title stringlengths 2 283 ⌀ | author stringlengths 4 41 ⌀ | year int64 2.01k 2.02k | month int64 1 12 | day int64 1 31 | content stringlengths 1 111k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Google Super Successful At Spinning Europe’s Right To Be Forgotten Ruling As Farce | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | Blink and you’ll still see it. Google’s strategy to spin the European Court of Justice’s as ‘unworkable’ is in full swing. The ruling, made in late May, requires Google to process requests by private individuals to de-index outdated or irrelevant personal information when a search is made for their name. The data is only de-indexed from European Google search results, not Google.com. And refers specifically to private individuals — those with a public profile would be exempt on the grounds of public interest. Google says it’s had about 70,000 requests for data to be de-indexed so far. Google started de-indexing links to comply with the law. But this week it’s clear that the advertising giant is outsourcing a public campaign of ‘censorship outrage’ to the media organizations whose business models entirely align with its own. Earlier this week BBC journalist Robert Peston published an emotionally charged blog post entitled , which questioned “why has Google killed this example of my journalism?”. Provocative language, no? This alarmist reaction was of course inevitable. Google has barely had to lift a finger to find a sympathetic mouthpiece from media outlets that also rely on people finding information on their sites to drive their own digital businesses. Still, there is evidently more than a little behind the scenes string-pulling going on. For starters Google has been emailing news websites to flag up when it’s removed a link to their content in its search results — to give them the required nudge to get to work on a piece attacking the ruling as censorship. (Google declined to specify how many notification emails it has sent out when I asked.) There doesn’t appear to be a legal requirement in the ruling that Google informs publishers it’s de-indexing a particular search. And Google has previously made no bones about making that affect all sorts of sites without giving them the individual courtesy of dropping an email to flag up the change. But it’s one thing Google pulling the levers of its own business for its own economic interests. The right to be forgotten ruling is a change thrown on an unwilling Mountain View by European judges and legislators that forces it in a pro-privacy direction that does not align with its ad-driven, individual data-harvesting business model — so it’s not going gently into this goodnight. Oh no. So far Google’s spin strategy has been spectacularly successful. By publishing stories about the removed links, the media is neatly turning a right to be forgotten on its head — shining the spotlight back on private individuals who may have been seeking to de-emphasize outdated or irrelevant information about them. This week the ruling has become digital theatre, and Google gets to laugh at the European data privacy farce it has so easily been able to engineer. As Andrew Orlowski points out in , Mountain View just bounce requests from individuals to national data protection watchdogs in the EU — and appeal each decision if the watchdog sided with the requester. But that process would be time-consuming. Much quicker for the company to generate a big spike of negative PR about ‘what an unworkable mess’ the law is by making what appear to be ham-fisted decisions in cases where there is some public interest angle that can be used to fuel accusations of censorship. Of course I am not party to Google’s decision-making in individual de-indexing cases, but the results so far speak for themselves. (And the company has consistently declined to comment in detail on its specific decision-making process.) Yesterday noted that Google had reversed a decision to de-index certain search results that had been earlier . Writing about the six de-indexed Guardian articles (some of which have presumably now been restored) the newspaper’s James Ball dubbed the ruling a “challenge to press freedom” and argued it “has created a stopwatch on free expression”. After Google reversed some of those de-indexing decisions, a Guardian spokeswoman told Reuters: “Their current approach appears to be an overly broad interpretation. If the purpose of the judgment is not to enable censorship of publishers by the back door, then we’d encourage Google to be transparent about the criteria it is using to make these decisions, and how publishers can challenge them.” ‘Overly broad interpretation’ nails Google’s strategy here, in my view. Pay out enough rope, and let the public hanging commence. Google will only say its process is “evolving” at this stage. Which is a neat way to side-step any criticism for bad and/or intentionally manipulative decisions that forward its agenda of trying to get the law overturned. When I asked Google for comment it provided the same statement it’s trotted out previously this week — namely: “We have recently started taking action on the removals requests we’ve received after the European Court of Justice decision. This is a new and evolving process for us. We’ll continue to listen to feedback and will also work with data protection authorities and others as we comply with the ruling.” The Peston instance is a great example of how negative, fear-mongering PR about the ‘censorship’ of important public information has been manufactured by the way Google has responded to the ruling. Peston’s post identified a 2007 blog as the target for de-indexing. The post was apparently about Stan O’Neal, the former boss of the investment bank Merrill Lynch, being forced out after the bank suffered what Peston described as “colossal losses on reckless investments it had made”. Now investment bankers rival journalists for the public’s most hated individuals in these post-financial crisis times — so enter stage right a perfect pantomime villain to tread the boards on Google’s behalf drawing angry boo-hiiiissssses in the direction of the right to be forgotten ruling. Who’s going to support a law that looks like it’s helping bankers whitewash past acts? The problem is, it wasn’t actually O’Neal who requested the removal of the Peston blog post. And the post is not actually removed when you search for O’Neal’s name, so there’s no ‘bankerwashing’ going on there. Peston has since updated his story to note this fact. His update states that the article’s de-indexing was in fact requested by an individual who had left a comment on the original post. And that a search for O’Neal’s name still brings up Peston’s post. So, in other words, the article is de-indexed if you’re searching for the unknown name of an individual commenter… Talk about misdirection. Of course it’s also true that the broad-brush nature of the ruling has enabled Google to put on this digital pantomime and spin the impact of the ruling to emphasis risks to media freedoms and mobilize news outlets to lobby public opinion on its behalf. So there’s perhaps an argument to say that the court could be more specific in setting parameters for how it expects Google to weigh requests. What’s clear is that this week’s Google farce is exactly the people the ruling aims to protect: private (not public) individuals who have outdated and irrelevant information appended to a search for their name that might in fact be making it harder for them to move their lives on from some past event; or find a new job after being made redundant; or avoid having their digital footprint bundled up with the reputation of someone or something else; or whose private home address has been published online without their permission. The right to a private life of average individuals is exactly the thing Google wants you to forget. Early data , a service set up to help people who want to submit right to be forgotten requests, on the kinds of reasons people have for asking Google to remove a link in a search result suggests privacy is a key motivator for those wanting something about them to be de-indexed. ‘Invasion of privacy’ and ‘defamation & insult’ were the two categories that made up nearly half of the requests people were submitting via its service. The top three privacy-related reasons were: disclosure of home address; negative opinions; and redundancy. The top defamation reason was ‘extraneous matters’ — aka people whose name has been erroneously attached to matters that are completely extraneous to them. For the media to rush to brand this complex privacy ruling — which seeks to give some protection to private individuals — as ‘unfettered censorship’ is irresponsible but unsurprising. There are huge and growing complexities attached to massive data retention impinging on the rights of private individuals. So let’s not pretend this stuff is simplistic. Especially when a self-interested entity is behind the scenes pulling the strings. [ by ] |
Apple Poaches Patrick Pruniaux, Watch Brand Tag Heuer’s VP Of Sales | John Biggs | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | has hired another luxury brand exec away from an established brand. Patrick Pruniaux, VP of sales for watch company Tag Heuer, will join Apple on Monday after seven years in the world of luxury timepieces. Pruniaux, second from the right in the above photograph, joins the company just as talk of an iWatch has risen to a dull roar. Tag Heur is best known for its Formula One-themed watches and spokesperson Tiger Woods. watch analysts as saying the iWatch won’t make a dent in the luxury industry but I wouldn’t be so sure. Watch companies work in an odd market where demand for mid-level pieces is very fickle. A unique, desirable smart watch that works with iOS and is considered by some as a status symbol or a must-have accessory could tip the balance away from a quartz or mechanical piece. Most Swiss watchmakers have stumbled while trying to grab a piece of the smart watch market, most notably . Pruniaux isn’t the first luxury hire for Tim Cook’s Apple. The company nabbed Burberry ex-Chief Executive Angela Ahrendts in May and head of Yves Saint Laurent’s head Paul Deneve. Perhaps the bells are tolling for the arrival of an iWatch? Only Pruniaux may know for sure. All we do know is that Apple is tripling down on luxury. |
null | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 3 | null |
Meet The Winner Of PragueCrunch III: Cloudfender | John Biggs | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | This man is very happy. He’s , one of the contestants in last night’s PragueCrunch pitch-off and a proud drinker of fine Czech beer. He is just one of the cool people we met in Prague last night. The pitch-off, judged by , our own Natasha Lomas, and , also made this man very happy. We listened to eight startup founders, Soukup’s included, talk about their products. The pitches, limited to 90 seconds, were solid and the questions were fair but tough. And, in the end, we had one winner. is a security platform that assesses the safety of your data in the cloud. It lets you track files across services, ensure no one is peeking at your data, and even cut out malware when it senses it in your network. It works across platforms and with most cloud services. They will receive a Startup Alley table at TechCrunch Disrupt SF or London. Runner-up and winner of two tickets to Disrupt London or SF was . It offers an all-in-one management tool for teams that lets you find applicable documents, emails, and data in the context of chat. Here is the full list of startups. All of them were solid and ready to ship and it was great to be able to see their founders in action. Thanks for making PragueCrunch a success and we’ll see you next year! – An app that lets you take a picture of a wine list and get immediate recommendations and reviews.
– Finds excess printing capacity and allows you to take advantage of local printing services.
– Is password management for teams. You can add and remove team members from app access from one portal. (That’s him with the beer up there.)
– Visionare is a goal setting app and website which allows you to draw from the experience of people who have already achieved your dreams.
– Liftago is giving existing taxi market a chance to survive and to connect to on-demand transportation of the future.
– Snapchat for jobs: a mobile and web app where job seekers send short video introductions to employers instead of just a CV. |
Everyone Has Seen Fireworks, No One Needs Your Photos | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | Here’s a novel idea for watching the fireworks: use your eyes. See, the Fourth Of July is when we celebrate the birth of our nation by blowing up . But when the urge to pull out your camera phone strikes you, instead, leave it in your pocket, throw your arm around the person next to you, and just be present in the moment. You’re never going to look at those firework photos or videos anyway. The courteous, pity-likes you would’ve gotten on Instagram mean nothing. What matters is if you were truly alive, awake, and inspired by the spectacle, not some digital momento or proof. You’re probably not going to capture 1/10th of what it was actually like to be there, so why sacrifice the first-hand experience for some crappy, second-hand imitation? And if you absolutely must wedge a phone between you and the experience, at least don’t be basic about it. together a montage. or an explosion and draw a silly face on it. it so at least your mug makes the photo unique. Or better yet, rally some friends around and take a firework-illuminated selfie. If you don’t believe me, look back at some of your old photos. I’d bet you’ll find most of the ones without people in them pretty boring. So when the bombs are bursting in air, remember the only thing that counts is right then and there. |
An E-Commerce Site Where You Can Haggle Down The Price | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | What are American holidays without shopping deals, right? A new kind of site has launched out of Y Combinator just in time for the most American holiday of them all. Founders Andrew Kurland and Joe Marrapodi created their e-commerce negotiation site, , out of frustration. The two were spending too much time trying to find the best deals online. That was proving time-consuming and difficult. Yes, it’s a weird name for an e-commerce site. Marrapodi says it has to do with a college nickname. We’ll get to that in a bit, but for now he says to “Think of Greentoe like Priceline for Amazon.” The site works like this: You want to buy, say, a new Canon EOS Rebel camera and you want the best price you can get. But you don’t want to spend a lot of time looking. Greentoe recruits a bunch of vetted online retailers. It then simplifies the process by showing you the average price and the lowest price for each product currently available online. You are then able to say how much you are personally willing to pay for that product. Going with our EOS Rebel theme here, you see that the price for the kind of camera you want is around $549-$594 online. We found it on for $749 (and that was with a $50 savings offer). You decide you would like to buy this camera for the much lower price of $460. The Greentoe meter will let you know whether you’ve got a good chance or not to get that price. You are lucky on this one. The seller agrees to the price. Congrats, you’ve made a deal! So how can two startup guys with little e-commerce background do better than what you’d find on Amazon or eBay? Marrapodi, who, by the way used to negotiate with celebrities like Leonardo Di Caprio, Scarlett Johansson and Justin Timberlake, says it’s a timing thing. “Retailers go through a cycle of inventory they need to sell and when you send in your price you could hit them at the right time to make a good deal out of it. We try to make that a more likely possibility.” he explains. This can work with a whole slew of different products on the site. Folks are already haggling down anything from baby cribs to washers and dryers. While the two founders are working on getting more products in, a major hole in the site is women’s designer fashion. Women’s clothing is the in terms of sales, accounting for nearly half of all industry revenue in 2013. Marrapodi acknowledges that he and his partner still have a long way to go to fill in the gaps, “We just started with Y Combinator and have only been live online for a short while here.” While Greentoe won’t reveal who the retailer is behind the wall, the founders swear they are all very reputable. You also get to find out who sold you the product only after the offer has been accepted. The deal between both buyer and seller also needs to be reasonable, says Marrapodi. “About 20% of our customers bid too low. They think it’s a crazy deal site and they’re just going to get whatever price they name. That’s not how it works.” he says. So bottom line is be reasonable when negotiating here. So what’s with the name…Greentoe? From the words of Marrapodi, “When we started the company, my co-founder, Andrew and I went through domains that I own. Greentoe seemed to be very catchy. So, we went with it.” He said the name originally came from his college roommate’s sister. She actually gave him Greentoe as a nickname. While we’re not sure exactly the story behind why on that one, there’s still time to negotiate for it. |
Rovio Owner Backs Teller, A Startup Aiming To Make Email Work Better When You Check It Less Often | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | If you’re in the U.S., you’re probably taking a well-deserved break from work and all the accompanying email today for the July 4th holiday. But when you return, your inbox is going to be a nightmare. An unsorted, unfiltered, unorganized mess. A new startup called wants to help with that. The company also has a small round of funding as one of the first investments from , the private VC firm funded by , of , creators of Angry Birds. Based in Stockholm, and founded by ex- employees, including and engineer , Teller is the first product from Takumii Sweden. Initially arriving as a Mac desktop application before expanding to mobile, the idea with Teller is to help people better manage their email through the use of algorithms that automatically sort your email for you, based on its importance to you. This sort of concept, in and of itself, is nothing new. Gmail has offered a “Priority Inbox” view , and a number of startups have attempted to do something similar, the most recent example being . But these third-party efforts can often be hit or miss, and because Teller isn’t yet available for testing, it’s hard to say for now how well it will fare. But the company makes some interesting promises, at least: Teller users will not need to run through any special setup or “training” procedures; Teller won’t create extra folders; messages are never read by third-party servers. And here’s the kicker – the company claims that Teller will be the first inbox that becomes efficient if you check it often. According to Marsh, the “magic” part of Teller is built on your implicit behavior. “In other words, the app measures the actions you naturally do when you’re handling email — not unlike the way Google analytics measures what you click or how long you’re on a website — and then our algorithm uses that data to decide who matters, what you should see first, etc.” he explains. Every time the user refreshes their inbox, the messages are automatically resorted based on that algorithm. Unread messages rise to the top, along with those from important relationships. Marsh, who spent six months designing the Teller inbox after researching users’ problems and complaints about email for many months prior, says that there wasn’t really a “Eureka” moment here. He explains he’s always been the guy companies hire to solve problems. “More conversion. More engagement. Whatever,” Marsh says. “Email was a problem we chose to solve, because we think we can. Not an idea we are chasing.” , for those those unfamiliar, founded in 2004 and headquartered in Stockholm, grew to become one of the larger online social games. Teller’s founders worked there during a time when founders from Spotify, Oscar, Wrapp, Tictail and others were also there, and watched it grow from a small startup to a game with some 200 million users. Brodd’s role at Stardoll involved being responsible for large-scale back-end performance optimizations. The team plans to launch Teller for Mac in September, but versions for iOS, Android, and Windows are already planned. A future round of funding is also planned to help them grow the team. Email is an incredibly tough challenge to solve because it has been around for so long that everyone has developed their own management styles and triage techniques. And people are often married to their preferred user interface, distrusting anything that disrupts their usual flow. But thanks to inbox triage app or a number of email startups have been encouraged to keep trying to “fix email.” Readers who want to register for an early invite to Teller, can . Those who sign up today (and through this weekend) will receive a special code later this summer which will help them move to the front of the line when the early access system goes live. |
On The Hunt For Better Margins, Fab Debuts Hem, A New Furnishings And Design Brand | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | Just two weeks after Fab.com announced the — a Helsinki, Finland-based maker of furniture, lights and other home deco products — the online design store is moving swiftly to the next stage of its new strategy to focus more on original goods: it’s launching , a new line of customizable, “affordable” furniture and products, designed in-house and also by third parties. As part of the new launch, it looks like Fab will dropping the “Fab Europe” name, or at least de-emphasizing it a lot more going forward. “One Nordic, MassivKonzept and Fab Europe will all fold into Hem,” a spokesperson tells me. MassivKonzept is the German retailer that Fab , just ahead of a massive funding round, to kick off its move into original products and physical stores (specifically in Germany, where a spokesperson tells me there will be three in operation). Part of Fab’s challenge up to now has been that of all e-commerce companies based around physical goods: building out an operation that balances keeping stock of a range of products, and then selling and shipping them in a timely way, all while maintaining decent margins. In a business that is driven on economies of scale — and hard competition from other and bigger players ready to compete on those margins (from Amazon and eBay through to Rocket Internet outfits and ) — that’s proven to be a challenge for the company. “We are creating a new kind of home company that delivers more of what people want—good design, easy assembly, customization, affordable prices and multi-point shopping opportunities—and less of what they don’t—commoditized style, lengthy ship times, and inflexible shopping experience,” explained Jason Goldberg, Fab’s CEO, in a statement. While a lot of Fab’s furniture efforts have been focused on Europe up to now, the company now is going to see if the same model will work elsewhere. Hem, Fab says, will be sold in 30 markets worldwide. Unlike its European business, which has now whittled down to selling furniture, Fab says it will continue to sell in the U.S. “a whimsical, unique and colorful assortment of products people know and love.” Hem is taking early sign-ups now, and plans to open its doors for business in September, the company says. The company said that some as of yesterday. Judging by the that Hem — Swedish for “home” (how Euro!) — is placing on its new , it looks like the new brand will be the vehicle for a lot of the products that One Nordic has already been producing for a while now (from metallic lampshades to the bent wood “Bento” tables and chairs), plus some new additions. In all there will be about 300 products in the Hem selection, the company tells me. |
A Drone Over PragueCrunch | John Biggs | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | When I held the first in I didn’t expect much. I loved the city but I wasn’t sure what sort of start-up ecosystem it had. But, in those strange days when and money was contracting, I found everything about the Czech Republic amazing. The people were friendly and had some amazing ideas and their energy was infectious. Fast forward to today and the same energy is almost everywhere. I could land in Taipei or Sydney or Anchorage and find cool people doing cool things and hoping to grab the brass ring. Sometimes it seems that it’s too much, this theatre of entrepreneurship, but I know that in all these places the goal is genuine and pure: people want to change the world, whether that means making a new taxi app or building a . But nowhere is that energy more apparent than in Prague. Last night’s event shows us how far all of us have come. The pitches were more polished and better rehearsed. The ideas were solid. And the technology was cooler. Take , for example. When we held our second event he took a panoramic shot of PragueCrunch from the ground. The image was pretty darn cool for the time and showed just a glimpse of what we would see in the next few years as cameras began recreating these images in high def. This is PragueCrunch in 2009:
in This time Martin flew a drone over PragueCrunch, taking shots at 10 meters and 50 meters. The results are breathtaking. The photos are crisp and beautifully colored and the detail is amazing and it shows the entire panorama of a vibrant, effusive city. It’s a great example of how far we’ve all come.
in
in So thanks, Prague, for making this event a success. And thanks to the techies all over the world who are turning the engines of commerce, politics, art, and science and who, for a few hours, filled the venue with amazing pitches, great conversations, and an energy that shows that from the ground we’re making waves but from 50 meters up we’re changing the world. |
Lessons From Sourcebits’ Road To Acquisition | Ashwin Ramasamy | 2,014 | 7 | 5 | , an enterprise mobility and telecom software services company, , a design-led engineering company that builds mobile apps for enterprise and consumer markets. The acquisition seems to be for capabilities. In a tough hiring market, teams with execution maturity at an enterprise level make perfect sense. The sale also strongly points to the growing appetite of tools, SDKs, platforms and API vendors for . |
The Government Once Built Silicon Valley | Vitaly M. Golomb | 2,014 | 7 | 4 | In May, I received an invitation to participate in the “Startup Global Design Workshop” hosted by the White House Business Council and Business Forward. The organizations are working on bridging the gap between entrepreneurs and Washington. Currently, small-to-medium-sized enterprises are responsible for 98 percent of U.S. exports. As part of the President’s National Export Initiative, this event was an effort to determine how American startups can be made aware-of and interested in exporting more and sooner. A small number of forward-thinking venture capital firms like and have looked outside Silicon Valley for some time. More recently, even has realized it needs to get out of its Silicon Valley comfort zone and take advantage of worldwide talent and growing markets. Looking at the stats, it is only surprising that most Silicon Valley VC firms are still only willing to make investments within an hour’s drive of their Sand Hill office: Decades and generations of specialization have concentrated the financial industry in New York City, the entertainment industry in Hollywood, and of course the center of the startup universe in Silicon Valley. That last one was no accident. It all got started when Fredrick Terman returned to Stanford with 11 top researchers from the Harvard Radio Research Lab (which arguably helped the allies win the WWII air war over Europe). He landed the first government contract in 1946. By the start of the Korean War in 1950, Stanford was the single best prepared institution to help NSA, CIA, and various military branches on classified Cold War technology research. The U.S. government soon became Stanford research’s biggest customer. Terman, whether out of brilliant insight or philosophical conviction, simultaneously created a path and motivation for his students to form companies rather than staying in the university setting to perform pure research and collect degrees. Thus, the Bay Area quickly moved from apple orchards to becoming Microwave Alley and spawning companies like Varian. In 1955 (the same year Terman became provost of Stanford) William Shockley, who ran military research for a decade and a half and co-invented the transistor (Nobel Prize 1956), came to the Bay Area and created Shockley Semiconductor – the first semi conductor company. Shockley’s “Traitorous 8” employees famously left to start Fairchild. From that spawned 60+ chip companies by the time the likes of Apple rolled around 20 years later. By the mid-50s, the first Silicon Valley IPOs like Varian and HP began attracting the attention of east coast “risk capital” investors and the first Bay Area angel investors. In 1958, the Small Business Administration (SBA) created a 2:1 fund-matching program to encourage venture capital investment – for every dollar invested, the SBA would grant two. In 1978, the government slashed capital gains taxes and allowed pension funds to invest in venture funds. This created an inflection point for the venture capital industry and grew it 10-fold overnight. In the period starting with the close of WWII to the late 70s, the U.S. government created ideal economic conditions for technology innovation and commercialization to thrive in Silicon Valley. By the early 90s, when it was time to commercialize the next technology wave — the Internet — Silicon Valley was already on the fourth generation of technology entrepreneurship. With that experience and specialization came an ecosystem full of engineering and technology sales and marketing talent, service professionals, investment firms and entrepreneurs turned angel investors. Most importantly, a scientific approach to entrepreneurialism of experimentation with no stigma or fear of failure. From the outside, it seems Silicon Valley has it all figured out. There is, however, one problem any VC or experienced entrepreneur will gladly complain about to anyone who will listen. At a time when there is arguably too much investment money providing ample ammunition in the talent war, finding, affording, and retaining top technical talent is hands-down the hardest task any company that has found its market has to deal with. This phenomenon also happens to be the biggest inflationary issue in the entire ecosystem driving up salaries and substantially reducing capital efficiency for investors. It artificially inflates valuations and even has a hand in gentrification and the rise of hipster communities like San Francisco’s Mission District. From the macro perspective, it is easy to see why the federal government measures success in exports. From the startup perspective, we care far more about being able to reasonably make and iterate products first and foremost. Herein lie my suggestions on how the U.S. government can help its own export goals and the preservation of Silicon Valley’s – and by extension, America’s – leadership position in technology. Focus on immigration reform and Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) education. For hundreds of years, the U.S. was nation of immigrants. Somehow in recent times, immigration has become a cornerstone issue for conservative politicians. They’ve twisted it into the “enemy of jobs” instead of the economic driver and job-creator it has always been. As a result, the U.S. regularly kicks out brilliant foreign engineers who would gladly stay to start companies as soon as they finish their education. To add insult to injury, it is difficult, costly, and extremely time-consuming to attain work visas for even the best and brightest who share in the American dream but were born in the wrong country. So countries like Canada are happily taking all of our brilliant rejects and benefiting from their entrepreneurial efforts. Education has also become heavily politicized and increasingly more – instead of less – difficult to attain. At a time when an investment should be made into basic science and math, starting in grade-school, municipal educational budgets are being cut. By the time these kids graduate, few have the grounding required to go into technical fields. Even if they are fortunate enough to get into a competitive technical degree program, they will be saddled with debt for years to come — a more effective deterrent than most realize. What most politicians fail to understand, or at least act on, is the fact that the make up of the workforce has to evolve with the times. One shouldn’t need any more evidence than the most recent “jobless recovery”. Having effectively given up manufacturing to other, lower cost-of-living countries, intellectual property development (mostly technical) is America’s future. For the last several decades the U.S. government has been taking Silicon Valley, its primary growth engine, for granted. Technology is a proud talking point for politicians, yet there is a severe lack of resource allocation and participation in the ecosystem. Representatives of the U.S. Patent and Trademark office will be quick to point to their Silicon Valley branch; however in the era of “software eats the world”, not only does the patent process move on a glacial time-scale but patents themselves have become almost irrelevant compared to the make-or-break importance of customer traction. Government can serve as important connective tissue here by establishing and funding a different type of Silicon Valley presence; staffed by leaders in the technology and entrepreneurial community who are respected by the startup inner-circle and know where to apply resources effectively. Much like sophisticated, value-add investors are “smart money” this can be “smart government”. Direct paths could be established to educational institutions from public grade schools. This knowledge can then be propagated to the rest of the country where today Silicon Valley might as well be a foreign planet. Partnerships could be made with top accelerators to provide their participants unparalleled distribution akin to what is done in many, more motivated, countries today. This innovation office can also take an active role in the numerous technology conferences and events as a valued contributor and not just occasional participant. Knowing where the hot foreign markets are, the U.S. Commerce Department has an opportunity to create economic mission offices, providing U.S. startups and more mature companies direct access to growing regions. Crucial local ecosystem partnerships can be established, maintained, and offered as a resource for U.S. entrepreneurs. Imagine deciding to explore a market like Brazil for instance, making one call, and a week later having a guest office to land in and a Rolodex of vetted partners offered-up for meetings. Outside of consultants who will take the watch off your wrist to tell you what time it is, this is something only a government agency can provide. Another overlooked area where a government agency can provide unique value is in foreign market operations. Startups usually ignore foreign markets until much later, in large part due to the time needed to understand and setup local operations, hiring, and IP protection. Most countries want the custom of U.S. companies and if a U.S. agency can help simplify the logistics, entrepreneurs would take advantage of the opportunities sooner. A special, turn-key trade agreement whittling down months of local hoop-jumping down to a one-page form would do wonders here. Overall, export is good for the U.S. economy. In a world of increasing specialization, Silicon Valley and technology innovation are the U.S. growth-drivers for the foreseeable future. Yet the U.S. is stuck in second gear when it comes to supporting our industry in the right way. It has not been about monetary support for a long time. Instead, substantial efforts need to be invested in education and immigration reform to solve the talent dilemma. The U.S. government also has the power to accelerate the pace at which domestic companies go global. All of this just needs to be done in concert with the brilliant minds that turned apple orchards into a digital goldmine. Much can be done and I’m hopeful the right partners will get involved on the government side. I will welcome and support them and I hope you will too. |
Israeli High Tech Gets Aggressive | Adam Fisher | 2,014 | 7 | 5 | Israel has always taken a disproportionate share of global media attention. This has long held true in international politics, where Israel would prefer a little attention, but also in high tech where the media attention on startup success has often been overstated and anecdotal. For the better part of a decade, Israeli venture returns have been disappointing, frustrating many who were once convinced they had found the next big thing. But more than a decade after the last bubble burst, the Israeli venture capital industry has steadily matured, reaching a turning point over the past year. The return profile in Israeli high-tech investments is improving remarkably as entrepreneurs build stronger, more ambitious startups with eyes on a much bigger prize and a higher probability of success. The Israeli tech industry may not be advancing at the pace that impatient investors and reporters demand, but the last decade has also proven that Israeli high tech is far from a fleeting trend. As a fund that has been investing in Israel since 1992, with a dedicated office there since 2007, we at Bessemer see a stark difference today versus what we found in the Israeli startup environment 10 years ago. Israeli entrepreneurs have always been ambitious, but the maturity of the Israeli entrepreneurial ecosystem now gives emerging companies a better chance to deliver on big dreams and therefore a better chance of raising money to pursue them. Today’s crop of entrepreneurs has grown up in the startup ecosystem and seen peers disappointed by selling too early or shutting down only a couple years after raking it in. This means not only more serial entrepreneurs, but more maturity and experience in the first 50 hires these startups make. The perspective shows. Venture-backed M&A and IPO exits have grown each year since 2011; (Google) was the largest venture-backed M&A deal in 13 years, but so was (Cisco) when it was acquired earlier 2013 and when it sold in 2012. , which started trading on NASDAQ late last year, was the largest IPO of a venture-backed Israeli start-up …and has since been followed by . But companies such as , , and others will likely file this year if they haven’t filed confidentially already. And I am increasingly confident that in the near future, the first results of a Google search for “Israeli IPO” will yield links related to public offerings rather than the acclaimed Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. In most cases, these successes come years after rejecting otherwise lucrative offers, with management choosing an independent path despite higher risks. Remaining independent is generally much harder for Israeli startups relative to American peers. To start, emphasis on cutting-edge tech and strategic partnerships triggers interest at a very early stage, well before a proper business has been built. And because scaling an independent business 6K miles away from the customer base is always daunting for the Israeli founder, accepting an early acquisition offer is often a very rational decision. Startups become large, independent success stories when they “control their destiny,” which requires owning the distribution channel and, most importantly, owning the Historically, Israeli companies and their venture backers thought it sufficient to be the owner of unique and proprietary IP. For this reason, Israeli startup success typically hinged on building strategic partnerships and OEMs that could bring strong technology to far-away markets at a relatively low cost and low risk. It’s often forgotten, but this is how Checkpoint (Sun), Amdocs (AT&T), and (GE), became success stories. Twenty years later, Israeli startups now know that such partnership shortcuts come at a profound cost to the company’s ability to stay independent long-term. Unfortunately, Israeli startups still tend to hire biz dev well ahead of sales, but the successful ones stand out for making every effort to own the means of customer acquisition as well as the resulting relationship. This industry-wide transition is exemplified by the rise of Internet, SaaS and mobile companies — something once thought unthinkable in Israel. Wix, Waze and Outbrain each devised a method for scalable direct customer acquisition, whether it was through advertising channels, mobile platforms or sales reps. The same is true with many enterprise-focused companies, which increasingly eschew the “white knight” OEM and build an independent go-to-market strategy. American VCs first entered the Israeli market in the late nineties, focusing primarily on follow-on financings in startups originally funded by local Israeli funds. Over the last five years, the traditional roles of early-stage Israeli funds and later stage American funds have become blurred. Six American VCs with deal-makers residing in Israel, including BVP, are among the most active early stage investors in Israel and at least four newly established Israeli VCs are focused exclusively on later-stage opportunities. The resulting American imprint at the early stage has been substantial, further fanning the flames of ambition and independence of Israeli entrepreneurs. American investors have brought not only larger checkbooks but a better read of the U.S. market and competitive landscape. American VCs have also introduced a more aggressive set of venture tools aimed at helping Israeli start-ups grow faster including growth equity financings, acquisition strategies and previously shunned founder liquidity. It’s American VC influence that’s behind the direct customer acquisition strategy and the spurning of strategic partnerships. Recent high-profile exits have investors once again focused on Israel. Active VCs are reaping the rewards after much patience, and institutional investors – who were heading for the proverbial door – have paused and are taking a second look. Some see these startups as not yet polished enough to warrant attention, but they do themselves a disservice. Israeli high tech has matured to a point where we will continue to see a steady stream of large M&A exits and IPOs for years to come. Israel is the only real technology rival to the Silicon Valley, and the Valley know this well. Just as political observers no longer view Israel as the underdog, few tech giants and investors are willing to underestimate the potential of an Israeli startup. |
The New Fast Food | Matt Mireles | 2,014 | 7 | 5 | I was trying to understand why food startups are so hot when I ran across the following two charts. In the image, you’ll notice that I circled a line labeled “P/E.” In the language of finance, P/E is short for “price-to-earnings ratio,” which is the relative value of a company’s stock price to its profitability (aka earnings). When a company enjoys a high stock price yet barely turns a profit––like ––it shows in the P/E ratio. This typically happens when investors think the company will grow and reap huge profits down the road at some later date (or that someone else will pay an even higher price later on). Generally speaking, having a high P/E ratio means that investors like you and believe that you have a bright future. The average P/E ratio on the major stock markets indices is 15. Google’s P/E ratio is 30. Chipotle’s P/E ratio is 56. Said another way: Chipotle’s profits are worth more than Google’s. Mind. Blown. Which brings me to the original inspiration for this post: . Gagan Biyani, the founder of Sprig, is a friend of mine. Sometime last year we caught up and he told me about a new food delivery startup he was working on. They’d make the food themselves, he explained, and deliver it too — really fast. Oof, I thought. Not a bad idea, but sounds like a tough sell to the capital markets. Lots of upfront cost, little relative profit, no clear customer lock-in or network effect. How would they ever join the ? Since that conversation, Sprig has gone on to raise over $10 million from Greylock and others. Immediately, the floodgates opened: raised $10 million. raised $28 million. Capital has literally flooded the food space, but I still didn’t get it. Why? What were the VCs seeing that I wasn’t? At first glance, these companies reminded me of , which I classify as a premium service targeting a niche audience of wealthy urbanites willing to pay a 30 percent premium to have food delivered. How big could these businesses get, really, especially outside of the SF bubble? What the hell were investors thinking? As I thought about it more, I realized that while Postmates and Caviar are services on top of restaurants, Sprig, Munchery and SpoonRocket restaurants. Really, they’re the new fast food chains. Like a Chipotle, these new fast food chains operate commercial kitchens, pay a chef to design their menu and hire low-skilled minions to mass-produce the actual food dishes. Unlike a Chipotle, these new fast food chains can lease out cheap real commercial real estate in out of the way, low-cost locations. Not only do the new fast food chains pay less per square foot of real estatec, they also need a fewer locations and thus less real estate in absolute terms. How many locations does SpoonRocket need to feed all of San Francisco? Three… maybe? Then think of Burger King — how many locations would they need to serve an equivalent volume of customers? Fifteen? Twenty? And finally, instead of someone upselling you fries with that, the new fast food chains seal the deal with nice photography and a well-designed mobile app. Not bad efficiency. Yet for the money they save on cashiers, the new fast food chains introduce a new, countervailing cost: human delivery agents. And with fuel costs being driven up by the rise of China’s middle class, delivery ain’t cheap — Sprig pays their SF delivery workers $16 an hour. Software is eating food. From an operations perspective, the relative costs of these inputs — real estate, food prep, delivery — are going to determine how profitable the new fast food chains are. The pressure to increase efficiency and drive down the costs in these companies will be great. For the workers on the other side of the iPhone app, the old industrial logic of low-pay-for-low-skill will apply just as it ever has, especially as more of the intelligence and skill becomes centralized in the form of software and the buffeting effect of venture capital goes away in five years or so when these companies mature. Due to their vertically integrated operations, these companies can reimagine the entire value chain from the vantage point of software. They can apply A/B testing and innovative startup thinking to not just their website or mobile apps, but the entire food production and cooking process. Here, in the unglamorous backend of operations, is where the profits will be won or lost. By way of comparison, the publicly traded stocks of the old fast food companies are kicking ass. In terms of P/E ratios, are doing better than ; is beating the pants off of and nipping on the buds of Amazon. How big can these businesses get? In a word, By market cap, McDonald’s is a $100 billion business — that’s two-thirds of an Amazon. At $19 billion, Chipotle is worth a whole WhatsApp. Hell, Taco Bell’s parent company is almost worth one-and-a-half Twitters. Source: Creditloan.com Whither the next unicorn(s)? Food. Trillions of dollars of consumption are quite literally in play. U.S. consumers spend $6,130 a year on food (~10 percent of all spending, depending how you slice it). And a dollar of Chipotle’s profit is worth more than a dollar of Google’s. There will many winners. Unlike social networks or online marketplaces, there’s no winner-take-all dynamic in the food world. Homebrew’s Satya Patel summed up the typical VC mindset in his own , writing: “Many markets have room for more than one “winner” but very few have room for more than two or three.” Satya is wrong about food. Food is a market like the Internet is a market — it’s too big to be to considered just one “market.” There’s high-end, low-end, middle of the road, Mexican, Sushi, Thai, Burgers, etc. The list goes on and on forever. Witness Jack in the Box ($2.4 billion), Panera Bread ($4 billion), Starbucks ($58 billion), Burger King ($9.4 billion), and more. The list of billion-dollar restaurant chains goes on and on, addressing all manner of market segments. Practically speaking, people don’t want to eat the same thing every day, thus supplier diversity is natural, organic and inevitable. And so it will be with the new fast-food chains who disrupt the old. The food opportunity is so big because people need to eat three times a day. And unlike casual social interaction — here’s looking at you, Facebook — people happily pay for food. Counted in terms of DAUs, the number of potential daily active users for these companies is in the billions. A thundering herd of food unicorns is assembling itself on the horizon. Prepare yourself. It’s not a fad. It’s not over yet. And you’re not too late. This is just the beginning. |
Zuora’s Journey To Managing The Subscription Economy | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 7 | 5 | The idea for subscription billing startup was born in Marc Benioff’s office. In 2006, K.V. Rao, then a WebEx senior engineer, was meeting with Benioff and Salesforce CMO Tien Tzuo. Tzuo made a comment that subscription billing was a hard problem for Salesforce, and Rao agreed that WebEx also felt the same challenge. He left the meeting with the feeling that this problem was something he could solve. Rao researched ideas for the next few months and recruited fellow WebEx engineer Cheng Zou to work on the fledgling startup. The next step was to raise money. By then it was 2007, and it wasn’t easy to raise money, he says, especially for a company that wasn’t consumer-focused. Rao and Zou scored a meeting with Benchmark’s newest partner at the time, Peter Fenton. As Rao tells it, he totally bombed the meeting. “[Fenton] told me that it was one of the worst presentations he’d seen in VC history.” Fenton did see a potential opportunity with the idea, but saw deficiency in the team. Not long after seeing (and passing) on Zuora, Fenton had breakfast with Tzuo and told him about Rao and his idea, with the subtext that this could potentially be Tzuo’s next step after Salesforce. Fenton always believed Tzuo would be a great CEO, and saw the potential to apply his Salesforce learnings to Zuora. Zuora’s premise was around a cloud-based billings platform that would alleviate the need for online businesses to develop their own billing systems, especially to handle recurring payments like those associated with subscriptions. The company wanted to build a platform that would automate metering, pricing and billing for products, bundles and configurations. Rao and Tzuo started the standard co-founder “dating” ritual. They met for coffee, took to the whiteboard for strategy sessions, and had a few double dates with their wives. Tzuo got the feeling that Zuora was on to something and this was his next step. So he went to talk to Benioff to get his approval and perspective. As Tzuo recalls, Benioff always said he had to go to his then-boss Larry Ellison at Oracle three times before he got the approval to leave. Tzuo expected Benioff to be equally as hard on him — but Benioff believed in the idea, and as Tzuo explains, “is a big believer in building.” Benioff was also a believer in karma: Ellison had put some of the first money into Salesforce, and he ended up putting $1 million in Zuora. Tzuo started at Zuora in January 2008, and kicked off his new beginning by helping to raise the company’s first round of funding. Tzuo went back to Fenton to see if Benchmark was interested, and Fenton, who was on his honeymoon at the time, immediately lined up the partnership for a meeting. “This is a company where there was a gut feeling with partnership that we should invest,” says Fenton. “There was a glaring need in the market for a billing system, and the thing that haunts billing is the complexity. Zuora changed that.” Zuora ended up raising $6.5 million led by Benchmark, with Benioff and Tzuo both investing. K.V. Rao, Tien Tzuo, Cheng Zou We now live in a world where, on the front end, paying for subscriptions is as easy as tapping a button and entering our payment information. But on the back end, subscription billing is as complicated as “designing an entire database,” says Zou. “It’s not something that a programmer can do because our ambitions were so broad. We wanted to create a billing system that covered any industry.” As Tzuo explains, “This isn’t something two kids from Y Combinator can do….if you think of Salesforce as the CRM for every industry, and WebEx as web conferencing for any industry, we wanted to be cloud-based billing for everyone.” It took the Zuora team six months to turn the prototype into a live cloud-based engine, and in July 2008, the company’s first customers, Coremetrics and Marketo, went live. For most companies, billing is complicated and difficult to build in-house. Legacy systems are expensive and cumbersome. As SaaS started to become more of a buzzword in 2008, customers found Zuora through simple Google searches. “We walked into demand right away,” says Tzuo. Early customers included then fledgling startup Box (which is still a customer today), and even Sun Microsystems, which remained a customer until Oracle bought the company. UK company Reed Business Information was one of Zuora’s earliest large deals. Mary Collerton explains that in late 2008, Reed Business Information was looking to replace a system in-house to manage electronic subscription billing. “We preferred to buy before building; we found Zuora through a search on the web and were impressed with the functionality they could provide.” Even now, she says, the executive team checks in with her and her team to ensure integrations are going well. From the start, Tzuo wanted to make sure that there was an element of customer centricity. At off-sites with the entire company, each employee is assigned a customer and has to walk through their billing challenges and present to the company how each customer should approach their billing situation. “We really want everyone to understand what it means to be in our customers’ shoes. Every employee should have a deep understanding of this — not just our sales or implementation teams,” says Tzuo. He still interviews every single employee to ensure a good cultural fit. In mid-summer of 2008, Zuora was at Benchmark giving the partners a product update, and Bill Gurley told the team to start raising soon. Lehman Brothers had not collapsed yet, but Gurley said he was a little nervous about the Q4 funding environment, and the Series B needed to be raised soon. In August, Zuora signed a term sheet for $20 million, which was led by Shasta Ventures, with Benchmark, Benioff and Tzuo all putting in more. Benioff had given Tzuo advice to get to cash flow positive as soon as possible, and for the next year Zuora didn’t spend a lot, choosing to focus instead on serving customers. The economic downturn ended up being a blessing in some ways for organic sales — bigger companies saw the cloud as a way to save money and were more willing to bet on the smaller guys, says Tzuo. In 2009, Zuora was able to triple revenue. “It took us a few years to get our product footprint broad enough so customers felt that they didn’t have to make big tradeoffs.” Redpoint led a $20 million round in Zuora in 2010, in which the valuation doubled, says Tzuo. A year later, Index Ventures participated in the company’s Series D. Around the same time, Zuora started to place more people internationally, focusing first on Europe and Australia. Index’s Mike Volpi led the round and joined the company’s board. As Volpi explains, Tzuo and his team have set themselves apart by taking an existing knowledge base around the challenges of billing, and extending this to an actual product. “This is very special and unusual,” says Volpi. He adds that there is no one who understand subscription services as well as Tzuo. The company raised its last round in 2013, at $50 million, at just under a $1 billion in valuation. Next World Capital and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital were both in the most recent round. Zuora is expecting $100 million in sales for this year, we hear. Despite building an impressive set of technologies used by companies like Dell, Zendesk, Pearson and Tata, Zuora has never fielded any serious acquisition offers. It’s surprising considering that some of the company’s contemporaries, particularly in the cloud SaaS space, like Zendesk and Box, were getting serious attention. “It doesn’t really phase us to not have any acquisition interest,” he says. “And we believe SAP and Oracle are archaic — if they acquired us it wouldn’t be a good fit.” Fenton says he is sometimes surprised that Zuora hasn’t fielded more acquisition interest but at the end of the day, Zuora has built something that doesn’t have much competition and are the clear market leader. One area where Zuora will need to focus its attention is on integrations. Volpi believes that shutting down the boundaries between data will be key for further adoption. The company hasn’t made any acquisitions but is considering doing more in M&A in the near future, perhaps in startups where the technology could add to the existing product line. Zuora’s seven-year journey is in stark contrast to the more common startup journey we see these days with two to three years of development, and then a multi-billion-dollar valuation or exit or acqui-hire. Fenton credits the perseverance of the leadership team in having an unwavering commitment to success, despite the hardships of running a startup. “They signed up to solve a really hard problem, and they have been able to stay motivated to solve it, while many would have lost faith. Tzuo and his team are spiritually connected to this, which has allowed to him to build a great team,” he says. Fenton adds that he usually tells founders that it’s best not to focus on how long the road is and to stay in the moment. But Fenton also firmly sees Zuora as a public company. Bankers are already courting Tzuo to see if he’s interested in taking the company public. While that’s the goal, he’s not focused on it at the moment. He’s already been through this rodeo after working through an IPO with Salesforce. For now Tzuo doesn’t want to be distracted from Zuora’s vision, which is helping companies to find success in the subscription economy. |
Gillmor Gang: Pass the Buck | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 7 | 5 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — spend a late Thursday afternoon on experiments, office shake ups, and a potential bank shot from an old monopolist. With the world going cup crazy, you wouldn’t fault those who traded tech for TV and shelter from the tweetstorm. The Facebook social reengineering has been all the media rage, and whether Twitter can overcome the innovation drought they created by starving their developers is an open question. But If the reports are true, Microsoft may have figured out a nifty way to ride the notification wave back from rich and irrelevant. The World Cup teaches us a lot can happen late in the game, and it usually does. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Google Now Is The Killer App For Android Wear | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 5 | Google’s I/O keynote may have been a bit of a jumble of different product announcements — many of which won’t be available until later this year — but was what most people in the audience wanted to hear about. While there is plenty of Android in Google’s smartwatch operating system and while developers will be able to develop apps specifically for it, Wear in its current form is fundamentally about bringing Google Now notifications to your wrist. While I’ve had Google Now on my phone for a long time now, the more I use Wear, the more I feel like it was custom-made for Google Now. Indeed, this is the first time I really feel Now is living up to its promise. It’s also the first time I find myself paying full attention to Now, despite its prominence on Android before. Android Wear, of course, also shows you all of your notifications from your phone (and when they are interactive, Wear will automatically mimic those, too). You could push all of your phone notifications to your watch, but that would be overkill. Thankfully, Google lets you choose which applications can push to Wear. But its most useful feature — and maybe its killer feature overall — is definitely easy access to Google Now. At this point, everybody is pretty much familiar with Google Now, but there is something fundamentally different between using it on your phone and on your wrist. Sure, the mission is the same on both platforms: Google wants to give you the right information at the right time. When you’re at work, it shows you the drive time to home. Got an appointment somewhere else? It’ll show you when to leave. At the airport? It’ll show you the barcode for your boarding pass. It’s one thing for that information to be available on your phone, but on your wrist, it suddenly becomes so much more accessible. That is, of course, only when Google Now gets it right — and most of the time, it does. The company has been working hard on bringing more information to Now and that has made it quite a bit more useful by regularly adding more information and new cards to it. Some cards that Google shows on the phone don’t make sense on Wear (links for topics you recently search for, for example) and those thankfully never make it to the watch. Wear doesn’t always get it right, though. If you end up swiping the weather card away by mistake, for example, you can’t easily get it back. That’s a fundamental problem with Wear — and maybe the only one that really annoys me. For Google Now, at least, it’d be nice to have an easy way to flip through all of your cards at all times. Just like Google Now brings together a number of Google’s services into one product, Wear has a similar feel to it. It’s a mix of what it has learned from Android and its ecosystem, its advances in voice recognition and its newly found design chops. All of that comes together to bring Google Now to your wrist, and while that may sound like a minor thing, it’s actually a very useful experience. Whether that’s worth $200 to you is a different question, but after using Wear for a bit more than a week now, I can actually see myself wearing one of these watches going forward — and before this I hadn’t worn a watch for at least a decade. In the next few months, Google will get some competition from Microsoft, Apple and a few startups in this space. For better or worse, none of them know as much about you as Google does, so it’ll be hard for them to replicate the Google Now experience. That should give Google a bit of an edge against the competition — unless the iWatch turns out to be so amazing that people will buy it even if it just shows the time and phone notifications. |
Lessig’s Mayday Hits $5M Fundraising Goal To Elect Pro-Campaign Finance Reform Politicians | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 5 | Lawrence Lessig’s just raised a lot of money…to help get the money out of politics by campaigning to . This morning the Super PAC hit its $5 million grassroots fundraising goal thanks to 47,000 supporters, which will be matched by $5 million in donations from wealthy tech luminaries. Combined with the $1 million it crowdfunded earlier this year that was matched by Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, TED’s Chris Anderson, and Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham brings Mayday to it full $12 million funding goal before this year’s mid-term elections. Harvard Law Professor Lessig’s ability to raise large sums from both wealthy tech luminaries and the general public shows broad support for making elected officials less beholden to big money campaign donors. People can still . In a upon reaching the goal, Lessig wrote “The pundits say ‘America doesn’t care about this issue.’ This is America caring. And this is America demanding something more.” CTO Brian Boyko followed this up with a message explaining next steps, noting “Now we need to think beyond simple fundraising, and start thinking about how to get the most out of not only the money we’ve collected but more importantly the great community we’ve built.” Lessig told TechCrunch this week that while his group pushed for the ambitious $5 million crowdfunding goal in one month because “the urgency is to be able to pick the districts and begin the campaign. (Plus I am a bit of a drama queen).” There wasn’t time to waste. He framed the campaign finance issue as a problem for the tech industry because corrupt politicians threaten innovation and a fair Internet. “We have no protection for network neutrality because of the enormous influence of cable company’s money in the political system…If NN is your issue, then this is why you should see that politic$ is your issue too” Lessig says. With the “Super PAC to end all Super PACs” now funded with the $12 million it wants, if it successfully gets candidates elected in its 2014 pilot campaign it plans to raise orders of magnitude more money to elect an an more pro-campaign finance reform congress in 2016, enact reforms in 2017, and defend them in 2018. |
Who Watches The Watchmen? | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 7 | 5 | In honor of the Fourth of July, let’s talk a little about how horrifically paranoid and counterproductive the US government has become. And I’m not even talking about Congress! Instead I mean our old friend the , who, , have been singling out for special treatment anyone who displays any interest in tools which might make the NSA’s life more difficult. Go on, read the yourself, courtesy of a from Jacob Appelbaum and co. The message is clear: if you do not accept that the NSA has every right to spy on everything everyone does (oh, and store that data forever to be used against us in the future) then you are the enemy! For sheer horrifyingly hilarious absurdity this reminds me of the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade in Joseph Heller’s . Dear NSA, privacy is a fundamental right, not reasonable suspicion. — Eva (@evacide) The White House with a statement which included: the United States does not collect signals intelligence for the purpose of suppressing or burdening criticism or dissent Unfortunately that message doesn’t seem to have filtered down to the NSA flunkies who, you know, actually write , which includes this awfully revealing comment: …terms and websites relating to the TAILs (The Amnesic
Incognito Live System) software program, a comsec mechanism advocated by
extremists on extremist forums. I mean, wow. are clearly aimed at at least dissent. If that isn’t a reflection of broader NSA culture, I will eat my hat. And who do people, and especially bureaucrats, marginalize? That’s right: those who they would like to to “suppress and/or burden.” It’s not just the NSA. The Brazilian government facial-recognition goggles that can recognize 400 faces per second to police the World Cup. The UK allegedly sports to watch its population of 70 million. Police forces across the USA would start surveilling their territory with drones. But the sheer scale of the NSA is different. It has collected for facial recognition — turning your . It spies on , including, of course, the USA: A Swiss academic who has information on the German government’s position in the run-up to an international trade negotiation, for instance, could be targeted if the government has determined there is a foreign-intelligence need for that information. If a U.S. college professor e-mails the Swiss professor’s e-mail address or phone number to a colleague, the American’s e-mail could be collected as well, under the program’s court-approved rules. The fundamental problem is this: they get to watch us; they even get to focus greater attention on any of us who display any interest in being watched; but we don’t get to watch them at all. When they can’t conceal, they deceive; when they can’t deceive, they obfuscate; and when they can’t even do that, they simply lie through their teeth, even to Congress’s collective face, and later call that “ .” There’s hope for online privacy. Tor remains remarkably effective; Tails is an interesting innovation; and end-to-end encryption, best exampled by Open Whisper Systems’ TextSecure and RedPhone — which won a Knight Foundation and will soon come to iOS — is the future. There may even be hope for , so that our information isn’t in the hands of a few huge megacorporate Stacks who can easily by coerced by governments. But that’s still not enough. I accept that the world needs watchmen, but someone also needs to watch the watchmen, and if you believe Congress, the courts, or the current White House administration are doing a remotely good enough job, then you are dangerously deluded. It is past time for the NSA to be either opened up or split apart — or both. Disclaimer/disclosure: Jake’s an old friend of mine. |
Hackers Target Silk Road Auction Participants In Scam | John Biggs | 2,014 | 7 | 5 | The folks at are reporting a fascinating phishing attack on leaked list of auction participants for the Silk Road bitcoins. The list, which appeared after a member of the failed to use BCC, identified all the parties attempting to bid on the bitcoin seized during a raid on the Silk Road marketplace. It has been a useful tool for scammers. In this case the thieves sent a set of interview questions to the participants while masquerading as . When participants opened the message, it forwarded them to a bogus email login page which captured logins and passwords. One company, was hardest hit. After logging in to read the document, the hackers used CTO Jim Chen’s email login to forward requests to members of the staff to send bitcoin to a certain wallet. The team sent 100 bitcoin to the wallet before the scam was uncovered. The . Given the irreversible nature of bitcoin transactions I’d expect these scams to happen more and more often, which could be an interesting problem for a startup to solve. Also always check your URLs, folks. |
Microsoft Goes After Botnet, Tanking No-IP’s Dynamic DNS Service For Regular Users In The Process | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Microsoft seized 23 domains this week from No-IP, a provider of dynamic DNS services, after filing a civil suit alleging that the domains in question were used to distribute malware. The domains, , were used 93 percent of the time for distributing the Bladabindi and Jenxcus malware families. A court granted Microsoft custodianship — DNS authority — of the digital properties so that it could “identify and route all known bad traffic to the Microsoft sinkhole and classify the identified threats.” It was not a smooth operation. In its zeal to take on cybercrime, Microsoft also disrupted normal service for regular users. The company noted this in a later statement: “Due to a technical error, however, some customers whose devices were not infected by the malware experienced a temporary loss of service.” Various reports online, however, directly dispute that claim. You won’t find too many advocates for malware and the like, but it seems that Microsoft stirred up more controversy than it expected to. The company acted through legal channels, making its actions likely under the purview of law, but many are incensed by its heavy-handed action against the infinitely smaller No-IP. A hashtag, , has been set up in protest. A taste: Domains are property, and Microsoft essentially appropriated control over No-IPs domains. No-IP isn’t pleased. In a in response to Microsoft’s actions, the company claims that Microsoft didn’t reach out to it before it acted — Microsoft declined to comment on the allegation, citing pending legal action — and that it has a “long history of proactively working with other companies when cases of alleged malicious activity have been reported to us.” In an , No-IP stated that “DNS is hard, and [Microsoft doesn’t] seem to be very good at it.” Microsoft thinks that No-IP had a role in “creating, controlling, and assisting in infecting millions of computers with malicious software.” No-IP has a slightly different take: Vitalwerks and No-IP have a very strict abuse policy. Our abuse team is constantly working to keep the No-IP system domains free of spam and malicious activity. We use sophisticated filters and we scan our network daily for signs of malicious activity. Even with such precautions, our free dynamic DNS service does occasionally fall prey to cyber scammers, spammers, and malware distributors. But this heavy-handed action by Microsoft benefits no one. We will do our best to resolve this problem quickly. Just what the hell is a dynamic DNS service? I asked TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois to explain: Dynamic DNS services like No-IP allow you to map your IP address — which can change at any time, depending on your ISP — to a domain name. That’s useful if you want to access your nannycam from work without having to remember an ever-changing IP address, for example. Normally, that would be a hassle to set up, but services like No-IP automate all of this for you. You can still use No-IP through one of its domains that Microsoft didn’t take over. |
The EFF Sues The NSA For Details On How The Government Discloses Security Flaws | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the National Security Agency (NSA) over government disclosure of security flaws that have been uncovered by the intelligence community. In the wake of the Heartbleed fiasco, and that the NSA both knew about the vulnerability and had exploited it, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) denied any prior knowledge of the bug. As the EFF , the ODNI stated that a policy in place called the “Vulnerabilities Equities Process” is used to decide when to disclose security flaws that it uncovers. Amid the controversy in April, the White House explained the process the administration uses to disclose cyber vulnerabilities But its explanation was vague and flawed. Michael Daniel, special assistant to the president and the cybersecurity center, said “we have established a disciplined, rigorous and high-level decision-making process for vulnerability disclosure.” Yet in the same paragraph, he goes on to say “there are no hard and fast rules.” He then goes on to give a list of broad questions he asks when an agency wants to withhold knowledge of a vulnerability. Another concern with the post is that it notes efforts to implement this policy were “re-invigorated” this spring. The reports (that the White House denied) accuse the DNI of knowing about the Heartbleed vulnerability for years. Was the policy being fully implemented before the Heartbleed reports put the public on high alert? In its suit, the EFF wants to know how the Vulnerabilities Equity Process was built, and how it works in practice. Leaning on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), it requested records that relate to “the development or implementation of the ‘Vulnerabilities Equity Process’ and . . . the ‘principles’ that guide the agency ‘decision-making process for vulnerability disclosure’ in the process described in the White House blog post.” Despite asking for expedited processing, the government failed to produce the requested material inside of the standard 21 day timeframe. As such, the EFF now is using more aggressive legal action force disclosure. It matters that we understand how the government approaches security flaws, especially when it feels compelled to disclose them, given that such weaknesses can be potent weapons. As the White House pointed out in its April post, disclosing a vulnerability could mean the government misses an opportunity to “thwart a terrorist attack, stop the theft of our nation’s intellectual property, or even discover more dangerous vulnerabilities.” But when the NSA finds a vulnerability and does not disclose the bug to the software maker, or community as a whole, all users of the code in question are open to exploit by other parties who discover the issue. The White House says it considers such risks when the government withholds this information, but it could and should be more transparent about how it arrives at these decisions that could endanger Americans’ security and privacy. |
Amazon Stands Up To FTC Demands For More Parental Controls | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Amazon is refusing to comply with a request from the Federal Trade Commission to implement stricter controls that would prevent children from making in-app purchases. The FTC is demanding Amazon implement a “consent” model similar to the one Apple conceded to earlier this year, . Amazon believes it already has implemented effective parental controls consistent with the model the FTC settled on with Apple, and it says it refunded customers who complained of children making in-app purchases without their permission. “In-app purchasing was and remains a new and rapidly evolving segment, and we have consistently improved the customer experience in response to data,” wrote Amazon’s lawyer Andrew DeVore in the letter. The FTC is threatening to take Amazon to court if it does not create a model like Apple’s to control children’s in-app purchases, according to Devore. Apple with the FTC in January that required the company to refund $32.5 million to 37,000 customers whose children made purchases on their iPad or iPod without permission. It also changed its billing practices to ensure that customers give expressed, informed consent for purchases before they are charged in the mobile store. Previously, if users entered their password to make one purchase, they were able to make unlimited purchases for the next 15 minutes. Currently Amazon gives parents the option of requiring a PIN for every in-app purchase. In his letter, DeVore said the company leads the industry in parental controls with Kindle Free Time, and Amazon says it is willing to take its fight to court. It seems the FTC’s decision to throw these demands at Amazon now could be proactive. The company is sure to have more in-app purchases with its first venture into smartphones, |
Salesforce Mobile Reports And Dashboards Provide In-depth Knowledge On The Fly | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | today announced a new mobile reports and dashboards tool that runs on their mobile Salesforce1 platform. The goal of the product is to give salespeople access to information on the go, presented to them in a customized fashion to meet the unique needs of each individual user. Salesforce customers have told them, it’s great to have access to data at their desks, but very often, salespeople are in the field and they need access to information wherever they are. The new Salesforce1 Mobile Reports and Dashboards product is designed to give them the information they need on the fly from their mobile devices. According to Salesforce, you can create custom dashboards with the data that matters most to you and you can even drill down into the data to see the raw data on which the dashboard was based. Further, you can tap into third-party graphing tools like Google Charts or the open source D3 graphing tool. As an example, say you’re the sales manager and you want to see your most lucrative opportunities for the month, you can bring up your pipeline dashboard, tap through to the underlying source data, sort by dollar amount and find which ones are most likely your most lucrative opportunities for the month, all from your mobile phone. The product includes APIs to tap into the third-party products, to bring in data from third-party sources such as SAP’s billing tool and to even embed Salesforce data in a third-party app. Anna Rosenman, director of analytics at Salesforce says there are a couple of key ideas at work in this product. First of all, they want to give customers access to the data that matters to each individual from a mobile device. As she said, you shouldn’t have to go back to your desk to access this information. Secondly, you can look at the underlying data and even update if need be, and finally you can create a customized view without help from IT. “The way we think about it is that every action should be an informed action. Information is critical to making the right decision,” she said. And she added, the information is in the data, and SFDC is giving sales people to access to this data on a device they have with them all the time. They plan to enable this on tablets eventually too, but said they decided to start with the smallest screen first, because they believe it’s easier to start small then scale up to larger screens, then it is to go the other way. Overall, giving sales people access to data where they are is part of an industry trend giving customers access to more data to help them make informed decisions, whether it’s this tool or the . If my statement from May is true that , then giving users access to crucial data wherever they are becomes increasingly imperative –and that’s precisely what SFDC appears to be attempting to do here. |
Charles River Ventures Raises $393 Million For Its 16th Fund | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | , the early stage venture capital firm that’s jointly based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Silicon Valley, has raised $393 million for a new investment fund, according to documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund, Charles River Partnership XVI, is the sixteenth to be raised by the 44-year-old firm (hence the XVI name, of course.) It’s a step up in size from Charles River’s fifteenth fund, which raised . Charles River, which is primarily focused on Series A investments, has had a string of solid hits: CRV was the first investor in Twitter, and was the lead investor in Yammer and Zendesk, to name just a few. I’ve reached out to the firm for more details on the new fund, and will report back with any information I receive. |
Facebook’s Head Of Policy On Emotion Experiment: “That’s Innovation” | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | While Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg for its being “poorly communicated”, another this kind of research makes the product better, and “it’s concerning when we see legislation that could possibly stifle that sort of creativity and that innovation.” Facebook’s head of global policy management Monika Bickert showed little remorse when she spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival yesterday, but did say “What I think we have to do in the future is make sure we’re being transparent, both to regulators and to people using the product about exactly what we’re doing.” Facebook Head Of Global Policy Management Monika Bickert speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, 7/1/2014 Tempers flared this week when mainstream media picked up on an of its own users. You can . For a week, Facebook showed people less positive posts in the News Feed, and found they posted 0.1% fewer positive words in their own posts. A more depressing feed led people to publish very slightly more depressed updates. This teaches Facebook that emotions are contagious, that seeing happy updates might not make you sad like some suggest, and that showing them could make you use Facebook more. Anger arose for a number of reasons: This has led others and I to call for more ethical experimentation and a bigger discussion of the morality of influence by these companies. On the opposite side, some of the positions supporting the experiment say: The biggest support comes from the utilitarian perspective that supporters including Bickert hold, which says that these tests make Facebook as well as other products and services better for consumers. If 690,000 people were part of an experiment and some were purposefully depressed, that’s acceptable if it teaches Facebook to show posts that makes all of its 1.28 billion happier in the long-run. When asked in Aspen what she thought about the experiment and if she foresaw regulation against it, Bickert said (emphasis added, video above): You’ve pointed out a couple interesting issues and one is the . It is — in the specific incident that you’re referring to, although I’m not really the best expert and probably our public statements are the best source for information there, I believe that was a week’s worth of research back in 2012. And most of the , ‘how do we better suit the needs of the population using this product’, and ‘how do we show them more of what they want to see and less of what they don’t want to see’. . That’s the reason that when you look at Facebook or YouTube you’re always seeing new features. And that’s the reason in your news feed. So . At the same time its incumbent on us if we want to make sure we don’t see that legislation, i about what we’re doing and that people understand exactly why we’re doing what we do.” The idea that this is all “innovation” is sure to rub some people the wrong way. There’s already a widespread distrust of Facebook’s power. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k8g-KsuO1E] There’s little likelihood that Facebook and others will stop this kind of A/B testing. Still, there’s hope that these companies follow Bickert’s suggestion and become more transparent. That could include reviewing more risky or controversial tests with an independent ethics board, or allowing users some way to find out if they’ve quietly been placed into an experiment. Facebook and other companies could also provide some open access to privacy-protected anonymized data to outside researchers. There are benefits to understanding humanity locked in the data of these big tech companies that might never be researched if they don’t have profit potential. Luckily, a source tells me there is a small contingent of engineers and other employees inside Facebook who are advocating for more basic science research — not just experiments to make the service more addictive. |
Ticket Resale Marketplace StubHub Goes Through A Big Fat Round Of Layoffs | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Online ticket marketplace recently went through a big round of layoffs, which the company confirmed to us by email today. A source tells us the cuts were made after the company failed to meet its parent company’s expectations, due to changing dynamics in the market for secondary ticket sales. StubHub wouldn’t comment on the size of the layoffs, but we’ve heard that approximately 100 employees were affected. That’s out of a total headcount of about 700 employees at StubHub at the time the cuts were made. When asked for comment, a representative from StubHub confirmed the layoffs and sent the following statement: StubHub announced a reorganization In June that will allow us to be more nimble and efficient in serving fans. The organization change had the unfortunate consequence of eliminating the roles of some StubHub employees. The majority of positions eliminated were in our Field Operations division, where the proliferation of electronic tickets has reduced our need for on the ground customer support. StubHub, which was founded in 2000 and , has long been the leader for after-market sales of tickets for concerts, sporting events and other live events. But over the years, it’s seen increasing competition from a number of other players in the market, most notably Ticketmaster. Last fall, Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster , called , to enable its customers to resell tickets they purchased directly on its site. The company reportedly to compete against StubHub and other resale players. Evidently that plan has worked. A source tells us increased competition resulted in StubHub missing its numbers, which prompted the company re-org. |
App: A Documentary About The Human Side Of The App Revolution | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Those interested in how our culture shapes and is shaped by the software we use every day should check out a documentary project on Kickstarter that hopes to give an in-depth look at the impact apps have had since their introduction with the original iPhone in 2007:
Though they don’t expect to complete the project until December 2015, the team behind the documentary has already gotten some impressive names from the app development community, including Apple blogger and Vesper co-creator , Instapaper creator , and MacWorld’s . If you’re thinking that the teaser looks a tad Apple-centric, you’re right. Jake Schumacher, one of the project’s co-creators, told me in an email that he and fellow director Jedidiah Hurt were both heavy iOS and Mac users going into the project, so “it was easy to start listing interviews on the iOS side.” Since then, the team has started to look for developers on the Android side of things who similarly stand out in that community. Schumacher also told me that they’re hoping they can bring in those shaping the Android operating system itself. His most wished-for appearances in the film: , the Google senior vice president in charge of Android, Chrome, and Google Apps, and , the director in charge of Android’s user experience. Considering the relative success of , a documentary that took a similar look at the people behind some of the more popular indie games in recent memory, you’d think that someone would have already put something like this together. While many of those involved have spent plenty of time blogging and podcasting on the topic, there’s nothing quite like App: The Human Story’s attempt to turn their open discussions into a single piece of media that anyone get into without context. In another email, Hurt noted that they’re also going to create something special for those who do follow the film’s participants: instead of letting the hundreds of hours of interviews they film go to waste after editing cuts them down to the final running time, they’re going to edit out all of the “umms” and long pauses and offer it all as a perk for those who contribute $300 or more. Pricey, but not that bad if you’re someone who buys Daring Fireball shirts or pays for premium podcast subscriptions. |
Fitmob Launches MobTribes, Gets Into The Personal Training Market | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Some people are paying up to $120 per session to get yelled at twice a week. Those people have personal trainers. , the company known for funny group fitness workouts like “Weapons of Ass Reduction” and “Drop it Like a Squat,” is now getting into the game with the launch of a new personal training program called . Its goal is to get you out of the gym and bring the workout to you at a much more affordable price point. Just like , the cost is much cheaper than it would be with a traditional personal trainer. For as little as $35 per session, Fitmob lets you sign up with a small group or bring your friends along and get the same benefits. Groups agree to twice-a-week sessions within one month with their chosen trainer, which works out to be eight sessions a month for $280. The company has also added social features to its mobile app, which allows participants to check in with each other and get encouragement or additional tips from instructors and trainers. Fitmob sources its trainers from many different places. One comes from a circus family in Russia. Jeremy Falk, the trainer I worked out with, is up from L.A. He spent the last seven years traveling the globe to learn about the mind-body connection. He says he stumbled into Fitmob through online service Thumbtack. Falks’s certifications in yoga, massage, nutrition and personal training made him the kind of trainer that is ideal for the Fitmob culture. Trainers track your vitals and measure body fat and progress as you go. Friends can band together and get the trainer to come to their neighborhood, or they can go solo and sign up for an already formed group on the company website. “Get those jumps higher, everyone,” Falk shouts as I arrived for my first MobTribe session. He’s already started the warm-up portion with the small group of five. “Tuck your chin, Jeff. Knees higher, Natalie. Nice job…” he’d continue throughout the session. It was windy and starting to get cold in San Francisco’s SoMa but I was soon to break into a hot sweat by doing rounds of push-ups and jack knives over and over till it felt like my arms might fall off. Two Fitmob assistants lay out black yoga mats and stretchy bands for the crew. What torture awaits us next? Apparently some breakdance moves. Katy Perry’s “Big Balloons” blasts in the background as Falk demonstrates the correct poses. The hardest part for me was a circuit that lasted five minutes (but that seemed like an eternity). We start with 10 push-ups, 20 full sit-ups and 30 jumping jacks and then do that over and over and over again. The goal is to get in as many rounds as we can. I get in three full rounds. Most of the other women get to four and the two guys manage to get in five rounds. Okay, so I’m not so fit. But I do like the idea of being able to get a smaller group of friends together and doing a private workout in my neighborhood for a third of the regular price. You can find local workouts or sign up for a personal trainer via Fitmob’s mobile app or on the website. MobTribes are only available in the San Francisco area for now. There are over 100 workouts in various neighborhoods throughout the city now. Fitmob plans to expand both workout offerings and the amount of personal training sessions in the next few months. |
Tetris Gets Hacked Onto The Only Thing It’s Not Already On: A Playable T-Shirt | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Tetris. Since its debut in 1984, it’s found its way onto nearly every possible platform. Game consoles. Graphing calculators. . Now its found its way onto the most elusive and coveted platform of all: some dude’s chest. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsi3bIHlKv4&w=640&h=390] In honor of Tetris’ 30th anniversary, tinkerer grabbed 128 LEDs, a fistful of batteries and an Arduino Uno, and crammed ’em all together inside of a plain white tee. The end result: Tetris. On his T-shirt. Tee-tris? Chestris? [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlx5bWb3t8c&w=640&h=390] [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV06M-Gqxgg&w=640&h=390] [via ] |
Yahoo Does A “Summer Cleaning,” Shuts Down Its Xobni Acquisition, Plus Other Under-Performing Products | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Yahoo’s spring cleanings have extended into the summer months, the company today, detailing a series of product changes and closures, many of which are nearly obsolete, obscure, or just unpopular. But among the more high-profile of these closures is , the maker of smart email and contacts management apps that were acquired last summer. At the time of , Yahoo people using Xobni’s products would be able to continue to do so. In fact, the earlier announcement stated specifically, “not to worry – we aren’t pulling the rug out from under you. If you’re using a Xobni product today, you can keep using it.” However, in today’s post, the company points to a on the Xobni website, implying that the total shutdown was previously announced. That may confuse the handful of remaining Xobni users who may have thought that as long as they had Xobni’s products installed, they would continue to work even though they were no longer being actively developed. But according to this new post, today is Xobni’s last day. Says Jay Rossiter, Yahoo SVP, Cloud Platform Group, Yahoo has instead “incorporated many Xobni-like features into Yahoo Mail” including and . Yahoo buys then kills a startup? That’s not really news, I suppose. And at least Xobni’s complete and total death was held off for a full year. [ : Yahoo says prior to last week’s blog post, the company communicated to Xobni users within the product, by email, and through the website and social media. It’s also now offering a as a replacement for Xobni for Outlook.] Other products getting the boot (or that already got the boot and you didn’t notice!) include a virtual makeover tool called Newlook, Yahoo Finance’s “research reports” feature, Bookmarks.yahoo.com, Yahoo People Search (bundled into Yahoo Search), Yahoo Toolbar on Chrome (replaced by ), Yahoo Shine (replaced by new magazines, Yahoo Beauty and Travel), Yahoo Voices, and the Yahoo Contributor Network. The last four in that list have yet to close, with the Toolbar dying off on July 22, while the remaining products will live until the end of the month. It’s not surprising for Yahoo to cut its non-performing products, as the company is trying to “further its focus” on core experiences – Search, Communications, Digital Magazines and Video – as it says today. This is also not the first time Yahoo has made the decision to eliminate items from its overly large lineup – it did the same in and 2013, today’s announcement also notes. |
Microsoft Presses Ahead With Office For Android | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Prepare another entry into your File Of No Surprise: Microsoft is moving ahead with its efforts to bring the highly lucrative Office franchise to Android tablets. According , Microsoft is currently prepping a private beta of the new software. A has been mostly taken offline since the news broke. A full Office suite for Android tablets is roughly as surprising as San Francisco morning fog. Microsoft that it was building the native suite earlier this year, and that the Android apps would beat a touch-first build of Office for Windows out of the gate. To see Microsoft begin to ramp up testing is hardly surprising. Office for iPad has been a material success for Microsoft. Despite some market doubt that the apps were too late to make an impact, or that users wouldn’t use them due to Office 365-related restrictions, Microsoft’s latest sally into iOS has gone well. Android may be no different. The mystery that I can’t unravel is why touch Office for Windows tablets is so damned late. The above is merely another plank in the current Microsoft effort to have its corporate focus be both mobile-first, and cloud-first. Office, of course, is now heavily based on OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage service. What will be interesting to gauge is market response to Office for Android, measuring if it can match the prior response to the iOS suite. Microsoft saw . Microsoft declined to comment. |
Microsoft Acquires SyntaxTree To Offer Better Unity Support In Visual Studio | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Microsoft today that it has acquired SyntaxTree, the France-based company behind , a popular plugin for developers that use the cross-platform Unity framework to write their games. As S. “Soma” Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its Developer Division, notes, the company plans to integrate UnityVS into Visual Studio “and to continue to push forward Visual Studio’s support for game developers.” UnityVS helps developers to more easily debug their Unity scripts and provides code snippets, wizards and other tools. It also provides integration between the Unity console and Visual Studio. By default, Unity itself offers its own for Visual Studio C# integration, but UnityVS goes quite a bit beyond this. The existing plug-in, which previously cost $99 for a personal license and $249 for a professional one, will soon be available for free on Microsoft’s download site. SyntaxTree it will also soon reach out to its existing customers to provide them with further details for how it will continue to support them. The list of UnityVS’s current users includes the likes of Microsoft Studios, Electronic Arts, Blizzard, Valve and Rovio. Unity currently has over 2 million developers on its platform, many of whom are also Visual Studio users, which explains today’s acquisition. While the Unity engine all of the main desktop, mobile and console platforms, Microsoft is obviously interested in its support for . Today’s acquisition shows the company’s commitment to supporting the Unity engine in Visual Studio, but it’s worth noting that Unity competitor Unreal offers Visual Studio plug-in, and CryTek’s CryEngine pretty much that you are using Visual Studio as your main IDE. |
Former Microsoft Engineers Launch Pixotale, A Social Networking App For Visual Storytelling | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | A pair of ex-Microsoft engineers, Robert Mao and Haitao Li, have launched what they describe as a new social network based around photos and videos with , an app that aims to re-imagine long-form storytelling for the mobile era. Mao, previously having spent five years with Microsoft Research, says that to create , the two had to basically “unlearn everything” they had learned while at Microsoft. Co-founder Li was there for a decade, as one of the core engineers on the Internet Explorer team, having lived through IE’s defeat of Netscape and more. After leaving Microsoft, the former colleagues wanted to explore the world of mobile applications, and started a new company called Pixomobile last January to test the waters in today’s App Store. Since that time, they’ve released a half-dozen somewhat utilitarian apps, all centered around photos and videos. The most popular of these is , an app which lets you edit photos to make it appear as if the subject is floating in the air – a photography trend which grew popular in places like and , but has now worldwide. That app has grown to a half million users, which accounts for a significant portion of the company’s 1.5 million-plus users in total. The revenue generated by Levitagram’s paid version has helped to fund the development of Pixotale, the company’s first effort to create a social networking-like app, instead of just a utility. Explains Mao, today’s social networks make it easy to get connected with others, but make it difficult for you to have deeper relationships with those connections. As one of the first bloggers in China, he remembers an era where users told their personal stories on their own websites, and formed communities around the commenting section and through trackbacks – which were the pings you’d receive when someone referenced your post in theirs. With Pixotale, the overall goal is to connect people again via these sorts of personal stories – something that’s been a bit lost in the age of social media, Mao believes. After publishing your stories, you’ll be alerted to any likes or comments from fellow app users. The app is also designed to make creating longer-form content easier on mobile, with a simple interface for adding text, photos, a map and soon video and audio. You can tap to add elements to the story or adjust its layout on the page before publishing. You can also work on stories while offline, and save them to publish later. The end results are polished, professional creations you can then share to other social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and more. The stories are also viewable via the web, which you can see , , or , for example. While Pixotale is simple to use, it doesn’t currently offer image editing controls, which means your photos will need to be cropped and straightened and filtered the way you want before launching the app. For now, the bootstrapping company is looking to grow Pixotale’s user base before turned to other means of monetization, but the team imagines that they’ll eventually sell in-app upgrades to help users embellish their content further, at some later point. Pixotale is a free download . |
Facebook Acquires LiveRail For $400M To $500M To Serve Video Ads Everywhere, Improve Its Own | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Facebook has video ad tech startup , which connects marketers to publishers on web and mobile to target 7 billion video ads to visitors per month. A source tells us Facebook paid between $400 million and $500 million for LiveRail, but Facebook refused to comment on the terms. [Update 3:30pm PST: Another source now tells us LiveRail sold for $500 million, matching the $400 million to $500 million range I reported earlier.] Facebook did say it will invest in keeping LiveRail running and is evaluating how to intermingle their data, but it plans to use its data to aid LiveRail with its targeting and vice-versa. The Founded in 2007, LiveRail’s supply side platform has a large base of customers including Major League Baseball, ABC Family, A&E Networks, Gannett, and Dailymotion. LiveRail provides publishers with video ad targeting tech so they can make money routing messages to customers they’ll be relevant to, and helps marketers connect with sites and apps with open video ad inventory. from its seed to Series C round, mostly from . We’ve heard its acquisition price was $400 million to $500 million, which would make it a huge win for Pond. The deal requires Facebook notify FTC and Department Of Justice regulators, but might not necessarily require formal approval. Still, this is no puny acqhire or firesale pick-up. LiveRail was doing well and Facebook had to pony up for it. In 2013, it was on track for a $100 million revenue year, and had grown revenue 300 percent year-over year. It was apparently considering an IPO in late 2014, but Facebook seems to have provided a better offer. It’s obvious why LiveRail would be scared of going public. Competitors who IPO’d got crushed in the market, as YuMe debuted at $9 and is now at $5.95, while Tremor Media IPO’d at $10 and has sunk to $4.61. [Update 5:30pm PST: A third source tells us that LiveRail did $60 million in gross revenue (less than the $100 million LiveRail claimed) and $22 million in net revenue in 2013. It was apparently on pace to do $200 million in gross revenue in 2014 and $30 million EBITDA.] The most important part of LiveRail is its real-time bidding platform that can dynamically assess the open video ad inventory across the publishers it works with, and find its marketer clients the best ad opportunities for their bucks. Its relationships with both marketers and publishers will help Facebook jumpstart its desire to be an ad powerhouse across the web and mobile, not just its own properties. LiveRail also has its Checkpoint technology for making sure ads for alcohol, tobacco, and other age-limited products don’t get shown to kids. LiveRail’s data management system meanwhile predicts video ad inventory fluctuations to lets ad buyer plan their campaigns, and reports to publishers that sell ad space what kind of content is driving them the highest rates. Facebook officially launched its in May at f8. This lets mobile apps work with Facebook to target their standard ad units as well as custom native units. Eventually, Facebook Audience Network and LiveRail could potentially work together to bring accurately targeted video ads to all sorts of apps. On Facebook itself, the company officially launched its in March. These are its version of TV commercials, and command high rates. LiveRail could combine its targeting expertise with Facebook’s vast trove of user data to match movie trailers and other video ads with the right viewers. The social adtech wars are heating up quickly right now. On Monday, . Earlier this year it for around $50 million, and made a huge for $350 million. As TV and print budgets shift online, there’s a big battle for client dollars between whoever can target ads best. The LiveRail acquisition will give Facebook a big leg up as television commercials are reimagined for the web. And with any luck, the deal means you’re less likely to see annoying video ads for things you’d never buy. |
The EFF Calls Gov Report Supporting Surveillance “Legally Flawed And Factually Incomplete” | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with a from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) concerning government surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The current report generally upheld the program, offering a few motes of potential reform as suggestions. The report was, I think it fair to say, expected to have more teeth. PCLOB previously by indicating in a prior report that certain bulk surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act is unconstitutional. The EFF, often the voice of dissent on this sort of issue, called the report “legally flawed and factually incomplete.” Its core argument against the report is that it fails to properly deal with the issue of upstream collection, that it doesn’t handle privacy protection for non-U.S. persons, and that the document hides “behind the ‘complexity’ of the technology” employed by the U.S. government in its surveillance efforts. Regarding so-called “upstream” collection (when the NSA taps directly into the cables that make up the core network of the Internet), the EFF finds the PCLOB report missing the core point at hand — that the “government has access to or is acquiring nearly all communications that travel over the Internet.” Instead it focuses on how that information is queried. It therefore all but endorses the collection itself, on a chronic basis, of such a large firehose of information that it can’t help but include the communication of Americans. The EFF also dismisses the PCLOB’s constitutional analysis, stating that the Fourth Amendment “requires a warrant for searching the content of communication” and that under “Section 702, the government searches through content without a warrant.” We’ll have to wait and see what impact the new report has, particularly in the Senate. The group’s earlier report didn’t appear to have much influence outside of the activist community. |
Massachusetts Open Cloud Project Hopes To Create Ad-Hoc Infrastructure Marketplace | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | Today, the cloud infrastructure market is dominated by several big companies — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — but a public/business/academia partnership called the is hoping to change that by creating an open computing marketplace where you can negotiate whatever services you need from multiple infrastructure vendors. Peter Desnoyers, a professor at Northeastern University who helped launch the project, explained that while companies like Amazon offer useful services, they have limitations. First of all, from an academic perspective, they have a closed system. That means their internal team has access to the system for research purposes, but anyone outside the company like academics who want to study the system and present papers are shut out. While they can go to company conferences and hear employees present papers, they can’t get deep inside the system and that’s a real problem for him and his fellow academics. The other is that Amazon and other IaaS vendors offer what he calls the “Henry Ford” approach to IaaS. You can have any color you want as long it’s black. In other words, they have certain products they have packaged together. The trouble with this approach though, Desnoyers explained, is that people often have very specialized requirements, and the way Amazon designs its products shuts those people out or makes it prohibitively expensive if they need specialized services. Desnoyers says that the project hopes to create a marketplace where multiple vendors can come together and offer their services in an ad-hoc kind of way, so you might get your compute power from one vendor, your storage from a second and your memory from a third. The vendors seem like to this approach and include industry heavyweights Cisco, Juniper, Intel, Red Hat and others. The colleges involved include Harvard, MIT, UMass Amherst, Boston University and Northeastern. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is also involved and the project will be housed at the in Holyoke, Mass. Vendors will contribute equipment and engineering talent and the goal of the project is to create a commercial project based on open source tools. One vendor involved with the MOC project is , and Jan Mark Holtzer, who is senior consulting engineer for the CTO office at Red Hat says his company can learn a lot from a project like this. “For us I would see the key opportunities we see around MOC is operational access, understanding large scale cloud infrastructure, and growing skills [around these areas]. We will rotate resources from support and consulting organizations so they can get first hand experience.” Holtzer says the initial use case for the project probably involves getting vast computing resources for a short period of time to meet a specific need. “Clearly currently the initial use case we see and MOC sees is probably driven by [high performance computing] and MOC would give customers the capability of harvesting large amount of resources and then releasing them quickly,” he said. He says, however, before it becomes a viable commercial entity for vendors like Red Hat, he sees potential as an incubation space for innovation where participants can experiment with different business models and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). But perhaps the biggest advantage of being involved in a project like this from a vendor perspective is very similar to the academic one. They can get real data about how large-scale systems like this work. “Probably the very interesting use case is the ability to get the operational data from such a large scale environment. A lot of cloud services are black boxes. We work with these vendors, but we don’t have the ability to get as much information from inside a large scale infrastructure,” he said. Holtzer added that there is a huge advantage in making the MOC project operational data transparent and visible. The fact is there are lots of cloud infrastructure options available out there, but no open marketplace where people can negotiate pricing and access different pieces of the infrastructure. A project like this is at least a starting point for offering a more open way of selling infrastructure services moving forward. For now it’s experimental, but if it works, it has the potential to change the way enterprise customers interact with and deal with IaaS vendors and that’s significant in itself. |
Smart Garden Sensor Edyn Moves Past Kickstarter Goals, Eyes Android | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | A month ago, I called Edyn that tracks light, humidity, temperature, soil nutrition and moisture data for gardeners. The company, which first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, beat their initial $100,000 goal for a . They’ve got close to $300,000 from backers and have made a few adjustments to the product based on backer feedback with six days left to go in the campaign. Edyn is a $99 solar-powered soil monitor that tracks and analyzes data about weather and soil conditions through a paired iOS app. The app gives a real-time snapshot of conditions in a person’s garden and also pushes alerts for monitoring plant health. They also built an automated water valve that backers can get for an extra $60. It was co-founded by a Princeton grad named Jason Aramburu, who spent time working on agriculture in East Africa and paired with famed designer Yves Behar to create Edyn. Initially, the were going to launch the Edyn with battery life of about 2.5 years, but they’ve bumped that up to a 7-year battery after hearing that the old battery wasn’t enough for users. They’ll also be offering Android support next year and are thinking about adding the ability to track water consumption with the paired water valve. So far, the campaign has seen about a half-half split between gardeners and farmers from all over the world including in Australia, Italy, India, China and Brazil. Here’s a new video they’ve released that explains some of the technology behind the sensor. [vimeo 99166589 w=500 h=281] from on . |
Scan Makes A QR Identity Play | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | , a company that’s trying to link physical businesses to users with QR codes, is stepping into the identity and payments space. The new version of Scan’s app adds a ‘Code Wallet’ that can be used to store codes you scan or use a lot. It can also store your personal identity code, which you can generate on the device. In fact, every user of Scan, over 75 million of them so far, will have a personal QR code available to them once they’ve updated the app. This code effectively acts as an identity that they can use to direct people to social media profiles, Instagram accounts, personal webpages and more. Scan founder Garrett Gee says that this should lower the barrier for people who may have never understood that they could use QR codes to create an easily transferrable identity before. And incorporating the scan-to-pay technology they debuted late last year, users will be able to offer that code to others to accept payments directly. Friend owe you a couple of bucks? Just have them scan your code and shoot you the money. As an example, here’s the , a freelance photographer using Scan to promote her business and accept payments directly. has , Menlo Ventures, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Start Fund, Social + Capital Partnership, Transmedia Capital, Ludlow Ventures and angels Ariel Poler, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Jim Pallotta of Raptor Group and Troy Carter. Scan is still one of the most popular code readers in the App Store, and sees around 50,000 new installs a day. Scan introduced its and now sees 150,000 of them using its website to create and manage codes. There are around 80,000 codes used on the site daily. Though Scan also reads barcodes for price checking, Gee recently told me that around 65 percent of the scans on iOS devices were of QR codes. Each of those codes is linked to an action of some sort, which is really at the heart of what Scan has been bringing to the table. There have been countless misuses of QR code technology, but some of the most egregious mistakes have resided in not giving people a discrete action to take upon scanning. If you scan a code and are dumped out onto a website with no focused purpose, you’ve already been failed by the creator of that code. By creating a framework for businesses, and now individuals, to deliver users to a focused experience, Scan is putting QR tech’s best foot forward. Scan has its work cut out for it if it wants to be an identity provider of any sort. But it’s a space that’s ripe for innovation, so I’m interested to see how this pans out. Digital identity is one of the biggest unsolved issues we have and I expect that pretty much all of the majors will make a play for the space very soon. Dabbling in trying to figure that out — and pushing forward its philosophy of linking digital and physical spaces — seems like a good direction for Scan. Ironically, one of the best things that could happen to a company like Scan is for someone like Apple to include code-reading functionality in the stock camera. Being Sherlocked could actually boost Scan’s business enormously. Scan’s secret sauce, after all, is in how it handles the actions after scan, not necessarily the scan itself. Of course, there are other opportunities here, given the proliferation of beacons driving hyper-local, contextually accurate interactions. Gee says that Scan is working with beacon technology but doesn’t have anything to share at the moment. And, it’s important to note, beacons don’t have the years of misuse behind them that have contributed to making QR codes such a technological punchline. The app is available for both iOS and Android . |
Threadflip Raises $13 Million in Series B, Plans To Grow Workforce by 40% | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 20 | , the online consignment marketplace for women’s clothing, announced $13 million in Series B funding today. led the round, with participation from previous investors , and . This latest infusion now brings the total funding for Threadflip up to $21.1 million. will use the cash to hire at least 20 more merchandising and operations people to help deal with the demand of its popular white glove service offering known as the Concierge Full Service. To understand the significance of this initiative, that’s more than 40% of Threadflip’s current workforce of 36 full time and 12 part-time employees. The Concierge Full Service is now Threadflip’s most popular service, according to a company statement. It allows women to order a “closet refresh package” from the company’s mobile app or website. Threadflip mails those who sign up for this offering a free, prepaid shipping bag to fill and send back with items for sale. Stylists then do all the work of sorting and taking professional photos and uploading the items to the marketplace within 24 hours. Silicon Valley consignment startups , and all have similar white glove services to Threadflip’s Consignment Full Service offering. According to Threadflip, this is its fastest growing and most popular service. Threadflip says over 78 percent of accessories and apparel are ultimately sold when listed using the Concierge Full Service. According to CEO this service has been growing more than 100 percent month-over-month since its launch earlier this year and there are over 1000 Concierge Full Service kits ordered per day on the site. Singh also disclosed that the company has been talking about expanding to other verticals beyond just women’s clothing and that Threadflip is in the middle of some bigger partnership deals as well, but he wasn’t ready to disclose those deals just yet. |
The Seven Constants Of Game Design, Part One | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 7 | 20 | There are infinite paintings, but also a more finite sense of what is a great painting versus not. Similarly there are infinite games, but also a sense of what works and what doesn’t. The boundless space of video games is bounded and their limitless possibilities have limits. There are, it seems, rules to game design. “Creative constant” is a term that I use to describe those rules. They are the foundational, shape-describing pragmatic realities that we designers run into. I call them constants rather than limits because limits sound like arbitrary rules meant to be broken. Don’t get me wrong: there certainly are many arbitrary rules around video games waiting to be smashed into atoms, especially the conventions of genre. However constants are different. A constant is an always-present factor, a boundary in some respects but also a pillar. The maximum speed of light ( ) is a constant, for example, whose affects are felt throughout the universe. seems to imply that travel to other stars is going to be more difficult than simply building , but it also plays a role in the translation of mass into energy, relativistic interactions and whatnot. Our knowledge of has helped in the development of most modern technology. Constants exist outside our ability to directly affect them, so it’s up to us makers to figure out how to use them. In the gaming sphere it may seem that the first and most obvious constant is “platform”. Platform constraints are often overriding considerations in the development of any game (from the control paradigm through to the supported business models and demographics of users) but they are also mutable. What holds us back today does not do so tomorrow (and vice versa) and so platforms are always moving targets. Therefore they’re not constant. Similarly it’s tempting to identify “the player” as a constant, because of course games are always played and therefore we must always think of the player. This is true, but not specific. Most game design constants are to do with the psychology of play, how players think and see, but they need to be separated out to be discussed meaningfully. Ditto ideas to do with “the audience”, “the market” or “rules”. These are all part of the landscape of making games, but fall into being too mutable or general. Having mulled on it a while, I think there are seven constants of game design that can’t be escaped, but can be toyed with to create powerful play. In an older version of this idea I used to say that “fun” was the first constant, but fun is a fuzzy word for many people to parse, and for new wave game designers it’s a dumb limit. To play a game like is not to have fun as such, but it still has a certain something. I later realized that what I really meant was “fascination”. I often encounter game designers who want to avoid systems. Dice rolls, rules and numbers all seem so dull, so mechanical and math-y when what the designer wants to create is emotion, story and meaning. So she charges off and makes experience-driven games full of interaction without system or light on interaction (such as ) and receives a cold reception. “It’s all well and good to walk around,” the gamers say, “but where’s the gameplay?” The gamers have a point. The lack of interesting logic, gears and levers, numbers, operations and mechanics gives games a short half life. They might be interesting to play around with for an hour or two, but they don’t sustain. Within the that might not necessarily be a deal-breaker (it’s often looking at games as part of an arts conversation) but outside that group it quickly runs into difficulty. A game needs to be fascinating. It needs and mechanics that bounce off one another to create the illusion of a dynamic problem. Whether that means a massively complex simulation as you would find in , the elegant rules of a sport or the rudimentary lock-key puzzle solving of adventure games, fascinating systems are one of the key vectors that pulls players in and keep them engaged. Then when you have them engaged you can bring the emotion. But it doesn’t survive well on its own. The difference between a perfect and an imperfect game is the quality of information that players know. Chess, for example, is a perfect game because all of its pieces are out on the board, players know all of the rules, and therefore all possible moves. Poker, on the other hand, is an imperfect game. Players know the rules but they do not know who has what cards at any given moment. They have to guess. All video games are imperfect, even the ones that appear otherwise (such as computerized versions of Chess). This is because in all cases the player is toying with a black box of code whose exact rules and operations are unknowable. The game enforces rules according to its own hidden structure, usually without telling the player how it works. So the player is as much playing the game to find out what it does as to master the doing, while the game is asking the player for trust. This has many curious side effects. One is that players become very sensitive to fair play. In sports issues of fairness often arise between players (such as the low-level cheating in soccer that’s considered a legitimate part of the game), but in video games players often have a gripe with the system itself. They believe that a game is being unfair to them, for example, when the developers know that it’s not. They perceive imagined slights where none exist and even consider balance-breaking corrections in favor of them (such as increasing loot dropping rates) as fixing “broken” gameplay. Another is the sense of a world behind the game. Part of why video games feel so compelling as story-ish experiences to some people is the sense that it has hidden layers. Players often ascribe character and personality to non-player characters (and sometimes even objects) that are not actually in the game because of their interpretations of imperfect information. They come to believe that the world of Hyrule is bigger than they think and urban myths spread about ways to unlock their hidden secrets. They see the scrawl of “The Cake Is A Lie” on the wall in and imagine a whole story behind it independent of what the game designers intended. Imperfect information is a wonderful constant. Video games can play with trust, they can be scary, wondrous or magical precisely because we never know what’s really going on under their surface. As a designer you always have the power to blow players’ minds because of this. Every day we humans deal with tens of thousands of sensory inputs, from the sound of the traffic outside our windows to the music in the movies we watch, the conversations we have with our colleagues or the flavor of the beer we enjoy. Within all that information there are threats to our survival, degrees of urgency and attention, lower order information that doesn’t need to be remembered and other data that is of high importance. As such one of the crucial skills that we develop is aggressive filtering of inputs so that we can focus on the most urgent. To use a computer analogy, your multi-core brain may be working on problems, thinking about relationships or idly dreaming, but at least one of your cores is always acting as your filter. You don’t get killed at crosswalks because your filter is paying attention to oncoming traffic and interrupts your other thoughts to say “Hey, watch out!”. Even though we don’t like the sensation of distraction that urgency brings, it saves our lives. Games are unique among media in that they engage us actively. We interact with and are fascinated by them. We also often play them with a sense of stake. We can lose lives, fail, face daunting challenges and be unable to overcome, all of which are survival situations. Whether in the frantic pell mell of , the need to complete tasks to progress an adventure forward or the one-coin-left moment playing a slots machine, games have a powerful relationship with urgency. We expect, and even need, it. Games without some sense of urgency feel oddly flat, whereas those that deploy it are often most engaging and most emotional at the same time. But one of the side effects of urgency is that the more urgent the game becomes, the less we have attention for subtleties. We evaluate purely on the criteria of utility than significance, and that can be problematic for games with creative ambitions. may work in a dramatic context, but in a gun is just a tool. Urgency is the main reason why cinematic storytelling doesn’t work as well as it seems it should in the video game context. Either the player is too busy to pay attention, or is too engaged with playing to be interrupted by sections of narrative. So story finds itself in a dissonant relationship with the player. On the other hand games that can play into that sense of urgency and use it to convey situation without resorting to cinema often succeed. Whether in the slow-boil form of or the rough-and-tumble of , often the key to great storytelling in games is to lose the “telling”, and instead to hint, intuit, lay seeds and let the player discover for herself. |
Taptalk Taps Phone Contacts To Add Friends, And A New Game Emerges | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 7 | 20 | One of the issues I’ve been grappling with with the social photos and location app, is that although it’s super simple and addictive — way more so that Snapchat I’d say — adding friends until now has been a chore. You had to literally type people’s handles in to the app. But, good news fellow Taptalkers! A new update to the just out, means you can now add many of your contacts (open that link from your phone to download). This is achieved by verifying your mobile phone number, and allowing the app to add contacts of yours who are using the app. You can add me if you like: mikebutcher (sorry, but I don’t promise to add you back ;-). Of course, it’s still frustrating that you can’t add Friends from or . But clearly this is an interesting strategy – it means Taptalk still exists outside those ecosystems, and thus has much more control over its destiny. At the same, a clever new game has emerged – #tapwhere. It all started when TechCrunch’s , sent a tap to Product Hunt’s (rrhoover on Taptalk), asking, “where am I?”. Here’s how to play #tapwhere, . 1. Open Taptalk
2. Enter #tapwhere
3. Aim your camera at something recognizable but not too obvious (remember, the map might provide a clue)
4. Tap the recipient to send your #tapwhere
5. Wait for their response… if they can’t identify the location, be kind and give them a hint
6. If your #tapwhere buddy guesses correctly, they’re awarded invisible cool points (hooray!)
7. Start over at step 1 when you change locations Social applications like this emerged on other platforms – the @-ing and hashtags on Twitter came from the users of Twitter themselves. There is no reason the same thing can’t happen with Taptalk. |
Political Leaders Rebuke Microsoft’s Mass Layoffs | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 20 | have picked up negative attention from governmental authorities and leaders, even as the cuts have been by investors and the broader market. The software company accreted more than 20,000 employees when it . In the wake of that deal’s closing, Microsoft announced 18,000 cuts to its staff, including 12,500 in its hardware division. Several were circulated to explain the staffing changes. Sources around and familiar with the Redmond area — Microsoft’s corporate stomping ground — that I spoke to generally indicated that morale was largely intact on the company’s main campus. That’s reasonable, of course, as only a will hit Microsoft’s Washington-based staff. Unless, of course, you are merely a Microsoft-adjacent employee, in which case you should and . While the firings — let’s call them what they are — might make business sense for Microsoft, as it hopes to both flatten its organization and build a development process that is more nimble, not all are fans of its actions. Senator Jeff Sessions recently lit into Microsoft, expressing something akin to outrage that the company would at once press for more high-skill visas so that it could hire foreign workers at home, while letting its own staff go. An : Microsoft confirmed it will cut up to 18,000 jobs over the next year, part of the tech titan’s efforts to streamline its business under a new CEO.’ That is a significant action. Indeed, Microsoft employs about 125,000 people, and they are laying off 18,000. The company laid off 5,000 in 2009. Yet their founder and former leader, Mr. Gates, says we have to have more and more people come into our country to take those kinds of jobs. It is pretty interesting, really. We need to be thinking about what it all means and ask ourselves: What is the situation today for American graduates of STEM degrees and technology degrees? Do we have enough? And do we need to have people come to our country to take those jobs? Or, indeed, do we not have a shortage of workers, and do we have difficulty of people finding jobs? The senator is conflating job cuts that will land heavily overseas at an international company with domestic hiring restrictions, but you can understand the source of his antipathy. Sen. Sessions isn’t alone in his unhappiness. Finnish are not enthused with Microsoft’s and union, respectively. Here’s : I deeply regret the significant job losses announced by Microsoft today because of the impact these will have on so many individuals, their families and the local communities they live and work in. All sectors of the economy are undergoing changes as technology develops and consumer demand evolves. Company restructuring is a fact of life but it should be done in a socially responsible way, based on social dialogue and with due respect for applicable legislation on the information and consultation of workers and on collective redundancies Microsoft has noted that it will sustain something in the range of $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion in costs associated with the layoffs and other conclusory episodes over the next year. I leave the moral-dollar work to you to calculate on a per-fired-employee basis. What’s clear, however, is that despite governmental discontent, Microsoft is full speed ahead on its efforts to reform itself after changing its corporate strategy. Microsoft reports earnings on Tuesday. |
#Love: My First Experience With Internet Porn | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 20 | existed since the dawn of time, but it has never been as widely available and accessible as it is today. That’s largely due to the internet, which provides a launch pad for our curiosity no matter the topic. But with sex, a topic relatively more private and intimate, the internet can serve as an important resource for sexual exploration, understanding, and yes, enjoyment. That said, we collected seven peoples’ stories from all walks of life about their first experience with porn on the internet. Some are funny, some will horrify, and some are oddly nostalgic. Oh, I downloaded so much porn on . Gay porn. Straight porn. Just, so much porn. I probably started looking for it when I was 13 or 14, using the family computer in the office next to my parents’ bedroom. I would search for stuff, download it, and then delete everything from the computer. I would sometimes re-download the stuff I liked, and search for other stuff, too. Before I discovered that I could actually use the Internet to find pictures of naked ladies, my porn experience was limited to waterlogged Penthouses in the woods behind the baseball field or old issues of Playboy filched from a friend’s dad’s dresser drawer tucked away in a remote basement corner. Though I don’t remember how I was clued into the fact, I distinctly remember plugging search terms into rudimentary, Web 1.0 search engines. I remember a lot of the sites that popped up in the search results were sites based in Japan, and took forever to load, even by the standards of my trusty external 28.8 BPS modem. It was well worth the wait, and I remember being fascinated by this new portal to the world of porn. Of course, back then I had no idea what browser history was, or how to delete it, so I can only imagine the awkwardness my parents must have experienced in discovering their pre-teen son’s porn predilections while shopping online for Beanie Babies or whatever normal people did online back then. Another reliable source for digital self abuse was in old school AOL chat rooms. Rooms with names like “gif” or “jpg.” I discovered fairly early on in my keyboard warrior days that going into one of these rooms and randomly saying something to everyone in the room like “send one pic to get one!” would instantly yield half a dozen or so jpg images in my inbox from fellow pervs looking to trade boobie pics. I’m guessing they didn’t realize I was all of 12 years old at the time. Maybe they did? Suddenly I feel so dirty. My first experience with porn on the internet was pretty horrifying. Clearing the cache was apparently not something my dad knew how to do, so my first interaction with porn on the internet actually just came from an auto-complete in the browser. I was about sixteen, and it was the shared computer in the family den. I was grossed out but I didn’t want to tell my dad. Wow. So long ago. I’d say my first experience was loading strip-by-strip BMP files over a painfully slow dial-up, with terrible resolution. This was pre-Windows, so probably Navigator or something. I was like 12, but I was using the internet when the internet was first available to people outside of the Defense industries because my dad was an academic and had access through work. I don’t actually remember how I found out about searching for porn or looking for that stuff. I was the oldest of my siblings, and I can’t really remember anyone tipping me off to anything. I do think that my dad kept the computer in the basement for a reason, though. He knew what was up. Remember that scene in the Freaks and Geeks where they all watch porn together and get all uncomfortable? It was kind of like that. I was spending the night at my friend Brittni’s house. We were maybe in seventh grade, and she was one of my only friends who had her own computer in her bedroom. We usually got on AIM together to chat, but on this particular evening, we somehow ended up in a “Romance” chat room. I like to think that Brittni clicked into it without ever warning or mentioning me, but knowing myself now, it’s entirely possible that we discussed entering this sex chat room together and that I even encouraged it. We began a chat with what we both believed to be a man, who expectedly got straight into some really dirty, misspelled talk: “Lik my nutz.” Shit like that. Brittni and I discussed sexy, descriptive responses which grew more and more detailed each time we shared something new. The guy asked to switch to phone sex, again, expectedly. Brittni, braver than I (perhaps because she was in her own home), was into the idea. So we did. We made sure we answered the phone before her dad. It was all very stressful. The phone call lasted maybe 12 seconds. He said hello in a voice that terrified both of us. It was an old man’s voice and it was creepy. We never talked about it again. Back in the days of BBSes and tape backups, one of my friends had a large quantity of image files that he would download and save for later. (This was important because download speeds were slow enough that it took a few minutes before you could actually see anything.) Anyways, one day he was backing up files and his dad walked in the room and could see the progress of files being moved to tape. Most of the files were named stuff like ‘jenny6.jpg’ or whatever but there was one particular file that caught his dad’s eye. “Mark, what’s ponyfuck.gif?” he asked. “Oh, it’s an acronym,” my friend replied. My first porn experience… Hmm… I’d say it was on . It wasn’t watching porn, but it was dirty talk in chat rooms when I was like 13. I didn’t actually start watching strangers have sex until I started researching female orgasms. Originally, it was driven by insecurity. I was trying to figure out how I should be during sex. But then my brain kind of calmed down about watching it and about sex in general, and I started to search for porn that actually turned me on. |
This Little Box Hijacks Your Chromecast, Rickrolls Your Living Room | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 20 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7nqP8AvXUg&w=764&h=430] You’re sitting in your living room. All you want to do is watch some on your day off… but your refuses to respond. All it will do is play Rick Astley’s over… and over again. It might be this little box’s fault. Built by as a proof of concept, his so-called “Rickmote” is able to discover any Chromecasts nearby, boot it off whatever network it’s on, and send any video the prankster desires straight to your screen. So how does it work? Petro has a video here,
Once a prankster has hijacked the host seat, they could send the Chromecast videos, or songs, or do whatever else you normally might as the legitimate operator. The nasty part: unless the prankster gets bored or goes out of range, there’s no easy way to get the Chromecast back under your control. Alas, this isn’t an easy thing for to fix. The way the Chromecast responds to a disconnection is intentional; it’s part of the super simple configuration process, and that’s a good chunk of what makes the Chromecast a Chromecast. Fortunately, the Rickmote is a one-off for now, so you probably won’t see this sorcery out in the wild any time soon — but the source code for others to make boxes of their own. [via ] |
TiVo Founders Shutting Down Qplay Video Service Fewer Than 6 Months After Launch | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 20 | , the video streaming app and device from a couple of TiVo co-founders, is closing down next Friday. The shutdown marks a short life for the service, which launched in February this year with a and just last month. The company was founded in August 2012 by and Jim Barton, who brought DVRs into the mainstream with TiVo a decade earlier. Their new venture, which was funded by and , offered up a way for viewers to watch a continuous stream of Internet videos found on sites such as and . It lacked a lot of the so-called premium content that viewers could find on the likes of or . For that reason, and due to the competitive nature of the streaming device ecosystem, the $49 Qplay TV adapter was a tough sell. Which is why the company unsurprisingly released a free iPad app with similar functionality. Even so, it seems like that wasn’t enough to get viewers interested. Qplay on its blog yesterday, offering refunds to those who had purchased the adapter. Marketing director Ashley Martin-Golis wrote the following: If you purchased a TV Adapter from us and would like a refund, we will give you your money back (learn how to request a refund). Refund requests will be accepted until next Friday July 25, 2014 at 5 PM Pacific. All TV Adapters will stop functioning when the service shuts down, so please responsibly recycle your TV Adapter. Click here to find a local electronics recycling location. If you have any questions send us an email to help@qplay.co. |
Why Marco Arment Built A Podcast App | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 7 | 20 | Developer isn’t exactly a household name, but that could depend on your household. As a frequent podcaster and writer, he’s taken on a somewhat polarizing role as a commentator on the Apple developer ecosystem. As a developer, he was ’s first employee and went on to create the still popular (now owned by Betaworks) and iPad periodical (now owned and operated by Glenn Fleishman). After Tumblr’s sale to , Arment went on to shed his other holdings and become an . His posts on Marco.org are frequently upvoted on Hacker News, where he is then praised and/or vilified based on the current developer meta mentality. But, over the past few months he’s been working on an app called , and it launched late last week. The app is a podcast player — which could sound like an odd niche to tackle — until you realize that read later apps, iPad magazines and (at some point) web logs were all niches too. I’ve been testing Overcast for a couple of weeks (and enjoying it) and I thought it would be interesting to reach out to Marco to ask the obvious questions and a few more. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our chat. It gets a bit into the weeds on the developer side of things, but my feeling is that if you’re reading this you won’t mind that terribly. Enjoy. : The easiest question to start with is why a podcast app? : The short version is just that I love podcasts. I’ve always loved podcasts. Ever since iTunes added them in 2005, I’ve been listening. I’ve actually been listening to podcasts since 2005, and it was always harder back then. It got a lot easier over time, and smartphones of course made it easier, so now there’s this great market. You have the combination of smartphones, and Bluetooth audio in cars, which helps a lot. I wanted to support the podcast medium, and from a selfish perspective, I don’t use a whole lot of apps on my phone. I’m not one of those people who has all the SpringBoard pages full. I have two pages of apps, and one of them has folders. I don’t have a lot of apps and I don’t use a lot regularly. My most commonly launched app is probably either Tweetbot or Mail. I’m not using tons of stuff. My podcast client is one of my most frequently used apps, so I was sitting there using other podcast clients all day, every day, and I’m like, “I would love to do it this way instead,” or, “I would love to add this missing feature.” It was just that developer itch that was — not only is this a market that I love, and a medium that I love, but I’m sitting here using someone else’s app every day that I don’t like very much and I want to do it my way, so that’s basically the reason. : It’s like a machinist. He’s using a tool, and he doesn’t really like it, but he can build himself a new tool. : Right. : Obviously there’s no shortage of podcast apps, right? : No, not even close. : It seems like a market that’s really, really deep with stuff, so what were the things that you saw that really flipped that switch for you, from, “I like podcasts. I listen to them. I open this app all the time. I really can’t find these things and that’s what I want. That’s why I want to build it”? : The biggest two were…I wrote about this…you’ll see on my site, but the biggest two were, by far, when I had ideas for what are now Smart Speed and Voice Boost. I first had the idea for Smart Speed — “What if we could do this dynamic shifting of the speed based on silence, and speed up the silence more than the rest of it,” because I wanted to pick up extra speed, but I didn’t want to distort the sound too badly. Just as a listener, I hear…when you listen to sped-up podcasts, it’s a waste. You hear all the silences that are longer than they have to be, and then someone has to say their words super fast, and it distorts them, so I said, “Let me try to even this out a little bit.” I wanted to play with that, and play with different time-stretching algorithms also, because at the time I first started doing this in the fall of 2012 — I don’t think Apple shipped any fancy speed algorithms on the iPhone. They had the one you could use that had the preset notches, the preset speeds. It was the old iPod algorithm. It was even called iPod Time in the API. It’s very old. It’s fine. It doesn’t use a lot of CPU power, it saves the battery, but it doesn’t sound very good and only has those preset notches. I started playing with different libraries, different even third-party commercial libraries to time shift and time bend, and I ended up using some of the Apple’s newer APIs using some new settings they had launched. In fact, if you look, Castro did an update a couple weeks ago — a couple months ago at this point — where they improved the voice quality of their speed-up algorithm, and what that was was choosing one of these newer APIs. There’s a low-level API you can set to say, “All right, I want the time stretching algorithm to be this,” and it’s a trade-off between CPU time and quality, so they changed that option. At my level that I’m working on, I have the same option that I can take, so I made the same choice there. Anyway, what made me want to do it was a combination of just wanting to do it my own way and then also coming up with these couple of features that I thought were pretty good, and that no one else was doing. I also knew the voice boost and the higher speed algorithm, you can do that with AVPlayer, which is the API all these other things are using. Every other app that I know about is using AVPlayer. You can’t do smart speed with it though, and I knew that if I did it, that would give me a competitive advantage for a while. It’s probably not going to last forever, but certainly a while, because if I’m willing to go through the technical hurdles to write my own audio engine, and use Core Audio down to the raw levels, and bypass the easy but limiting frameworks that everyone else was using, I knew that would be unique, at least temporarily. We’ll see how long it lasts. : Like all good features, if you execute them well, then they’re just going to pop up everywhere. Just ask anyone who creates a category-defining or element-defining piece of design, or code, or whatever. : Exactly. The difference here is that smart speed, in the best case scenario, if every other podcast app drops everything they’re working on now and starts trying to do this, it’s probably a six-month project, so at least there’s that going for me. : You’ve got six months of feature uniqueness going on. : Right, which I have to spend catching up with all their features. : It’s interesting because you’re launching a podcast app at a time where you have been “pre- ” by Apple. It seems like this is one of the first times that I’ve seen that somebody’s launching an app that has been ‘pre-killed’, in theory. Podcast is built into iOS as of iOS 8. : If you look at, whether it’s built-in or not, people are making a big deal of this because it’s a change that is happening, but if it was always built-in, which for the first x years of iPhones it was, they didn’t split it out into its own app until [iOS 5]. For all the time before that, there were podcast apps, and they were fine, and if you look now, there are tons of apps that have been always built-in. Notes. Weather. Look at all these things, and they’re massive app categories in the store. : What do you mean, Marco? Nobody makes notes apps. : And no one makes weather apps. : You have these massive categories in the store that are technically Sherlocked in the most complete, obvious way, which is that every iPhone has always come with a free app, often on the first screen, to do that, often with capabilities that third-party apps couldn’t do. Different integrations; different features; integration with Siri, stuff that third-parties can’t do. This is not a new situation, and the fact is you can look all around the market and you can see it’s really no big deal. : It seems like there’s definitely a case to be made that a podcast app on the home screen will expose many people to the idea of podcasts that have never been exposed to them before. It was on the iPhone, but you would be forgiven for not knowing about them because it was a section of the iTunes app. Then it was a freely downloadable but not pre-installed app from Apple, but now it’s been elevated to first-party status. Apple is saying, “We are as interested in podcasts as we are in weather or your calendar,” so it seems like there’s a case to be made that they are elevating the conversation around podcasts. : I hope so. The fact is I’m not sure they are, but I hope they are. It could just be this is easier for them. It could just be that…and maybe they were losing too much control by not having their own podcast app out be there. Maybe it had to be there for some other reason. Some kind of integration with iTunes or iCloud where it was causing issues with sync to have it be a separate thing. Who knows? It could be any of those reasons. Either way, again, I just don’t think it’s going to affect third-party clients at all. I saw with Instapaper when they added Reading Lists and everyone’s like, “Oh, this is going to kill Instapaper.” At first it was — “Well, this isn’t really a full competitor yet because it doesn’t have sync or it doesn’t have text view or it doesn’t have offline support.” Over the next two releases, they added all those things. Then obviously it was a direct competitor, and it had all these advantages of things like system-wide integration before iOS 8. Everything could send to reading list. In fact, you couldn’t even disable that! They had this thing that completely Sherlocked me in the most clear way and had all sorts of advantages. It was built in. It could do all these special things I couldn’t do. I had the same thought at first which was like, “Oh, god, I’m going to die.” Then next I made this post saying, “Oh, well, people are going to see Reading List, get into the idea of saving things for later, and then search for a better app and find me. So it should actually help me, right?” Looking back on it, I’m pretty sure it did nothing either way. It had no impact at all. : The people who were going to download Instapaper downloaded it and the people who weren’t, didn’t. : Exactly. I really don’t…looking at the stats over those years, and even just remembering what it was like to be there, I can’t see any correlation of any effect at all. : It will be interesting to see what happens with the podcast thing. Apple’s always been a front-runner on podcasts, but you get the sense that, early on, there was one dude there who said, “no, this is super important, we should do this,” and built podcasts into iTunes. It will be interesting to see if they start to take it more seriously now that it’s a built-in thing or if, as you said, it’s just to facilitate something else — or just easier for them, architecturally speaking. : They are still bound and held back by the Apple strategy tax with what they do in the podcast app. Because, first of all, whatever is in the podcast app has to be locked and tied to the iTunes podcast store. Which means it is tied to the iTunes store. Which — that does not sound like something that would make your job easier. That’s something where I would imagine it’s hard for them to get things done, to get changes made, because they are tied to the iTunes store ecosystem and they are completely reliant on it, and they can’t do anything outside of it because obviously they’re in that company. They also can’t do geeky, specialty features because that’s not generally what Apple does. That would not work in their aesthetic, or it wouldn’t pass the committee, or whatever. : Or it doesn’t fit their ’ ’ philosophy, necessarily. : Exactly. Everyone else in the market is not bound by that. We can do whatever we want to, within reason. But for the most part, we can add whatever features we want to. You can have really geeky things, like per-feed settings and priority playlists, the stuff that I don’t think Apple would ever add. We can do things like that. That will always be able to set us apart from them. There’s nothing stopping them from doing this if they wanted to. They could do it, but they won’t do it. : I don’t think the 80 percent philosophy’s going anywhere. That’s an opportunity, obviously, for everybody else. Because 20 percent is a very healthy business when you’re talking about hundreds and millions of downloads. : If you look at the landscape now, the Apple podcasts app is already way more popular than any other podcast app on iOS, or in the world, for that matter. The Apple podcast app is even more popular than Android podcasts, despite the market share difference. The Apple podcast app is by far the biggest podcast app in the world, and it always has been. There’s nowhere for us to go but up, right? It’s not like Apple’s going to steal our market share. : They already have the market share, right? : We’re stealing it from them. : That’s the direction that this is going. I also have always gotten the feeling that Apple didn’t really know what to do with podcasts. They invented podcasts, basically. They didn’t technically invent enclosures and feeds and everything, but they were the ones to popularize it and get the whole model that we have now. They still have the biggest and most important podcast directory in the world that they maintain. They do features. They do the new and noteworthy section that I was looking through the other night. They have tons of categories in this directory. This isn’t just in the US. They have different ones for different countries. It’s just like, man, they have a big staff working on this. Here they are and they’re putting a decent amount of resources into keeping the directory running. They are in the most, the best position in the entire medium. They basically control the medium. Yet, they do so little with it. I was always curious. Why doesn’t Apple have the best podcast app? Why hasn’t Apple done anything with the format by promoting new standards? Like, ‘this is going to be the standard for paged feeds’ or ‘this is going to be the standard for inline links in the podcast’, stuff like that. Some of the stuff they have the basics for, and then they just drop the ball. It just always seems like that working on podcasts is never important enough to Apple compared to their other stuff. It’s never a high enough priority. They just let it sit and wither. Unlike almost everything else they’ve made, there’s no lock-in. There’s no DRM. There’s nothing proprietary about the iTunes podcast store at all. Everyone else can do all of it. It’s this great opportunity for people like me to, like, the fact that podcasts publish their RSS feeds and they have to be publicly accessible to be useful to be most people. All this stuff and anyone can just walk into this market. It’s not totally locked down. You don’t have to go deal with anybody. : That is interesting, and it is relatively unique to other Apple products. I know that they’ve been making some effort to do that a little bit, with expanding store linking and stuff like that. But for the most part it’s the only thing that Apple maintains that’s like that. You can argue WebKit, sort of, but they keep all the best bits for themselves anyway now. : The App Store is not this open. Not even close. Certainly not the iTunes Store, the music store. That’s not even close. : They don’t have full feeds for everything. They don’t want you recreating a store. But they don’t care if you recreate a podcast directory. : Exactly. : It’s an interesting dichotomy there — I don’t know. Maybe it stems from the fact that podcasting was essentially an Internet radio-like paradigm of some sort, or like a mutation of radio for the Internet. That openness of radio. It just like grew that way, organically. It seems like if the podcast store was created today, it would be created with an entirely different architecture. Mostly likely much more closed off. Because everybody’s locking down their silos these days. It’s like Twitter and the Instagram friend finder — Twitter asked themselves ‘why are we giving you that information?’ It seems like it might be much different if it came about today. : One cool thing I’ve noticed is that you put links to all of your independent podcast app competitors into Overcast, which I thought was an interesting decision. : I was surprised Apple allowed it. : Oh, really? : That was the one thing I was concerned about, about rejection. I was lucky. This actually got approved on its first submission, which is a first for me.They have rules against showing unrelated apps, or showing apps that you didn’t make. : I remember that. It was . : It was aimed at those app specials — “hot apps” — kind of apps. That was the one thing I was little concerned…I’m like, “I wonder if they’re going to allow me to do this?” But they did. Who knows? I might be removed in the future. : It seems like maybe they just agreed with the philosophy behind it? : Maybe. Honestly, I don’t think the App Store reviewers have the leeway to make exceptions to the rules based on their own philosophies. : You might be surprised. : The reason I did that was — it was nothing weird or sinister — it’s just that this is a small market full of independent developers that I knew to some degree. I felt bad going in at a free price point, so this was a way to alleviate that, but it wasn’t that much thought put into it. It was more like, “You know what? This is a cool thing I want to do, and let me see what happens.” I was hoping it wouldn’t be perceived as an asshole move, and fortunately it hasn’t been, because there was a little bit of a risk there. But most people have been very good about seeing it as just what it is, just something that to me is a relatively small but fun, nice thing to do, so that’s what I hope it is. These are friends of mine, some of them. : It’s not such a big market that you have this distance from all these people. : No, it really isn’t. It’s really a very small market. You look at the top podcasts in the world, something like “This American Life,” which is usually the biggest podcast in the world. They might get a million downloads of a popular episode. Compare that to traffic numbers that you get on blogs, and big news sites, and everything. The whole podcast medium is a pretty small community relatively, so it doesn’t make sense to do crazy poison-the-water kind of things in this small, well-meaning community. : One last thing. I saw you mentioned something. I can’t remember if you wrote something about it or what, but you mentioned that it was much easier for you to do design work now that Apple’s made some changes to their frameworks that they offer for developers looking to design their own apps? : Yeah. It’s less about the frameworks. The frameworks helped a little bit in…ever since iOS 6, they’ve been slowly adding things. Maybe even five. They’ve been adding things that make it easier to style the built-in elements, because back in forever ago, in the iOS 3 and 4 days, everyone would try to do crazy, ridiculous hacks to try to customize but not totally replace UI kit controls, so you’d have crazy hacks to try to dig in, and dive into the subclasses of something, and try to replace the texture with your own texture, and all sorts of crazy text. : Without having to create something from scratch? : Exactly. Over the last few releases, Apple has added a lot of customization so that now you can customize the stock stuff pretty effectively without hacks and without rewriting everything, so that helps, but what also helped a lot. What probably helped more, is just the change in fashion that happened with iOS 7, because if I was making this app for iOS 5 or 6, and I released it looking like the way it does, a lot of people would say it looks terrible because it didn’t fit in. It was not the fashion of the highly textured style of app. It didn’t have that. I’ve never been good at making those kind of apps because I can’t draw textures, I’m not a graphic artist, so Instapaper never really had that, and that was mostly because I couldn’t do it. Now it’s nice because that’s out of style, and what’s in style is exactly what I happen to be able to do by pure coincidence, which is text, lines, and white space. Now I can turn in something that looks like the wireframe I would’ve handed a designer for iOS 5 and that’s the final app. : I know there are a lot of reasons why they made those changes, but making at least decent design more accessible to more developers is a great side effect. I don’t think they got together in a room and said, “What do we need to do? We need to make it easier for people to make decent-looking apps and that’s the primarily goal for this release,” but it probably came up at some point as an effect of what changes they were going to make to the system, which had a lot more to do with flexibility on different screen sizes and all of that stuff. It seems like it’s a good side effect and it should make it more accessible, which will make, in turn, help Apple because of expanded App Store offerings for their customers that look at least decent. : Exactly. : I think that’s about all I had, I’ll let you go. Thank you very much for talking. : I have 387 emails to read. : I’ll let you get to it. |
The Problem With Founders | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 7 | 20 | a company.” The ultimate panacea to all of life’s problems, the one solution to rule them all. I have personally received Silicon Valley’s most popular advice line more times than I can count, and my friends seem equally likely to have this help foisted upon them. Feeling bored at work? Just go start a company. Feeling depressed about life and lack any direction? Just go start a company. Broke up recently? Just go start a company. Had a parent die and can’t move on? Just go start a company. (To be fair, I overheard that one last year. Apparently the idea is that you get so busy you can’t think about anything else. Grieving 2.0?) The irony of all of this advice is that it almost invariably came from people who had never founded a business before. Our generation’s just go start a company is pretty much like our parents’ “just go join the army.” Regardless of where you stand in life, somehow the experience of going through hell will shape you up and make you a productive human being. And yes, being a founder is a sort of hell. For most founders, the intensity of building a company and the stress that comes from making payroll is almost unimaginable and can break even the strongest-willed entrepreneurs. We can see this darker side of Silicon Valley in , and in . This is not an atypical experience, but rather the experience of a founder in today’s Bay Area ecosystem. And yet, the standard advice remains the same. That persistence is easy to understand if we observe how Silicon Valley operates. What was once a work environment lauded for its egalitarianism has now become something akin to Hollywood: a world of stars amid extras and hopefuls. This of course is not a new theme – certainly captured the limelight from and others who built in the early years. But we have never seen quite the level of focus on founders at the complete expense of the rest of the ecosystem. They attend exclusive events like Sun Valley and Summit Series, stand on stage at Disrupt, and get front-cover profiles on the most prominent magazines in the country. The secret of Silicon Valley is that the benefits of working at a startup accrues almost entirely to the founders, and why people repeat the advice to just go start a business. There is a reason it is hard to hire in Silicon Valley today, and it isn’t just that there are a lot of startups. It’s because engineers and other creators are realizing that the cards are stacked against them unless they are the ones in charge. We need to find a way to build up the profile of that quiet army of people who are developing products behind the scenes, the engineers and product managers who took risks to build their founders’ dreams. We need to democratize our startups again, to recapture some of the communalist culture of the 1960s that once pervaded the Bay Area. And we in the media need to do more to critically analyze the mythmaking that happens around founders and bring our stories back to reality. The act of building something from nothing is deeply cherished by Silicon Valley. For good reason, too, since it is among the most challenging tasks a human being can undertake. Whether it is in the creative space with art and literature or in the economic world with startups and new products, entrepreneurs (very widely defined) bring progress to our civilization by pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Such invention is fundamentally an act of dissent, a protest against the status quo. For creators, it almost always requires some level of arrogance, because creation is about assuming that our vision for the world is more correct than what others have previously decided. Silicon Valley is a rare place where the status quo is always subject to transformation. Everyone is looking for the next revolution, the next great product, the next ingenious business model to join and support. It’s the reason why San Francisco residents and startup-types are such a toxic mix: one wants to preserve the past, while the other wants to erase it and completely repaint the canvas. This might be called the core myth about founders. The world is a dark place, filled with bureaucrats and decision-makers who would prefer to stop innovation and see nothing change in society. Founders are the glorious ones who carry the torch of progress, no matter the cost. That’s why you never hear a startup founder say they are in it for the money. Striking it rich is déclassé in a world of missionaries. This makes the “narrative” key for startups, and so founders have to concoct the most bizarre stories imaginable to ensure that their goals fit the particular altruism permissible by our culture. It’s always about delightful products, compelling user experiences, disruption, and innovation. And a founder can’t just be excited for their product. No, they have to be crushing it. Killing it. A founder must be supremely confident in their plan for global disruption, a hardened rebel fighter. It’s all part of the mythmaking of overcoming adversity, of accepting a lower paycheck because the cause is fundamentally . The militarism in the language is striking. Silicon Valley protects these individuals because they are the rare wellsprings of innovation. Or at least, they used to be. Many years ago, starting a business was difficult, needing vast reserves of capital and requiring founders to give up their careers just to try a new idea. The bar was extraordinarily high, and the talent that joined in these early days was equally high. The bar is so much lower today. Starting a company requires little capital to get started, and even then, dozens of seed funds will cover a startup’s first bills. Top students from engineering and business are gravitating toward Silicon Valley to build their company, since everyone is starting a business and everyone wants to change the world. That single rare diamond is now mass-manufactured cubic zirconia. Yet our myths about founders haven’t caught up with this reality. It’s the reason there is so much derision about founders today from some corners of the press. Heck, it’s the reason this article exists at all. The issues surrounding founders this year, from sexual harassment to physical assault to drunk driving are not problems of heroes, but quotidian problems of everyday life. Founders are normal people, yet are treated like deities. Founders are not normal people in any of the ways that matter of course. For them, the benefits of building a business are many-fold. They can connect with journalists, advisors, mentors, new business partners, and most importantly, investors — relationships that all continue well past the success or failure of their current startup. Plus, they get to define the equity they receive at the conception of the company. It may never have been easier to start a business, but the upside of startups still largely accrues to the founders themselves. Today in Silicon Valley, there really is no risk in entrepreneurship provided you are cognizant of your personal finances. Seed funding is plentiful, and you can essentially be paid to walk around and build up your own brand (and build a product of course). This is why people say “just go start a company.” Even though there can be times of stress and hell in the journey of a startup, the collection of benefits is never at risk like the rest of the business. The personal networks a founder builds will continue to function, and a failure at a startup isn’t even harmful to a personal brand. In fact, it may even accentuate it. It’s the next ten employees who are taking a real risk in joining a startup. They don’t get to build their own personal brands and networks when they join that early. Nor do they get the equity package to compensate them for their risk, receiving only a sliver of what a founder will receive. . Even worse, some startups don’t even list the names of their employees (or use only their first names) nor allow them to add the startup as their employer on , because the company is in “stealth” or more likely, because they are afraid of losing their employees to recruiters. The only way for an early employee to get some sort of credit for their risk is for the startup to exit successfully. But that bar is quite high, since the value of the exit directly correlates with the depth of employee numbers considered influential. What’s a shorthand way to see this? Credit really only goes to founders when a startup exits for less than $250 million. Under a $1 billion, a handful of the early employees will be able to receive credit. And above $1 billion, the number of early employees who can claim credit continually increases with exit value all the way up to a or , where people will mention and receive acknowledgment for even their triple-digit employee number. We often hear that there is an engineering crisis, that there aren’t enough engineers able to do the work needed by our industry. But like all labor markets, the talent looks at the risk-adjusted benefits of a position and chooses an optimal option. Given the amount of equity and the low level of credit and benefits they receive, it should be no surprise that many engineers choose to look elsewhere than early-stage startups for their work. We can’t live in a world where everyone wants to be a founder. Starting a business may be hard, but scaling a business is where all the value of a company gets built. For every founder, we need dozens or more engineers, product managers, business developers, salespeople, marketers, and others to build a startup into a sustainable, economically-competitive entity. Silicon Valley’s founder premium needs to adjust accordingly. Equity is one valve for making this a bit more democratic. Having a startup’s talent, especially those with single-digit employee numbers, receive a bit more equity would probably assist startups in recruiting, and may also allow them to focus more of their attention on getting the best people. But, we also need to shift our culture and empower our employees to build their own careers, networks, and ultimately, dreams. Companies should take the opportunity to encourage their engineers to give technical talks, release open-source code libraries, and receive external credit for the work that they are doing. The same is true on the business-side as well. Interestingly, these sorts of practices are fairly common at Silicon Valley’s top companies — evidence that such practices are ultimately beneficial to startups. Our culture won’t change, however, as long as the media continues to fawn over co-founders at the expense of every other individual. Reporters are often too willing to engage in the narrative-building of startups, since it helps in crafting a story. We need to take a wider lens, and report more than just what the CEO has to say. It’s one of the reasons why I read sites like , where employees who often don’t get much attention have an opportunity to demonstrate their innovations and skills. It’s been fashionable to call Silicon Valley and startups a “hits” business, but we are not Hollywood. Ultimately, the names on our “About Us” pages matter little unlike the movie actors that grace a film poster. The only narrative, the only thing in the whole universe that truly matters is the product we build for our users. Silicon Valley’s roots are in the communalism of the 1960s, and the egalitarian ethos of the Bay Area in the 1930s. We need to bring that egalitarian spirit back into our startups. Just start a company — like that. |
Snowden Calls On Developers To Champion Privacy By Design | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 7 | 20 | Speaking at the conference taking place in New York this weekend, NSA whistleblower put out a call for developers to build systems that protect privacy and constitutional rights by design. He also revealed his own intention to work on developing privacy protecting technology. Snowden was speaking via videolink from Russia where he currently has asylum after the US government cancelled his passport, following his leak last year of classified NSA documents detailing security agency surveillance programs. Responding to a question about what people “It doesn’t end at encryption it starts at encryption,” said Snowden. “Encryption protects the content but we forget about associations… These programs like section 215 [of the Patriot Act] and mass surveillance in general is not about surveilling you, it’s not about surveilling me. It’s about surveilling collectively. It’s about watching the company. For everybody in the country and on a global scale. “This is basically a big data program which provides the raw data that can then be analyzed, it can be filtered, it can be subjected to rules for example… it says everything you do is being analyzed, it’s being weighted, it’s being measured and that’s without regard to whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.” Snowden argued that government dragnet surveillance programs constitute an “unreasonable seizure” of information, under the 4th and 5th amendments, being as there’s no proven suspicion to justify what happens in advance. He also argued it can be seen as a due process violation under the 5th amendment — “where the government is basically saying we’re going to use warrantless surveillance to collect evidence to then secretly use to get a warrant application” — and a violation of 1st amendment rights that give US citizens freedom of association. The continuous, programmatic analysis of the connections of everybody is “a fundamentally un-America thing”, he argued. “If you let you go of your rights for a moment, you’ve lost them for a lifetime. And that’s why this matters. It’s because it happened, and we didn’t know about it. We weren’t told,” he said. “We the people. You the people, you in this room right now have both the means and capability to help build a better future by encoding our rights into the programs and protocols upon which we rely upon everyday,” he added, calling on developers to rethink how they build digital technology so both content and connections can be kept private. “And that’s what a lot of my future work is going to be involved in and I hope that you will join me and the Freedom of the Press and every other organization in making that a reality.” Governments are using the same techniques they use to unmask spies to discover journalists and leakers, said Snowden — via these “association methods”. Getting into specifics, he talked about the need for protocols resistant to traffic analysis, and a padding process to make tracking content and connections harder, plus mixed routing to obfuscate individual connections. “When we think about how we fix these, programmatically, when we think about these in terms of protocols, we need to have protocols that are resistant to traffic analysis. They need to be padded, basically, even if there’s some level of performance penalty. So you can’t look at differences in for example Skype conversations and tell which phoneme or word was spoken based on packet size and signaling speed and so on and so forth. You also need to use some sort of mixed routing, some sort of shared infrastructure, that divorces the individual connection from the individual orgination point. And that’s still a hard problem. We haven’t solved that in a performance respecting manor.” User experience is another clear challenge to be worked on. “GPG is a robust and pretty reliable encryption. Unfortunately it’s damn near unusable,” he said. “We need encryption, mix routing, we need non-attributable communications. Or unattributable Internet access… that’s available to people — that’s easy, that’s transparent and that’s reliable. That we can use not just here in the US but around the world because again, this is a global problem.” Snowden said he believes collective community action and a peer review model is required to address the challenges of developing privacy protections. “We need people to attack these systems, we need people to work as adversaries to try to find holes so that we can fix them,” he said. While technology is clearly enabling governments to harvest data on individual citizens on a scale and at a frequency never before possible, Snowden as a technology practitioner evidently believes technology itself is a neutral force that can also be applied in the counter direction — to rebalance the relationship between individuals and governments. Assuming, of course, enough developers can be encouraged to start thinking about and building privacy by design. “We need to think about software as a means of expressing our freedom, but also defending our freedom,” added Snowden. “Technology gives us a new power — if we pair that with a responsibility to police ourselves, the way technology grows, and not sleepwalk into new technologies.” You can watch the full video interview with Snowden — which also featured Pentagon Papers’ leaker — via . |
Waiting For VC | James Altucher | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | I spoke to the VC on Wednesday. He said he would have his decisions “fast.” He said the great thing about his VC firm (as opposed to all of those “others”) is that it has absolutely no problem making a quick decision. “Our lawyers are all ready. The deal is boilerplate. We can send the money to you right away.” Now it’s Friday. “Did anyone call yet?” I could ask that but I’ve already asked that five or six or 10 times. And then there was yesterday. He did say “fast,” right? I heard him say it. “We invest in exactly this type of company,” he said as he went into the elevator. He was confident, his coat slung over his briefcase. Smiling. He was happy. Harvard and happy. “We did it!” I thought. Finally we got funding. We have a good product. We have customers who want it. We just need that first investment. I mean: ABC Inc got $5 million and their product is much worse than ours. It doesn’t look anything like ours. If their customers knew we existed then we would have 100 percent of the market. We would have no competition. Did he call yet? Is it bad form if I call him now? He did say “fast”? Maybe he didn’t have the right number. I carry my cell phone everywhere but maybe he’s trying to call the office phone. Maybe we don’t have that whole “click 1 if you want James, click 2 if you want Office Admin, etc.” hooked up yet. I don’t know. Nobody ever calls that number. And I’m the office admin anyway. And I’m sales and I’m customer service. No matter what number he clicked it would go to me. I should have it all forwarded to my cell phone. Is it bad if I call him? Would he think I’m desperate? He did say “fast” and that was 48 hours ago. 48 hours = slow. Okay. I’m going to call him in five minutes. It’s not so bad to call and say “just following up.” Or an email! I can say “just checking in.” That’s not too desperate is it? It’s not like he was about to decide “Yes” with his team and then he gets my email and say, “Wait a sec, guys. He just emailed. Let’s raise the valuation on him.” Well, so what? What if he did raise the valuation? You know the old saying: “100 percent of nothing is worse than 1 percent of something.” And this something is big. If that other company sold for a billion we can sell for $10 billion. Why does everyone else have no trouble getting funding? They get all the VCs calling them and then they all split the pot five ways and they say there was so much demand that the valuation had to go up. But I actually have a product that works. And I have customers who not only want it, they are calling me saying, “when do you think you’ll finish it?” I have a real pipeline. If I email him he might not respond. Or he probably gets too many emails. Phone call is the only thing that makes sense, right? I hear the other day the biggest productivity hack: get this. It’s making a . You just pick up the phone, check in with the guy and in three seconds you’re done. But what if he hasn’t met with his partners yet? What if one of them got sick or died? Then I’d have to call him. You know, I don’t even know if I want to do business with someone who says he will call fast and then makes a potential investment and then wait 48 hours. Now 50 hours. He left at noon Wednesday and now it’s 2 p.m. And if he said “fast” and now it’s Friday at 2 p.m. in the summer and he’s probably off to the Hamptons is he really going to make me wait until Monday? Will he really make me wait Saturday and Sunday to wait to see if I’m going to stay in business? I should call him. But will it seem desperate? He said, “We love this space.” He used the word “love.” Do you treat the people you love this way? Make them wait all the way until Monday? Now that it’s Friday at 2 p.m. the week is pretty much over. It’s already Monday. That means “fast” went from Wednesday until Monday. Maybe “fast” for him was just a way of saying “next week.” But in what world does “fast” mean “next week”? Not even a time lord would say “fast” is on “Monday” when it’s already Wednesday. I thought maybe we’d at least be getting paperwork by now. Maybe “no news is good news.” Maybe they’re getting the paperwork together. “It’s boilerplate,” he said. “We just have to fill in the blanks.” Maybe there are just filling in some blanks. Okay, I can’t wait anymore. I should call. In one more minute he might be on his helicopter to the Hamptons. Maybe he even wants to invite me. Maybe if I call now he will invite me and we’ll talk “big picture.” How we might sell later to Google or Facebook or even IPO. I could be rich off this! This can be game-changing. This could be generations of my family. He did say “fast.” I don’t want to appear desperate. But maybe he’s been calling that damn office phone system! I hate that! We all have cell phones anyway. I better call him. I could run home quickly and pack clothes for the Hamptons. I have a bathing suit somewhere. I’m sure he’s going to be really happy when he picks up the phone and hear that it’s me. Later on we’ll joke how it’s a good thing I made this decision. |
Bebo Founder Michael Birch Sends Cease And Desist To Airbnb For Infringement On “Genital Marketing” | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | Bebo founder just sent Airbnb what seems to be a hilarious tongue-in-cheek , citing the “phallic nature” of the . new logo has been a sort of Rorschach test for all of Silicon Valley, as it has been referred to as . To add to the hilarity, Birch sent out a tweet this afternoon that calls out Airbnb for infringing on his “Genital Marketing(TM)” IP. Dear – you're new logo infringes on my IP – — Michael Birch (@mickbirch) had announced nearly a year ago on Youtube that it was launching a new whiteboard feature that Birch called, “The single biggest repository for illustrated cock and balls ever recorded.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm9J8Glk0bE Birch’s letter to Airbnb contests that, “…the visual representation of genitals has become an iconic, strong, firmly associated image with the Bebo brand worldwide.” “Given that Bebo has hung its hat on the tip of Genital Marketing(TM), we firmly request that you discontinue the use of the ‘Bélo’ logo immediately. The phallic nature of the AirBnB logo has the potential to confuse, conflate, and deceive the general public.” “How did they manage to get all genitalia into one doodle?” Birch asked me over the phone. “I let it slide when Dre put our logo on his headphones. But this has reached a climax. We simply can’t be dicked around like this.” We reached out to Airbnb for comment and are waiting to hear back. In the meantime, here’s Birch’s letter to Airbnb, in full:
|
Dell Now Accepts Bitcoin For All Online U.S. Purchases | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | Dell in the United States for online purchases of its products. The move is a win for CoinBase, which today announced that it was the integration partner for the personal computing company. Overstock.com and online technology marketplace TigerDirect also accept the cryptocurrency. The price of bitcoin, long a driver of media and public interest in the stuff, has been quieter lately, leading to less commotion regarding the currency. (In fact, there is between media interest and the price of bitcoin.) To spur interest, Dell will sell its gaming-focused Alienware products for a period of time at a 10 percent discount, provided that users make their purchases in bitcoin. Bitcoin trade volume has been essentially flat in recent months, which could be a troubling indicator that the currency isn’t seeing widening adoption. However, companies like Dell coming aboard could spur more use of the currency by those who already hold it, and promotions like the computing firm have in mind could, perhaps, bring in new users. But Dell is merely another player in the larger bitcoin ecosystem, a network that will require far-wider buy in from non-technology facing companies if it wants to grow into the potential that so many have laid out of for it. I asked Dell if the decision to accept bitcoin was more driven by its own interest or by consumer demand. If I hear back, I’ll update this post. It also isn’t clear if or when Dell will expand bitcoin purchasing to other countries. For now though, a nice day for bitcoin, and a nice day for Dell, a company that has been somewhat off the grid since it went private late last year. |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 2 | null |
Netflix Plays With The Idea Of A Private Viewing Mode To Keep Your History And Recommendations Clean | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | While Netflix tends to stray away from hosting stuff that could be considered straight-up porn, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing on there that you wouldn’t want sitting in your viewing history ’til the end of time. Maybe you want to watch on your lunch break without catching flack for it from your buddies later. Maybe you share a Netflix account with your parents and don’t want to explain what is all about next time they have you over for dinner. Maybe you promised your significant other you’d wait to watch the last new episode of and, er, didn’t. Whatever your reason, it seems that Netflix is catching on that not all viewing has to be public/permanent. got word that Netflix is playing with the idea of a private viewing mode. Once enabled, anything you view would neither show in your viewing history, on Facebook (if you’re who actually tied into ), nor affect what Netflix recommends for you moving forward. With that last bit — that what you watch in “private” mode doesn’t impact recommendations — Netflix has found a solid, family-friendly way to pitch the feature beyond just hiding your viewing shame. Don’t want your kids’ Dora binge-watching sessions to convince Netflix that you would dig ? Problem solved! The bad news? While they’ve confirmed that they’re dabbling with the idea by offering it to select users, Netflix won’t make any promises about when (or even if) it’ll show up for everyone else. |
Comments To The FCC Regarding Net Neutrality Slow As Deadline Approaches | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | The (FCC) initial comment period regarding its notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on net neutrality regulations ends in around seven hours. Instead of seeing a final surge in submissions, however, it appears that the influx in missives from the public to the agency is slowing. According to the FCC’s most recent figures, the current tally of submitted comments rests at 1,062,000, up only modestly from yesterday’s . In short, after a week that saw hundreds of thousands of new comments, it seems that the final day of public comment for this period will be somewhat muted. Traffic to the FCC’s website was so high earlier this week that the agency , so that more could have their say. However, that surge appears to have mostly dissipated. Given that there was an initial rush to meet the deadline — that server-melting traffic — and a large number of comments that poured in following the extension of the time limit, the slowdown at the end is not surprising. Public interest has been high on the issue for some time. The FCC’s NPRM contains rules that would, if enacted, allow for some forms of “paid prioritization,” what is generally referred to as Internet “fast lanes.” Content from companies that could pay might be able — provided the FCC’s rules pass as they are — to pay for faster access to consumers, something that strict net neutrality advocates find to be . We will shortly enter into a second comment period designed to enable responses to previously submitted notes. Comments submitted in that period, however, don’t have to be responses per se, but could in fact merely be standalone responses. So, we’re approaching something of an artificial deadline. That in mind this September, when we hit the hard stop on formal public comment, could see a surge of its own. |
Higgle Lets Like-Minded Shoppers Name Their Price When They Buy Together | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | is a recently launched website where consumers can set the price that they want to pay; in exchange, all they need to do is convince enough friends to join in. is both the name of the company and the term it uses for the discount offers that consumers can make to merchants on the site, combining haggling and bulk discounts, where merchants cut prices in exchange for selling a certain amount of product. When you find a product that you like on the site, you’ll also see the suggested retail price, and you can make an offer to buy it for below that price. Then you try to enlist other people to buy the product at the same price — Higgle tells you how many others need to join the higgle for the merchant to give you the discount (the bigger the discount, the more people you need, presumably). “Higgle is two-way negotiation, giving both sides the opportunity to make a deal by bringing what they have to the table,” co-founder and CEO told me via email. “For users it’s their network and connections and influence; for merchants it’s their pricing flexibility.” To recruit other buyers, you can tell friends and followers by posting the higgle on social networks. At the same time, it’s not limited to people you know — the deal is actually visible and joinable to anyone on Higgle itself. You can also create groups of like-minded buyers and share deals with them. If enough people join in a three-day timespan, then hooray, you get the product at the suggested discount (with free shipping, too). If not, Higgle will send you a counteroffer for a smaller discount, which each participant can decide to accept or not on their own to accept. The merchants are selected by Higgle, which says it automates the haggling/higgling and counteroffer process for them (after merchants enter their initial pricing parameters). Products are offered in categories like fashion, health and beauty, and “geek.” Most of the higgles I saw when I was browsing the site today offered discounts in the 30 to 50 percent range, but there are no explicit limits on your offer — though if you go too low, the site will reject it and ask you to “be fair.” Higgle was in private testing for the past six months before opening to the general public this week. |
CrunchWeek: Microsoft’s Big Layoffs, Airbnb’s New Logo Controversy, Yo Funding | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | Watch , , and I talk about all of that in the episode of CrunchWeek embedded above. |
Gillmor Gang Live 07.18.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | – Danny Sullivan, Alexia Tsotsis, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor.
|
Here’s What’s New In The Xbox One August Update | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | Each month since launch, the has received a software update meant to teach the console a few new tricks. So far, these updates have primarily served to fix bugs, tweak the UI, and reintroduce things that were inexplicably absent after the jump from Xbox 360 to Xbox One — things like , , and . The best news of the next update? Your controller will give you a heads-up it dies, rather than just conking out in the middle of an epic battle. As he does each month, Microsoft’s Major Nelson has released a video breaking down the new goods: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovHyso_jy24&w=560&h=315] |
Y Combinator Adds New Slate Of Partners | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | Silicon Valley startup accelerator announced this morning that it has added to its team with . founder , App.net founder , and Talkbin founder have all joined the organization as full-time partners. Caldwell and Younis had previously been working as with while Ohanian had as its “ambassador” to the East Coast. In addition, HomeJoy founder is joining as a part-time founder. Ohanian, Caldwell, Younis, and Cheung all founded companies that graduated out of the Y Combinator program. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Summer Doldrums | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | As you may expect, the summer can be a slow period for tech journalists. But since we’re obsessed with startups, there’s still plenty of new stuff to discuss this week on the TC Gadgets Podcast. For one, we look at the new , as well as a new piece of hardware called the , which lets you send messages on your phone without any connectivity whatsoever. But first, we take a look at the and what that means for the future of the two tech giants. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by . |
Levi’s Stadium, The New Home Of The San Francisco 49ers, Is Geek Heaven | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | When the San Francisco 49ers take the field for their first preseason home game on August 17, fans will have a lot to cheer about. Not just because the team, which finished last year with a 12-4 record and made it into the NFC Championship game, is back — but also because they will be playing in a brand new stadium. , which had its ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday, is a beautiful arena. It comfortably seats 68,500 fans and can add additional seating to hold 75,000 for events like the Super Bowl. There are two giant screens on either side of the field, with a viewing area of 19,200 square feet between them. But that’s the kind of thing that we’ve come to expect from new modern arenas. What’s really cool about Levi’s Stadium is the technology that has been built into it. [gallery ids="1031779,1031777,1031782,1031780,1031786,1031785,1031784,1031774,1031773,1031769,1031766,1031765"] Fans will be treated to arena-wide WiFi, with more than 1,000 access points scattered throughout the stadium. It will have 40 Gbps of connectivity coming in, which is about 40 times the capacity of even the most connected stadiums out there. The stadium will have an app that will allow fans to instantly watch replays from their mobile devices in the stadium, choosing from a variety of different camera angles. That app will also feature paperless ticketing and the ability to order food and drinks directly from your seat. All in all, it sounds like just the type of stuff that folks in Silicon Valley would want while watching their local sportsball team. Check out the video above for more! |
Yo Raises $1.5M In Funding At A $10M Valuation, Investors Include Betaworks And Pete Cashmore | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | , the simple app that just sends a “yo” to your friends, has closed $1.5 million in seed funding with a $10 million valuation and is finally ready to talk about its investors. They include Betaworks, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, and the founders of China’s Tencent, among others. Yo previously confirmed it had raised $1.2 million in funding, but until today it was unwilling to disclose who had invested in the company. co-founder and Mobli CEO Moshe Hogeg had given some of his own money to the project, but we knew it wasn’t all $1.2 million of it. that the founders of Tencent were also in the round. CEO Or Arbel tells us he’d been in funding discussions with Betaworks since May but couldn’t divulge this information until now. This latest tranche added another $300K to the total, closing the round at a total of $1.5 million. A source tells us the round was raised at a $10 million valuation. The company will use the funds to expand operations in San Francisco, says Arbel, who moved Yo’s headquarters out of the Airbnb offices it had been occupying and into The Hatchery in San Francisco’s SOMA district. Yo has already started hiring a team of engineers and business development folks to help the company expand brand partnerships. These partnerships could mirror what Yo was able to do with updates to users every time a goal was scored at this last World Cup or inform a user that their flight has arrived on their preferred airline. To date, Yo has had over 2 million installs of the app and currently has over 2,000 developers who have started working with the API. “The value of this round goes far beyond the dollar amount that we received,” said Arbel in the . “Bringing such incredibly smart, talented, and experienced people into the Yo team at this stage is an incredible advantage that will allow us to accelerate the growth and provide more and better value to our users.” Some may scratch their heads at why anyone would give such a basic app that kind of cash. “We are fascinated by these uses of simple yes/no, on/off communications tools,” Betaworks co-founder wrote on the Betaworks blog. “As the notification layer becomes the primary interface of alert-based information on your phone — as the OS’s allow navigation and controls in those alerts — there will emerge a new class of applications that mediate this layer for web sites, other app’s and connected hardware.” |
Google Previews A ‘Material Design’ Inspired Look For Chrome OS | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | All of properties will eventually bear a look inspired by ‘ ‘ and Android L, and is part of that sweeping visual overhaul, too. A new by Google “Happiness Evangelist” François Beaufort today (via ) shows a very early design inspired by the card-style multitasking view that made an appearance in Android L, the new Material Design-based update for Google’s mobile OS. The new look, which clearly lacks polish and yet bears some hallmark resemblance to Google’s other Material Design reimaginings, is actually available already on the prerelease Chromium OS builds, and those keen on getting an early look and not afraid to get their hands a little dirty can follow along with fresh updates to the new look as they happen. What’s interesting about this new look is that it resembles not only Google’s other efforts around Material Design, but also Apple’s use of Time Machine and Microsoft’s stacked multitasking view introduced in 7. The Cards metaphor is not new by any means, of course, but its use across Google properties looks to be a certainty, although this is a test only and things can definitely change before we see any major alterations committed to the final release of Chrome OS. |
New Search Engine Unmasks The Hackers | John Biggs | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | Indexeus.net looks like it could have been a project. With a slick design, snappy copy, and a -based payment system, it looks unusually legit. But what the site is hiding is the produce of hundreds of hacking efforts from around the web. I’ve left out the link because it’s unclear if the site may deliver malware now or in the future. You can type it in if you’re curious. While the tagline “Account recovery & Consultancy made easy!” sounds innocuous, Indexeus is a database of stolen names and passwords. According to , the database includes stolen passwords from the recent and hacks. But, according to the site’s crawling file, , the site also indexes all of the major hacks performed against hacker forums themselves. This means that the personal data of various bands of script kiddies are also indexed here.
I tested the site today with my own name as well as President Obama’s. I found one record that matched me – it cost 50 cents in BTC to view – and 11 records for the President. The data it found on me was useless. Because all of these hacked accounts are now indexed using the site, hackers themselves are getting nervous. Writes Krebs: You can also pay to blacklist content that you don’t want to appear on the site, which is quite a feature. Given that the hackers have been hoisted on their own petard, it’s a delightful bit of Schadenfreude. tracked down the creator of the index, Jason Relinquo from Lisbon, Portugal, and even asked the young man a few questions about his service. While it’s unclear how accurate this data is right now, it’s clear that a solid programmer with a little chutzpah could recreate this ad infinitum, creating multiple databases of hacked data that would pop up like hydra heads. Interestingly, Relinquo is not fixing the site to be compliant with Europe’s Right to be Forgotten laws, which, I suspect is exactly what some of the hackers he’s cataloged would appreciate. |
TubeMogul Surges 48% In Its Debut After Cutting Its IPO Price | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | is having a strong first day of trading as a public company, rising nearly 50 percent in midday trading. The company went public for $7 per share, and is currently trading in the $10.30 range. The IPO, however, came with caveats. The $7 per share price was dramatically under its initially proposed pricing range of $11 to $13. And, to help get the thing out the door, prior investors had to offered in the deal. The moves are interesting in that the company’s initial S-1 document indicated that it would seek to . A figure that was bumped up after it first priced its shares — . At $7 per share, TubeMogul raised a slimmer $43.75 million. The basement price of the shares and the use of prior investors to shore up orders were both likely indicative of limited pre-IPO demand for the company’s equity, according to a source with intimate knowledge of the venture capital industry and IPO process. That same individual also told TechCrunch that among many investors, a more conservative outlook on technology shares have become prevalent, especially when compared to market sentiment in early 2014. I asked the company about the purchase of its IPO shares by prior investors. It responded that the move “shows is that [its] investors are bullish on the long-term future of the company.” Those investors certainly are having a good day. What is the lay of the land when it comes to TubeMogul’s financials? As TechCrunch reported previously: It recorded a $7.4 million loss in 2013, the highest of its three reported year-long periods. However, in the first quarter of 2014, the company’s revenue — $22.02 million, up from $9.58 million in the year-ago quarter — came attached to a slim $767,000 loss, down from $1.90 million the year before. It will be fun to see where goes: |
MatterFab Launches To Make Metal 3D Printing Affordable | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | When most people think of 3D printing, they usually think of the plastic trinkets that come out of machines. But increasingly, there’s interest in being able to 3D print items out of metal, which allows for more heavy-duty industrial applications of the technology. Metal 3D printers exist now, but they can be expensify to purchase. A new startup called hopes to reduce the cost associated with metal 3D printing, with a machine that houses a high-powered laser to basically weld metal together. Unlike most plastic 3D printing machines, which work by extruding small amounts of plastic filament onto an object, the MatterFab machine puts down a thin layer of metal powder onto a build plate and then uses its laser to melt the powder onto the layer beneath it. By doing so, the machine can very precisely print various metal objects. [gallery ids="1031752,1031751,1031753,1031747,1031748,1031754,1031750"] CEO Matt Burris got his start after growing up around his father’s in Indianapolis. That shop specifically built machine parts for the aerospace industry, but about three years ago, GE started to 3D print some of the parts that the shop used to make. That led Burris to become interested in creating his own metal 3D printing machine, which he’s been working on for the past two years along with co-founder Dave Warren. The team has been working out of the office of hardware incubator and seed-stage investor firm Lemnos Labs, which helped to get the startup up and running. Due to the rapidly decreasing cost of sensors and computational power, the MatterFab machine was built to offer up metal 3D printing at an order of magnitude lower than other products that are available to manufacturers today. With its prototype done, the company is looking to start building and shipping printers to partners beginning early next year. Check out the video above to see how it works. |
If You Are Lazy Or Incompetent, Unofficial Cardboard Offers A Perfect Google Cardboard Clone | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | There’s nothing that rankles me like a chance to try out some cool new tech squandered – and that’s what happened at Google I/O this year. I managed to snag some face-on time with Google Cardboard, the surprise gift for attendees that consists of a simple folding cardboard harness for your Android device and some concave plastic, but my own unit went missing in the hazy fugue of the I/O press room, leaving me hungry for more than my quick 30-second demo. Enter . This enterprising business sprung up after Google gave away all its units and provided instructions about how to make your own at your home, with a few inexpensive supplies and some elbow grease. Me, though, I got lazy elbows and more money than brains, so I was looking around for something better. , or $25 with an included NFC tag, but that still sounds haarrddd. Unofficial Cardboard, on the other hand, only builds Cardboard clones, and it will even assemble the thing for you for $29.99 with an NFC tag included. capitalized on my inclination towards extreme laziness, so I picked one up, and the results are terrific. I could notice no discernible difference between the unofficial version and the official version, and it worked perfectly from everything down to the magnetic switch that triggers your device’s magnetometer to enable clicks in the official Cardboard app, and any third-party apps built for Google’s experimental project. The field out there for apps to use with Cardboard is still pretty slim, but in the pre-packaged ones that offers up as part of its official software make this a $30 purchase worth making, especially if you’re among those who’s been hearing about and how game-changing it is but have yet to experience it yourself; not that I’m saying Cardboard is at all equivalent with Rift – just that it will provide some approximation of the sensation you get when you try VR, especially if you’re new to the experience. In short, Unofficial Cardboard might as well be Official Cardboard, and if you’re really hankering for a taste of Google’s cheeky experimental foray into mobile-powered VR, this is the laziest, best option that should ship to you the fastest, too. |
The Brandery Accelerator Launches Its Latest Class | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | , has accepted its latest clutch of startups, and they’re pretty interesting. The class included companies developing products ranging from a location-based iPhone app that’s looking to make Yelp hyperlocal on mobile devices, a company making a wearable device programming toolkit, to a water use sensor and mobile app to reduce customers’ water bills. The Cincinnati, Ohio-based accelerator operates a four-month program focused on consumer marketing and branding. Each company in the Brandery class receives $20,000 in seed funding. Of the 35 startups that Brandery launched since 2010, several have gone on to raise $44.3 million in aggregate. So here are the latest startups that are currently working through The Brandery: Location-based lets users define a geographic location to create chatrooms. Founded by 21-year-old chief executive Joel Green and 19-year-old chief technical officer Erwan Lent, the company is the latest example of the location-based messaging craze. Other startups have mined the sector with different iterations focusing on hyper-local anonymous messaging, or with a broader geographic scope. ShoutOut could be one of the first to let users define the scope of their location-based chats. Los Angeles-based is heading to Cincinnati to develop its social music app for concert discovery. Like , uses a mix of algorithms and curators to build a concert recommendation engine. Chief executive Jonathan Lane previously spent 10-years in the music biz as head of digital sales and marketing. 28-year-old entrepreneurs Steve Caldwell, a former software developer for the Army Corps of Engineers, and former airborne ranger, Patrick Henshaw, launched the Vicksburg, Miss.-based to make a wearable development toolkit. The company’s first products include StrapKit, a cross platform SDK to create native applications for wearables, and Strap Metrics, which provides analytics tools for developers. Dayton, Ohio-based wants to increase royalty distribution for musicians when their music is played in businesses. As money from traditional music sales declines, more artists are increasingly interested in wringing every bit of cash they can out of their catalog. The company was co-founded by Eron Bucciarelli-Tieger, the drummer and co-manager of and Todd Tieger, the company’s chief technology officer, and a software developer for the past 30 years with companies like Bell Labs, Deloitte, and Morgan Stanley. hails from Boston and is the latest app to tackle image processing and crowdsourcing to give marketers better data. Using Shelfie, customers can take pictures of empty supermarket shelves and let stores know what items are out of stock. The company was formed by its 25-year-old chief executive C.J. Acosta, who previously led research efforts for the New England Venture Capital Association after graduating from Babson College’s MBA program in 2013. The Houston and Charleston, S.C.-based was created by Adam Cooper, a 24-year-old chief executive from Houston, whose app has already from places like Wired. The company’s mobile app lets users search Instagram photos by time and place via its map interface. Before launching Pixifly, Cooper was a founding member of , a project management tool for Github members to open-source their workflow. New York City’s is a marketplace that connects translators with clients. The vision from 32-year-old Rodrigo Galindez and 29-year-old Sergio Florez is to allow anyone who speaks at least two languages to register to be a translator. Galindez is no stranger to the tech community, with a previous stint at Lemon Inc. and the Interaction Design Association as a leader for its chapter in Cordoba. Cincinnati’s home-grown is designed to improve household water conservation by monitoring the flow of water through a household’s main water line. Its technology is based on a sensor and connected smartphone app, which provides information, action and notifications about water use. The company’s 28-year-old chief executive, Eric Elias, previously worked with Clifton Labs, General Electric Co., and Nielsen. Another contender in the social media marketing and advertising, Chicago’s is developing a user-generated ad platform so customers can create ads for brands. The company’s 30-year-old chief executive, John McClelland, led ecommerce and data projects at McKinsey and Groupo, while its 28-year-old chief technology officer, Luke Libraro, worked at a telematics startup, a hackerspace, and was an adjunct professor of creative technology. Getting fashion tips from the crowd may be a gateway to snark or a multi-million dollar business opportunity for San Francisco’s . The company wants fashion brands to upload pictures of outfits and use the comments to A/B test products. By working online through Lookit, companies can save money and time, the company says. Lookit’s 24-year-old chief executive Connor Bowlan previously served as the technical co-founder for a cleaning marketplace service. When your team includes a former Survivor contestant and luxury real estate agent, and the former chief technology officer Cash4Gold.com, of course you’re going to launch a referral tracking business for industries like real estate, healthcare, and financial services. That’s what Matt Lenahan, 34, and Steve Sperry, 36, are hoping to do with ; which allows any professional to make effortless referrals. Finding a spot to meet with a contact, a date, a stranger, or your dealer can be a chore. So Cincinnati’s is looking to make it easier. The company uses automatic geo-location and proximity tools to select the best place to meet given the context of the person users are meeting. The company’s 26-year-old chief executive has spent the last 6 years working in business development and sales, and previously sang in a heavy metal band. Now that’s a peer network. |
India’s Gigstart Looks To Be The Platform To Hire Live Acts, Musicians | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | India continues to cultivate a small, but fast-growing startup ecosystem. New Delhi’s is building a platform where people can book live artists and performers for parties and weddings. As you might know, Indian weddings are pretty elaborate and take place over many days. The country hosts 10 million weddings per year, points out Gigstart co-founder Atit Jain. “Our wedding market is biggest across the entire globe,” said Jain, who adds that he wants to expand the platform into other Asian markets as well. Gigstart vets listings and has 1,800 curated artists, including dancers, musicians, comedians and magicians on the marketplace. Jain and co-founder Madhulika Pandey, who also happens to be an Indian classical singer, launched the platform back in March. The pair, who had worked for JPMorgan and one of the country’s biggest telecom providers, got the entrepreneurial itch and started collaborating on concepts. “We researched the idea for a good four months,” Pandey said. “Basically, we saw a pain point felt on the artists’ side. It’s tough to hire artists or DJ’s in India. Talent needs representation; there are 40 million artists across the globe.” They started out in a super scrappy way by building a basic Excel sheet of artists and musicians that they floated around to restaurants. But eventually, that became more elaborate as they added on more and more acts. They integrated with one of India’s larger payment gateways, PayU to process payments. They handle credit cards and Paypal as well. So far, they’ve supported about 200 gigs and taken in a 10 percent fee on each. They’re aiming to have 90,000 artists on the platform in the next two years. They have more conventional acts like bands, and then there are more eccentric performers like a human fountain. The startup, which has six people, has raised about $45,000 in funding from backers including GSF, Performing arts are built into the DNA of the company. Several of the startup’s employees are musicians and they have jam sessions every month. Here are a couple dance acts you can hire from Gigstart, including and . [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyqj5Fj9irc&w=560&h=315] [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76KLMUdYFxg&w=420&h=315] |
Premium Not Freemium: iPad Game Monument Valley Passes 1M Downloads | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | Going against the freemium gaming grain, , the sumptuously designed, premium priced iPad game which launched back in and snagged its makers an Apple Design Award at this year’s WWDC, has now passed one million downloads, TechCrunch can reveal. The title is normally priced at $3.99/£2.49 — although it’s currently half that on the iOS App Store in a promotional discount. Although London-based designers’ ustwo’s initial idea was to make a game that made the most of the iPad’s larger screen, launched for the iPhone too. It was then expanded to Android — after racking up 500,000 iOS downloads. Although launching onto has clearly expanded the game’s reach, producer Dan Gray told TechCrunch it’s had a much higher percentage of downloads on iOS. “But that’s kind of indicative of the two marketplaces,” he says. “We knew that creating a game for $4 is a big ask in comparison to the competition on Google Play.” Interestingly the Amazon app store Android version of the game has done pretty well — accounting for around a third of the overall Android downloads. The game has just 10 levels in total, which has led some to complain of its brevity. However ustwo’s intention for Monument Valley was always to create a highly curated experience, with a focus on design aesthetic, first and foremost. That focus has worked out — not only grabbing attention (and the benefit of platform promotion) but winning the game players from outside the usual gaming crowd. One anecdotal sign of that is that the team has been sent all sorts of fan art for Monument Valley — including various cakes and a handmade 3ft high plush totem, according to Gray. Encouraging breadth of usage was built into the design process of Monument Valley, with ustwo conducting plentiful user testing sessions with age-groups ranging from toddlers to grandparents. There’s also intentionally little text in the game — with a strong visual aesthetic providing the cues and clues. “There’s this idea that we don’t confuse people with text tutorial,” says Gray. “There’s only about 20 lines of text in the game — and that’s just the story. So the audience has generally been pretty damn broad. “A lot of people say is it a game, is it just a visual experience/journey… We like to describe it as an interactive experience.” The title made its development money back within a week — rather than the 12 months Gray and the team had originally hoped it might. “To say it blew our expectations out of the water is an understatement,” he adds. ustwo is now spending some of its unexpected MV windfall on building out some new levels. There’s no confirmation on exactly how many it will build yet — although Gray says the aim is to roughly double the gameplay time with a sequence of ‘lost scenes’. (Average gameplay time worked out at around 90 minutes.) There’s also no firm release date but they’re loosely working to an October/November release target. “We don’t mind pushing things out,” adds Gray. “We don’t want to lock ourselves in.” They also haven’t decided whether the new levels will be a paid download or a bonus freebie. However they end up being priced (or not), they will be incorporated into the existing game in a way that doesn’t disrupt the original narrative — so will sit in a separate section as ‘lost scenes’. “Because we put so much time and effort into each one of these chapters, we don’t duplicate ideas and mechanisms on each… But we still had some ideas in our heads that we wanted to venture into further,” says Gray, explaining why ustwo is putting in the time and effort to build some extra levels. “It’s sort of unfinished business,” he adds. That and existing MV users clamoring for more. Despite the extra levels pack incoming, there’s no appetite to turn MV into a ‘fast fashion’ franchise to be immediately milked with a sequel. There may be a Monument Valley 2 in time but that’s not going to happen immediately, says Gray. “We won’t be doing a Monument Valley 2 unless it’s actually Monument Valley 2 and not Monument Valley 1.5,” he says. “People have a love and passion for this game — people really care about it… One thing we don’t want to do is run the IP into the ground. Monument Valley 2, if it ever gets done, it’s not going to be done for a good while,” he adds. That means the team doesn’t yet know what it will be working on when it puts these lost scenes to bed. But it will be going back to the same “vigorous prototyping process” through which Monument Valley, and its silent protagonist Ida, was born. “Ken [Wong, MV’s senior designer] does a lot of sketches and art,” says Gray, explaining the process. “The studio allows space and freedom to riff on ideas. We will go back into that phase again. “We’re not going to make another isometric puzzle game… We want people to say they don’t know what’s coming next from us — and we don’t, as long as core principles remain — a high level of visual quality and polish and originality. The rest is malleable.” Check the gallery below for a sneak peek at the forthcoming Monument Valley lost scenes design process: [gallery ids="1031614,1031615,1031616,1031617,1031618,1031620,1031621"] |
The Seven Constants Of Game Design, Part Two | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | I discussed how video games are both unbounded and bounded by “creative constants”, by which I mean inescapable factors that simultaneously limit and empower the game designer. I discussed the first three – Fascination, Imperfection and Urgency – and promised more to follow. So let’s continue: The rules of soccer are few. The goal of the game is to trade a ball token for points by placing it in an opponent’s net, with the primary restriction being that you can’t handle the ball. You can kick, head, chest and so on (except for the limited circumstance of the goalkeeper), must keep the ball in-bounds and in-time, and there are a variety of fouls. The result is a marvelous game, the most popular sport in the world. Many game designers look at soccer or other simple games like Chess or and think them neat but with room for improvement. To make a video game of (for example) they might add many elements like super-kicks and powerups, bringing more elements onto the pitch (mines, laser beams), changing the scoring conditions away from simple trading maybe to something more exotic like having multiple kinds of goal, or two balls. Maybe the changes would make a very cool game, but it would run the risk of devolving into a big mess. There could easily be too much happening on screen, too much craziness, and for the player who likes soccer the overall game might just be too weird. Weird can be exciting and cool, but weird can also be incomprehensible and opaque. That’s not so good. Games that become opaque lose the player. So this constant sounds like it’s advocating for elegance, but it’s not that easy. Complex games can be opaque, but so can simple games. In addition many complex games (such as massive multiplayer games) can work really well even though they are heavy. The real difference is less about how elegant a game is and more about how natural it is. By “natural” I mean that the actions and and rules of your game need to be physically and naturally relate-able to the player, something that they can intrinsically understand. They have to be able to understand the basics of what they’re supposed to do and what to expect for results, otherwise they simply feel lost. Designers who understand naturalism tend to work from the starting position of fingers and thumbs because those are the root appendages that most players use to play. Ultimately it is from that starting point that the entire of the game is subsequently defined. So the control designs that lean into easy presses of fingers that players naturally use in circumstances that feel right (example: pull a trigger to shoot) tend to require less abstract learning from them. They just get it and can subsequently store that skill and focus on play rather than interface. So naturalism implies a need for predictability. If I hit X intending to hit something and suddenly my character starts spouting dialogue instead, that gets pretty confusing. If a game includes different actions resulting from the same input that’s unnatural design. Conversely if a game includes multiple compound inputs for basic actions that’s generally pretty bad too because it then becomes gesturally abstract rather than intuitive. Furthermore if a complex game’s controls don’t seem to follow a natural logic (such as placing all building options within one menu) then it becomes weird. You can’t break the naturalism constant but that doesn’t mean you can’t play with it. Sometimes it’s good to be weird. To play the web game , for example, is to be lost in a wondrously weird space where nothing makes anything like what the regular player might consider “sense”. But it runs with its weirdness and is amazing as a result. For many more cultured players (folks who play indie games, for example) the sensation of the weird is a large part of why they like to play games at all, so if that’s your crowd by all means play into them. Lastly, please don’t confuse naturalism with conservatism. None of the constants are in any way about the content, tone or culture of video games, nor trying to say that your game should conform to certain cultural norms. I mean naturalism solely in terms of biology and cognition and process. If you want to make games that transgress norms, do so (please do, many of us are bored with white-dude video games). Just understand that if you want to bring players along for the ride, it’s important to ensure they can naturally understand what’s going on. All games are designed in loops. The player does something, something happens and the state of the game updates such that she can do something else, and around and around it goes. There are essentially four kinds of loop, defined by dependence and presence. By “dependence” I mean whether the actions of the player require input from other players or not (Dependent: yes. Independent: no.), and by “presence” I mean whether the game requires players to simultaneously be in the same space (Present: yes. Absent: no.). Both are related to time. I occasionally get into trouble in game design circles for saying that the greatest invention of the video game era was – and continues to be – “single-play”. Most games (board games, sports, etc.) prior to video games were multiplayer. Nowadays you can play all by yourself against the computer, and that fact is why the industry basically exists. Without single-play the games industry would be about 1/100th of its modern size. But why? The answer is that single player loops (and by extrapolation, the games based on them) are independent and absent. Other, more plainly, the player can play on her own time. If single-play is the combination of independence and absence, “multi-play” is the opposite. Multi-play needs players to all be on the same pitch, in the same room, seated at the poker table or logged onto deathmatch arena. Whether co-operative or competitive, multi-play doesn’t work well unless all are present so that the dependent mechanics it uses (pass a ball, shoot a dude) work. This makes multiplayer video games most sensitive to the vagaries of time. Players disconnecting, players in different time zones, players with laggy network connections and more all affect multi-play more severely than any other kind of game, and these can be very heavy design constraints. And, interestingly, a side effect of multi-play’s problems is that multiplayer games tend to be the ones most likely to attract “hardcore” cultures. However there are two other types of loop. There’s the loop that requires dependence but not presence. This is “serial-play”, the loop of the turn-based game that you can play for long periods of time against opponents all around the world, but take your turn as you like. In an older form serial-play was the root of the play-by-mail game and in modern times it updated a little with email. However in the last few years, especially since smartphones and cellular-enabled tablets have emerged, serial-play has become much more usable. , for example, is an enjoyable serial game that works because everyone’s got a mobile phone. Serial-play was also a common feature of social games. All those friend requests asking for you to act to unlock your friend’s next level? Serial loops each and every one. Then the other kind is the loop that requires presence but not dependence, otherwise known as “parallel-play”. Massive multiplayer games are mostly parallel, for example. All players are on the same server(s) and experiencing a shared game state. They may interact with one another, whether socially or through gameplay. They may co-operate to try and take down a dungeon or overthrow a rival corporation (at this point probably verging more into multi-play). The game needs them to be there in order to fill out the world and make it fun for everyone, but players can just carry along as they like. The same is true of games like , of pervasive games like or and of most transmedia games and gamification that uses player comparison to drive play. Time is often a natural barrier to game design. Multiplayer games tend to favor players with lots of spare time like teenagers and students, for example, but creating a multi-play based game for suburban moms is would probably be a non-starter because they wouldn’t have the time to get into it. On the other hand time can be a very powerful mechanic. Remember all those stories your Facebook friends used to tell about waking up at 4am to harvest their corn? That’s an example of a game that leaned into the idea of the long-time loop, creating an “appointment” mechanic that could be used for good or evil purposes. |
Enterprise Investments Surge To Over $5.4 Billion | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | After years of backing headline-grabbing consumer internet deals, it seems that venture capitalists are paying more attention (and more money) to the seemingly staid and stodgy enterprise technology companies (the businesses that sell technology to make businesses work better). Their mission: to explore new ways of organizing data, to seek out new models for efficiency and security for business customers of all shapes and sizes, and to develop new technologies for marketing and selling on devices that no one has done before. Investments into enterprise software companies of all stripes are soaring. The amount of capital invested in these startups has already surged to over $5.4 billion in the first half of 2014. That’s roughly the same amount that enterprise-facing companies raised in the entire year for 2013, according to data from CrunchBase. Much of that capital was invested in the monster financing for new database technology, , but it points to a belief among investors that there’s a huge change coming in the way that technology effects business. And these venture capitalists are hoping to cash in. The surge in investment dollars is actually accompanied by a slowdown in commitments to new technology companies, indicating that investors’ confidence in the sector’s strength is matched by a belief that this current crop of business technology companies is maturing. In the second quarter of 2013, investors backed 328 startups in the enterprise software category, by the second quarter of 2014 that number had declined to 205.
While the numbers indicate a slowdown in the commitments going to business-focused technologies, some investors insist this is only the beginning. The idea of selling software as a hosted online service has been around for nearly a decade, beginning with the customer relationship management revolution, but the technologies that are moving to the cloud were never part of core business operations, they argue. Now, these hosted software businesses are everywhere, and taking over core functions that used to be the purview of internal information technology departments. Data storage is now a service, and even enterprise resource planning software can be bought as a service (and if there’s anything more important to a business than where it keeps its information and how it manages and organizes the use of its resources I’m not sure what it would be). Furthermore, new companies are taking advantage of the extremely powerful new infrastructure technologies that are available to rethink how customer service and other business processes can be automated to a degree that wasn’t possible before. That’s why , Microsoft in the cloud, and why to deliver software to mobile business users. One need only look at the fact that Salesforce and Red Hat now trade above Oracle to see how momentum has shifted away from the traditional software vendors (although at 179.67 billion Oracle’s market capitalization is still over five times that of Salesforce.com’s $33.7 billion market cap). Not to mention that , , and are placing on technology like Hadoop and NoSQL. “This is that next future data platform that in 30 years from now the vast majority that structured and semi-structured data would be stored in,” said Joseph Ansanelli, a partner at Cloudera backer Greylock Partners, in an April interview. “Oracle? Their core database is basically under attack from Hadoop.” If Hadoop and NoSQL are eating at the core of the infrastructure businesses use to operate, then a slew of software as a service offerings, and technology solutions are attacking big enterprise companies on their periphery with services that better apply the new architecture of hardware, software, and cloud-sourced services with open interfaces for application integration. “One of the themes we’ve invested heavily behind is this intersection between big data and traditional enterprise application software,” says of Indeed, Bain’s newest partner, , the former chief executive of Symantec, sees business technologies on the cusp of a still-greater transformation. “Historically some of these cycles have been a five-to-ten year change, but we are just at the beginning of this transformation,” says Salem. “Historically, $120 billion was spent on hardware implemented inside data centers. Now consumers will start running and picking their own applications and that $120 billion spend that was inside the four walls of the data center? A majority of the spend will not be in the data center, but in companies that are delivering services.”
|
#Love: In The Time Of Spotify | David Cotrone | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | has appeared in The Rumpus, Thought Catalog, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and elsewhere. He lives in New York. If you look closely at what I’ve built—at my playlists, all of them public—you can see me. You only have to search my name and you’ll see it all right there: what’s in my head. I’m 23, and my idea of love isn’t far from the chorus of “In Your Eyes”. I’m living in the memory of John Cusack standing outside a window. I’m in the time of Spotify. I’m what others have named a millennial. I have a music streaming service and I’m not afraid to use it. I’m not holding a boom-box high over my shoulders. I’m not serenading you with an acoustic guitar and a song I wrote for you on the back of a napkin. I’m not even rifling through CD store bins to find the perfect compilation of songs, or burning them on a disc with your name written across the front. As a substitute, I’m connecting through codes and algorithms. I’m giving you all I have. For lack of a better vocabulary I’ll call a channel for music. It’s meant to play on your laptop or mobile device. But when making mix CDs was all we had, when it was a language, we were surgeons. We were construction workers taking tiny pieces of ourselves and building from the heart. We turned our insides into bridges. Think about it. The process was painstaking: choosing special songs, finding a way to record or download them onto your computer (or both), and then burning those songs in the perfect order on the perfect CD. Now, that process of wading through stacks of records to find the best blend of songs, burning them to your computer and burning them again back onto a single CD has become a heap of data. Spotify even auto-shares your song-by-song decisions with social networks like Facebook, pulling you into even more data networks, scrambling you into more numbers and codes. To build a playlist on Spotify, the process must start digitally and it must end digitally. You can create custom playlists, but only after running search queries. You can share them with others, but only after linking virtually. You can explore a massive digital library according to artist, song album, genre or record label. You can view suggested rankings of top hits instead of making your own from scratch. You can access the service if you have an Internet connection and a Wi-Fi network. You can even hold a “private session”, which is, I assume, exactly what it sounds like. On Spotify, your heart doesn’t stand alone to create a playlist. It’s plugged into a computer. But even if the process of sharing it has changed, music has stayed the same. Whether you’re heartbroken or not, whether you’re happy, angry or sad, a song will sound different according to the situation. This is how we find our way through the blown circuits of our lives. It’s how we speak. Despite the virtual life of Spotify, you can still connect in a way that matters, which is why I haven’t removed it from my dock and why it’s always open on my computer. In the time of Spotify, I can listen to music that’s double, triple and quadruple my age, or I can listen to the music of today. My Spotify announces it to me directly as if it’s not embarrassing: Mariah Carey, Jay Z, Gavin DeGraw, Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, John Mayer. I receive this information and I’m both embarrassed and relieved. The reasons are obvious. After all, there’s something intensely private about what we listen to. Before Spotify was thought possible, CDs and the playlists we burned to them were full of weight. They’re how we told others what we really felt. We passed them on to our deepest crushes. We said, in so many songs, “I think I might love you.” Fleetwood Mac, Tina Turner, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Eric Clapton—this was the music of my mixes. I would make it a point to seek out the warmth of an era already gone, those timeless songs like “Born to Run” and “Wonderful Tonight” and “Wildflowers.” This was the music of adulthood, of emotions I thought I could touch, and whether I could or couldn’t, it’s what I shared. It’s corny as hell, but music is a fierce kind of magic. It tells us who and when we are. Naturally, we want to hand it to those closest to us, especially with those we want closest to us. I’m no longer in middle school, which was my time of burning mix CDs, but am now using Spotify and Pandora and all of these services that want me to share my music with everyone by default. For some, that makes perfect sense. Some want to broadcast their every song with the rest of the world. Some want to reach hundreds or thousands of miles and make that distance disappear by listening to the same track as the person on the other end. In the time of Spotify that true kind of connection is possible. I live in New York, which at this point is both an apology and a declaration. Most of my playlists have titles like this: Alphabet City, Bowery, F Train, Fort Greene, Madison Square Park, Washington Square, Chrysler Building and SoHo. I’m constantly trying to pair the mood of where I visit with what I hear. It’s ridiculous, and at the same time incredible, like our first crushes, our current crushes and presumably whatever comes next. Spotify promises us “music for everyone” as well as “music for every moment.” So here I am. I’m making a playlist and sharing. We each have headphones on, and the volume is turned up too high, and it’s 4 a.m., and it’s halfway between dark and light, and our eyes are bleary but we’re only a little tired and we’re electric. We’re more tired than we can say. We’re looking up lyrics but reading different parts of our screens, scrolling past the first verse into the second and onto the last. We’re doubling back to the chorus. We’re pressing repeat and then pause, dragging the stream of the song back to an exact time—1:22…2:06—skipping to the next track because there are over 20 million of them, because there’s you and also me, here together only like this. We’re listening. |
The Return Of The Desktop Productivity App | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | Sunrise. Evernote. Feedly. Wunderlist. Mailbox.* Those apps are all an integral part of my personal productivity suite, the tools that I use on a day-to-day basis. Without a desktop version, those mobile clients are useful but not transformative. But with multi-device access, they have become difficult to replace. I’m not the only user who is seeing the tools he uses for personal productivity shift from some weird mix of web and mobile to increasingly connected apps which live on my smartphone, tablet, and now also my desktop. And that’s reshaping the way developers think about how important the desktop is to their distribution strategy. For many users, the desktop productivity app probably never fully went away. Anyone who uses Microsoft Exchange for email or calendaring, or Microsoft Word as their word processor, can tell you that those applications remain omnipresent in a number of organizations. What has changed, however, is how users first find and connect with their favorite applications. Increasingly, we’re seeing users adopt apps on their mobile devices before later installing the desktop version. Interestingly, the rise of these new desktop applications was helped in part by the movement toward cloud-based services as the underlying infrastructure for personal and enterprise productivity tools. The rise of Google Apps in the enterprise over the last several years meant that many users became reliant on applications that lived in their web browsers for communications with others (Gmail), document creation and collaborations (Google Docs/Drive), and scheduling (Google Calendar). But the openness of those services has also led to an ecosystem of apps that provide more power and flexibility than what can be accomplished in the browser. “I think we’ve moved back into an app world where both users and developers are more expecting of apps to do tasks instead of browser tabs for everything,” partner wrote in an email. “In the first case, developers who build for iOS now are much more comfortable building for desktop too — there was a gap from say 99-2009 where most developers were not building client apps at all.” At the same time we saw increased adoption of web apps powering communications, collaboration, and scheduling, we also saw a growth in the number of productivity apps that have sprung up on mobile devices. For a while, those apps were mostly complementary to the tools people were already using in the browser. “I don’t think desktop productivity tool usage went away, but it was complemented/partially replaced by mobile productivity tools that leveraged the benefits of mobile connectivity and data,” partner writes. “However, all of those mobile-first companies are coming to realize that the key to sticky engagement is being omnipresent and for most knowledge workers that means bridging to the desktop as well. So everything old is new again.” Mobile app developers are finding that being just on a smartphone isn’t sufficient. Today users are connecting to services like email and calendaring through a variety of devices and screens, and app makers increasingly want to work seamlessly across all of them. “By owning engagement on both desktop and mobile, startups capture more attention and become more defensible,” Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover writes. “It takes more effort to switch someone from Sunrise when they’re using both the mobile app and desktop app. This is especially important for those creating more ‘commoditized’ apps that can be easily replaced.” Hoover uses calendaring app Sunrise as one example. Mobile email, calendar, and to-do clients, by themselves, are easily replaceable, but having a consistent experience across multiple screens makes them much less likely to be replaced. “Certainly when we talk about being in a mobile era, we mean a multi-screen era,” wrote founder . “We want our information and the experience of the tools we use to span seamlessly across these screens regardless of OS. On our mobiles, well-designed single-purpose apps win because they minimize friction, helping us get what we need quickly while doing whatever else it is we’re doing.” Mailbox is a perfect example of a mobile-first application going multi-screen. It started on the iPhone but soon after also released an iPad app, knowing that users were also using their tablets for productivity. Now, the company is working on a native desktop application that seamlessly connects with its existing mobile apps. “With something like mail, efficiency and consistency of experience are really important,” Underwood writes. “A native app lets you have a first-class experience in every way: an icon on the dock with a badge, dedicated UI that’s tailor-fit to the app’s purpose, multiple windows that can interoperate easily, and the speed of an interface that doesn’t have to be delivered over the network via html.” While web apps were great for getting distribution, thanks to having nothing to install or regularly update — all changes to the user interface happened on the backend and were displayed in the browser — they lacked the speed and power of native apps that users were getting used to on their mobile devices. At the same time, the means of distribution have changed. It used to be that if you wanted a particular desktop application, you would either need to find and download it from the developer’s own website, or possibly through an application aggregator like . Prior to that, you might have had to go to a brick-and-mortar store to buy a box that included software which you would install from a disc. But the problem of distribution is being solved through the emergence of desktop app stores that mimic the way users have come to discover and install software on their mobile devices. The best example is Apple’s Mac App Store, which is a key component of the latest builds of OS X. But users can also find apps that look, feel, and react like native apps on the . “Moving downloadable, executable clients into the “App” metaphor through the desktop App Store makes a bunch of differences, mostly in safety, trust, and convenience,” partner writes. “It also gives all those apps a consistent (if limited, compared to an in-the-wild download) set of permissions.” Furthermore, the convergence of mobile and desktop connectivity seems like it will only get stronger over time. Both Apple and Google have been working to build cross-platform functionality into their application platforms. For Google, that means seamless connectivity between mobile and web apps, while for Apple that means building “continuity” between its OS X and iOS development platforms. As Product Hunt’s Hoover notes, “iOS 8 + Maverick’s cross-platform push notifications will open new opportunities to tie together mobile and desktop.” As connections between desktop, web, and mobile development platforms continue to converge, we’re likely to see even more mobile developers bringing their applications to the desktop. And those apps will continue to get more useful, the more screens that they’re available on. ==
* Disclosure: Yes, I’m on a beta build of Mailbox for Mac. And yes, it’s pretty damn sweet. |
The VP of Devil’s Advocacy | MG Siegler | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | In the 2013 film, , Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) is riding through the streets of Jerusalem as Jurgen Warmbrunn (Ludi Boeken) explains how the city was able to avoid the zombie apocalypse: The tenth man. If nine of us look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it’s the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start thinking with the assumption that the other nine are wrong. While Hollywood may have simplified the idea a bit for the screen, this is apparently which Israel has used in the past. Their military has a unit often referred to as the “devil’s advocate office” [ ]. And yes, the goal is simply to avoid falling prey to group think. I’ve thought about quite a bit over the years. While the stakes may not be as high as war, or even zombies, I’m constantly surprised when companies launch a product that seems doomed to failure right out of the gate. We’ve seen a lot of these launches in recent years. Microsoft’s . Samsung’s Smart Watches. Google’s . Apple’s Maps. All great examples. Each was quite clearly a disaster waiting to happen to many on the outside. So why was it so hard for those on the inside, those closest to the projects, to see the obvious? The answer, it seems, is that most of those people were likely too close to the projects to see what was right in front of them. They fell victim to group think, or worse, they started to rationalize their own bad projects. The latest case in point: the . The reviews have been . The hardware is . The software is . The apps are . And the core points of differentiation seem more like . The list of grievances . But most of this before anyone had even seen the device! And yet, Amazon still launched it. Maybe Amazon will be able to turn this piece of coal into a… slightly polished piece of coal, if they promote the hell out of it on a little site called Amazon.com. But the early returns at stores promoting the Fire Phone don’t look good. . It sure seems like Amazon, and really, every company could benefit from some sort of Vice President of Devil’s Advocacy. That is, someone who looks at a product just about to launch and points out all the reasons it will fail. It was said the served a similar role throughout his years at Apple. He’d be presented with a product and more often than not, he’d rip it apart. He was even known to cancel launches at the last minute if he didn’t feel like something was up to snuff. But Jobs was also undoubtedly deeply involved in the creation of these products. He was the rare visionary who could step back and see the forest through the trees. (And even he had — .) A better way to do this may be to have someone outside the company, a trusted advisor, who is kept in the dark about a new product until that product is ready to launch. Then you bring them in to give honest, unvarnished feedback. Is it a good product or is it a bad one? You need someone who won’t hold back. Yes, this is what user research is for to some extent. But that clearly breaks down in many situations, like the ones listed above. Or sometimes a product is too top secret to test with outsiders. This needs to be a single person whose opinion is fully trusted. Someone with the power to kill or postpone a launch. A VP of Devil’s Advocacy. A 10th man. If a product can withstand the honest feedback and all the potential worst-case scenarios this VP of Devil’s Advocacy points out, only then does a product launch. That may mean millions of dollars of work lost in some cases. But it sure seems like it beats the alternative — . About a year ago, as Microsoft their way towards a series of launches, folks wrote to me pointing out both the reference (and, in turn, the Israeli Defense Force reference), as well as a column noted sports commentator Bill Simmons , suggesting something similar for professional sports: I’m becoming more and more convinced that every professional sports team needs to hire a Vice President of Common Sense, someone who cracks the inner circle of the decision-making process along with the GM, assistant GM, head scout, head coach, owner and whomever else. One catch: the VP of CS doesn’t attend meetings, scout prospects, watch any film or listen to any inside information or opinions; he lives the life of a common fan. They just bring him in when they’re ready to make a big decision, lay everything out and wait for his unbiased reaction. If so many parties can arrive at the same conclusion independently of one another (and in wildly different fields), there’s clearly something to this idea. How many bad products have to ship before we see such a position in tech? After all, it worked against zombies. ( .) |
Fates Forever Is League Of Legends Lite For Your iPad | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | Thanks to the of ‘ , the multiplayer online battle arena (or MOBA) genre is the hottest space in gaming. Besides , which has achieved on the PC, a are hoping to by repeating the formula on tablets. Released , is a well-executed attempt to bring the MOBA to tablets. It doesn’t bring every feature in League of Legends to your iPad, but as you play you realize that most of what’s missing is fat trimmed to make for a better handheld experience. Everything is scaled down in . Instead of playing 5 versus 5, each team has 3 players; instead of 3 “lanes” to struggle over, there are 2. There’s also less diversity in characters showing up in matches — there are only 10 playable characters (with 4 on the way), and since not everyone pays up for characters (or puts in the tens of hours needed to unlock them), you’re going to fight the same characters over and over for a while. has been running daily challenges that give extra in-game credit and giving surprise gifts of characters to keep matches from getting stale. Matches don’t last anywhere near as long as they do in League of Legends or Dota 2. Rather than committing to 45-minute experiences, a match in Fates Forever is generally 10-15 minutes long, which feels much more reasonable considering how most people use their tablets. You can play a match, go check Twitter, and come back for another round in the time that it would have taken to start planning your late-game strategy in a PC MOBA. In a lot of ways, Fates Forever seems like a good way to get younger or inexperienced gamers into the MOBA genre, which is . If you buy the $20 “launch” bundle, you get all of the characters that have been announced so far, which significantly increases gameplay variety. I doubt that the bundle is going to go away any time soon though — the normal price for the characters it includes is $84.99, which sounds ridiculous to the casual/beginner audience. Since you don’t have a full keyboard in front of you during games, players have fewer opportunities to explode into vulgar-flush rants against less-experienced players, an issue Riot Games in the League of Legends community. There’s a chat room shown immediately after each match, but so far I’ve only experienced polite exchanges or silence, which is nice. The length of matches also reduces the amount of planning required to stand a chance in a game. There are fewer stats and items to keep track of, and the game is more forgiving about the timing of attacks since it has to account for the inaccuracy of taps from players like me with fat fingers. Hardcore gamers might be turned off by the limitations that come with playing on a touchscreen, especially on the iPad Mini. You have to partially block your view of the action to tap when moving your character or attacking, and without the mouse and handy shortcuts available on the keyboard you simply cannot control your character as accurately as you can on a PC. While Fates Forever seems more enjoyable for casual gamers than the popular PC MOBAs, that audience’s usage patterns might not mesh well with hardcore players. A common complaint on the is that there are too many players who start games and then abandon before they’re over. Most of the posts about the subject are suggestions for ways to reduce this behavior, which can make games unfairly challenging for the remaining players when someone leaves. I’m the guy who enjoys watching instead of committing an hour to actually playing a game. For those who consider themselves casual gamers, Fates Forever is a fun way to occasionally dip into that style of gameplay without facing the wrath of hardcore players. If you enjoy ands its competitors on the PC, it might be a good way to fill short gaps in your schedule, but you might find everything a bit too simplistic. Here’s what a typical game of Fates Forever looks like: http://youtu.be/WKrsDdNuTWM?t=1m20s |
These Guys Turned A Rock Climbing Wall Into A Big Video Game | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | [vimeo 89390488 w=500 h=375] Indoor rock climbing is a pretty excellent sport. It’s great exercise, it works your brain, and you can yourself getting better each time you reach the top. But once you’ve mastered the fastest/hardest/most creative routes up a given wall, that wall becomes… pretty boring. Perhaps a massive, virtual chain saw heading in your direction will liven things up a bit? Built by a pair of augmented reality researchers in Finland, this rock wall uses a and an ultra-bright projection system to bring all sorts of new challenges into the mix. The bad news? This probably won’t be coming to a climbing gym near you any time soon. While the Kinect was good enough for the proof-of-concept, the team mentions that it’s by no means optimal for their use. Built for tracking people who are , it tends to freak out a bit when the person it’s tracking contorts into a more complex climbing pose. They hope to build a custom tracker of their own moving forward, but that seems like a pretty steep order. [via ] |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 18 | null |
On The Importance Of Forgetting | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | The ongoing debate about Europe’s so-called ‘ ‘ ruling on search engines has shone a light onto a key pressure point between technology and society. Simply put the ability of digital technology to remember clashes with the human societal need to forgive and forget. Our technology now enables total recall of the digital tracks and traces we leave as we go about our lives. It’s trivially cheap to store vast amounts of data. And for tech giants like Google, there’s no business imperative to ever forget an iota of our information. Data is the business. It’s where the value lies now and where more will be created in future as new devices come on stream generating ever more data to be mined, analyzed, joined up and the resulting intel on us sold off , or used to fashion new, more effective products. Sure you might want a tech company to create some cool new service that delights you. But would you be willing to let them implant a chip in your brain so they can read your mind during their R&D process to push your buttons? Where do you draw the line between you as a person, and the services you want to use? There’s a problem with total recall. It doesn’t allow us as a society to forget. And that means, paradoxically, we lose something. Perfect memory engenders individual paralysis — because any legacy of personal failure is not allowed to fade into the background. And individuals are not, therefore, encouraged to evolve and move on. Total recall shuts us down. It encourages conformity and a lack of risk taking. If trying to do something results in a failure that follows you around forever then the risk of trying is magnified — so maybe you don’t bother trying in the first place. It’s anti-creative, anti-experimental, even anti-entrepreneur. To . Name the human society where total recall is considered the norm. It’s far more human to forget. Forgetting allows for new beginnings. As a creative medium, a little forgetting goes a long way. While too much recall smacks of dystopia, or prison, or the dragnet digital surveillance programs set up in secret by our own governments. It’s hardly an accident that corporate power and state machinery are aligning along the same digital fault lines here. There was an attempt under the Stasi in East Germany to exhaustively document individual citizens. To create systemic, mechanized total recall — and that was using records kept on paper. Digital technology enables so much more. These are the issues currently being wrestled with in Europe. Regulators seeking to safeguard individual privacy rights are clashing with tech giants like Google who monetize their algorithm-powered total recall. Google continues to spin the European ruling as ‘knowledge censorship’ — and has so far turned the process of de-indexing private individuals’ links into a by co-opting the media, whose business models generally align with its own here, to be its outraged mouthpiece. But that spin just obscures the genuine nuance of this debate. (Gigaom’s David Meyer wrote a this week dissecting some of the political complexities involved in the rights and wrongs of online censorship.) Consider startups like or or . A new breed of technology startup is thinking different vs the old web guard — and winning users exactly because they recognize that humans need multiple social layers to interact; that humans find anonymity liberating; that it’s normal to have different personas in different social contexts; that it’s ok to screw up now and again; and that no one in their right mind wants some silly photo they snapped on a whim to follow them around forever and ever online. It’s no accident startups that get all that are getting traction right now. Newer tech companies understand the pressure points being created by technology and are using the same technology — which is, after all, just a tool — to relieve those pressure points. And winning fans in the process. Even Google recognizes some of these truths. Just it gave the green light to pseudonymous behaviour on its social network Google+, rolling back from its original requirement that people be tied to their real names. Facebook too, another data-harvesting giant, has been forced to concede attention to less rigidly identity-centric rivals like Snapchat — and has ended up (not to mention with fantastic user engagement for a massive $19 billion), that give people a space to interact privately, and share content without fear of future consequences. What’s posted on Secret is not the same content that gets posted on Facebook — but you can bet your life the two services share some of the same users. The point is, information and communications are always layered and stratified. To pretend otherwise — i.e. to argue that there’s some single sum-of-all-knowledge platform where everyone’s information is supposed to perpetuate ad infinitum is the skewed view here. The bottom line is for creativity to flow society needs to feel fluid. And that requires freedom to try and space to fail. And while technology threatens that freedom — at a big platform level — by its ability to capture, store and make trivially retrievable everything we do, conflating the individual with whatever of their actions the platform has marked, it can help too; via smaller services that reintroduce some of the myriad layers, channels and outlets we need to function and thrive. Still, that’s not enough, given the huge power and reach of the big platforms. Platforms that have captured and continue to capture so much of our data — even, in the case of Facebook, — meaning there’s no opt out of your personal data being stored on their servers, unless you live off the digital grid entirely (good luck!). Or — in the case of a dominant public search platform like Google, which organizes individuals’ information to create a proprietary hierarchy of retrieval — there is no practical opt out for individuals, and no individual input into what Google’s algorithms determine is immediately attached to a search for your name. Europe’s right to be forgotten ruling offers a small outlet for private individuals to be heard when it comes to their own info-hierarchy. It’s a small step — and not without its problems. The implementation currently has glaring holes that allow for easy workarounds (for instance based on territoriality) and loopholes that allow the entire process to be subverted (most obviously as media outlets publish stories about de-indexed links, thereby turning old, irrelevant information into something current and newsworthy again). What’s needed, more generally, are more creative approaches to the storage of information about private individuals. Academics Julia Powles and Luciano Floridi recently wrote elegantly about this concept in , calling for a process of information sedimentation — aka “solutions, adapted to the infosphere, that enable us, individually and as a society, to remember without recalling; to live with, but also beyond, experience; to acknowledge without constraining”. This is not about deleting knowledge or censoring/sanitizing behaviour; it’s about being appropriately sympathetic to the ephemeral character of (human) memory — which, being flexible rather than rigid, allows individuals and societies to move on. Intel’s David Hoffman postulated the possibility of creating an industry self regulatory body to arbitrate on when web users should have a right to have certain personal online information obscured. A so-called Obscurity Center might be a better solution than expecting search engines to be judge and jury on when to grant an individual request for obscurity, as is now the situation in Europe (and part of the reason we are seeing so many problems with the de-indexing ruling). While, relying on overburdened national regulators to step in and arbitrate in a timely fashion seems just as forlorn a hope. Technology always outstrips the establishment. Perhaps the personal information of private individuals that’s stored and made searchable on big dominant platforms like search engines and social networks should be required to have an expiry date, or made intentionally and exponentially more difficult to locate as time goes on. Twitter does this quite well, with an interface that does not permanently delete information but layers it chronologically, making it more arduous to dig down into the sediment of an individuals’ tweets. It’s not that you can’t go looking for the things someone was tweeting five years ago, but it’s not a trivial task to summon their past into the present — and the amount of effort required to unearth that past voice becomes a reflective reminder of its context as a past info-artifact, divorced from their current identity. No one said this complex problem had an easy fix. But to argue the issue itself is black and white — an open and shut case of ‘knowledge vs censorship’ — is to belie the complexities of human identity and social interaction. We are not simple creatures. We are full of contradictions and capriciousness. And our tools should therefore not seek to pin us down, or paint us as black or white — but support and reflect our multifaceted nature. And, while the big platforms are pouring time, money and resources into resisting this reality, there are ample opportunities for startups to innovate — to examine these socio-tech pressure points and come up with creative solutions that can help individuals and the Internet grow together. So startups, here’s one more thing for your to-do list: remember the importance of forgetting. [ by ] |
How Can We Make Recruiting Better? | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | Recruiting is broken. In fact, it is so broken that almost no one I have ever talked to about the subject has offered up a point of disagreement. Not one person has said, “I love recruiting” or “We find that recruiting works just great for us.” Among the Valley’s cognoscenti, today’s startup truism is that recruiting is the most important function of a great CEO. If that is so, why is it so hard to do it well, and why does it have to be so universally despised? While it may be obvious, let me start by giving a couple of case studies of the sorts of recruiting behavior that I think are endemic to the problem. The first comes from a conversation I had with a friend this past week who had recently moved to San Francisco. She was looking for jobs in the startup world, and found a company she liked through an alum of her university. In order to see how well she fit into the culture, the startup had her work for them for a week (I didn’t ask if it was paid or not, but hopefully it was). While she didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by such an approach, I was deeply troubled. It has become popular to have recruits work with their potential team on a short project in order to judge the recruit’s cultural fit and skill level. However, such a practice seems deeply unfair to potential employees, who need to find the time to do such a project while presumably continuing to work for their current employer. The second example is the recruiting industry itself. For those out there who live in the Bay Area and have computer science degrees, getting a LinkedIn ping once a week (or even once a day!) from a recruiter is fairly typical. Yet, these pings are almost universally despised, since recruiters often don’t match job descriptions to skills or provide any information on the startup they are representing. Due to the incentives in the recruiting industry, these massive outbound programs are highly encouraged in order to turn a profit. Lastly, and a bit outside the immediate bubble of Silicon Valley, is the hiring frenzy in certain industries like private equity and court clerks. As the New York Times , the hiring of private equity associates can take place up to 18 months in advance. The same is often true for law school grads looking to clerk for a judge, some of whom get accepted more than two years before their actual start date. In these industries, each cohort transitions at roughly the same time, which causes an arms race among employers to be the first to catch the best talent. In all of these cases, a lack of trust and keen competition on both sides is causing the recruiting process for professionals to be far worse than it has to be. The lack of trust causes employers and potential employees to communicate poorly with each other, beginning arms races and demanding a week of work in order to demonstrate fit. The competition for talent means that recruiters often use less savory tactics in order to meet their quotas. I have been thinking about this for a while, and so it was nice to page through “ ,” a new book by , the founder of LinkedIn, as well as and . Their initial premise for writing the book was witnessing the fake conversations that always take place during recruiting, where both sides over-promise and under-deliver to move the process forward as quickly as possible. Once the job began, however, both sides became disappointed, dooming the work relationship right from the start. Although I don’t like a lot of the militaristic language they used ( : tour of duty, allies, missions, etc.), I think their overarching framework deserves to get more attention. It can be simply summarized as asume that people leave, and thus in the limited time that they are employed, find ways to work together to everyone’s benefit. In this way, recruiting becomes more of a discussion about results than an attempt to demonstrate false loyalty. The process of hiring needs to start with a very different conversation, one that emphasizes that people will almost certainly move on and how can an employer and employee work together to the mutual advantage of both parties. By having an honest conversation, there is more trust built up through the recruiting process. Ironically, these sorts of interviews happen all the time, but with consultants rather than employees. Consultants get hired to bring their talents to a specific project meaningful to the company. In addition to their salary, their compensation includes working on a new problem in their space and thus increasing their skills while also getting an endorsement for future work engagements. This same sort of thinking should be applied to recruiting regular employees. Next, we need to find ways to work together as an ecosystem to build a more trust-based talent system. Engineers, product managers, and other startup employees have long half-lives. It is entirely possible for an employee leaving a startup today to rejoin that same company just one or two years later in a different role, which is why large companies like Facebook and Google generally treat employees well on their transition out. Employees should be able to have transparent conversations with their employer about the state of their career, and have that company assist them in transitioning to their next role. We need to build this open system for two reasons. For one thing, people switch jobs more frequently, and therefore companies should understand that their employees are always preparing for their next position. But more importantly, the competition for professionals has intensified. Recruiting is now harder, and that means clearer references can increase the speed of how we all operate. Building trust here is critical for a productive ecosystem. Rather than seeing such behavior as disloyalty as many do today, employers should see this as an opportunity to construct stronger networks across the ecosystem. As former talent spreads out, the ability to build business partnerships becomes easier, as does the ability to recruit. For example, the engineer that left after 18 months may very well return in a year, and he or she may even bring a friend along as well. It’s always hard to lose good talent, but we need to bring a long-term perspective to this issue. Recruiting is often a process filled with fear, stress, and opaqueness, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Changing the conversation around recruiting can make the process far more palatable — and profitable. Ironically, a more open dialogue between employers and employees may even lead to longer tenures because there is less to misunderstand in the relationship. That means we can turn a broken system into a well-oiled machine, focusing more of our attention on building our startups. |
647,000 Comments Have Been Sent To The FCC About Net Neutrality. Keep Them Coming. | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU&w=630&h=354] In just a few months, the FCC is expected to enact new rules that would allow (or, perhaps more accurately, fail to ) ISPs to provide “fast lanes” for companies who could afford to cough up the dough. When ISPs are able to decide which site’s data moves the fastest, competition becomes a matter of who is willing/able to spend the most. Big companies like Netflix, ESPN, and Disney lose. Startups lose. You lose. Everyone loses (besides the ISPs). The open Internet is in danger — but how many people actually care? 647,000, give or take. That’s the number of comments that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler says they’ve received so far. We’ve received about 647k comments so far. Keep your input coming — 1st round of comments wraps up July 15. — Tom Wheeler (@TomWheelerFCC) In four days, the commenting process enters the “reply” phase. At that point, this first batch of comments become public. You’ll be able to read what others have commented, and voice your support/disagreement. Need a refresher on why this matters? Watch the video up top, in which John Oliver breaks it down better than just about anyone could. |
The Near-Death And Resurrection Of Teen Social Network Let | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 27 | When I met earlier this week, I expected to get an extended pitch for his social networking startup . And sure, he ran me through Let’s features and pointed to its early signs of success, but he also detailed the bumpy road that he took to get to this point. Lorne two years ago. Afterwards, he said he made a mistake that’s common among entrepreneurs when they have a successful sale. He wanted to go big right away with his next project, so he hired a large team of developers, setting up a company with a significant burn rate. This turned into a big issue when, after a year of development, Let launched last November. (It was, coincidentally, a week before Lorne ran the New York marathon). Lorne said the app was aimed at teenagers, but he quickly discovered that wasn’t the audience it was reaching. At the same time, the company was about to take on $1.5 million in seed funding from outside investors. The way Lorne saw it, he and his co-founders had three options. One, they could take the money and hope for the best, but there was a big risk that they’d end up burning their bridges. Two, they could continue to recalibrate while funding the project themselves. Three, they could shut the whole thing down. Not wanting to spend more money on the company, the co-founders decided to go with option three. That meant laying off the developers. However, the developers asked to keep the servers up for a few weeks, while they applied for new jobs, so that potential employers could check out their work. That could have been the end of it, but after those developers got new jobs, some of them wanted to continue working on Let in the evenings. That appealed to Lorne, who had bought out his co-founders’ shares in the company, but he wasn’t willing to spend money the way he had before. So the developers agreed to work on Let part-time, in exchange for equity, leading to its relaunch on March 14. This, I suppose is a good time to explain what Let actually is. Lorne said his goal for the app (which is available on both iOS and Android) was to create “the ultimate, coolest space for teenagers.” While there’s been plenty of debate about whether , Lorne said he’d become convinced (thanks to focus groups he’d conducted while at Miyowa) that “Facebook is not for teenagers anymore. They don’t want to go there.” Let tries to connect with that audience with a focus on positivity, plus a layer of gamification. As they can on many other social networks, Let users can follow each other and post photos, videos, and more. Then they award each other stars for updates they like, and Let creates leaderboards highlighting the posts and users with the most stars. Even after the relaunch, Lorne said Let didn’t take off right away — not until joined, followed by another young social media celebrity, , and they brought their followings with them. Since then, Lorne has been courting what he called the “long tail” of teenaged social media celebrities, i.e., the ones who have amassed a significant following but aren’t quite in the top tier. He said it’s easier to recruit those celebrities, and they’re still feeling competitive about growing their audience. That strategy appears to be paying off. Let’s user base has apparently been doubling every two weeks, and it’s now in the hundreds of thousands. Lorne declined to offer a more specific number, but he did say that 65 percent of Let’s users are girls, mostly in the 13- to 15-year-old range. And the app has been successful enough that three developers re-joined full-time last month. I was also curious about how Lorne tries stays with his audience, since he’s pretty far removed from being teenager himself. He said he has a team of 20 volunteer “gurus” who are actively working in the app to maintain its positive culture, and who give him plenty of feedback about what users want. |
Lyft Will Not Launch In New York Today, Company Says It Will Work With Taxi Commission | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | New Yorkers hoping to catch a ride with today are out of luck. The company said via email and that it’s putting off its NYC launch. had earlier this week, and it said yesterday that despite the fact that the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission said the service did not comply with safety and licensing rules. Now it looks like the company wasn’t able to hold to that stance. It wrote on its blog: Today we agreed in New York State Supreme Court to put off the launch of Lyft’s peer-to-peer model in New York City and we will not proceed with this model unless it complies with New York City Taxi and Limousine regulations. We will meet with the TLC beginning Monday to work on a new version of Lyft that is fully-licensed by the TLC, and we will launch immediately upon the TLC’s approval. This is a positive step forward and a good demonstration of compromise in balancing innovation with government regulation, and we appreciate the continued efforts of New York City government to find common ground for the betterment of New York. One of the stranger things about this story is a dispute about whether or not the state Supreme Court issued an injunction today. the court did issue an injunction while Lyft says there was no injunction or restraining order — “the judge adjourned to Monday because we agreed to hold our launch and maintain status quo.” The company goes on to call the attorney general’s claim “a deliberate misstatement.” We discussed Lyft’s regulatory challenges in New York during today’s (now slightly out-of-date) . |
What Should YC’s Sam Altman Do With These Bizarre Conway, Paul Graham Oil Paintings? | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | trying to figure out what to do with these paintings — Sam Altman (@sama) The Conway painting was , and a YC applicant sent in the one of , according to . I would say auction them off for charity. founder But that could be terribly tacky. Thoughts? For the record, the world of startups and oil paintings are not wholly unacquainted with each other. Back in 2011, once promised new hires a personal oil painting along with a briefcase filled with $11,000 in bacon-wrapped cash, a year’s supply of Dos Equis, a custom-made tuxedo, cigars, Sex Panther cologne, a spear gun and beard-grooming oil. |
LastPass Finds Security Holes In Its Online Password Manager, Doesn’t Think Anyone Exploited Them | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | When you’re in charge of keeping many hundreds of thousands of passwords under lock and key, trust is everything. Maintaining that trust means fessing up when things go wrong — even if it’s something you don’t think affected your users. Such is the case today for , a popular password manager for Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera. They’ve just published details of two security exploits discovered lurking in their products, though they say they don’t believe the exploits were ever used maliciously. You can read their , but here’s the gist of it: So why’d they wait a year? As LastPass fixed the bugs quickly and had no evidence the bugs were ever exploited maliciously, it says they opted to let the research team publish their research on their own schedule. If you’re interested in getting into the technical details of either exploit, appears to be the research paper in question. If you are concerned that you’ve used bookmarklets before September 2013 on non-trustworthy sites, you may consider changing your master password and generating new passwords, though we don’t think it is necessary. Regarding the OTP attack, it is a “targeted attack”, requiring an attacker to know the user’s username to potentially exploit it, and serve that custom attack per user, activity which we have not seen. In 2011, LastPass on their server that they couldn’t account for. Though there was no evidence that user data had been exposed, they opted “to be paranoid and assume the worst” and told many users to reset their passwords. |
Landscape Mobile Launches Sight, Raises Seed Round To Visually Archive Articles | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | The good folks at the new Beijing and San Francisco-based startup have launched Sight today, an app that makes it easier to organize articles on mobile devices. Copying and pasting on mobile devices is a huge pain in the caboose, and solves that problem by allowing users to take a screen shot of whatever they’re reading through the Sight app (available on iOS and Android), which then scours the web for the story and saves it to the app’s own clipboard. The technology and talent behind Sight was persuasive enough for to sign on for a $1.85 million seed round. “An image is the new URL on the mobile web,” says Landscape Mobile’s co-founder and chief executive Yue Zhuge. Yue, a former executive at Yahoo and Microsoft in Beijing and Silicon Valley, has a lot of experience with mobile advertising. “Because of mobile devices, the image has become so cheap to acquire, store and manipulate and with the development of smart imaging technology, analyzing images has also become easy,” Yue says. Landscape Mobile was formally launched in August 2013, when Yue and her co-founder Tian Bai, a former colleague at , began developing the technology that would become Sight. Sight is actually the second product from Landscape Mobile; its first offering was a cloud-based photo gallery service, Ivy Gallery in November 2013, and it was with that product that Landscape first approached IDG Capital. According to the company, its core technology is centered on image understanding, searching and readability. Articles are only the first content that Sight will target. Eventually the company’s smart-imaging identification and retrieval technology could be applied to other areas, like e-commerce. |
Instagram Direct Isn’t Dead, The Messaging Feature Has 45 Million Users | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | Seven months after , 45 million of 200 million users are actively sending or opening Direct messages, the company tells me. This 23% monthly usage rate indicates Direct is far from stillborn. While I haven’t seen or heard of many friends using the ephemeral private sharing channel, it may be quietly gaining steam with those who use Instagram as their primary social network, or small groups looking for more intimacy than the feed. Prior to the launch when sources told us an ephemeral Instagram messaging feature was on the way, I said it was wise move for four reasons. Direct could: The last is the most important, and what I suspect is driving Direct’s growth. Whether it’s a goofy face, a flirty smile, a crass joke, or just everyday conversation, Direct creates a medium for a much wider range of photos than what gets publicly published on Instagram. In private, you don’t have to look perfect, capture the most stunningly filtered sunset, or show off your grandiose lifestyle. Micro-sharing one-on-one or to smaller groups of close friends lets us be ourselves. A few days after Instagram Direct launched . None of my friends were using it. It was awkward to have a visual conversation because each photo or video reply started its own thread. And it didn’t feel different enough from sharing via Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, or even text. [tc_5min code=”518062004″] But I bet there are two main types of Instagram Direct users that make up its 45 million strong following. I may have succumb to judging an international product’s success by my atypical social graph of more mature, hardcore tech users. Many of my friends were on and since the early days. They frequent , and use Facebook Messenger, , and more chat services already. Most importantly, Instagram isn’t their primary social network. They’re interested in knowledge sharing through text and links, not just easily digested photos and videos. My graph is far from representative, though. There are plenty of people out there who live and breathe Instagram. Tired of the drama, inanity, boring links, and ads on Facebook, they use Instagram as their social network. They aren’t necessarily avid Snapchat or messaging app users. To them, Direct is a convenient way to communicate because they already spend so much time in Instagram and that’s where their friends are. Direct could be flourishing with these loyal users. Who else? An Instagram executive told me a few months back that Direct was gaining steam with small groups. Some were based around interests, like a tight-knit community of photography enthusiasts using Direct to get feedback on their shots. Others groups were just cliques of friends who wanted to make sure their besties saw their ‘grams. Since the app has an unfiltered feed, it’s easy to lose track of close friends if you follow too many people or they don’t post that often. Direct’s read receipts show whether friends have viewed a shot you sent them, so you’re not just sharing into the darkness. This type of micro-sharing opens up more informal content types with a lower barrier to creation. Direct lets people share more types of photos more often…just to fewer people. And as long as that keeps users coming back to the app, taking photos, and browsing the feed where it shows ads, Direct micro-sharing could be a win for Instagram. |
Crooks Reanimate A Dead Botnet To Target High-Value Bank Accounts | John Biggs | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | In something that sounds like the plot of a Hollywood movie, hackers have reanimated an apparently dead botnet called Gameover Zeus even as malware researchers dismantled the previous version of the network. The botnet, essentially a collection of zombie computers that can be activated to perform denial of service attacks on banks and other financial firms in order to hide thefts from account holders, was torn down . According to , the tools used to build the network have been slightly improved to allow them to recreate the network without the original command and control structure. He : The network is just one part of the criminal scam. First, hackers break into a bank account – they’ve allegedly taken $100 million so far – to grab the cash and transfer it to their own accounts. While this is happening, the hackers point the botnet at the user’s own servers to prevent them from seeing the theft until it is too late. The Gameover Zeus botnet, then, is a sort of smoke screen to keep things under cover until the hack is over. has a complete rundown of the botnet and shows the spam that it sends to lure users and the fake files it uses to hack into zombie computers. The original botnet died when law enforcement took over the command and control of domain names. Now, however, the new botnet uses seemingly random domain names for command and control. As writes, “this discovery indicates that the criminals responsible for GameOver’s distribution do not intend to give up on this botnet even after suffering one of the most expansive botnet takeovers/takedowns in history.” It’s a fascinating look at a powerful DDoS tool and the lengths crooks will go to keep these things alive. |
Investments In The UK Surge To Nearly $1B As London Is Calling | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | London’s is coming to an end, but the rollick wrought by our roving band of reporters is nothing compared to the party that startups and investors are having in Shoreditch and Camden town these days. For the first half of the year, investors have poured nearly $1 billion into UK-based startups. In all $911 million has been invested in the UK, up from $362 million in the year-ago period, according to data from .
The venture investment scene in the UK is riotous and , but more with the ring of cash registers . And those investments are fairly evenly geographically distributed, according to CrunchBase data.
Some of the UK’s biggest rounds this year were in companies like the cloud call-center , which raised $50 million from investors led by , with participation from previous investors , , , , plus one strategic investor: the cloud-based CRM giant . WorldRemit, a money-transfer service, also raised a big round in one of the largest ever Series A financings for a European startup. . “We like their focus on the long tail, and on the smaller corridors,” said Harry Nelis of the WorldRemit deal. “Instead of focusing on Sterling to euro or to U.S. dollars, what WorldRemit does is think of how to service, for example, Filipinos in Norway remitting back to the Philippines.” Also in the $40 million club were the ticketing company ; the retail analytics data services provider ; and, at $32 million, the investment management company, . Thanks to the big rounds for Nutmeg and WorldRemit financial services was one of the top targets for UK investors in the first half of the year. Other big sectors include mobile technologies, software and e-commerce companies, which each saw roughly $100 million in new commitments through the first half of the year.
|
Apple Spent Over $3B With 7,000 U.S. Small Business Suppliers In 2013 | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | Today, SVP of Operations Jeff Williams attended a meeting with President Obama following the company’s . The program, which also includes a financing component, is essentially an agreement by companies like Apple, , and more to pay its small business suppliers faster — so that they can reinvest funds into growth. SupplierPay is an evolution of , which required federal agencies to pay small businesses within 15 days. SupplierPay applies this to the private sector, where manufacturers will fork over cash quicker to suppliers and investment companies will help them get lower-cost capital. Basically, this is an attempt to get companies that can afford it to return cash flow to small or ‘diverse’ businesses quicker to let them spend that money, rather than it gathering interest in the coffers of a company like Apple. One of the case studies highlighted by the White House is , a company that mills aluminum, one of Apple’s favorite materials — and the company that manufactures the Mac Pro’s distinctive cylindrical enclosure. You can see Metal Impact’s aluminum mill at work in Apple’s video about the making of the Mac Pro from last year. “Last year, Apple spent more than $3 billion with over 7,000 suppliers running small and diverse businesses, creating tens of thousands of U.S. jobs,” the company said in a statement. This is the first time Apple has released these kinds of numbers related to its U.S. supply chain, which it has been building out recently. “We are proud to be making Mac Pro in Austin, Texas, partnering with dozens of component and equipment suppliers from 23 states. The first thing customers notice when they look at a Mac Pro is the revolutionary cylindrical aluminum enclosure which comes from Metal Impact, a small company in Elk Grove Village, Illinois,” said Apple in a statement. Apple says that Metal Impact was primarily working with aluminum in the automotive space before it came to them about working on the Mac Pro. “Alongside their team we created an entirely new process and supply chain, conducting more than 40 experiments with ten different alloys on multiple aluminum mills.” Apple says that working with Metal Impact on the Mac Pro created 18 new jobs and millions in revenue to the Illinois company, which was founded in 1959. Metal Impact credits Apple for aiding in its economic recovery over the past few years — during which they’ve tripled their business. “Apple’s role in our recovery has been significant in both our financial results and, perhaps more importantly, the innovation they have provoked,” the company said in a statement. “Apple believed in us and has totally changed the way we look at our business today. Our work with Apple has inspired us to do things that had never been done before. Together we created an entirely new manufacturing process and have built something that we never imagined possible. “We’re a tiny part of Apple’s incredible story but every time a customer looks at their Mac Pro, we hope they see the pride our team in Elk Grove Village put into making it.” One factor to consider, of course, is that it is likely that some of those 7,000 suppliers actually outsource manufacturing or supply of their own to China — so not all of that money is staying here. Still, Apple contributing to the U.S. economy is good — and certainly makes for good PR at a time when the supply chain of tech giants like Apple have come under massive scrutiny. The general thought behind QuickPay was that it would reduce costs to small businesses to the tune of ‘billions’ by they paid out on loans taken to finance growth or continued manufacturing. The goal, of course, would be to generate economic growth without having to rely on Congress. Since 2011, QuickPay has generated for small contractors — at least according to the administration. We’ll have to wait and see whether SupplierPay will generate similar gains for these small businesses. Jason Roys, president of consulting firm SDV International, told the New York Times that a major contractor of theirs, IBM, already pays faster than other firms. Still, faster would be better. “We’re small and cash flow is a major constraint,” Roys said. “If we’re paid sooner, that would allow us to more quickly reinvest our earnings.” Apple’s SupplierPay agreement is one component of an ongoing campaign to promote the company’s spending inside the U.S. These efforts have likely been accelerated by talk over how much manufacturing the company outsources to China, as well as the continuing back and forth over whether Apple pays its due taxes in the U.S.. Apple CEO has stated that Apple pays ‘every dollar we owe’. In an early last year, Cook said that the company had made a $100 million investment in domestic manufacturing of what we now know to be the Mac Pro — and maybe future products. “We’re going very deep in this project,” Cook said at the time, noting that some components would be manufactured in Arizona, Texas, Florida and Illinois, where Metal Impact is located. Apple has also in Sapphire glass production with GT Advanced Technologies, an Arizona company. That expanded Apple’s ‘Made In The USA’ efforts beyond silicon facilities it maintains in Texas. Other tech companies that have signed on to the SupplierPay initiative include IBM, AT&T, Intuit, Ericsson and Philips. |
CrunchWeek: The Latest Tinder Drama, The New New Microsoft, Lyft’s Struggles To Launch In NYC | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | This time, Ryan Lawler, Anthony Ha and I discussed the in the ongoing story about trouble between the co-founders at , the from new CEO , and ‘s its ridesharing service in New York City. |
Rap Genius Raises $40M, Changes Name To Genius, Launches Embeddable Annotations | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | made today to further its goal to annotate the world. The founders tell me it’s raised a $40 million Series B led by and joined by previous investor at a valuation under $1 billion. It also changed its name to and is launching embeddable annotations so any website can hover over text and see explanations and background info on what that text means. You can see a demo run of the embeds on into the company. ‘ big new investor , plus the majority owner of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers. He’s know to many as . The new funding brings Genius to $56.8 million in total, which it plans to spend hiring engineers, designers, and community leaders. The new Genius name will make it more accessible and intelligible to communities reading and writing annotations outside of rap. And the new self-serve embeddable annotations will give it a powerful way to gain widespread exposure while helping news sites and more offer a unique format for sharing information. A look at Genius’ new embeddable annotations, as seen on Rap Genius launched in 2009, originally as a place to explain the esoteric metaphors and allusions of rap lyrics, but it had a larger ambition to annotate all sorts of texts from legal documents to poetry to news. The scrappy startup stunned the world in 2012 when it raised led by prestigious investor Andreessen Horowitz. Partner Ben Horowitz, an avid rap fan, had dreamed of annotating the web with his old company Netscape. Technical limitations of the 90’s made that impossible, so he invested in Genius to make it a reality. The startup has since been involved in several scandals, including being temporarily demoted in Google’s search results for using link spam to improve its rank, though it . In May it after he used Rap Genius to leave insensitive annotations on Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger’s manifesto. Now it seems the company and its remaining founders have bounced back. Rap Genius Founders Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory (From Left) With , name, and embeddable annotations in place, Genius is poised to significantly grow the traffic that it monetizes with ads. Previously, Genius was at the mercy of SEO, battling older lyric sites for the top result spots for queries like “Kanye Blood On The Leaves Lyrics.” Earlier this year it tested out guided tests of embeddable annotations, but soon they’ll become a self-serve tool any site can use without needing assistance. Annotations featured on other sites could drive Genius extra referral traffic. The company also that also helps ween the startup off of Google’s teat. Many said that a couple of troublemaking Yale students weren’t fit to run a well-funded startup. It’s taken a few stumbles and one less founder to get here, but Genius tells me “we’re psyched to pursue our mission of global annotation with newfound vigor.” |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Misfit, Android Wear, And Samsung Earnings | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | After taking a week off for the holidays (sorry about that), we’re back to chat up the latest news in the Gadgets world. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much. That said, had some disappointing earnings, and to get into the platform space. Plus, we simply can’t help ourselves from talking about smart watches, including the latest Android Wear from Samsung. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by . |
Apple Opens Up With A New Blog About Swift, Its New Programming Language | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | Times, they are a-changin’: about that makes it easier to build applications for and . This marks a new period of openness for the famously walled-in tech giant. While it’s certainly not the same as Apple showing off a product before it’s ready to come to market — a fairly standard practice at rival — it shows that recognizes that it can’t keep developers, whose apps are one of the key differentiators in the smartphone and tablet markets, in the dark about what it’s doing until the last second. In this case, it seems Apple has specifically chosen Swift as a topic where it’s acceptable to be a bit less secretive because A) it plans to eventually migrate developers from primarily using Objective-C to using Swift to develop apps for its platforms and B) the language is technically still in development, so being open lets them get more feedback on its design. Developers are openly showing their surprise at the change in behavior on Twitter: Apple engineers… talking publicly about their work? *looks suspiciously for marketing or legal people with nets* — David Smith (@Catfish_Man) How times have changed. — Ole Begemann (@olebegemann) This is not just about Swift, more like APPLE HAS A BLOG. — Peter Steinberger (@steipete) What what what? Swift Blog? From Apple?!? — Mike Zornek (@zorn) As for the content of the blog itself, there’s . It has to do with a concern some iOS and Mac OS X developers had with using Swift in actual production code: if the language is still under development, does that mean our apps might break in the future? Apparently, that’s not an issue. From Apple’s post: Simply put, if you write a Swift app today and submit it to the App Store this Fall when iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are released, you can trust that your app will work well into the future. In fact, you can target back to OS X Mavericks or with that same app. This is possible because Xcode embeds a small Swift runtime library within your app’s bundle. Because the library is embedded, your app uses a consistent version of Swift that runs on past, present, and future OS releases. |
Yahoo Acquires Video Streaming Platform RayV | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | Following rumors of talks going as far back as May, we’d been hearing whispers all morning that had finally acquired the video broadcasting platform . Sure enough, it’s just been Built in 2005 as something of a competitor, RayV’s specialty lies in delivering high-quality video streams to a lot of people. Yahoo is in the middle of a huge effort to up their video game, doing things like to prove they’re in it — so this move to improve their video streaming tech makes a lot of sense (especially after Yahoo’s attempts to nab or both fell apart). Details of the deal are still under wraps; as usual, we’re digging for more and will update this story if/when we hear anything else. RayV had raised roughly $16M to date. |
XKit, The Tumblr Client For Power Users, Arrives On iOS | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | A well-liked extension called , which adds more functionality to the social blogging service, has just made its way to mobile in the form of a paid iOS app. Though there have been of following its acquisition by , the platform today hosts close to 200 million blogs, which are updated over 94 million times per day. Among these bloggers is a smaller group of “power users” who have always looked for a bit more functionality than what Tumblr offers out-of-the-box. That audience was initially served by a third-party extension called “Missing E” which Tumblr itself once against, via threatening pop-up messages. For 24-year old web developer Atesh Yurdakul – now better known as just “the XKit guy” – his issue with Missing E was not Tumblr’s distaste for it, but its own missing options and settings. “It didn’t have all the features I wanted, such as XPreview…and several other tweaks I wanted,” he says, referring to a notification preview option, which was not available at the time. “So I started writing small userscripts.” XKit emerged from those userscripts around three years ago, when Yurdakul realized that he could compile all the scripts into a single extension, while also replicating some of Missing E’s functions so as not to have to run two extensions. Over the years, the XKit’s user base has slowly grown, and now has around half a million users, Yurdakul now estimates. Most of these users (65-70 percebt) are from the U.S. and Canada, though he himself is based in Istanbul. The XKit software itself is open source, and Yurdakul only asks for donations. Those vary wildly with some months seeing less than $200 coming in, while other months see $1,000. However, for Yurdakul, who learned to code from his dad when he was around 10 years old, building XKit seems to be more of a labor of love, rather than an attempt to earn a living. He also works part time at a software company, he tells us, while attending university. With the new XKit iOS application, Yudakul may soon have another avenue for generating revenue, however. The new app won’t include in-app purchases or ads, but it does cost $1.99 to download. As with XKit on the web, the native app offers a full Tumblr client with a good number of features that the official Tumblr app doesn’t have, including the ability to Mute, Blacklist, reply to Notifications, and more. It also offers “Smart Safe Dash,” which blocks pictures from known NSFW blogs as well as a “Safe Dash” feature which hides all photos until you tap on them. This is helpful because even though there seems to be a limit to the tags and blogs you can query on mobile, there are still ways to see adult content – like by going to a blog by name and following it, or by going to a sometimes ‘softcore’ tag like #selfshots, for example. And accidentally pulling up this content while in public, of course, could be embarrassing. At the bottom of the XKit app, you can navigate between your Dashboard, Inbox, New Post view, Notifications and “Other” tab, which is where you can view more blogs, explore tags, manage your blacklist and muted users, change themes, and adjust a variety of options. Meanwhile, XKit for iOS also offers its own customized reblog window, where you can write, remove or append a caption to a post. You also do things like change the quality of your rich media uploads from the new post screen, block blogs, disable GIFs, and much more. The end result, for regular Tumblr users, is a much more powerful application. Today, “the XKit guy” has a which may be why Tumblr has left him alone for now. How Yahoo/Tumblr will respond to him further encroaching on its mobile turf with this new app, however, remains to be seen. Yurdakul says it’s too soon to talk numbers for the new XKit mobile app since it only launched a couple of days ago. But his personal blog about it already attracted nearly 27,000 likes on Tumblr to give you an idea. The XKit iOS app is $1.99 . |
Twitter’s New Analytics Tell Advertisers And Publishers How Many People Actually Saw Their Tweets | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | If you’re looking for more details about how all of your tweets are doing, today released a new analytics dashboard for advertisers, Twitter Card publishers, and verified users. The company already gave its advertisers data about tweets that they’d paid to promote, covering things like impressions, replies, and link clicks, but there was nothing equivalent for “organic” tweets, i.e., regular, non-promoted messages. So the new dashboard offers a broader view of an account’s entire Twitter strategy. That comprehensive view is important from an ad perspective because, as Twitter’s Buster Benson noted in , Twitter’s ads are just organic tweets that advertisers have paid to promote to a specific audience. The new dashboard includes data like total impressions, total engagements and engagement rates for each tweet, and also aggregates that data for the past month, showing you how you’ve been doing compared to past months. Benson wrote that Twitter also looked at the data for “200 active brand advertisers” and found some patterns. One of the big messages was just to tweet often: “Tweet consistency is a key factor when it comes to maximizing your organic reach on Twitter.” Other “best practices” include: The dashboard definitely got the attention of some TechCrunch writers, who are poking around their data as I write this. Hey, it’s — and if you’re not verified, well, you can always create an advertiser account. You can . |
Microsoft Acquires Disaster Recovery Service InMage | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | Microsoft today that it has acquired , a business continuity service that helps enterprises migrate their data between public and private clouds, replicate their on-premise assets in the cloud and recover their data in case things go awry. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Microsoft is clearly interested in making Azure more interesting to enterprise customers. The company says this acquisition will help it provide hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any customer IT environment, “be it Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware or others.” Specifically, however, the company’s corporate vice president for cloud and enterprise marketing Takeshi Numoto argues that this acquisition will help make Azure “the ideal destination for disaster recovery for virtually every enterprise server in the world.” With that, he also manages to get a little dig in at VMware, because in his view, this will also help VMware’s customers “explore their options to permanently migrate their applications to the cloud, this will also provide a great onramp.” InMage’s existing service will be integrated into the service and InMage will enable data migration to Azure with Scout. Existing customers will be able to continue using the service, but going forward, new customers will acquire access to Scout through Azure’s Site Recovery service. It’s unclear what exactly will happen to InMage’s other offerings, including its , but according to a message on InMage’s site, all of the current products will continue to work as before. San Jose-based InMage, which was founded in 2001, had previously at least $36 million in venture capital from firms like Hummer Winblad, Amidzad Partners and Intel Capital. Microsoft has often said that it believes enterprises are mostly interested in hybrid-cloud solutions and InMage’s technology fits right into this strategy. |
Chinese State Media Renews Anti-Apple Rhetoric, Calls The iPhone A “National Security Concern” | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | has faced a fair amount of state-sponsored criticism in China, a market where the prevailing powers have a stated goal of promoting more home-grown network and IT solutions. The that Apple’s iOS 7 poses a threat to national security because of its ‘Frequent Locations’ feature, which identifies and provides users a map of their oft-visited places, for the explicit purpose of improving various device functions. This location information could be used to potentially sleuth out information about the state of affairs in China, including possibly “state secrets” according to Chinese researchers quoted in the report, which was broadcast on the state-run China Central Television network on Friday. CCTV has , including when it accused the company of discriminatory practices against Chinese customers implied in its warranty policies. The People’s Daily also decried Apple’s customer service practices as “arrogant” last year, and Xinhua cited Apple as a cause behind students running up high-interest debt. All of these campaign efforts have so far fallen on deaf ears; Apple’s consumer base in China is strong and growing stronger. Nevertheless, Apple CEO has shown himself willing to play ball with the criticism from Chinese media, warranted or not – last year he issued an apology in the form of a letter for the complaints by CCTV about its warranty practices, and promised to amend its policies accordingly. In most cases, the concerns of the Chinese state-sponsored media appear to be overblown, and not without agenda, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have influence. Cook clearly recognizes that and has acted in the past to make changes accordingly, but we’ll have to see if Apple formulates a response to this fresh criticism as well. |
Developer Predicted LeBron’s Move To The Cavs With Website Analysis | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | LeBron James is going home. just announced that the king will once again don a Cleveland Cavaliers jersey. The move was predictable yet few people knew for sure that he would leave Miami — except LeBron’s web developer. Yesterday, a developer ran on . Reportedly, the results revealed several new unpublished pages built the day prior. The pages were void of content but did have a color palette with a navy blue header, crimson fonts and golden accents — the colors of the Cleveland Cavaliers. From what I can see, these pages are still not published an hour after today’s announcement. They might not exist at. The developer to scrape a password, which is illegal and could result in legal action. Four years ago LeBron partnered with for a 30-minute dog-and-pony show to announce his move to South Beach. This time around he penned an article for Sports Illustrated, explaining his intentions. Today’s announcement ends weeks of rampant and obnoxious speculation of where the game’s greatest player would call home. Would it be Miami? Cleveland? L.A.? Few knew but everyone had a guess. But as one web developer can attest, it’s awfully hard to have secrets now. Web developer friend’s take on the stuff: — Matt Borcas (@mattborcas) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZzgAjjuqZM |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.