just makes practical and technical sense. I strongly suspect that the number of such people will begin to grow rather large as we move through the next iterations of blockchain technology. |
null | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 10 | 22 | null |
Gillmor Gang Live 07.03.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today. Find our Facebook page here |
Everyone Seems Mad At ReservationHop, Founder Admits He Was “Taken Aback” By The Criticism | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | So … have you heard about ? I mean, it’s not quite the hottest topic on Twitter, but among the folks who heard about it, the idea seems to have unleashed . Our own Josh Constine wrote a whole rant about it called “ ” The idea, basically, is that ReservationHop will help users get a table at in-demand restaurants. How? The company will make reservations in advance, and then allow users to claim those reservations up until four hours ahead of time, for a price. (The startup says pricing starts at $5.) This is irresponsible and sleazy and exactly what people hate about startups sucking the life out of San Francisco — mat honan (@mat) To be clear, there have been some positive responses, and some neutral ones, but I think it’s fair to say that most of the tweets, particularly the most passionate ones, have been intensely negative. And beyond Twitter, described the idea as “sleazy” and as “tech enabled scalping.” Others have noted that this could make it even harder for folks who don’t want to use ReservationHop to get a reservation, and have compared it to apps that basically allow users to sell street parking. At least ReservationHop isn’t dealing with public property, so isn’t likely to run into . i wonder if startups will eventually start squatting in emergency rooms and let people pay to get to the front of the line. — Selena Larson (@selenalarson) I emailed ReservationHop founder Brian Mayer and asked if he was surprised by the criticism. “I’m not totally surprised by the reaction, but I have been taken aback by the level of hostility, especially for a product that addresses San Francisco’s love of both food and instant gratification, which I share,” he told me. ReservationHop, a dick move-as-a-service. Steals hot restaurant reservations and sells them for $5. — Josh Constine (@JoshConstine) And despite the slams, Mayer defended the concept itself. He pointed to other startups like and that do something similar and to restaurants like . He also said that he’s open to working directly with restaurants (which should help avoid one of the more awkward things about the current system — the fact that you have to claim a reservation that’s under a different name). “There are a lot of claims that we are selling something that’s ‘free,’ Mayer added. “But if you think about it, there’s nothing free about restaurant seating. There’s a limited number of tables in high demand and there are very long wait times for walk-ins.” Site of da day: Pic of da day: 10Mt yield would destroy all from Sausalito to Santa Clara — Rob Beschizza (@Beschizza) Personally, I found the response to ReservationHop as interesting, or at least as entertaining, as the idea itself. Something about it must have struck a nerve, making it seem like the embodiment of people’s preconceptions that startups are building for lazy, entitled jerks — and that they are, in the process, making things worse for everyone else. (I asked Mayer about the jerk criticism and he responded that he hadn’t heard anything like that.) Plus, it’s July 3. There’s not a lot of tech news to compete with. Well, at least it made me laugh — Anthony Ha (@anthonyha) [image ] |
Samsung Gear Live Review: Samsung’s Smartwatch First Mover Advantage Helps Its Android Wear Effort | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | of the first to market with an Android Wear smartwatch, and the company arguably has a head start since it’s been making its own smartwatches since last year. The Gear Live owes much to its predecessors, which have run both a modified version of Android and Samsung’s own Tizen, but it manages to feel like much more than an older sibling’s hand-me-downs. Samsung hasn’t strained themselves with the Gear Live’s design – this is a very similar device to the Gear 2 on the outside, minus the camera at the top and the button at the bottom. It looks a lot like an original Galaxy Gear, in fact, but with a bezel that makes the screen seem a bit more like it’s protruding from your wrist and cleaner lines overall. The minor tweaks are for the better, however, and this is overall a better-looking device than any of Samsung’s older smartwatches. [gallery ids="1025403,1025402,1025401,1025400,1025399"] The design is much more prone to strong negative reactions than that of the LG G watch, however, at least in my experience. While many were fine with its looks, a lot more said they definitely didn’t like it, vs. a mostly neutral or net positive reaction to the G Watch. You’re less able to add your own personal flair to the Gear Live, too – it uses a proprietary band connector meaning aftermarket options aren’t nearly as readily available. That said, the wrist-hugging design is comfortable on the wrist, and though the clasp isn’t all that easy to affix to begin with, it’s secure once you’ve got it clipped in. Samsung also gets points for including a recessed hardware button on the right side of the display – it’s every bit as surreptitious as LG’s complete lack of any physical controls, but loads more convenient for power on/power down functions. As mentioned in my review of the LG G Watch, all Android Wear devices are virtually identical in terms of their software experience so far, and that’s by design. The exception here is that Samsung offers some of its own apps for monitoring heart rate and activity (alongside the native Google-provided software for handling both). The similarity of experience is a very good thing: users who learn Android Wear once will never have to go through a learning curve or adjustment period again when they upgrade or change devices, so long as Google sticks with this plan. Android Wear does offer everything that users should need in a smartwatch, however, and nothing more. The crucial part will be keeping things clutter free: I enjoyed the relatively spare influx of notifications and activity possible on the wrist, but developers will be able to do a lot more with the Wear SDK, so simplicity might not last forever. Existing watch apps from partners including Pinterest offer interesting functionality, however. And Google’s own turn-by-turn navigation on the wrist is pretty much perfect for walking or even biking (if you’re extra careful) places without continually taking your phone out of your pocket. Samsung has proven with its most recent devices that if there’s one place it excels, it’s in display tech. The Super AMOLED screen on the Gear Live has all of the advantages of the big, bombastic versions it includes in its new Tab S line of Android tablets, but shrunk down and on your wrist. Those advantages include super contrast and deep blacks thanks to the absence of a backlight, decent daylight visibility and colors that really pop. Receiving photos on the Gear Live through Hangouts actually provided a pleasant enough experience that I was seldom tempted to reach into the pocket and pull out the connected phone, in fact. Samsung’s screen is also more pixel-dense than LG’s, and it makes a difference. Text appears super crisp and legible, and overall Samsung is the clear winner when it comes to display quality. The battery on the Gear Live is one of its least appealing features. Your watch will probably last you through any given day, but don’t expect it to go much further than that. Depending on how actively you’re using the device, you’ll probably need to hit the charger around the same time your head hits the pillow. The price of wearables, at least for now, appears to be getting used to the fact that these devices require at least as much charging as our smartphones. Samsung’s charger is at least small and easy to hide on a nightstand, but it clips in with a ferocity that makes plugging in and unplugging Samsung may not have had to do much to pivot its own existing smartwatch efforts into a launch day product for Android Wear, but that doesn’t mean the device it did ship feels half-baked. In fact, if anything it benefits from not having been as rushed as its competition, and for the time being at least, that earns Samsung bragging rights as the best available Android Wear device for most users. |
HomeAway Mulls Venture Fund As It Hits A Milestone | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | The vacation rental marketplace is pondering a move into backing startup companies. As it of breaking more than 1 million listings on its service, one of the first online marketplaces to challenge the hotel industry may begin making minority investments in companies that would add value to its service. “There are lots of entrepreneurs in the travel space — and now in particular around the vacation rental space,” says Brian Sharples, HomeAway’s co-founder and chief executive. “We’re very actively looking at [investing]. Historically we have either bought companies outright or bought a joint position.” Indeed, since it was launched in 2005, HomeAway has made roughly 20 acquisitions, according to Sharples. “Mostly what we do is we buy leading companies in other countries that we’re not in,” he says. “When you have a success in the U.S., entrepreneurs from all over the world start creating businesses that they hope you’re going to buy.” HomeAway also makes technology acquisitions, like the for Glad To Have You. Now, however, the company is doing more to encourage an ecosystem of startups that can help make the rental process easier, Sharples says. HomeAway is actually on the cusp of making its first minority investment — in an undisclosed company that provides tax services for owners who rent on the HomeAway marketplace. The move into investing around an ecosystem is just another indicator of how HomeAway has grown. “We’re the biggest in this business by far,” says Sharples. “We have more rooms than the top four hotel chains in the world.” In some ways, the move to investments in startup companies is a sign of the company’s maturity and established position. In business for nearly a decade, Sharples says that some of the company’s employees may begin to look for their next venture, and he’d like to be able to support them. Unlike the still-private behemoth ( ), HomeAway targets families with second homes — a smaller number of properties than Airbnb’s offering of potentially every spare room in the world. For Sharples, whose company is currently valued in public markets at a not-insignificant $3.23 billion, HomeAway represents a different value proposition for customers. “When you rent from HomeAway, it’s something that’s been set up as a rental,” Sharples says. “People’s clothes aren’t sitting in the drawers. The toothpaste isn’t out in the bathroom.” |
Stop The JerkTech | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | “Go disr*pt yourself” is what I have to say to founders of startups like ReservationHop and Parking Monkey. They’re emblematic of a compassionless new wave of self-serving startups that exploit small businesses and public infrastructure to make a buck and aid the wealthy. Let’s call these parasites #JerkTech. It’s one thing to outcompete a big, stagnant company with new technology. It’s another to screw over the little guys just because you can sell what’s usually free. So what do these do? places phony reservations at the hottest San Francisco restaurants, and then apiece on its site. That makes it harder for the common man to get a reservation, since if they call the restaurant directly, they’ll find all the spots taken. And if ReservationHop doesn’t sell the spots it stole? Tough luck for the restaurant, which just had a table go empty or wasted a half hour because the fake Dick Jerkson that ReservationHop put as the name on the res never showed up. And then there’s . It lets drivers who are parked in public street parking spots to another apesh*tter who’s the highest bidder when they leave. And Monkey Parking takes a cut. Yes, it might reduce circling for parking that causes pollution. But it’s essentially co-opting city infrastructure and profiting by reserving it for people with smartphones. Got a flip phone? Your problem, not the monkey’s. Plus it dangerously promotes cell phone use while driving. is another parking scalping app where you pay $5 to take over a spot from another user, and get $4 back for selling it off when you leave. Sweetch keeps the difference. Thankfully the city of San Francisco is fighting Sweetch and Monkey Parking with . All of these apps are essentially tools for scalping a public good or open resource. They don’t deserve to take something that’s supposed to be free and first-come-first-serve so they can sell it. Don’t concert ticket re-sale sites like StubHub encourage and take a cut from scalping? Yes, and I’m not a big fan of them for that reason. If the demand for a band’s ticket is high, they’re the ones that should be making the mark-up, not some sleazy guy with 20 computers who bought 40 tickets the second they went on sale to turn around and flip them. But at least that guy has to bet his own money that he can resell a private commodity he bought. There are ways to disrupt with building JerkTech. Take Uber. I don’t always agree with with its , but the taxi industry had been content giving the people a crummy service for too long. With unreliable scheduled pick-ups, run-down cars, and road-ragey drivers talking on the phone the whole time, they were inviting someone to change things. Uber is , but it’s giving people a better experience by updating an (albeit regulated) private industry. If you weren’t aware, San Francisco’s tech scene already has some serious problems. Between techies belittling the homeless and women, being sexist and discriminatory in the work place, or comparing criticism of the 1% to Crystalnacht before bragging “I could buy a six-pack of Rolexes”, the rest of the country and world is building up a decent argument for hating us. I don’t want to go all Uncle Ben on you but wielding disruptive tech does come with great responsibility. Build scalable businesses, but not by pillaging the local community. Get it straight, it’s not about “changing the world”, it’s about “making the world a better place”. Or at the very least “earning money without making the world a worse place”. That doesn’t start by prioritizing your JerkTech startup, wealth, and fame over common decency. |
LG G Watch Review: This Early Android Wear Watch Could Use A Bit More Time To Bake | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | of the first to market with an Android Wear smartwatch. Their hardware runs on Google’s smartwatch platform, which is pretty locked down in terms of what kind of customizations Google allows OEM to make. But there’s still plenty of room to shine – and fall short – when it comes to hardware design. LG’s watch seems to have missed the mark in some key areas, possibly by virtue of being rushed, but in others it leaps ahead of the competition. LG’s G Watch is my favorite Android Wear device in terms of design thus far. Of course, there are only two commercially available, so that’s not necessarily saying much, but LG really has done a good job here. The basic rectangle offers little in the way of flair, but it’s the perfect vehicle for an operating system that is likewise designed around offering up the bare essentials, instead of reaching for unnecessary extras. [gallery ids="1025407,1025406,1025405,1025404,1025399"] The screen is the star in the design, which means that Android Wear is front and center. That’s exactly the scaffolding that Google’s new smartwatch OS needs to show off its potential benefit to consumers – the entire concept of the OS is to provide users with something that feels organic, and that recedes out of mind when not needed or in use. The G Watch translates that experience into hardware, especially with the black version I tested. It takes things almost too far by leaving off a physical button, however – I had to read the paper instruction manual to figure out how to power it on (plug it into its charging cradle). The industrial design is spare but not devoid of care or attention. It’s comfortable, and constructed out of a durable stainless steel body that’s light on the wrist. And the 22 mm rubber strap it ships with is comfortable and easy to fasten and size, but easily swappable with a standard strap of your choosing, allowing owners to put their own stamp on the overall look and feel of the device. Android Wear is Android Wear, regardless of where it appears, and in testing the G Watch side-by-side with the Samsung Gear Live over the past week, it’s clear that Google has provided little to no wiggle room for OEMs using the platform. As such, what I have to say about the software experience on the G Watch mostly applies to the Gear Live and vice versa, and likely to any and all Android Wear watches to come for the foreseeable future. With that caveat out of the way, Android Wear is actually mostly a joy to use, and the closest anyone’s come yet to getting the smartwatch experience right. Google has focused on the essentials, delivering all notifications from your Android smartphone or tablet through the watch without any change required on behalf of developers. You can also launch any app from which you receive notifications right from the watch. With some added work, you can reply to messages from various apps, launch on-watch navigation from nav apps and do much more, as Google has demonstrated with its own software first. For the bulk of my time with Android Wear, that’s about all I could do, and that was surprisingly enough. It allowed me to keep abreast of what was going on in my digital world without dipping in to the point of distraction, and made the act of browsing and keeping current with notifications much easier and less intrusive. Over the past day or so, third-party apps like Duolingo, Glympse and Allthecooks have introduced Android Wear support, and these add a lot of value when used correctly. Duolingo’s flashcards are arguably only a bit more convenient than using your phone, but Allthecooks’ recipe directions, which proceed step-by-step on the wrist, feel like a natural implementation for use in the kitchen. Finally, LG has done the best work in terms of creating original watchfaces for Android Wear, which is significant as that’s what you’ll be looking at on your wrist most of the time. The LG G Watch uses an IPS display for its screen, which LG says was a choice made to help with battery life. And the display works well and looks good, especially indoors and out of direct light, but unfortunately after many days of use I noticed a banding issue on the screen which is especially evident in dark settings when the device is in its dimmed, passive mode. Two large rectangles are clearly visible as ghosted impressions along the top. The display is also less brilliant than that of the Samsung Gear Live, which might be a good thing to some, since it’s probably actually truer to real life colors than is Samsung’s device. LG’s is, in my opinion, the weaker of the two overall when it comes to the screen, however, partly due to the banding issues, partly due to it being slightly harder to read in direct sunlight, and in my opinion Samsung’s exaggerated colors work better to make pictures and graphics pop on the smaller screen. LG’s watch is the Android Wear device to get if battery is your main concern. The Gear Live lasts around a day under normal usage circumstances, while the LG can often manage to extend most of the way through a second. Both devices are best served by being put in their charging docks overnight, however, so this isn’t as much of a concern if you’re making a decision between the two. The charger for the G Watch uses a magnetic connection to keep it in place, and has a replaceable sticky pad on the bottom to allow you to stick it anywhere. Of the two Android Wear watches, this charger is the better design in terms of easy use. As a first crack, the LG G Watch brings a lot to the table for Android Wear, including staid design that lets the platform shine. Overall, though, it also suffers from a number of issues likely related to it being first out the gate (Samsung has the advantage of having built multiple devices using almost exactly the same hardware before the Gear Live). The LG G Watch will serve Android Wear fans well enough, but prospective buyers should think long and hard about whether the design choices LG has made warrant paying $30 over what the competition charges and potentially running into the issues described above. |
Facebook Becomes A Local Party Discovery Tool With “Events For You” Redesign | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | Just because you weren’t invited, doesn’t mean Facebook can’t help you crash the party. Facebook Events on the web got a today that includes a new “Events For You” tab that recommends gatherings it thinks you’ll enjoy, even if no one invited you, friends aren’t going, and you’ve never been to the venue. Rather than just being a calendar of your invites and a few suggestions based on what friends are doing, Facebook is now applying everything it knows about you to get you out of the house and somewhere fun…where you can take photos and post them to Facebook. After we spotted the unannounced redesign today, Facebook confirmed to me it’s testing it with some users globally before a mid-paced rollout to everyone in the coming weeks. A similar design for Events will be coming to Android and iOS later this year too. You can see how it looks on web above. The main Events feed now has a much cleaner, more condensed, iOS7-ish feel to it. A tabbed interface lets you quickly jump back and forth between All your events, Invites, events you’ve “Saved” but not RSVP’d to, and ones you’re “Hosting”. A shortcut on the right lets you hop immediately into past events or the creation flow. The design makes it much easier to manage invites because they get a dedicated space, instead of being meshed in with ones you’ve already accepted or declined. But what’s really important here is Facebook’s concentration on Event discovery. The new “Events For Your” section on the right sidebar that can be opened into a list has more suggestions based on a lot more data. A Facebook spokesperson tells me “The recommendations you see are based on the information you have shared with Facebook (i.e., Pages you like, groups and communities you’re a part of, events that friends are attending), and other relevant contextual information such as day of the week and location.” Essentially, Facebook can look at an Event, assess what it’s about and who is already going, and use that demographic and interest data to match it to more potential attendees. This is much more powerful than when Facebook . Facebook Events will now compete with a host of Event discovery apps ranging from catch-all services like , , , and to focused ones like , , and for music and for cultural events. Bafflingly, still does a mediocre job of event recommendations despite having such a strong database of local happenings. Facebook’s push into event discovery could be big for a few reasons. First, I think this looks rich enough to become its own standalone app. Some people aren’t avid News Feed readers and do their messaging elsewhere, but they have to use Facebook because of Events. Otherwise, their meatspace social life could suffer. WillCall and Applauze take a highly stylized approach to Event discovery, compared to Facebook’s utilitarian approach CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me in an on-stage interview last year that certain Facebook features buried in its interface like Groups would benefit from having their own standalone apps, and I think this applies to Events as well. He said “…if you have something like Groups, it’s always going to be kind of second-class in the main Facebook app, or even messaging for that matter. In order to make these things really be able to reach their full potential, I do think over time we’re going to have to create more specific experiences.” An Events app that helped you find fun things to do around you as well as manage your invites could be a killer tool you can’t get elsewhere. There’s also a ton of monetization potential in event discovery. Concert halls, conferences, clubs, and bars might very well be willing to pay to get their events injected into Facebook’s suggestions. While it might seem counter-intuitive, getting people off the computer and out on the town is productive for Facebook. Events are where you meet friends that strengthen Facebook’s social graph, and take photos to share back, and interact with Businesses you could Like. If Facebook can be the portal to fun IRL experiences, it will win a place in your heart. And finally, Events help Facebook achieve its mission to connect people, and fights the perception that it actually isolates us. The Events feature has quietly become one of the social network’s most critical over the years. Seems Facebook is finally ready to celebrate it. |
Foundation: The Squarespace Ideation Narrative | Contributor | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | In our newest Foundation interview, I spend some time with Squarespace founder and CEO . Anthony provides a fascinating look at the Squarespace ideation narrative, and the company’s short-term and long-term goals. Anthony on managing a team at a startup: “You can’t wish trust into existence. Trust is built and shared experiences. I think of how aligned we are as a team and how everyone shares certain values.There are a couple of things you need to have: natural alignment and connection.” |
Music Streaming Eats Downloads With On-Demand Up 42% Over 2013, Digital Sales Down 12% | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | on the first half of 2014 shows digital music consumption rapidly shifting from downloads to streaming. On-demand streaming was up 42% over the first half of 2013, racking up 70 billion play in the first half of 2014. Meanwhile, digital track sales fell 13% to 593.6 million and album sales fell 11.6% to 53.8 million. The report on US trends (not international) makes , as its iTunes download sales model is quickly dying out. As a whole, dismal digital and physical sales dragged total music sales plus streaming industry down 3.3%. Back in the analog world, hipsters are making a serious impact as vinyl sales rose 40% over 2013 to 4 million in the first half of this year. That’s the only medium where sales grew. [Update: It’s important to note that abroad, where iTunes is available in 83+ countries and streaming services often aren’t, the download may survive longer.] If you use the standard 10X multiplier convert album sales to tracks, you get a combined 1.131 billion songs sold in the first half of 2014, down 12% from that period in 2013. While YouTube’s music videos have been strong provider of music streaming for years, the rise of apps like Spotify is pushing on-demand audio music streaming to grow faster (+50%) than video (+35%). The two are now nearly the same size, as 33.65 billion songs were streamed in the first half of 2014, compared to 36.64 billion music video streams. At this rate, pure audio streaming will overcome music video streaming in the U.S. by the end of 2014. Internationally, where many of the top streaming apps aren’t always available, YouTube is probably still a bigger chunk of consumption. You can see Nielsen’s full report here: [scribd id=232506898 key=key-RreCVl657FgzarzFTUKr mode=scroll] The music industry’s rapid recent changes make more sense after looking at this report. With the death of the download and the rise of the stream, power is up for grabs. While iTunes and to a lesser extent Amazon ruled the age of the legal download, Spotify, Google Music, and Beats are poised to reign over the streaming era. That’s why Apple bought Beats. A source close to iTunes’ executives told me before the acquisition that Apple didn’t want to shock users and the music industry’s bottom line by suddenly converting iTunes into a streaming service. Instead, , permitting late-adopters to stick with the familiar a la carte download model while early adopters moved to Beats’ all-you-can-hear streaming subscription. Google just to bolster its bolster its . Google’s combatant looked a bit dry before, especially compared to Beats’ focus on expertly crafted playlists for different themes, situations, and moods. Now Google Music has of what people want to hear and when. Spotify has , making it too big to buy for all but the biggest players like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. At this rate it’s going to fly independent into an IPO, though that could be tough to sell since it’s saddled with high royalty rates that scale alongside it’s popularity. earlier this year, and is now experimenting with an API that let’s users play their Spotify music through third-party apps. Becoming the could make its subscription more attractive to users, and I see developing an ecosystem of niche music apps around it as high-potential way to fight the platform owners. Samsung is trying to popularize its own device-specific music service with , but since its phones run Android, it highly vulnerable to Google’s native offering. While Pandora still has a huge user base, and bolted on in the form of iTunes Radio and Spotify’s ad-supported version. Meanwhile, Pandora’s licensing model doesn’t allow it to offer on-demand song choices like they do, which is why I foresee it struggling in years to come. SoundCloud offers on-demand streaming of songs and long mixtapes that users and artists upload themselves. It’s seen labels cracking down on unlicensed streaming through the app, which is trying to build out its own advertising system. While music fans view it as an authentic place to connect with artists, it’s still . The “YouTube of music” might benefit from being acquired, though on the idea, which I believe was because it needed to spend the money to get its own monetization squared away by buying ad tech companies instead. Amazon just launched its . But rather than trying to win over serious music fans, it’s using it to simply . It’s more of a threat to services courting casual listeners like Pandora who just want to hear something and aren’t too picky. YouTube is expected to launch its as a complement to its ad supported music video streaming that gets little press but is extremely popular, especially with kids. While the on-demand service has a tough uphill climb ahead given Google already has its native Music All-Access service to promote, its free browser-based videos reduce the need to pay for a dedicated music app. In 15 years we’ve gone from CDs to Napster piracy to iTunes downloads to Pandora radio to YouTube’s music video streaming to Spotify’s audio streaming app. Perhaps the next shift will finally see the labels loosen their death grips and allow a cornucopia of music discovery apps to flourish atop a few legal rights holders so everyone can get a listening experience that’s their jam. |
California Democrats .Whine Over Proposed .Wine Domains | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | Let’s see if we can do this without making any puns. In May, California Democratic Congressman Mike Thompson to the Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers (ICANN), asking that .wine and .vin domain not be assigned to “any applicant,” provided that worries concerning protections against cybersquatting can’t be resolved. Congressman Thompson’s district, the California 5th, contains Napa county, which is famous wine country. The fear, it appears, is that there will be something akin to a digital landrush on .wine and .vin domains if the new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are created. Wineries, of course, aren’t in favor of having someone else scoop up their name.wine or .vin, and thus want protection. Another California Democrat has sent ICANN a letter with the same request. Rep. Anna Eshoo asked that the two wine-focused gTLDs “be permanently withdrawn from consideration.” Her letter, which , notes that was sent last week, but released more recently. Her district covers much of Silicon Valley. It’s somewhat incredible how many gTLDs there are now. And how small their impact appears to be. I could buy alexander.ninja, for example. Did you know that you could buy .ninja domains? I didn’t. Thousands of wineries have the creation of the gTLDs. Vetting this, I have come to the following conclusion: The era in which I can register .rich and .solar and .lightning domains, but not alexthinks.scotchwhiskeyisgreat is just a time that I don’t want to live in. |
South Park, Now In Virtual Reality | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | Ready to head on down to (virtual) South Park, and have yourself a (virtual) time? Looking to brush up their virtual reality skills, a team of designers going by the name of has recreated everyone’s favorite quiet little mountain town for exploration with the Oculus Rift. Now, before you dive in: remember that this is just a fun proof of concept — so it’s a bit simple, and there’s not exactly hours of interactive entertainment crammed in here. Once you’ve bumped into a few of the townsfolk and found Officer Barbrady rolling around in his cruiser, you’re pretty much done. (With that said: there’s at least one easter egg level hidden in there.) Getting a proper map of South Park to base the geography on was something of a challenge, as the town’s layout has shifted around a fair amount over the show’s 247 episodes. For this case, the designers based their town on a mix what’s shown in the recently released game, and what’s visible in the that debuted in Season 17. And with that, South Park joins the likes of , Spirited Away’s , and the from on the list of famous scenes/sets that have been recreated in VR. As predicted by Ready Player One (a damned good book, by the way), people seem to love the idea of using VR to explore fictional worlds they already know and love. Just wait till someone gets around to recreating Hogwarts. You can find the simulator for Mac and PC . |
Mobile Accelerator Tandem Announces Four New Startups As It Prepares To Double In Size | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | , a Silicon Valley-based accelerator for mobile startups, is unveiling its latest group of companies. The firm says this is its “largest startup class ever” — though that’s not quite as dramatic a change as you might think. In the past, Tandem has accepted three startups in each class. This time, there are a grand total of four. Pointing to Tandem’s , as well as plans to move into a new office later this year ( ), co-founder Doug Renert said, “With all that in place, we can now ramp up the volume of disruptive mobile startups that we back.” So even though Tandem only added one extra company this time around, the plan is to go up to six startups per class by the end of the year. Speaking of the new fund, from back in January suggested that Tandem had raised $53.7 million of a targeted $100 million. Renert confirmed that there is a new fund (Tandem’s third) and that the firm is investing the money, but otherwise he declined to offer any details. Renert said the basic structure hasn’t changed — the firm is still looking to invest $200,000 in mobile startups who work out of the Tandem office for six months while trying to find product-market fit. It does sound like the firm will be backing more hardware startups (there’s one in the current class), with Renert predicting that they’ll make up “25 to 30 percent of Tandem businesses” moving forward. Here are the companies: — A graduate of the Boost VC incubator for bitcoin startups, Arbiter has built a platform for real-money betting in mobile games. — A social commerce app for, yes, shoe lovers. The team is from Mexico City and applied for three quarters before being admitted. (“They were very persistent,” Renert said, adding that in previous applications, “We liked the guys” but thought the company wasn’t mature enough yet.) — The startup has built a smartphone cover that doubles as a second digital screen. Tandem describes it as “the world’s thinnest screen” and says it’s working with the team to bring that screen to other devices. — Caarbon building a smartphone app for on-demand valet parking. And yes, the extra A is part of its name. Past Tandem startups include , which , Bash Gaming ( ), and Zecter/ZumoDrive ( ). The deadline to is July 13. You can read more in . |
Peter Thiel Is Returning To Disrupt SF | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | We’re thrilled to announce that legendary founder and investor will be joining us on stage at Disrupt SF 2014. From PayPal to Founders Fund, Thiel has set the bar for success in Silicon Valley, and this will be the second time he’s spoken at our conference. We’re glad he’s back. Thiel made the first outside investment in Facebook in 2004, and was an early investor in LinkedIn in 2003. Through a combination of his personal financing and the Founders Fund, he’s also helped fund the likes of SpaceX, Yelp, RoboteX, Quora and Spotify. More recently, Thiel and the Founders Fund for Airbnb in 2012, and played a part in Airbnb’s in 2013. The Founders Fund has also taken a shine to Lyft, in 2013, and participating in round in April 2014. Thiel is also the founder and president of , a global macro hedge fund, and a partner at , an internationally-focused venture capital firm that invests exclusively in companies outside the United States. And he’s built his share of startups, too. Most notably, Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998, and served as the company’s Chairman and CEO until 2002 when he successfully oversaw the sale of PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion. His investment in Facebook landed him on the company’s Board of Directors, where he’s served as a board member since 2004. Thiel also co-founded in 2004, which helps companies integrate, visualize and analyze data. This will be Thiel’s second visit to the Disrupt stage. In 2011, Thiel and his PayPal co-founder Max Levchin to talk about the book the two co-authored, as well as the changing face of innovation, disruption, and technology in the U.S. Come hear Thiel talk about these topics, as well as his new book “ ” at , which is slated for September 8-10 at San Francisco’s Pier 48. If you’re interested in joining us, tickets are at extra early bird pricing levels. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the event, to our sponsorship team for more info. |
Windows Phone’s Market Share In The United States Isn’t Growing | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | The regarding the United States smartphone market isn’t great for Microsoft. The company’s Windows Phone platform managed no growth, ending the May period with a 3 month market share average of 3.4%, the same level that Comscore reported for the platform in February. Android was flat, Apple picked up 0.6%, and Blackberry lost 0.6%. Android and Apple, however, control nearly the entire United States market, so to see little motion from them is hardly surprising. For Microsoft, which has invested billions into its mobile strategy, maintaining market share isn’t enough — it needs to grow. Microsoft has seen some international success with Windows Phone, but given the importance of the United States market in terms of developer density, the company can’t afford to neglect its backyard. Microsoft recently announced that may increase support for its mobile platform. Windows Phone or bust, you could say. Redmond recently to buy Nokia’s hardware business, in hopes of spurring its mobile efforts. It’s certainly true that as it has aged, Windows Phone has improved. What Microsoft can do to breakthrough in the United States isn’t clear. The company’s recently announced Windows Phone 8.1 software update contains a number of new features, including Cortana, a voice-activated digital assistant most often compared to Apple’s Siri. Now that the Nokia deal has closed, Microsoft can execute whatever strategy it’s had on tap. We’ll see the impact of that effort in the next set of data. |
Bonobos Raises Another $55 Million To Expand Its Online-Offline Shopping Experience | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | Online clothing retailer has raised a $55 million Series D round of funding led by Coppel Capital. With the funding, the company plans to expand its offline presence as a way to introduce new customers to the style and fit of its clothes, while also showing off new offerings to existing customers. While Bonobos launched as an online-only retailer, over the years it has gradually been launching so-called “Guideshops” in major cities, where customers can try on its clothes before they buy them. With the recent launch of a Guideshop in Los Angeles last week, it now has 10 physical locations around the U.S. Those stores provide customers with more of a personalized shopping experience, and customers who visit often buy more than users who traditionally just shop online. According to Bonobos, in-store transactions are double the average order value online. With that in mind, the company plans to aggressively expand the number of Guideshops around the country, opening 30 more nationwide. The funding will come in handy while fueling that expansion. Since being founded in 2007, Bonobos has raised a total of $127 million. Other investors include Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nordstrom, Mousse Partners, Glynn Capital Management, Forerunner Ventures, and Felicis Ventures. |
Atlassian Expands Its Enterprise Offerings With JIRA And Confluence Data Center | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | , the company behind developer collaboration tools like , and , has long had a strong presence , but the company today announced two new products specifically geared at this market. Next week, Atlassian will launch JIRA Data Center, the latest version of its JIRA project management software with high-level customer support offerings and technical account management, as well as support for running the service on multiple nodes. JIRA Data Center will launch July 9. Over the course of the summer, its Confluence team collaboration service will also join this new ‘Data Center’ product family. The company says that about 25,000 companies and their 8.5 million employees use JIRA daily. With the Data Center version, larger companies will be able to get access to the latest version of JIRA. This includes better support for scaling the services across multiple nodes to improve performance and scalability. To ensure this, administrators will be able to route certain applications, teams or geographies to specific nodes in a cluster. Additional nodes can be added in real time and the clustering technology, and shared file systems are integrated with most industry standard technologies. For these enterprise customers, Atlassian has also ramped up its service offerings. On top of its existing partner and technical account management programs, the company now also offers access to a team of senior engineers that can handle customer service requests, as well as onboarding help and expedited SLAs. Companies that want to implement JIRA or Confluence Data Center will have to for a license that covers one product and up to 1,000 employees. Premium service is available for $35,000 per year and Technical Account Management costs $60,000. |
eBay-Owned E-Commerce Platform Magento Shuts Down Services Aimed At Smaller Retailers | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | E-commerce platform , owned by eBay’s Enterprise division, is closing down two of its products designed to reach small to medium-sized online retailers: and . The company has posted notices and informational guides on both product websites, directing current customers to “Migration Center” dashboards and various FAQ’s that will help them move their businesses to other platforms. Combined, the two products include around 10,000 merchants. , Magento is now telling customers via email that the move to shut down these products “was not an easy decision and we understand it may not be welcome news.” The company also says that the two products will not go dark until February 1, 2015 – well after the busy holiday shopping season, during which time the sites will continue to “operate and perform normally” and customer support will be provided. However, affected Magento customers can make preparations to migrate their stores ahead of the holidays, if they choose. To aid in the transition, eBay named competitor Bigcommerce as its official migration partner, in part because the company already has experience porting Magento customers to its platform. In an , Bigcommerce notes that it has already moved over 6,000 ProStores customers to its platform previously, alongside 6,000 more customers from other competitors. It also supports tight integration with PayPal and the ability for clients to sell on eBay, which is what many of the booted merchants will be looking for. Bigcommerce today has over 50,000 customers, and will be offering special incentives to those arriving from Magento, it says. In a related statement online, Mark Lavelle, SVP, Product and Strategy at eBay Enterprise explains that Magento is making this move in order to focus on Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Community Edition which he positions as “two solutions that better support and better equip small and medium size merchants to prosper in the evolving and increasingly competitive eCommerce landscape.” However, Magento Community, the open source version of the Magento platform, is generally aimed at larger retailers who need more flexibility with their code. And of course, Enterprise Edition, as its name implies, is not aimed at those with smaller shops, but rather those with millions in online sales. In the documentation shared with Magento Go site owners, the company explains that “changing market requirements” were a significant factor in its decision to close things down. Meanwhile, the newer versions of its flagship products will offer features not available in Go, it notes, including a new responsive design reference theme, and new payment options to streamline checkout. Magento, as you may recall, , with nearly 50 jobs cut from the e-commerce division, according to reports. And though Magento now stresses in that same client document that it “remains committed to small and medium size businesses,” its move to focus on platforms that generally serve much larger clients says otherwise. |
After Closing $49 Million In Funding, TeleSign Pushing Authentication Services | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | In the age of email spoofing, identity theft, and the myriad sorts of virtual chicanery and flim-flammery, having a service that can verify a person’s identity is vital. As demand for identity verification and and authentication grows, is looking to , shopping for technology acquisitions and new markets for growth. The company recently added , the investment arm of the Australian telecom giant, , as a new strategic investor. Telstra is also incorporating TeleSign’s authentication technology into its own services. The new commitment brings TeleSign’s total haul for its latest round to $49 million. The new partnership is only the latest in a string of successes for TeleSign, which booked $50 million in revenue for 2013, up from $25 million in 2012. For the current calendar year, the company expects to reach $100 million in revenue, according to TeleSign chief executive, Steve Jillings. “This is the next wave of authentication,” says Jillings. “The technology is based on the simple notion that the only unique and readily identifiable identification that anyone has is the mobile phone number.” With the additional capital, Jillings says that the company will look to develop more frictionless authentication services, where the verification of a person’s identity will happen more quickly. The Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based company is also beginning to experiment with ways to fold biometric sensors into its authentication services, according to Jillings. “Security is one of those things where there’s no silver bullet,” says Jillings. “We’re starting to look at other types of capabilities and adding them to our arsenal.” That could mean acquisitions in the future. “We are looking at acquisitions,” says Jillings. “A lot of it is around different styles of authentication. There are some really neat, very young startups out there with interesting technology, but their ability to get to market is very limited.” With some of the world’s largest companies as its client, TeleSign provides access to nearly any market a startup would want to reach. So what things are on Jillings’ wish list? “We’re evaluating everything from biometrics to a bunch of frictionless technologies,” he says. “There are some companies outside of the U.S. that could come and join us.” And Jillings isn’t worried about competing technologies being rolled out by companies like Apple — . “We think it’s just another level of security,” says Jillings. “And Apple is just 12% of the marketplace.” Beyond its authentication services to companies, Jillings says the company is also working on rolling out new services to telecommunications companies that’s going to market in the U.K. Last year, the company acquired the London-based GMNO Routo Telecommunications, in a deal that gave TeleSign control of a mobile messaging network, and began reaching out to global SMS operators. The bulk of TeleSign’s business is still based in America, with 80% of its customers based here, but the remainder is from clients around the globe. TeleSign was founded in 2005, and when Jillings first linked up with the company in 2010, there were only 12 employees. Under his guidance, TeleSign has grown to 220 employees and gone from $1 million in revenues to nearly $100 million.
The company was founded… it was founded in 2005… they built up this whole notion of phone based authentication and verification… and the biggest pushback they got in 2005 and 2006 was “what if someone doesn’t have the phone” |
Video Content Network BuzzMyVideos Launches To Attract International Creators | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | is a new a content network which specialises in international online video content promotion allowing video makers to grow and monetize their video content via a multi-channel network and creators program. It’s now launched out of Beta. The startup has so far attracted over 5,000 video makers (who pay for the tools their offer), in part because its founders Paola Marinone and Bengu Atamer are both ex-YouTube leaders, so they know their stuff. Operating largely in six key verticals; beauty, entertainment, food, music, technology and games, BuzzMyVideos claims it has had over 2.3 billion views and 13.5 million subscribers on its network. The London-based company is setting aiming at the international video creation community because over 80% of views on YouTube come from outside the US and 70% of the predicted $163 Billion digital ad spend in 2016 is also set to come from outside the US. Thus, it has localised in English, Russian, Turkish and Italian with other territories planned. Now, there are a few competitors in this space. Fullscreen in multi-verticals. started in content production although acts as a MCN (multichannel network) as well and aggregates channels. And there are more. However BuzzMyVideos thinks its got an edge because of its tech platform geared to growing an audience and monetising content; the founders know this business inside and out; and the localisation of the videos into other languages. |
Apple’s Hamid Mohammadinia Joins The Vessyl Smart Cup Team | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | Mark One, the makers of the Vessyl smart cup, have brought on as the new VP Engineering. Mohammadinia comes from Apple where he led Design for Manufacturing, with specific participation in the DFM of the iPod and the iPad, as well as other projects from Apple. The was designed over the past seven years to be able to understand exactly what you’re drinking on a molecular level, to ensure that you’re hydrated throughout the day as well as aware of your caloric intake. The Vessyl will tell you if you’ve had too much coffee for the day, or when you need to gulp down a glass of water. Through a system of sensors and software called Pryme, the Vessyl actually has an LED screen on the side of the cup that can give you exact instructions on what liquids your body needs and when. Last month, the Vessyl launched a pre-order campaign cutting the price from $199 to $99, and the team received overwhelming support, surpassing their $50,000 goal in 100 minutes. According to the company, 40 percent of total sales have come from outside the United States, with customers from more than 75 countries. You can learn more about the Vessyl cup . |
Reelagram Turns Instagram Photos Into View-Master Reels | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | Before there was and , there was . Children who grew up in the analog era will have special memories of this stereoscopic viewer and its accompanying cardboard disks featuring images of their favorite characters and scenes from books, TV shows, and movies. Now, a company called is tapping into our collective nostalgia for this simpler time by offering a new way to print and view Instagram photos. Yes, via a View-Master-like device which you can buy online alongside the photo reels. The idea for Reelagram comes from Darren Marshall, a designer and co-founder of , a 30-person digital agency in Chicago. A serial entrepreneur, he has also co-founded a coffee company called Bow Truss and shared offices dubbed SPACE. Around five years ago, he and were looking for a clever way to show off the best of their portfolio. They ended up reaching out to a company in Portland that was cutting and gluing View-Master photo reels by hand. That company, Image3d, was run by Rich Dubnow – a guy who had shot stereo photography for View-Master for nearly 20 years, including some of the memorable Disney reels you may have had as a kid. When Marshall later caught back up with Dubnow and introduced him to Instagram, they realized a partnership between the two companies would make sense. “Over the years he’s stayed completely committed to growing this business and is doing very, very well,” says Marshall. “When the tech caught up began printing and cutting film on the fly opening up new opportunities. The team capable of fulfilling hundreds of orders per day with the facilities and capital to scale up as necessary.” Today, the business lets you choose 7 photos from your Instagram gallery for $19.95, or you can buy a reel and a viewer for $29.95. At checkout, you can choose whether you want a red, blue, black or white viewer, which ships in five business days. Reelagram has been piloting its service for a few months, and has seen a couple hundred paid orders during some light testing. But already, the site is converting 10% of its visitors to sales, they say. According to Marshall, the viewers are generally being bought as gifts for others – including for birthdays, holidays, weddings, teams, company gifts and more. Some are even being used for special purposes, like an engagement proposal or a welcome home message for a returning U.S. Marine, for example. Now Marshall says that Instagram is asking Reelagram to change its name. Facebook-owned Instagram , citing trademark violations. But Reelagram, to be clear, is an app. It’s a physical product, so there shouldn’t be any confusion between the two services from a consumer perspective. But that’s up to the lawyers to sort out, we suppose. In the meantime, you can order your own Reelagram . |
Beast Sensor On Indiegogo Tracks Your Weight-lifting In Real Time | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | In recent years hardware has appeared to track your gym workouts. and are both devices that will measure your reps as you grunt and build those muscles lifting weights. A new kid on the block is and it’s currently trying to raise $60,000 . This little device differentiates itself by being suitable for all exercises (not only a few) and by displaying results in real-time. In theory this creates more motivation and prevents you do the wrong movements as you lift. Developed in Milan, Italy, the sensor is magnetic and can be attached to barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells or gym machines and to the body itself for performing free body exercises with the Beast Vest. It then links to a smartphone app to record the data. The Beast shows you in real-time how much you are pushing yourself by lifting weights, using a machine or performing bodyweight exercises. You can chose to visualize speed, power or strength and monitor your performance while working out. On the accompanying app, you can review your results while resting between each set and get indications about how to make your training more effective. For example the Beast App accesses all your data to suggest the optimal weight to use or the number of reps to perform to reach your training goal faster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IHkCEaPDsE |
Balderton Partner Bonanzinga Steps Back To Pursue Career As An Angel | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | After 7 years as a partner at , Roberto Bonanzinga has taken a step back from the fund. He now becomes ‘Venture Partner’ and will pursue other interests as an Angel investor rather than as a VC. However, in a statement, Balderron said he would “continue to be strongly affiliated with the firm”. Although Bonanzinga will not make new investments from Balderton’s latest fund in this new role, he will continue to serve on several boards of the Balderton portfolio, and will continue to source investment opportunities for the firm. Bonanzinga has spearheaded Balderton’s investment in companies including Banjo, Contentful, Depop, SaatchiArt, Tictail, Vivino and Wooga, among others. This latest move is a sign that London’s VCs are changing to take advantage of the new wave of startups coming out of Europe. Balderton in particular is changing quite a bit, , and raising a new fund in Europe. |
NearDesk Raises £1M On Crowd Equity Platform Seedrs | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | A sign that equity crowd financing is taking off in the UK is the news that NearDesk — a startup that offers touch-out and rent desk and meeting space by the hour at different locations all around the UK – has broken the record for the amount raised on the Seedrs platform. Originally was looking to raise £600k, but it’s busted that limit, . On NearDesk, users only pay for the time spent with a member card, with a single monthly invoice issued per company, rather than having to deal with multiple companies. The service appeals mostly to freelancers and independents. Over 500 investors piled into the fund-rising round, with the biggest single investment £75k. They clearly agree with the startups’ view that there’s a societal change going on which means people are just not needing to us offices as much as they used to. NearDesk also hopes to see of competitors such as YourWorkspaces, LiquidSpace, HandyForWork, WorkSnug, ShareDesk by using a revenue sharing business model with venues. |
FuturePerfect Ventures Is A Small Fund Launched To Back Applications For Big Data | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | Looking to harness the flood of data streaming from every networked and sensor-enabled smart device, computer, and machine that circumscribe our modern world, has launched a small venture fund to focus on the bedeviling problem of big data. Founded by , the former director of mobile investments for the Omidyar Network, and previously senior vice president of the New York City Investment Fund,
FuturePerfect Ventures intends to invest in what one person with knowledge of the firm calls interpretive intelligence. “The thesis is around interpretive intelligence,” the person said. “[Backing] companies that are using all the data that’s being collected and crunching it in ways that are useful for all of us.” The thesis, the person said, is closer to cognitive computing, than investing around pure data — because the firm is taking into account human intelligence as well as machine learning. For a small fund, the firm has already made several investments, with over 11 companies already in the FuturePerfect Ventures portfolio. Companies include the body scanning startup, ; career advisory and planning company ( ); , which collects unstructured data to give companies information on emotions and behavior that influence customer decisions;
and , which develops technology for in-video sales and interactions. “Being thesis driven helps,” our source said of the new fund. Firms can make a name for themselves with a tight concentration on a particular thesis. Entrepreneurs know that the firm will be receptive to their pitches, and the firm becomes more of a “go-to” option with the approach. |
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