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FCC Approves Billions To Bring Wi-Fi To More American Schools | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 11 | American schools are set to receive billions in federal dollars to bring Wi-Fi to more kids. The (FCC) today approved, by a 3-2 vote, a new plan that will deploy $2 billion over a two-year period to bring increased wireless Internet capabilities to schools. The program will impact . The larger E-Rate program that helped get nearly all American schools Internet access has an annual budget of $2.4 billion. The Wi-Fi monies come on top of that tally. It almost didn’t happen. Republican members of the Commission found the original $5 billion plan too expensive, and Democrats wanted the full amount. The smaller figure failed to unite the opposing sides, and the final vote was executed according to party affiliation. The , in an email, noted that the passed plan does “target” the original $5 billion amount that Commissioner Ajit Pai would “blow a $2.7 billion hole” in E-Rates’ budget. Complaint was also raised about how the money would be spent in terms of the breakdown of its rural and urban divide, and whether the new plan sufficiently reformed the bureaucratic overhead that the E-Rate program currently endures. Spoiler: Not everyone is convinced. Despite complaint from various angles, the Democratic portion of the Commission managed to find enough common ground to pass the effort. In the end, FCC Chairman Wheeler stated that passing the plan was a “good day’s work,” given the impact it will have on kids. That’s correct, but there is enough tang in the vote to indicate that something bigger was perhaps within reach. |
Twitter Acquires Image Search Startup Madbits | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | has acquired image search startup for an undisclosed amount. The announcement was made on New York-based ‘ site and . Madbits co-founders Clément Farabet and Louis-Alexandre Etezad-Heydari said: “Today, after a tremendous year of development and iterations, we are excited to announce that we are joining Twitter. Over this past year, we’ve built visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organizes and extracts relevant information from raw media. Understanding the content of an image, whether or not there are tags associated with that image, is a complex challenge. We developed our technology based on deep learning, an approach to statistical machine learning that involves stacking simple projections to form powerful hierarchical models of a signal. We prototyped and tested about ten different applications, and as we’ve prepared to launch publicly, we’ve decided to bring the technology to Twitter, a company that shares our ambitions and vision and will help us scale this technology. We are excited to join the folks at Twitter to merge our efforts and see this technology grow to its full potential.” Madbits says the company is “primarily interested in the task of image search, and the creation of intelligent, dynamic image sets, to automatically organize large databases of images.” Last year it launched , which allows users to create collages from photos taken inside the iOS app. was a student of Yann LeCun, the New York University professor and deep learning pioneer who is , while studied with Larry Maloney and Eero Simoncelli. Twitter’s acquisition of Madbits makes sense because the social networking site has been focused on building out its image features. For example, it recently and (though the GIFs that show up in Twitter feeds , but MP4s embedded with the HTML5 video tag). In addition to building out its people graph, adding support for more types of images to Twitter will give it an edge in e-commerce, another business that it is focusing on. Earlier this month, Twitter , an app platform that lets developers build card-linked offers like electronic coupons, loyalty cards, and virtual currencies. Twitter did not have any comment beyond Madbits’ post. |
Taptalk’s Official Response To Its Clone ‘Instagram Bolt’ | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | “F*ck Retakes”. That was founder Onno Faber’s reply when I asked for his reaction to . Bolt lets you send photos and videos with . And those faces are lined up on the bottom half of the camera screen…just like Taptalk. But that doesn’t seem to have dampened Onno’s spirits. Here are the Taptalk messages he sent me back. |
Netflix And AT&T Sign Peering Agreement | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | has signed a peering agreement with that will see the video streaming service pay the ISP for direct connection to its network. Previously, Netflix signed similar agreements with and . Interconnection agreements do not deal with how content moves across the network of an ISP, but instead focus on how it gets onto the network. In short, Netflix customers — who are also the customers of ISPs — request large quantities of data from the video-streaming company. Non-paid interconnect agreements see traffic traded between networks for no cost. ISPs are unhappy that Netflix sends so much data onto their networks, allowing the connection points between themselves and the video service to become clogged. Netflix, therefore, pays the ISP for a direct connection to its network, ensuring that its content can find its way to its customers without delay. While Netflix is willing to sign peering agreements with ISPs, it doesn’t want to. The company has in favor of what it calls strong net neutrality, a definition that it expands to include the barring of peering agreements. Netflix provided TechCrunch with a brief statement on the deal, indicating that the agreement was reached in May, and that it would see “additional interconnect capacity” installed to “improve the viewing experience of our mutual subscribers.” The processing of hooking up the new capacity should be “complete in the coming days.” This is the new normal. |
A TV Show About Online Videos Shows Us We’re In A Weird Place With Content Right Now | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | A TV show devoted entirely to showing nothing but online videos is now in the nation. You may have seen RightThisMinute on HLN or one of your local channels: It’s on most Cox, Scripps and Raycom stations coast to coast and will soon be syndicated throughout about 91 percent of the country. The show gets over 2 million viewers for each half-hour episode. Comparing some of the long-standing syndicated shows like the ever popular Judge Judy to RTM is like comparing apples to oranges, but it’s more popular than new shows with big names like Bethany and also Queen Latifah’s new talk show. There are no writers for the show. The producers and talent all watch and comment on videos they find, TMZ-style, just as they watch them. That may be because the former executive producer for TMZ, Lisa Hudson, is now a part of the RTM team. Videos on TV conjure up images of Bob Saget hosting America’s Funniest Home Videos. Something we’ve left in the past. We’ve moved on to making our second screen our first screen with YouTube, Hulu and Netflix on hand. “We find the best videos from around the web and bring them to your TV screen,” says show host Beth Troutman. She sees the show as a good crossover in this weird time of TV meets Internet meets TV viewership. Shows like The Young Turks and Revision 3 have niche audiences, and not everyone discovers them with the flip of a channel. I sat down with Troutman to find out why this show has become so popular. While opts for their mobile devices, there’s still plenty of Americans watching good old network programming. The latest from shows 18-24 year olds still watch about 22 hours of TV per week. The numbers also show for traditional television. And so we get the marriage of crazy videos and TV together to make one very popular show. |
Our Nine Favorite Companies From The 500 Startups Demo Day | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | It’s that time again: just put on demo day for its at Microsoft’s conference building in sunny Mountain View, Calif. The seed stage investor and startup incubator showed off 29 products and services that range from making it easier to get a home loan to a marketplace for 3D printed knick-knacks. We don’t want to disservice our readers or the startups we saw today by only briefly mentioning what each is doing, so we’re only going to mention the companies that we found to have the most potential. We selected the following companies based on the quality of their early products and the market they’re addressing. In no particular order: Co-founder and CEO described as the “ for after school car pools.” The app is by parents for parents, allowing them to coordinate playdates and rides for their children to and from school and practices. Parents are organizing into groups based on neighborhood or school. The startup has already partnered with several Bay Area school districts, which will be promoting the app during the back to school season and also monitoring the school’s groups, ensuring only school parents are using the app. Obviously parents will like this app, but kids who used to get stuck waiting for a ride home will love it. Running a social media account is harder than it looks, and for most small businesses it isn’t worth it to hire a person to manage Twitter and Facebook profiles. Still, engaging with your customers outside of direct transactions can be important for strengthening ties and maintaining mindshare. takes most of the work out of creating and managing a social presence. By feeding its algorithms certain preferred sources and topics, you can give it an idea of what kinds of posts you’d like to see go up on your streams. Once you start approving tweets and posts that it generates, it recognizes what you’re looking for and can be set to post on “autopilot.” While most of us can’t help but yawn at the latest “marketing solution,” ‘s service actually makes it easier to improve the user experience in an app faster than you could with traditional development tools. Vessel includes all of the analytics tools that developers expect. The real trick to its service is that it lets you act on data coming in from analytics without waiting for updates to make it through App Store approval. By adding a bit of code, it lets product teams adjust an app’s interface and workflow in a WYSIWYG interface that can be pushed out to different groups of users in order to test the effects on engagement and sell-through. You can’t seriously change functionality of an app from Vessel without deploying an actual update, as Apple wouldn’t like that very much. But by using Vessel’s analytics and editing tools, you can fiddle with workflows in an app to make sure that people are getting to the point where they might by something faster and with less frustration. Whether you believe cryptocurrencies are the future of e-commerce, it’s still commonly understood that bitcoin and its ilk aren’t exactly user-friendly. Wallets, the blockchain, verification — for most people, it’s simply much easier to stick with the credit cards or services like PayPal, even with the hassles that come with them. makes it easier to jump in to using bitcoin by making it as simple to buy as a prepaid debit card at your local market. You pick up a card, pay a 7 percent redemption fee, and you’re good to go with a Everyone here loved the end of GogoCoin’s presentation. The company pulled an Oprah moment, asking us all to look under our chairs to find one of their prepaid cards. In a marketplace where retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch and Lululemon refuse to make plus sizes, ’s founder Cynthia Schames says her company grew out of frustration she personally experienced when searching for fashionable, plus-sized clothes. As we’ve , Abbey Post allows women to buy clothes made at their custom measurements at retail prices. Everyone can relate to being unable to find the right fit in the styles they like, and Abbey Post solves that problem. We have to give Schames presentation points for coming out in a perfectly fitted royal blue dress to Sir Mix A Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” With hundreds of millions of hours of video and music out there on the web, it’s not easy to find the exact piece of content you’re looking for. Unlike text, which can be indexed directly, tags have to be generated or made by hand for videos on or songs on uses advanced transcription to vastly increase the textual data we have about the content that’s out there. Right now, podcasters can upload an audio file to the service it’ll generate tags and a transcription (and host the audio in a searchable format), but in the future the company envisions its software letting users search for a reference or character in a TV show and instantly jumping to the points where they show up. is launching a series of apps to make the most of existing security cameras. In the company’s cloud-based app store, users will be able purchase apps that include one that anonymizes faces and another that will track traffic patterns. They hope to one day build a platform that can gather video from security cameras and apply them to big data problems. This could have huge applications, from small business security to cities solving infrastructure problems. ‘s app gives you a grid of four squares that you can fill with different pictures and videos. By swiping a square, your friend can then remix the tiles, allowing you to collaborate to make content that evolves over time. In the presentation, the founder showed a video of herself singing the Mario theme song a capella. Friends shot video separately and then remixed her Waffle by adding their voices, creating a single video featuring each person even though they filmed at different times and places. The app still has a few bugs and won’t be rolled out for about four more weeks. The world of financial modeling is a mystery to those who aren’t analysts themselves. Institutional investors have immediate access to reports from industry experts, while everyone else is stuck with the information that companies are required to release or the analysis of bloggers. It can all feel like the market is rigged in favor of the big guys. Prices move up and down, and most of us have no idea why. As we’ve , is hoping to be a “ for finance.” People will be able to share their valuation models, letting those creating them borrow and learn from those looking at the same companies from different perspectives. With its simple visualization tools, Thinknum also gives a window into the minds of the analysts shaping the market’s expectations. The concept seems to have fans in the investment community: only yesterday, the company announced that it had raised |
Facebook Is Shutting Down Gifts To Focus On Its Buy Button And Commerce Platform | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | wants to help other businesses sell things, so it’s done selling its own. will shut down on August 12th and stop selling gift cards for businesses like Starbucks and iTunes. Facebook tells me no layoffs will occur, and most of the team has already been reassigned to other commerce initiatives it’s concentrating on. Those include the Buy button for making ecommerce purchases within Facebook, Auto-Fill for auto-populating your billing info in other shopping apps, and Custom Audiences that let brick-and-mortar merchants retarget Facebook ads to existing customers. By selling ads and potentially charging a revenue share for products bought through the Buy button, Facebook could make plenty of money on commerce without having to host its own Gifts store or bombard people with Gifts prompts on their friends’ birthdays. Facebook’s official statement on the shut down is “We’ll be using everything we learned from to explore new ways to help businesses and developers drive sales on the web, on mobile, and directly on Facebook.” In September 2012, to a test group in the US. , it was a cutesy online shop within Facebook for buying chocolates, teddy bears, wine, and gift cards for friends. What was especially useful was that you didn’t need to know a friend’s address to send them a physical gift, unlike Amazon. Facebook would post a “wrapped” gift to your friend’s wall that they could open, see a personal message from you and be asked for their shipping address. Facebook took a cut of the purchase price in exchange for promoting Gifts and managing fulfillment with its own warehouses. , as there was (overly optimistic) hope it could make serious money by with its data on what people Liked and who their friends were. The $FB share price bump from Gifts was important because at the time Facebook’s share price was hovering around $20, far below its IPO price of $38 (it’s at an ). A source tells me that at the time, Facebook was desperate for new revenue streams around ads or anything that would convince investors it had potential. But the Gifting experience just didn’t fit naturally into Facebook, many of the Gifts were kitschy junk, and people just didn’t want to spend money sending them to friends. And while handling shipping was feasible in the continental United States, Facebook never found a way solve distance and localization problems to make Gifts work internationally. Facebook scrambled to into its popular birthday calendar. Instead of the traditional “HBD” wall post, people to buy friends small gifts. It didn’t take. Facebook signed more , and launched its own that could be refilled with credit to an array of businesses like Target and Olive Garden. But my own attempt to use the card as clerks had never heard of it. Facebook entirely in August 2013, and doubled-down on gift cards, which were 80% of sales already. It gave brands their own URLs for their Gift card stores, and concentrated on personalization by using its treasure trove of interest data to recommend what you should give a friend. Still, no luck. Gifts were long , the company avoided talking about them in earnings calls, and didn’t push any product updates. The beginning of the end came earlier this year when Facebook quietly stopped letting people add credit to the omni-cards. And now it’s dead. In retrospect, Gifts looks like a clumsy stab in dark of ecommerce. Post-IPO, Facebook was willing to try pretty much anything to make money, especially on mobile. Facebook typically operates as an open platform without injecting too much of itself. But Gifts felt overly branded and heavy-handed, like an elephant in pageant make-up with nowhere to stand. The experience should teach Facebook to stick to its strengths: advertising and delivering traffic. Gifts will stop being sold August 12th and Facebook is currently notifying partners to expect no more orders. Anyone who has an unredeemed code for a gift card will be able to redeem it directly through the merchant, which each have their own expiration policies. Facebook’s Omni-Gift Cards with remaining balances can still be used. Since any Gift that’s not “unwrapped” after two weeks gets returned, there won’t be Gifts left in limbo. With Gifts on its way out, Facebook can focus on what does work: helping businesses sell more to Facebook’s users, rather than selling products to them directly. Instead of replacing their stores, Facebook just wants to smooth the checkout flow, show ads that lead to purchases, and prove those ads work. Here’s a look at Facebook’s major commerce products going forward: : This lets Facebook businesses publish Page posts and ads which show a Buy button that lets people purchase things without leaving Facebook. Rather than having to click through to a merchant’s website, users can enter credit card info directly into Facebook or use a card on file to complete the checkout flow in-line. This shaves both the website navigation and clumsy billing info entry steps off the conversion funnel. The Buy button lets Facebook to drive businesses more sales, especially on mobile where users loathe leaving their favorite apps and tapping in credit card numbers. Facebook isn’t taking a revenue share from Buy button sales currently but tells me it was “not disqualifying that option” in future, which could become a big new revenue stream. As long as businesses are getting more sales, they may be happy to give Facebook a cut. : This tool for third-party ecommerce mobile app developers lets business like JackThreads put an “Autofill With Facebook” button into their checkout flows. Instead of having to type in their credit card info, if a user has a credit card on file with Facebook, the button will auto-populate their billing info into the app for a speedy checkout. Facebook isn’t taking a cut of these purchases just yet either. Instead, Autofill lets Facebook know how much which users are spending in what apps. It can then connect this to data on who clicked what ads to prove the return on investment of mobile app install and re-engagement ads to ecommerce developers. : These let businesses show off three different products in a single ad that users can scroll through horizontally. Each item has its own description and click destination. It could be combined with Facebook’s new scrollable to create a mini-shelf of buyable products within the social network. Facebook says former Karma CEO and Gift’s head Lee Linden is now working on its commerce ads products. : Facebook wants to help drive offline purchases too. With Custom Audiences, businesses can upload sets of email addresses or other identifying information of different subsets of their customers into Facebook’s ad tool in a privacy-safe way. They can then retarget these users with ads. For example, if a car dealership got someone’s email address who test drove a car but didn’t buy it, it could use Custom Audiences to show them ads tempting them to pull the trigger and buy the car. : Facebook can also use Custom Audiences and partnerships with data providers like to track if its ads are driving offline purchases. When it gets lists of people who made purchases straight from the businesses or its data providers, it can match them against its ad data and prove their ROI. If businesses know buying Facebook ads nets them more sales than they spent on ads, they’ll increase their spend. Facebook tells me it’s still early days for its commerce initiatives. On , COO Sheryl Sandberg said “The more people buy online, the more people buy things they discover through their mobile phones, the more people discover things from a News Feed and go on to purchase, the more important we are in driving ecommerce and I think we are increasingly important. That doesn’t mean we’re going to or have to sell products.” Gifts may have failed, but Facebook has so much data on who people are, what they care about, and what they buy that it has plenty of other ways to inject itself into commerce. |
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ThredUp Flush with $23 Million | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | On the heels of online consignment rival , just filed a $23 million Series D with the . According to the filing, is seeking a total of $25 million in equity funding. We’ve reached out to ThredUp about the filing but have not heard back. led the company’s Series C back in 2012. Other investors included and . All three previous investors are named in this current filing, along with Clinkle and Netflix operations officer Andy Rendich, ThredUP co-founder and CEO James Reinhart and Greg Bettinelli from Upfront Ventures. This would bring the company funding total up to just over $46 million. That’s more than double the amount raised for rivals at $23 million, at $16 million and at $21 million. |
Palantir Acquires Social Polling Startup Poptip | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | , a startup that helps companies conduct social media surveys and , just that its team will be joining starting on August 1. A spokesperson confirmed the acquisition but declined to comment further. The two companies don’t seem like an obvious fit; for example, see the slightly mystified conversation that follows . As I said, is a social marketing/polling company, while Palantir is a data analysis company that sells its technology to government agencies and financial institutions. However, what Poptip does seem to offer Palantir is . Poptip founder : The Poptip team has worked tirelessly to develop innovative technology that helps commercial companies process unstructured conversation data. And we’ve been fortunate enough to help quantify the voices of hundreds of millions of people through our products. Our work at Poptip was our first foray in real time data analysis. But we know we still have so much room to innovate and grow, and Palantir gives us the resources to do just that. Falter also said Poptip will be “part of the growing Palantir team here in New York.” Poptip’s investors include , , and . Palantir, meanwhile, last year, valuing the company at $9 billion. |
Eventbrite’s Power Duo Julia And Kevin Hartz Will Speak At Disrupt SF | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | We’re thrilled to announce that Eventbrite co-founders Julia and Kevin Hartz will be joining us for an on-stage interview at — the tickets for which are sold by Eventbrite, natch. and are married now, but they weren’t when they paired up with to start the incredibly popular self-service ticketing company that lets users create, promote and find events. Since it was founded in 2006, the company has arranged over 200 million tickets for a total of around $3 billion in gross ticket sales, including around $1 billion in sales in the last year alone. Eventbrite raised a on a more than $1 billion valuation back in March of this year, bringing its total funds raised to $190 million. The company but the IPO will likely be pushed back to 2015 due to its recent funding round. In March, Eventbrite made steps to break out beyond just general admission events, and rolled out a service that . If Eventbrite wants to continue leading the pack, it will likely have to compete with Facebook and other competitors when it comes to helping people find local events. At Disrupt, we’ll be sure to ask them about their future plans. Before Eventbrite, Julia Hartz worked in television as a manager of current series at FX Networks and the coordinator of series development for MTV. In 2013, she was a finalist for TechCrunch’s “Founder of the Year” award, and was listed in Fortune’s list of Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs. Julia currently serves as the president of Eventbrite, and handles in-house strategy and growth, as well as building and evolving Eventbrite’s 300 “Britelings.” Kevin Hartz is Eventbrite’s CEO, leading the company’s day-to-day operations. Before founding Eventbrite, Kevin was the co-founder and CEO of Xoom Corporation, an international money transfer company that operates in over 30 countries worldwide. He also served as an early-stage investor and adviser to successful startups PayPal, Pinterest, Lookout, Flixster, Airbnb, Trulia and Yammer. Come watch Julia and Kevin talk at Disrupt SF 2014 about the future of events and what Eventbrite’s plans are for 2015 and beyond. Tickets are , and early bird pricing is on now through September 1. If you’d like to sponsor Disrupt, sponsorship packages are still available as well. Reach out to for more info. |
Google Docs, Sheets And Slides Get New Home Screens With A Taste Of Material Design | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | has rolled out for its , Sheets and Slides productivity web app suite, with new homepages for each that present your content in a visual grid and that introduce just a hint of Material Design into the look and feel of the apps, with bold edge-to-edge fields of color and some basic animations. The new start pages for Docs, Sheets and Slides do make it a lot easier to find your relevant file and start working on it, but it’s a mobile paradigm brought to the desktop instead of the list-based design that previously let users navigate their files, which more closely approximated the hierarchical file folder system those used to Finder and Windows Explorer might be more comfortable with. Luckily you can switch to that style of navigation with a single click. Personally, I’m a big fan of the new look, and I hope it gets even more of Material Design’s slick good looks and bold, minimal style as Google progressively rolls out its new design principles across its properties. |
Twitter Picked Up 16M Active Users In Q2 | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | In its most recent quarter, didn’t just . It also showed continued user growth, which has been an ongoing concern for the company. Twitter there were an average of 271 million monthly active users, compared to . (Of that total, 211 million active users were mobile, representing 78 percent of all active users.) That’s an increase of 16 million users, or about 6.3 percent quarter-over-quarter, and an increase of 24 percent year-over-year. Concerns over user growth were reportedly a big cause of last month. The company’s active user base has never actually declined on a quarterly basis, but its growth appeared to be slowing, reaching a low of 3.9 percent at the end of last year. The Wall Street Journal had previously that Twitter would be releasing new user metrics as an attempt to highlight its reach beyond logged-in users, but that effort seems to be delayed. So this earnings report, like the ones before it, stuck with monthly actives and timeline views as the main measures of user reach and engagement. Timeline views, by the way, were up 15 percent year-over-year, to 173 billion. During the earnings call, CEO addressed the issue of Twitter’s reach. He said the company is still focused on the experience of the “monthly active user base,” but he also said that its “total audience and reach represent a significant opportunity.” |
Microsoft Now Builds Nearly 95% Of All Windows Phones | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | The Microsoft- deal closed, and Microsoft now builds and sells millions of phones each month. But more to the point, Microsoft now builds 94.5 percent of all Windows Phone devices. That’s according to , an advertising company that services the mobile platform. Its on the Windows Phone ecosystem indicates that in the month, devices that it marks as Nokia units had nearly 95 percent market share. That market share now belongs to Microsoft. As adduplex notes, the assets that Microsoft now owns are still gaining market share, picking up 0.7 percent in the last month. So that makes Microsoft the de facto Windows Phone OEM. Microsoft is working with global OEMs in an attempt to broaden the hardware base of its mobile platform. Those efforts, in many cases, are nascent. We should, however, see a number of new handsets running Windows Phone inside the next 12 months. The Nokia assets that Microsoft purchased provided the company with partial-quarter revenue of just under $2 billion, and negative earnings per share for the truncated period of $0.08. It’s expensive revenue, in other words. Microsoft indicated during its earnings call that it expects the division to stop losing money by the middle of 2016. Microsoft wants to sell lots of phones and derive profit from that revenue. But it also wants other companies to buy into Windows Phone. As such, it likely wants to see its percentage market share decline over time, as unit volume expands. For now, Microsoft’s Lumia phones all but Windows Phone. |
Instagram Launches One-Touch Photo And Video Messaging App Bolt Outside The US | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | is taking on by turning your best friends’ faces into the shutter button with today’s official release of its but only Singapore, South Africa and New Zealand will get this initial phase of the and rollout. Designed for lightning-fast, ephemeral one-to-one video and photo messaging, Bolt was that appeared on Instagram last Thursday. Now the company is officially trickling out Bolt in hopes of powering visual communication with your closest friends and family. The won’t work if you’re not in these three countries. Instagram says it picked them because they each feature high Instagram usage, deeply interconnected communities, high penetration of Android Ice Cream Sandwich, and speak English. This makes them good testing analogues to its home market where its not ready to push yet. The plan is to get the kinks out before releasing the app worldwide, including in the United States. Instagram wouldn’t comment on . is barging into the already extremely crowded photo and video sharing space. Beyond Snapchat, , , Twitter, Vine, and a slew of international messaging apps, Facebook itself already offers News Feed, Messenger, Groups, Paper, Slingshot, WhatsApp (once official), Instagram’s feed, and Instagram Direct. Yet Instagram tells me it’s confident the ‘fast-first’ app will be very popular and won’t cannibalize Facebook’s expansive roster. I’m not so sure. Eliminating a few taps from the photo sharing process just doesn’t seem like a big enough deal for people to use a whole new app. And if it is, Bolt already has two young competitors in Taptalk and Mirage that look and work so similar, some will call Bolt a clone. You sign up for Bolt with your phone number — no Instagram or Facebook account required. It sucks in your phone’s contacts and you can select to pull any of them into your Favorites list. You’re then given the Bolt camera. Rather than a standard shutter button, the faces of all your friends in your Favorites list are shown as a scrollable row across the bottom of the screen. Tapping one of their ugly mugs instantly sends them the photo with a single touch, which is supposedly Bolt’s big value proposition. Tap and hold to send someone a video. Taptalk had a similar set of face-buttons for sending photos, though with a pane of boxes instead of overlayed circles. Mirage looks almost identical. On Bolt, you can only share to one person at a time, and have to re-shoot to send to more. There’s no uploading shots from your camera roll. A few buttons at the top let you switch the selfie mode, turn on your flash, or overlay big white text similar to Snapchat.
When (if) you receive a Bolt, you’ll get a notification in the top center of the app. Once you’ve viewed a Bolt, you swipe it away to delete it as the photos are ephemeral. You can also choose to reply with a Bolt, or send a text reply overlayed over a blurred version of the Bolt you received, similar to Facebook’s standalone app Slingshot. One intriguing feature is ‘shake to unsend’. Similar to ‘undo’ in Gmail, you can retract a Bolt within the first few seconds of sending it by shaking your phone. That shake will also bring up the option to save your outgoing shot to your camera roll. You can block people who are annoying, but there’s no report function. Instagram tells me it will monitor for spam but isn’t scanning Bolts for dickpics or other lewd content. Anyone with your number saved in their contacts will be able to Bolt you, though there’s a weak little privacy option that lets you opt out of being searched for by phone number. Like Snapchat and Slingshot, once a friend has deleted a Bolt you sent them or its automatically destroyed after 30 days, it disappears from Instagram’s servers. That’s it. It’s slightly faster photo sharing. And I’m not convinced that’s seductive or addictive enough to succeed. Instagram tells me that Bolt is useful because it’s so quick. The company says that right now it’s relatively cumbersome to go through the three to ten steps to send a photo from a mobile messaging app. But similar to the “Speed improvements” release notes in many updates, I think people will ignore that, perceiving it as a non-feature. Taptalk also uses faces as buttons for sending photos Just imagine trying to get your friend to use Bolt. “It only takes one tap to send a photo!” I imagine the response would be “Wait, doesn’t it only take a few to send one with SMS or Facebook Messenger, and they let me send whatever I want?” Successful social mobile apps tend to have a standout feature that makes them compelling and immediately worthy of word of mouth. Instagram combines filters with a sharing feed. Snapchat has self-destructing photos. WhatsApp made international texting free. Secret is anonymish. Even those that are only doing okay tend to have something special about them. Frontback’s diptychs put selfies in context. Even Facebook’s oft-derided Slingshot app has something unique in reply-to-unlock. Bolt doesn’t. And in case you think it does, Bolt will have to compete with TapTalk and Mirage, which both look and work very similar to it. They’re both just getting started, though Mirage apparently hit 200,000 downloads in the first 24 hours, and was the and the #1 free social app. Taptalk’s Android app apparently has That shows there’s some initial interest in the idea, but I’m not sure people will stick with these apps. Bolt might be useful for people who incessantly photo message with just their spouse or best friends. From the screenshare demo I got, it does seem a bit fun because it’s so lightweight and fast. It does have one powerful weapon to fight competitors. Instagram will be promoting Bolt app with in-app banners just like the leaked ones from last week. Still, there are so ways to share that have existing communities of users, it may be extremely tough for Bolt to score the ‘ ‘ necessary for rampant social app success. I thought we had enough photo apps two years ago? |
Twitter Skyrockets After Reporting Big Q2 Revenue Of $312M, Profit Of $0.02 Per Share | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | This afternoon reported its second quarter financial performance, including revenue of $312 million, and earnings per share of $0.02. The street had Twitter to lose a penny per share on revenue of $283.07 million. Its revenue in the quarter was up 124 percent from the year-ago period. In the second quarter of 2013, Twitter’s revenue . In its most recent, , Twitter had revenue of $250 million. In the period, 81 percent of Twitter’s ad revenue came from mobile advertising. The company reported that it has 271 million monthly active users, up from its 255 million tally in the first quarter of 2014. That’s up 24 percent, year-over-year. Twitter’s monthly mobile user count was also up, to 211 million, a gain of 29 percent. The company had adjusted EBITDA of $54 million for the three-month period. Keeping the non-GAAP statistics coming, Twitter reported that it derived $1.60 per thousand timeline views, up 100 percent year-over-year. Twitter rose more than 1.5 percent in regular trading in a down day. In after-hours trading, following its earnings beat the company is massively up. This was a massive quarter for Twitter. Stronger-than-expected user growth attached to big beats on both revenue and non-GAAP earnings per share have delighted investors. The other side of the coin? Twitter’s GAAP net loss totaled $145 million, up from $42 million a year ago. On a GAAP basis, Twitter lost $0.24 per share. Investors, however, were not expecting Twitter to be profitable by GAAP measurements, so the loss isn’t too much of a drag. Looking ahead, Twitter expects revenue for the third calendar quarter of 2014 to come in between $330 million and $340 million, strong guidance. The company expects similar adjusted EBITDA, and large stock-based comp expenses. So, expect those GAAP losses to continue for now. TechCrunch will tune into the earnings call at 2, so get ready for more. |
Atheer Labs Releases A First Enterprise Developer Kit For Its 3D, Wearable Glasses | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | There is a pretty wide spectrum between wearables like Google Glass, which you take around with you in your everyday life, and fully immersive virtual reality experiences like the Oculus Rift, which take you out of the real world and are experienced in a stationary environment. , a Mountain View-based startup, is building a set of wearable glasses that’s somewhere in between. “In certain cases, people need to do something in the physical world but they also need information or have to interact with the digital world,” said chief technology officer , who was a researcher at UC Berkeley specializing in computer vision and sensor networks before joining the company. ‘s glasses let you see an overlay of information over the real world — like Google Glass — but they also let you manipulate digital fields or content with hand gestures. A sensor built into the pair of glasses can pick up the shape of your hands and whether you’re swiping left or right, or clicking on an augmented reality button. After that raised more than $200,000, they’re releasing an enterprise-focused developer kit. That kit includes the developer unit and glasses. Yang and co-founder Soulaiman Itani envision partnerships with all kinds of enterprise applications. They’re thinking about use cases where a person might need to access online information but don’t have extra hands to tap on keyboards or tablets. Like oil workers in the fields, or doctors whose hands are unclean while they’re in the operating room. “We’ve identified a number of these companies from airspace and industrial and machine companies and we’re engaging with them,” Itani said. “This could revolutionize workflow for large companies or it could change the way that hospital floors work with nurses and doctors being able to see vitals through the glasses.” The initial developer kit went for $1,000 on the Indiegogo campaign, while the Atheer One glasses went for $350 to 500 depending on how early a backer joined the campaign. Itani and Yang didn’t disclose the amount of funding that they had raised, except to say, “We have runway that we’re very comfortable with.” Investors , however, include Georges Harik, who was one of Google’s first 10 employees and Hossein Eslambolchi, who was previously a chief technology officer at AT&T. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0onzbGNJIQ&w=560&h=315] |
Exchange Corp. Launches Cardless Payment Service With $3.3 Million Series A | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | The Japanese startup has launched a new up-front payment service for online retailers called as it closes on $3.3 million in new financing. Launched by Russell Cummer, a former trader with Goldman Sachs in Japan, began as a peer-to-peer lending service in Tokyo, but is expanding to offer up-front payments as the market for those services begins to blossom in Asia. “I left Goldman to start Exchange Corp. as a peer-to-peer lender [and] we’ve lent about $15 million, but the gating agent has been identifying qualified lenders,” Cummer says. The pivot to Paidy takes advantage of the work that Exchange Corp. had already done to identify creditworthy borrowers, and couples it with a financing platform that has already loaned $15 million through its peer-to-peer network. “Paidy is a cardless check-out that allows a customer to check out with only their name and email address,” says Cummer. “We’ll take the risk. We will let you check out without a credit card. We guarantee payment to the retailer in 18 days. Customers can pay us in one shot or they can create a financing.” The idea for Paidy grew from Cummer’s own observations into the way Japanese consumers shop. “People are not so comfortable using their credit cards on the internet,” he says. “In Japan 40% of transactions are not settled via credit card, but with people paying at a convenience store in advance or paying using a bank transfer.” Using Paidy, retailers should be able to reduce that slippage, says Cummmer. It’s actually part of a broader movement that firms like Arbor Ventures, which led the financing for Exchange Corp., see emerging in financial services. “Arbor has an investment thesis, which is right, that all of these new categories of data-driven financial services are the future,” says Cummer. “Look at credit card technology, where the stack is 60 years old.” The vision for replacing the credit card with an automated service that elides the plastic was convincing enough to rope in not just Arbor Ventures, but also CyberAgent Ventures and Recruit Strategic Partners. “We see a huge market opportunity in the growth of e-commerce in Asia and with cardless payment services, driven by the rising tide of mobile purchases.” said Melissa Guzy, managing partner, Arbor Ventures in a statement. |
Microsoft Updates OneNote For Apple Products | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | a number of changes to OneNote for Apple products — iPad, iPhone, and Mac — today that broaden the functionality of the note-taking tool. Users of OneNote for Mac can now connect to OneDrive for Business accounts. Across all three devices, OneNote users can now add files to their ‘notebooks.’ On iPad and iPhone, users will be able to insert files sent to their email inbox as well. Added to the mix is the ability to access password protected files on each of the devices. Improved copy and pasting technology is also coming for iPad, iPhone, and Mac. Small updates, but worth noting in the following context: Microsoft debuted updates to OneNote on a rival platform, not in sync with updates to OneNote for its own platforms. That’s to say that the software company’s OneNote development cycle for iOS and Mac is likely independent of its Windows and Windows Phone cadence. Interesting. |
Talk Private To Me: Free, Worldwide, Encrypted Voice Calls With Signal For iPhone | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | Rejoice, O lovers of privacy! For has released , which gives any and every iPhone wielder the power to fully encrypt their calls against prying ears — and is completely compatible with OWS’s time-tested and well-liked . Under the hood, Signal uses push notifications to initiate calls, Amazon Web Services to route the data, and the protocol, developed by , to encrypt conversations end-to-end. You don’t need a new password or a new number; it’s built to Just Work . Oh, and your call’s metadata is protected/discarded as well. The code is and has an , too; every merged pull request is rewarded with some of the Bitcoin donated to the project as a whole. The Open WhisperSystems iOS team — security researcher and astrophysicist / hacker / engineer (disclaimer/disclosure; Christine’s a friend) — are also working on encrypted text communications compatible with OWS’s TextSecure for Android, and expect to release that as part of a new version of Signal later this summer. At that point, on the Android side, RedPhone and TextSecure will similarly be rolled into a unified Signal app for Android. Development is also under way on browser extensions so you can make secure calls from your computer. One quirk of ZRTP’s anti-surveillance arsenal: to protect against , it generates a random pair of words for each conversation — “hockey publisher” in the screenshot above. Users can ensure their word pairs match by simply reciting them to one another. , it’s a sign of a Man in the Middle. It’s been a busy summer for Open WhisperSystems. A month ago they won a , and last week they , a private — and, of course, highly secure — cloud-sync service for Android calendars and contacts. |
Backed By Tencent And Felicis, Scaled Inference Wants To Be The Google Brain For Everyone | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | Google Brain, an artificial intelligence and machine learning project at , has been used to power services like Android’s speech recognition system and photo search on Google+. Now, two of the most longstanding machine learning engineers, one of whom worked on Google Brain, have left the search giant to start a new company. The idea: to build machine learning, artificial intelligence technology similar to what’s used internally by companies like Google, making it available as a cloud service that can be used by anyone. , as the startup is called, is still very much in stealth; it doesn’t even have a website (although there will eventually be one at and ). An lists the two founders, Olcan Sercinoglu (first started to work for Google in 2001) and Dmitry Lepikhin (an eight-year Google vet who worked on projects like Sibyl, in products like YouTube and Google Play). It also notes notes that the startup has already raised $4 million in seed funding from investors that include distinguished Google engineers Georges Harik and Gautham Thambidorai, , , Tencent’s , itself, and others. Contacted about the startup, Sercinoglu tells us that Quora’s Adam D’Angelo is also among its backers, that the seed round is likely to be around $8 million when it closes, and that they are now on the hunt for engineers and others to flesh out the business. There have been a number of notable departures from Google Brain — a so-called Google Brain Drain as one person who I spoke to described it. Andrew Ng, one of the original founders and leaders of the project, left to co-found Coursera and earlier this year . Quoc V. Le is . Other Googlers with deep learning, object recognition and image classification expertise have left for Facebook, to fill the ranks for the social network’s own artificial intelligence project. And when you consider that companies like Apple are also ramping up in search, there is clear demand in the market for deep learning expertise. For Sercinoglu, this is actually the second time that he has left Google — the first being when he worked on another startup called Imanen, focused on intelligent mobile applications that adapted based on user interactions. Sercinoglu says that Imanen’s IP is now being transferred to Scaled Inference. Sercinoglu and Lepikhin chose to build this project as a startup rather than within Google, even though they could have stayed there to work on it. “We had the opportunity to do this exact project at Google,” he says. “They were willing to acquire the IP from Imanen to let me work on this there. But I just felt that it might be a great opportunity to build a company like this, to sustain itself.” It’s very much a case of no hard feelings. Sercinoglu has a history of doing his own thing: while still at university he also built a music search engine called AVFind.com, which is no longer running but had been the first project of his that helped catch Google’s attention. “I’ve always had a tendency to build my own thing, and how long I stayed at Google speaks to how great Google is.” While startups like DeepMind (acquired by Google) and (still independent with ) are focused on the long term problems of human-level AI, imitating the human brain with machines, Scaled Inference is based around the idea of takings this concept and effectively making it a neutral platform for different kinds of problems. (Here is one analogy: if you think of individual AI applications as vertical, specific search engines, then Scaled Inference positions itself as the Google in the world of artificial intelligence.) Scaled Inference positions itself differently from these other companies, too. “We believe that an AI company should be able to provide useful services to sustain itself along the (very long) path to advanced general AI,” Sercinoglu says, “and also that ultimately such AI does not need to imitate humans any more than an airplane needs to flap its wings.” Scaled Inference will provide its AI as a cloud service — virtually any kind of machine learning and AI that can be used on the web or in apps, particularly those that are built around creating services that are based on individual users and a particular context, be it location, browsing history or something else. Mobile apps, created for smartphones with small screens and people on the move, are particularly suited to this idea of doing the legwork for users. It’s something that are trying to tap into more, specifically for consumer-facing services. “Big companies have been using machine learning and AI for a long time and it’s not new but it’s becoming more visible now,” Sercinoglu notes. “We would like to power the new generation of apps that are intelligent and more context-sensitive.” There will be other areas where Scaled Inference’s platform could apply. For example, an application Sercinoglu released with Imanen called River aggregated a user’s various feeds from Facebook, Twitter, and so on, and then learned to rank items according to the probabilty of a user interacting with them — not unlike how Facebook moderates its own feed these days. “River would capture your intent and reduce features that can be fed into the AI system to get a ranking of items that you haven’t read according to the probably of you engaging with them,” Sercinoglu says. While River was built to run on devices the idea is to take some of that IP and put it into the cloud. When launched, Scaled Inference will be based around a set of APIs, three of which will be released at launch. The first set, the “lowest level” as Sercinoglu describes it, will be around pattern reognition. “You submit data to us and we start recognising patterns and start alerting you to patterns or anomalies in it,” he says. Another will let developers predict a user’s actions based on questions that are answered. (Something that you could imagine might apply in customer service surveys, for example.) And the third will be a ranking product based around the basic functions that existed in River. (Think here of how such a service could apply to a site like Quora, for example, where people search for information and this could help rank the results.) Quora has its own in-house solution for ranking search results, but with D’Angelo investing in Scaled Inference, the company is also looking at what Scaled Inference is creating. The whole platform, in fact, will be built with some of its own AI in mind: “We will offer these three sets of APIs and our goal is to make them simple and intuitive,” he says. “You will only need to describe the problem — no mention of the methods that you should use. Our systems should be able to figure that out based on what you have.” |
Tech Companies Throw Their Support Behind Strengthened NSA Reform Bill | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | As expected, introduced the USA FREEDOM Act to the upper chamber of Congress on Tuesday. The bill comes on the heels of a that was widely condemned as denatured and passed by brute force. “If enacted, this bill would represent the most significant reform of government surveillance authorities since Congress passed the USA Patriot Act 13 years ago,” Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. The new bill is widely heralded as a compromise, as Leahy sought input from the Obama administration in drafting the bill. Privacy groups, such as the ACLU and The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), as well as tech companies that pulled support from the House version when it became too watered down, praised the bill. A coalition representing AOL (which owns us), Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo expressed support for the bill. That group, called Reform Government Surveillance (RGS), previously for the House version of the USA FREEDOM Act after its gutting. “[The Senate] bill will help restore trust in the Internet by ending the government’s bulk Internet metadata collection and increasing transparency around U.S. surveillance practices,” the group said in a statement. Leahy’s bill would curtail bulk collection of data under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, create a special advocate inside of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and add a host of language changes to current law that would greatly limit the potential purview of many surveillance programs. Importantly, if enacted in its current form, the bill would end the now-infamous that was first unveiled last June. That program was the first of the activities that came to light due to the documents that former-NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked to the media. The special advocate would not have the power to appeal rulings, and the bill doesn’t end the so-called “backdoor” searches that are used by a number of American intelligence agencies to search the communications of United States citizens. Also in the bill are rules that dictate the destruction of collected information that isn’t relevant, and the mandating of declassification of some FISC opinions. The latter could better draw the blinds on the inner workings of that court, which operates in secret. Currently, there is no advocate for the potentially surveilled in the court, making its operation a decidedly one-sided affair. The full text of the Act can be . Later in the bill, a reporting structure is set up to command broader disclosure of surveillance activities to Congress, including the number of applications and orders — both applied for and denied — allowed for under various authorizing sections of the law. It would provide Congress with a better window into the inner workings of the intelligence community. Some in Congress have complained that having to oversee agencies that they often don’t fully understand, such as the NSA, is an opaque, muddled process. In a section detailing “discretionary reporting by [the] Director of National Intelligence,” the law calls for disclosure to the public the number of individuals whose communications were collected under various provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including Section 702. Proponents lined up this morning to praise the bill. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, who introduced the USA FREEDOM Act with Leahy in October, said Leahy’s version recoups privacy provisions that were lost in the House’s revisions. “Today, Chairman Leahy introduced a compromise that strengthens the privacy protections of the House bill while retaining support from the Administration and intel community,” Sensenbrenner said. “By reclaiming important provisions stripped from our original bill, tech giants and privacy advocates have reestablished their support.” The ACLU noted the historical significance of the bill. If the Senate passes this bill, it will be the first time the body voted to rein in government intelligence programs since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978. “To quote Joe Biden during the signing of the healthcare bill, ‘This is a big f—ing deal,'” the ACLU said on its blog. The ACLU praised the bill’s termination of the bulk collection of telephony metadata under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and dragnet surveillance. However the privacy rights group did criticize the bill for its narrow focus on Section 215 and its lack of reforms to abuses occurring under Section 702. The Information Technology Industry Council said it was “vital” for Congress to pass reforms that would repair the public’s trust in the government. “Today’s introduction of the USA FREEDOM Act by Sen. Leahy is an important part of moving this process forward,” said Andy Halataei, senior vice president of government affairs. “This bill improves bipartisan legislation already passed by the House of Representatives by effectively putting an end to bulk collection and enabling companies to be more transparent about the orders they receive.” Microsoft, in addition to its participation in the RGS, released a comment by its chief lawyer, Brad Smith, praising the bill’s ending of “bulk collection of data” and provisions that would allow “companies to be more transparent about requests [they] receive from the government.” |
Shervin Pishevar And Scott Stanford’s SherpaVentures Closes $150 Million For Its First Fund | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | , the venture firm founded by former partner and former banker , is finally ready to be less vague about what it’s doing. After a year of raising money and simultaneously making investments, the firm is announcing that it has closed $150 million in financing from limited partners. Most readers of are probably at least somewhat aware of who Shervin is. He spent a decade as a serial entrepreneur building companies like , which sold to for $117.5 million; , which merged with ; and , all before moving into venture capital and joining Menlo Ventures. Shervin was ahead of the curve when it came to making investments in the sharing economy — that is, peer-to-peer marketplaces like or . But it was his while at Menlo and close association with the company in the years since that helped make his name in the investor world. It was that and a propensity for sharing selfies with people like Kanye West on Instagram or along with Sean Parker at a tech roundtable that made Shervin a bit of a minor celebrity among the tech set. (It’s probably worth noting that Shervin earlier this year.) Scott might be the lesser-known of the two, but he’s no less connected. People might know him as a banking guy — while at Goldman Sachs he had a hand in pretty much every big tech IPO over the past few years, including Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. But he’s also a nerd at heart. Scott started coding at the age of 12, working at the local computer store. Later, when he got to college he won the university robotics challenge, even though he wasn’t a computer science major. After a stint as an analyst at Goldman, Scott moved to San Francisco and joined online search company Looksmart, where he held a wide range of biz dev and corporate development roles. Scott got sucked back into Goldman in 2004, around the time that investors’ appetites for tech investments started to heat up again. He co-led the firm’s Global Internet Investment Banking practice out of its San Francisco office and ended up making about $600 million of investments into companies including Facebook, Uber, DST, and LinkedIn during that time. Both Shervin and Scott were in the Uber Series B deal, but they didn’t know each other at that time. The two were introduced by Kara Swisher at the D10 Conference in 2012, and became fast friends after that, according to Stanford. They hit it off while talking about Uber, which neither of them saw as a pure transportation company. Shervin loved the logistics and delivery angle, while Scott was excited about the bigger opportunity in payments. The two kept in touch, and saw each other again in late September at Kevin Systrom’s birthday party at a club in Las Vegas. Scott said they should start a fund together, and showed Shervin some slides on his iPhone that he had prepared to pitch a tech fund internally at Goldman. But they decided to work together a few weeks later at the F.ounders conference in Dublin. Someone lent Shervin a car and driver during the event, and the two spent about 19 hours driving up and down the Irish coast and talking about everything from e-commerce to , according to Stanford. “There was something very special… I don’t mean to sound corny, but those are the facts. We discovered a real deep appreciation for each other,” he told me. It wasn’t until the following February that the two would make the pact official, and announce the creation of a new kind of fund that was “ .” In the past year they’ve worked to secure investment from LPs while simultaneously making their initial investments. While most first funds start small — in the $20 million to $40 million range — it was important for SherpaVentures to secure $150 million, according to Stanford. Based on the firm’s model, it made sense to allocate about $75 million per partner, so that it could write checks in the companies it believed in, while also having enough money to follow on in its winning portfolio companies. Stanford added that when it comes time to raise the next fund, it will also be for about $150 million. The firm was anchored with an initial investment by TPG, which invested in Uber’s Series C round last summer and, as a result, knows Shervin and Scott pretty well. But it’s since secured a total of $155 million in LP money to invest in Series A, Series B, and to a lesser extent, seed investments. The firm has already made five core investments where it’s taken board seats. Some of those — like , , and — have been announced, while some others have not. Their background with Uber and other marketplace businesses means they can guide a roadmap for companies like Munchery and Shyp as they look to expand into new markets. And they each have a deep list of contacts throughout the industry to help companies build new partnerships and bolster their executive ranks. To date SherpaVentures has remained mostly under the radar, as Scott and Shervin have been more focused mostly on helping portfolio companies over the past year. Now that its fund has closed, though, you can probably expect that to change. |
Yahoo Exec Accused Of Sexual Harassment Files Defamation Counter-Suit | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | Prominent executive filed a against a former female employee who for sexual harassment and subsequent wrongful termination. In her filing, Zhang called Nan Shi’s allegations — that she forced Shi to have oral and digital sex — “outrageously false” and based on attempts to extort Yahoo. On Friday , asserting that Zhang coerced her into having sex on multiple occasions against her will. Shi claims the incidents occurred in February 2013, shortly after Zhang was hired as a principal software engineer at Yahoo and while Zhang was staying with her at her temporary Yahoo housing unit in Sunnyvale. Prior to working at Yahoo, Shi had worked for Alike, a Seattle-based startup Zhang founded and had been acquired by Yahoo. “Zhang told [Shi] she would have a bright future at Yahoo if she had sex with her,” Shi’s complaint alleges. “She also stated she could take away everything from her including her job, stocks, and future if she did not do what she wanted.” The lawsuit claims Zhang forced Shi “to work grueling hours and compose work emails over the weekend at the apartment, sometimes right after sex.” Shi says when she rejected Zhang’s “further advances,” Zhang downgraded her performance reviews. She also accuses Yahoo of failing to conduct a proper investigation when she reported the situation to Human Resources. A representative for Yahoo, which is also a defendant in Shi’s suit, did not respond to a request for comment, but referred TechCrunch to a statement when Shi’s suit was first reported last week: As we previously stated, there is absolutely no basis or truth to the allegations against Maria Zhang. Maria is an exemplary Yahoo executive, and we intend to fight vigorously to clear her name.” “By March 2014, it became obvious to Shi that her job was in serious jeopardy,” Zhang’s complaint says. “Realizing that consistent negative performance feedback would likely lead to the termination of her employment and the loss of unvested stock worth potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars, Shi attempted to save her job by making complaints to Yahoo’s Human Resources department.” Zhang says initially, Shi did not complain of sexual harassment. According to the complaint, Shi initially complained in March 2014 Zhang was a “demanding manager and “threatening her job.” The department conducted what Zhang calls a “thorough investigation,” but found no evidence of Shi’s claims, especially because she had received poor reviews from two supervisors. In April 2014, Shi realized her “termination of employment would likely be imminent,” according to Zhang’s complaint, and told Yahoo Human Resources that Zhang had forced her to have sex. Zhang claims that never happened, and that she never had any form of sexual relationship with Shi, whether it was forced or consensual. Zhang further asserts that Shi was unable to produce any evidence — witnesses, photographs, correspondence — of any sexual contact. Shi’s suit does not reference any evidence. Shi claims that during the investigation Yahoo put her on an “unpaid leave of absence” before eventually firing her. But in her rebuttal, Zhang says during the investigation Shi was on paid administrative leave, and actually remained employed by Yahoo much longer than she otherwise would have been. Shi’s employment was officially terminated on July 11, according to Zhang. |
Snapchat Files Trademarks To Handle Payments | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | Snappay? may try to monetize by processing peer-to-peer payments, money transfers, or online payments, according to it filed earlier this week. Owned by Snapchat and filed on July 11th by an attorney at Cooley, which is known to be Snapchat’s law firm, the trademarks could keep anyone else from entering the same space under the Snapchat name. After being tipped off to the trademarks by a source, I’ve contacted Snapchat and am awaiting a response regarding what exactly these trademarks are about. [Update: Snapchat declined to comment.] Laugh it up all you want about Snapchat making your money disappear, this could be serious business. Specifically, the two trademarks are for: Until now, has focused around advertising, in-app purchases of virtual goods, and sponsorships from brands for promoting live events. These trademarks paint a different picture. It’s not the only one that might look to earn money on messaging through money transfers. recently to head up its Messenger division. Snapchat has done some staffing of its own on the monetization front. It hired ‘s head of business Emily White as COO in late 2013, and last month poached Facebook’s Global Director of its Preferred Marketing Developer program . If Snapchat does get into payments, it might allow friends to send cash back and forth, or buy things online with a credit card registered in its app, similar to Venmo. By taking a small fee on payments, it could earn money without forcing users to watch interruptive ads, buy filters, or have their experience cluttered with Our Stories from brands. Imagine getting a flash sale Snap of a cool product from an ecommerce company. Snapchat could potentially let you pay to buy that product from within its app. The startup has also already dabbled in commerce. It provides links for users to buy from iTunes the (awesome) songs it features in its announcements of new features, like or . At the very least, Snapchat may have filed the trademarks to keep the option of processing payments under its name open. |
Tech Entrepreneur Priya Haji, Founder And CEO Of SaveUp, Has Passed Away At 44 | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | , a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur known for her focus on socially-minded ventures in both the for-profit and non-profit spaces, most recently as of personal financial savings app , passed away unexpectedly of natural causes on July 14th at the age of 44. SaveUp co-founder and CFO Sammy Shreibati confirmed the news to TechCrunch today. The cause of death has not been verified by medical authorities, though we’re told that early assessments indicate a pulmonary embolism or cardiac event may have occurred. Prior to founding SaveUp, Haji co-founded and led World of Good, a marketplace for fair trade and sustainable goods made by female artisans from developing countries. World of Good was acquired by eBay . Haji founded her first social venture, a free health clinic in her hometown of Bryan, Texas, while she was still in high school, according to a published in Forbes. Haji earned a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UC Berkeley. Shreibati shared the following statement on behalf of SaveUp:
“I am incredibly saddened to write that my friend and co-founder Priya Haji passed away at her home on the evening of July 14, 2014. Her 11-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son survive her. Priya’s nickname was ‘Firecracker’, a name that her mother gave her because her birthday was on the 4th of July. At SaveUp we fed off her energy and passion to build something that helped the world. From her non-profit work at Free At Last to her ventured-backed companies World of Good and SaveUp, Priya was always striving to help people in everything she did. She was a courageous leader and colleague, but first and foremost a friend. Priya was one of the pioneers of female entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. When she asked me to create this amazing company with her, I was honored and thrilled to be a part of it. She was an inspiration and made me a better person. We lost a wonderful leader, innovator, and friend and all of us at SaveUp are profoundly grieving.” Memorials to Haji have also been shared over the past two days by many saddened friends and colleagues and . Chicago-based entrepreneur Cheryl Dahle has established a to help support Haji’s young children. A celebration of her life is scheduled to occur on Saturday, June 19 in the San Francisco Bay Area; further details will be posted on a that’s been set up by her family. In the 2011 interview with Forbes, Haji said her ultimate goal in business was to help solve problems for people in need, and encouraged others to do the same. She said:
“My entrepreneurial imagination gets inspired by seeing how I can help people through an innovative use of business or technology. …I think the best ideas to solve the biggest problems are still out there to be done – and someone reading this article might have one. If that is you – trust yourself, and go for it! The worst thing that can happen is that it will not work, and who knows: You might create something even better than you imagined.”
Haji also discussed her outlook on using business and technology for social good in a 2012 video interview with Aol’s Makers series. You can watch that embedded below.
Priya Haji was an inspirational and positive presence in the technology and business worlds, and she will be greatly missed. |
Xbox One Sales “More Than Double” In June, But Microsoft Doesn’t Disclose Absolute Figures | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | Today that in June, sales of its “more than doubled.” It did not release a concrete sales figure for the time period, disappointingly. Microsoft last indicated a hard sales number for the Xbox One in April. It that month. It isn’t clear if its sales declined in the ensuing period thus making the doubling less impressive, but either way, things are looking better for Microsoft. What changed? Microsoft made a cheaper Xbox One package available that didn’t contain a Kinect sensor. The $100 price decline that the new bundle provided was apparently enough to get sales to grow. The PlayStation 4, ‘s competing next-generation console, has outsold Microsoft’s Xbox One so far. The former is available in more countries and had, until recently, a lower price. Provided that the current Xbox One sales bump isn’t fleeting, Microsoft may be able to make up some lost ground. Thanks to Amazon, no one has to report actual sales numbers anymore! Woohoooooo — Kyle Russell 🚀 (@kylebrussell) |
Funding Circle Gets Funded, $65M More For Its Small Business Lending Marketplace | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | , an online marketplace that connects small businesses looking for loans with individuals and institutions willing to lend money, has picked up a significant round of funding of its own. The startup, founded in 2009 in London and active in the U.S., has raised $65 million — money that co-founder and CEO tells me it will use to continue to improve its technology, as well as build out further into the U.S. and new markets, likely via acquisitions of other, regional online lending platforms. The $65 million round getting announced today is s biggest to-date and puts the total raised by the company at $123 million. It’s a Series D round and was led by , with participation from other existing investors, , and . Why so much, and only nine months after its last, $37-million, round? “It’s a testament to the market opportunity,” Desai says. “It’s a very, very fast-growing business.” The UK business, he tells me, has been growing at 150% a year over the past four years, with the current rate of loans accelerating rapidly. Of the more than £350 million ($600 million) loan in that time, nearly £150 million was loaned out this year. In the U.S. the business has been seeing similarly high rates of growth. Whereas Funding Circle started out 2014 lending out $300,000 per month in the U.S., in June it passed $6.5 million/month. In total, Funding Circle is forecasting that it will loan out $600 million in 2014. The idea behind Funding Circle is that it targets small businesses — “not startups,” Desai notes pointedly, and “not desperate businesses, just good, solid operations” that might be restaurants, pharmacies or small manufacturing firms. A typical turnover for a typical business on its platform is between $1 million and $2 million. Funding Circle may provide interest rates similar to banks — “sometimes it’s cheaper, sometimes it’s more expensive,” Desai says simply — it does it on a vastly more efficient basis. Like other online lending platforms like , , and , Funding Circle has created a platform that relies heavily on technology to help make more intelligent lending decisions. Funding Circle’s twist is that it assigns a human expert to vet each loan. Desai says that so far the formula has been working well. The company targets a loss rate of 2.3% per year, “but on average we’re seeing a loss rate of 1.8% per year.” And, in terms of the net returns, 70% of investors are seeing net returns of between 6% and 10% each year and in the U.S. above 10%. Desai adds that even with that more analogue approach, a typical loan is turned around in a week, or faster if necessary. (A bank, in contrast, can take 15-20 weeks on average to process a loan application.) Part of the company’s growth up to now has had to do with the platform gaining popularity and a higher profile — “small businesses are massively underserved by the current markets and banks,” Desai says — but part of it is also because of the investors stepping up to loan money. There are a large amount of high net-worth individuals who are — which Desai describes as “the stock exchange or eBay for small business loans — but now there are also a growing number of institutions as well, such as the UK government-backed British Business Bank, which in March of this year to Funding Circle’s lending coffers. Even with the hundreds of millions of dollars already passing through its platform, and a number of other players also looking to disrupt the same space, Desai believes that it will be some time before the space feels crowded. “In the UK there is about $10 billion lent each month to small businesses, and in the U.S. it’s five times as much, so as though we are growing it’s still just a fraction of the market,” he says. Any competition, in other words, is good competition for now. “There is plenty of cake for all of us.” While companies like Kabbage have tapped the finance markets to raise to finance their loans, Desai says that Funding Circle will “remain committed” to its peer-to-peer marketplace model. “It’s just a more efficient model.” The company is not profitable yet, as it continues to reinvest to expand. Along with this round, Robert Steel, the CEO of Perella Weinberg Partners and former Under Secretary for Domestic Finance of the United States Treasury, is joining the Funding Circle board. The move is a smart one, as it adds both banking and regulatory clout to the operation, essential as it continues to grow. “I have been impressed with the growth of the company over the past four years, and believe there is a unique opportunity for marketplace lending to revolutionize access to finance for small businesses across the globe,” Steel said in a statement. “I hope my experience as CEO of one of America’s largest banks, and my time in the US Treasury department, will support the company as we enter the next stage of our growth.” Image: |
Balderton Injects $6.5M Into Crowdcube’s Funding Platform | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | is leading an investment into investment crowdfunding platform . Yes, things really have got that meta in the startup investment world. is putting £3.8 million ($6.5 million) into UK-based Series B round — with a further £1.2 million being offered to crowd-backers (starting at . Let no one accuse Crowdcube of not eating its own dog food. Indeed it previously successfully crowdfunded two prior rounds in its own platform — raising £320,000 in 2011 and £1.5 million last year. Crowdcube launched its crowd equity investment platform in the UK back in 2011, and has grown to become one of two bigger names in the UK space. ( being the other.) platform has been used to raise more than £30 million for more than 130 start-up, early stage and growth businesses. On the investor side, the platform has more than 80,000 registered users — and does not limit those who can invest to only professional investors. It does screen the companies that list on its platform, though — doing background checks on company directors to verify the claims made by listing entrepreneurs. One in three of the businesses listing on its platform this year have hit their funding target, according to Crowdcube co-founder Luke Lang. “None of our competitors have achieved the traction and investment that we have,” says Lang, discussing the competitive landscape. “The £15m raised for businesses this year alone is greater than anything any of our competitors have done over the past two years since they started launching.” Lang says he expects the crowded crowd equity funding space to ultimately consolidate — with “one or two major providers dominating and a few niche sites catering for very specific needs”. Obviously Crowdcube is gunning to be one of the big guns here. Crowdcube’s own new cash injection will be used to further expand its operations in the UK and internationally — with a plan to double its team to 50 and open new offices in London and Scotland, as well as expanding its Exeter-based HQ. On the international front, it will be expanding beyond its already established seven joint ventures. The current overseas footprint (via partnerships) covers Brazil, Sweden, Dubai, Poland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand. |
Intel And Microsoft Hit 12- And 14-Year Highs On Strength Of Improving PC Market | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | We’re apparently in the -Post PC market. The PC market has almost stabilized, and its re-found salubrity is helping players in the space. Intel and both notched big gains today in the wake of report that came after the bell yesterday. rose 9.27 percent during regular trading, pushing its market capitalization to $172.28 billion. That’s Intel’s strongest close . The company’s $13.8 billion in revenue, and $0.55 in earnings per share were supported by its PC division posting 6 percent year-over-year revenue growth. That division generates more than half of Intel’s revenue. Intel’s results were not too surprising — the company had previously raised its guidance, and the , or at least what passes for strength for the PC market. Data for the PC market in the second quarter of this year showed either a very modest decline, 1.7 percent, or a small rise, 0.1 percent, in global PC shipments. Hardly stellar numbers, but after endless quarters in the red, the period was a welcome respite for personal computers and their progenitors. The PC market is currently moving units at , or around 822,000 per day. Microsoft, which reports its earnings on Monday, picked up a more modest 3.84 percent in value today, closing just above the $44 mark. That’s Microsofts’ highest close . Microsoft’s gain today was partially due to Intel’s strong earnings, implying that the Redmond-based software company’s Windows division will have a strong quarter. It was also likely influenced by the rumors of which could ease the company’s operating expenses in the wake of absorbing tens of thousands of Nokia employees. The PC market may not be done shrinking, it’s worth remembering. A few stronger quarters led by the Windows XP end-of-service date and perhaps a decent holiday cycle would not indicate new long-term weight in personal computer sales. So let’s not get too far ahead of a potential trend. But it’s still an interesting day. Once more round the sun. |
Online Fashion Company ModCloth Lays Off 70 Employees | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | Online retailer laid off around 70 employees yesterday, a little under 15 percent of its 500-person-plus workforce. We first heard about the cuts through a couple of emailed tips and . A spokesperson confirmed the news. Apparently the layoffs affected all three company offices (San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles) and represent an effort at restructuring and consolidation — but they don’t indicate a broader shift in direction. And ModCloth is . Founded in 2002, the company is best known for its vintage-style dresses. , and . The company told us last year that , and that it was becoming increasingly focused on mobile. Back in 2011, to centralize designer relations and other teams. |
Visa Launches PayPal-Like ‘Checkout’ Widget For Third-Party Websites | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | To do so, it’s adapting to Internet retail with the launch of that will allow users to speed through the online checkout process in just a few steps. is introducing a username and password system for making payments, which would eliminate the need to enter a 16-digit credit card number. “Merchants want to sell, they want to convert cardholders to sales,” said Sam Shrauger, Visa’s senior vice president of digital solutions, at an event announcing the launch. “People want to buy, people want to enjoy what they’re buying. What they don’t want to spend their time doing is paying.” Visa isn’t the first to do this, of course. PayPal has offered a , and more recently Amazon . But Visa was careful to make it sound like it wasn’t competing with for these payments. CEO Charles Scharf called PayPal an “important partner” to Visa because many PayPal transactions are also paid for on Visa cards. “We like those transactions,” he said. “But we shouldn’t have to rely on anyone else.” Shrauger said the current arduous process often deters users from making purchases on small phone screens, with 86 percent of users abandoning shopping carts on mobile devices. With Checkout, users simply select the Visa Checkout button on the merchandise page and enter a username password and select their card. Visa then automatically fills the payment form with their credit card and shipping information. Initially the service will be available at retailers like Neiman Marcus, Pizza Hut, Staples and United Airlines in the United States, Canada and Australia. This isn’t the company’s first attempt at a faster online payment system. In 2011 Visa launched . However Shrauger emphasized that Checkout differed from a wallet, offering customers a faster way to get through the checkout process rather than using a variety of payment sources like V.me. “Customers don’t want a wallet,” Shrauger said. “They want to be able to pay and be done with the experience.” The product launched at an event at the company’s , where attendees tested the service with partners the company has already acquired, like Neiman Marcus. Visa also launched a mobile SDK, which developers can implement as they build apps for iOS and Android. At the event, Visa showed how this could be implemented with a bike share app. |
Samsung Launching Its Premium Headphones In The U.S. | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | With sales of its premium smartphones , Samsung is moving into another potentially high-margin business: premium headphones. Tomorrow the South Korean electronics giant will launch its Level line of headphones (and a wireless speaker) on premium goods retailer , whose members will have to buy a pair before they become more widely available. Dedicated Samsung fans who haven’t signed up for the site don’t need to wait long, however, as the headphones will hit Amazon on July 20th. With prices ranging from $149 for its “Level In” in-ear buds to $349 for its wireless, noise-cancelling “Level Over” headphones, Samsung is clearly going after the same premium, design-centric market as Beats, the headphone maker purchased Beats has shown that the combination of good-looking hardware and well-targeted marketing can make headphones a big business. While Samsung is known for throwing huge amounts of money at marketing campaigns, its lack of distinguished design is frequently cited as the reason its in the smartphone space. To make the Gilt offering more enticing, Samsung is bundling its Level On headphones and Level Box speaker for $299, a $50 discount from buying them separately. While we can’t speak for the headphones, and found that Samsung delivered exceptional build quality and performance compared to similar-sized offerings in its price range. |
New Airbnb Logo Wants You To Draw It Like One Of Your French Logos | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | In a real-life scene that could be in HBO’s “ ,” Airbnb a very sexually connotative logo today: . Apparently no one process asked themselves, in parlance, “Does this logo look like a boobs and a butt and a hooha?” Per Armin Vit’s post, “The answer has to be a resounding “No”. If there is just a slight hesitation, then it probably does look like [genitalia].” And, in a move of staggering obliviousness (or genius), Airbnb wants you to design your own VBnB logo, with which some members of our team can’t stop using. Here is design: And ‘: But this is just the start. Donuts, cherries, USAirways flights: There are literally a million things you can add to Airbnb’s new logo, and we want to see what you, our readers, can come up with. Put your best ones in the comments or tweet them at us with the hashtag #buttlogo. As Airbnb itself implores, |
Why The First YC-Backed Biotech Company May Just Be The Future Of Pharma | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | sounds kind of like a mad science lab of the future. The Boston-based biotech company is currently working on a project with to treat antibiotic-resistant germs, using designer microbes to convert CO2 emissions into fuel and is somehow making yeast smell like roses. co-founder Jason Kelly considers these projects, and many others, the future of the pharmaceutical industry. “The designer organisms we create are solving a supply problem,” he says. “Instead of going to the agriculture industry or pharma we will eventually just use organisms.” Kelly says this is the main reason he and his co-founders started Gingko while at MIT. The four students began discussing how inefficient it was to program microbes. It was too slow and tedious to make any real dent. It was also a good reason biotech didn’t get the kind of funding that other tech was used to. So they switched things up, added robotics and created the first organism engineering foundry. Their “organism engineers” now take DNA sequencing from nature and basically create designer microbes that can actually replace technology with biology. The DARPA project is just one example of this. Rather than trying to come up with better antibiotics, is working with to get at the root of sickness and immunity by manufacturing probiotics that specifically target and remove bacteria with harmful traits – such as antibiotics resistance – while leaving healthy bacteria intact. It’s also, notably, the first biotech company to be backed by Y Combinator. YC president confirms the seed accelerator has also invested in 4 other soon to be announced biotech companies and that he’d like to see more funding in the biotech space. “We look at three things before deciding to invest in an industry – upcoming hyper growth, costs coming down to series-A scale, and cycle time coming down to something reasonable for a startup,” says Altman. All that has started to happen in biotech. Though Altman admits may be a little earlier than traditional VC firms to get into the biotech space, , and others also seem to be making more of an investment in these types of companies. currently lists WarpDrive Bio, Aveo and Concert Pharmaceuticals in its portfolio. managing partner, Bill Maris biotech is one of “the brightest spots” to invest in. Maris was once was a biotech portfolio manager at Investor AB and as one of the main brains behind . That’s a biotech pet project at Google that focuses on aging and ending death (as in we might never have to die). Gingko Bioworks and other companies like it touch on changes rapidly coming down the line for myriad industries that affect our daily lives – from the way we create medicine and grow our food and even in cleaning up the air we breathe. This major shift in the last five years in biotech means lower costs, faster time to market, new markets and other things we have only been able to scratch the surface of. |
Investors Cash Out Of Payment Technology Startups | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | Even as a clutch of new payment technology companies including and announce new financing rounds today, it seems like investors are no longer paying out for payment companies. Over the past three quarters, the number of venture-backed payments companies has declined, tumbling from 59 startups in the third quarter of 2013 to just 41 companies in the second quarter of 2014, according to .
Some winners have already emerged from the scrum of payments technologies that have raised money over the past five years. Companies like , the online payments provider for small and medium-sized businesses, which raised $80 million in January from investors including ; , the mobile payment company for small and medium-sized businesses, which closed a $100 million debt financing in April; and , the Swedish payments company that notched its own $115 million in private equity funding earlier in the year as well. , the European juggernaut in online payments, is beginning to make moves in the U.K. and is eyeing an expansion into the U.S. So much firepower may be keeping new platforms for jumping in, but there are also problems inherent in the payments market that have made it a difficult sector for startups to navigate, according to Khosla Ventures’ . “Payments are a massive industry with a lot of room for innovation, but it is very hard to break through because not only do you have to get consumers, you also need merchants and often times… third parties like associations behind you to be successful,” Ling wrote in an email. “Consumers want trust and ubiquity in payments. Merchants want to know there are large numbers of consumers. For a startup none of these is usually true. The chicken and egg problem in payments is one of the hardest to break through.” Those challenges are what make the successes of companies like Klarna, Stripe, Square, iZettle or any of the large venture-funded startups more impressive.
Meanwhile, investors like ‘ Matthew Harris think the slowdown in funding for payments companies is a natural evolution of what had been a relatively young market. “It basically came from nowhere if you look at the earlier quarters, and it was almost literally zero in the prior years,” wrote Harris in an email. “Payments have gone from being irrelevant in the venture landscape to being a meaningful sub-sector, but trees don’t grow to the sky… I also think there has been a shift in focus to alternative and ‘peer to peer’ lending as the hottest sector, which I think is drawing away from capital.” |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 29 | null |
Evoke Is A New Induction-Based Vaporizer That Looks And Feels Like An Old-School Pipe | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | is the latest electronic vaporizer to grace the industry with its presence, and I sincerely mean that. From the looks of things, the Evoke (from LotoLabs) is one of the first vaporizers I’ve seen that looks to the past for design inspiration, with a wooden, hefty look to it not unlike the tobacco pipes of the olden days. The company touts that its induction-based vaporizer is healthier than its competitors in the market, and that it will last longer and require less replacements than anything else you can find. Curious, we decided to chat with founder for a Q&A. How is the Evoke different from other vaporizers? I’d say there are three main ways the Evoke is different. The first way is induction. The Evoke is healthier for you. When you use the traditional “wick and coil” system, dangerous particles like formaldehyde get into your lungs. The second difference is that our vape is designed to be beautiful and luxurious. It’s not a round, discrete pen. I, personally, don’t want to smoke out of a pen. So we built the Evoke to stand out as a luxurious vaporizing pipe, not something you have to hide. The third way it’s unique is that it uses smart technology. It’s not about voltage anymore. It’s not about turning a dial and heating up and cooling down. It switches now to frequency and power, because the Evoke controls just how hot the system gets. It requires a smart chip, and because of that, we can control so many parts of the experience. We want you to be able to control the heating pattern. If you’re using a special kind of shatter and need a different voltage, the Evoke can offer that. It’s almost like a hack on your own vaporizer. People that vape a lot are hobbyists in the space, and they want these kinds of controls, like the ability to change out the wick. Eventually, we want to integrate with and health platforms so you can monitor your THC or tobacco usage alongside your sleep, heart rate, etc. If Apple won’t accept us, we’ll build out a standalone app for usage monitoring, but hopefully we can mix it in with all your other sensors. Explain the induction heating vs. traditional wick and coil heating. Both systems start the same way. There’s a reservoir, and a wick placed in it to pull the liquid out. With current technology, typically the wicks are made out of some fiberglass material. A resistive coil is wrapped around and in contact with the wick where a current is applied and heat is generated. This means the coil is hotter than the ideal vaping temperature, and electrical components are in contact with the liquid. With our system, our coil is outside the airpath. It stays cool but creates magnetic fields that heat up our wick. Our wick is made of a proprietary alloy and heats evenly, putting the heat exactly where it is wanted and only where it is wanted. This makes for a cleaner tasting, altogether better vaping experience. As far as dry herb is concerned, the induction-heated mesh heats evenly and again, is not as hot as a coil. It doesn’t stress a tiny coil over and over again, breaking it eventually. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_AiBbOZpyk&w=640&h=360] In such a crowded space, what feature or characteristic makes the winning difference for a vaporizer? One that can be tailored to the use of the owner. One that doesn’t break all the time or burn or constantly require replacing. One that isn’t so difficult to clean. Honestly, a vaporizer that just works well and lasts long should do very well on the market because right now it doesn’t really exist. Why did you choose to deviate so much from the usual design of most vaporizers? We really wanted to look to the past for this. Most people are focusing on carbon fiber wraps and other more futuristic materials. We wanted something more luxurious. Something that’s a statement in your house and in your hands. We want you to be excited to tell people about your vaporizer. We chose something wooden and ergonomic, and something that doesn’t roll off of a table. Who is your ideal customer? We have two ideal customers. One is anyone seeking relief from pain with medicinal marijuana, especially because waxes and liquids are really where we shine. Most vaporizers work the same for dry herb, but for oils and waxes, we can really provide a healthier and more luxurious experience around that. Our other ideal customer is someone who has been vaping for a long time and is sick and tired of replacing parts. Our customers are going to be the connoisseurs of the space. Right now, we have three separate models on the campaign for e-liquids, waxes, and dry herb. But we’re working right now to create bullets or capsules that can be swapped out with the existing Evoke model. Users can then refill those capsules and swap them out depending on what substance they’re vaping. Why did you choose to get into this space? My mom was diagnosed with cancer and started vaping marijuana to handle the pain. I got into the process and realized that most of the vaporizers out there were always breaking and burning and I just wanted something better for myself, so I decided to build it. If there was no Evoke, what vaporizer would you use? The vapes I use today are the cheapest ones I can find, as I got tired of my expensive ones breaking: eLiquid – Nemesis Clone (battery) with an Aero Tank (atomizer). Oils/Wax – Nemesis Clone (battery) with the e-skillet or v-hit attachment. Dry herb – Davinci Ascent Check out the Evoke . |
eBay Reports Mixed Q2 Results With Revenue Of $4.366B, Non-GAAP EPS Of $0.69 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | Today after the close of regular trading, eBay its second-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $4.366 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.69. Its revenue tally for the period was up 13 percent year-over-year. second-quarter GAAP earnings totaled $676 million. It’s non-GAAP earnings were much higher at $868 million. The company had mixed results. Analysts had eBay to earn $0.68 per share on revenue of $4.38 billion. It therefore beat on profits, but missed on top line. Ebay was slightly down in regular trading, and following its earnings report is up nearly 2% after hours. In the , eBay reported revenue of $4.3 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.70. The company had a large one-time tax charge of $3 billion in that period that impacted its GAAP earnings. In the second quarter — its most recent — eBay’s core marketplace gross merchandise volume rose 12 percent, with international growth besting domestic expansion. That business provided eBay with $2.2 billion in revenue. , eBay’s other key asset, saw its net total payment volume rise 29 percent compared to the year-ago quarter. PayPal’s revenue for the period was $1.9 billion, with the payment company picking up 4 million new “active registered accounts,” wrapping the quarter with a total of 152 million. eBay Enterprise, the smallest of its three main business groups, had revenue of $267 million in the quarter, up a slim 3 percent from the year-ago period. eBay had a workable, but not ecstatic, quarter. The minor profit beat and the minor revenue miss are mostly a wash. The company is seeing its GAAP operating margin decline, which could put pressure on its future profitability. As far as its bank account, eBay is very wealthy, ending the quarter with cash, equivalents, and non-equity investments of $12.4 billion. For the current quarter, eBay expects something of a repeat, with top line of $4.3 to $4.4 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.65 and $0.67. |
Zillow Acquires Retsly, A Service That Helps Developers Access Real Estate Listings | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | Real estate site today announced that it has acquired , a Vancouver, B.C.-based startup that helps developers access real-estate data from multiple listing services (MLS). The service takes the data from these sites and normalizes it so developers can more easily use the data in their own applications. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. MLSs are the central hub for real estate data in the U.S., but they are also very insular. Every region has its own and in total, there are about 1,000 different systems. That wouldn’t be a huge problem if this were just about geographic distribution, but all of these MLSs use different software and often describe homes in different terms. Retsly was founded in 2013 by and , who I first met at the Grow conference in Vancouver last year (Growlabs also incubated the service). Few people know more about the state of MLSs in the U.S. than these two Canadians, and Retsly was actually responsible for holding the first real estate hackathon at the National Association of Realtors conference in 2013. Given that the MLSs have generally been extremely protective of their data and the real estate business is somewhat suspicious of technology, that was quite an achievement by itself. As Chief Revenue Officer to me, though, it’s worth noting that the data the MLSs provide to is only to be used by applications that were authorized by the MLS for use in the specific market the MLS covers. They get to decide how the data is used. In addition to its service for developers, Retsly also provides MLSs with tools to manage software applications in their market and ensure that their content is being used appropriately. “Retsly’s team and cutting-edge technology is a great fit with Zillow and aligns with our goal to offer great value and services to our industry partners,” said Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff in a statement today. “We’re thrilled to welcome Retsly to Zillow.” The service will continue to function as usual and Lopour says the acquisition will help the company to accelerate “the growth of a vibrant software community within the industry.” Schwartz tells me that he believes Retsly is a great fit for Zillow. “This is an extension of our efforts to provide productivity tools to help MLSs, brokers, franchisors, teams and agents be more productive and successful,” he said. At the same time, though, he also believes that this acquisition goes a bit further than some of Zillow’s previous ones in that it provides developers with the data to create new applications and that it gives the MLSs the ability to mange that data. “We believe that when the real estate ecosystem thrives, also benefits,” Schwartz said. |
Shipping Startup Shyp Raises $10M Led By SherpaVentures, Plans Expansion To New York City | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | On-demand shipping startup only officially launched in San Francisco just a few months ago, but it’s already looking to expand to new markets. First, though, the company raised $10 million in new capital, led by and . The funding follows $2.3 million in seed funding that Shyp had raised from . And with the latest funding, SherpaVenture’s Stanford will join the company’s board. With an iPhone app, enables users to simplify the process of shipping items basically anywhere in the world. The company has aligned itself with all the major shipping carriers, and has done a lot of work to create efficiencies around shipping and lower the cost it takes to get goods from one place to another. Users simply take a photo of the item they wish to ship, and the company does the rest — it picks the item up, packs it, and determines the lowest-cost, highest-quality carrier to send it with. By doing so, it can not just make the process of shipping more convenient, but actually save consumers money, since most don’t know the best way to ship their items. The idea has resonated in its home market of San Francisco, where Shyp . It’s now done more than 15,000 shipments and grown its user base 20-fold in just a few short months. Now that Shyp has gotten its feet under it, the company is ready to start thinking about expansion. And that’s partly why it chose SherpaVentures as its lead Series A investor, according to co-founder and CEO Founded by Pishevar and Stanford, SherpaVentures has a good amount of experience in peer-to-peer marketplaces and on-demand services. The two were behind their previous employer’s investments in Uber, and Pishevar had also funded a number of other startups, including TaskRabbit and Getaround, among others. More recently, they led the , which is planning a launch in Seattle. Having an investor well-versed in the nuances of market-to-market expansion will be crucial for Shyp, as it prepares to enter its second market of New York City. The company already has warehouse space there and is looking to hire drivers to pick up goods and packers for its warehouse to get things up and running. The company is planning a New York launch in the fall, and has a up so that users can sign up to be alerted when the service is live. In addition to market expansion, Shyp is also hoping to use the funding to invest in its product, bringing it to new platforms and improving the experience for different types of users. One of the surprising things about early adoption has been the different types of users that have signed up, according to Gibbon. It was expecting to get users signed up who were casual shippers, but is seeing use from power sellers on different sales platforms and even companies that are looking to fulfill sales. Filling out shipping info for multiple destinations on a mobile interface was not what the product was intended for, but Shyp will probably look to make that easier over time. It’s also looking to get the app on more devices, and that means developing for Android and possibly other operating systems. |
Pond5 Raises $61 Million Series A Led By Accel Partners, Stripes Group | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | , rival in the digital media and video world, has today announced that the company has closed a $61 million round of funding led by and . According to , this is Pond5’s second round of funding after securing a $500k seed round back in 2008. Launched in 2006, Pond5 offers an alternative to Shutterstock with a user-driven marketplace for stock video, music, photos, special effects, Adobe AfterEffects, etc. The Pond5 model asks media creators to upload their own work and set their own prices, so control is left almost entirely in the hands of the buyers and sellers. Pond5 simply provides the venue. Here’s what Pond5 CEO had to tell TechCrunch about the round: We are profitable, and part of the reason we were able to hold off on another financing round up until now is because we chose to grow more slowly in a way that is more robust and organic. With regards to any future financings, we haven’t made a determination one way or another whether we’ll go down that path, but we decided a long time ago that at all points in time we would have the option of a sustainable, profitable business that doesn’t require external funding. Pond5 now accounts for more than 15 million media clips from 30,000 artists in 127 different countries, and according to the company, Pond5’s 2.7 million videos comprise the largest royalty-free video collection on the web. In terms of the business, the company is home to around 70 employees distributed between the New York headquarters and an office in Prague. With the funding, Pond5 plans to build out the product, double the staff, add more content, and marketing. If you want to learn more about , check out the . |
Y Combinator May Be Worth One Billion Dollars. Here’s The Math | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 16 | president about his prestigious startup accelerator today. But there’s a few he left out that can be estimated based on his announcement that the combined market cap of all YC companies exceeds $30 billion. Specifically, you can use that number to approximate how much YC’s stake is worth. The ballpark answer? Around $1.05 billion. adtech sorcerer , here’s how the math shakes out: First, Altman’s stats. Y Combinator has funded 716 companies. They have a combined total market cap of $30 billion based on their funding round valuations, and have raised a total of $3 billion. Three of the companies are valued at over $1 billion: , , and . , YC would typically get 7% of each in exchange for a $17,000 seed investment and admission to the program. . The equity gets diluted as companies raise later rounds, but YC rarely gets diluted more than 50%, so YC at least . That makes YC’s total investment in all the companies combined worth roughly . That’s an . Not too shabby, though a lot of this value is just on paper. If the companies don’t IPO or get acquired, that money never materializes. Y Combinator President Sam Altman *There is one major issue with this calculation. We don’t know exactly how much dilution affected YC’s stake in Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and its 17 or so other $100 million-plus valuation companies. Since they make up a big part of that $30 billion market cap, YC’s total stake value could be lower if it got diluted down below 3.5% on those deals, and higher if it retained more equity. YC also used to vary how much it invested in relation to a startup’s team size, and many of its investments from the last few years still have plenty of time to mature into high valuations. These issues led Altman to tell me “that [ ] math is wrong, but not way wrong”, though he wouldn’t specify where the error was because he didn’t want to reveal stats that without consent of the companies. Altman sees the $30 billion total market cap as a better reflection of YC’s impact. However, its stake potentially growing to over $1 billion signals that its providing an important enough service that founders consistently are willing to give YC significant equity for accelerating them. Through a combination of the partners’ ability to pick high potential teams and startups, rear them for success through the program, patch them into the alumni network, and connect them with the right investors and resources, Y Combinator is adding a ton of value. The real story here for founders is that it looks like being in YC gives you better odds of success than if you go it alone. And YC has even bigger aspirations. Earlier this summer I reported that solving serious technical problems, not just rushing social mobile apps to market. Altman hinted at what they might be when he concluded with this eye-opening stat: Number of nuclear energy companies in the current batch: 2 |
Napster Owner Rhapsody Passes 2M Paying Users As It Extends unRadio To Europe | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | In 2012, nabbed the European assets of streaming service Napster, covering the and , to fill out its 2011 acquisition of Napster in the U.S., as part of its strategy to square up globally to Spotify and other online music rivals. Today, it’s putting that reach to use as Rhapsody is expanding its unRadio service for the first time outside of the U.S. The news comes as Rhapsody says that it has now passed 2 million paying subscribers between its eponymous music streaming app, Napster and unRadio. To put that number into context, and are now available in 32 countries, and they passed way back in 2011. The company is also competing against some juggernauts. Spotify in May this year said it had , with 40 million overall. When Rhapsody launched its unRadio service — a Pandora-style curated service that’s been created in part to attract less die-hard music fans but also to market the more premium on-demand streaming service — last month, it did so in partnership with T-Mobile in the U.S. It’s following the same pattern in Europe, partnering with number-two French mobile operator SFR. (France’s leading mobile carrier, Orange, is an investor in another large competitor in the space, Deezer.) For the French launch, the service is going under Napster Découverte (Napster Discovery), and will give users the same service options as in the original service in the U.S.: while the list is pre-selected by Napster/Rhapsody, listeners can skip as many songs as they want to, and, because they are paying €3.95, listen ad-free. Marking a song as a favorite gives users the option to listen to it again later, even offline. “We are very satisfied with the development of Napster in France and the successful co-operation with SFR,” said Thorsten Schliesche, Napster SVP and GM for Europe, noted in a statement. “France is one of the fastest growing markets in Europe. The success of our service proves that customers are eager for a blend of on-demand and mobile data bundles.” Rhapsody/Napster are also digging deeper in the Latin America with another European carrier deal. Telefonica Movistar, the Spanish carrier’s operation in South America, will be “actively promoting” Napster Premier in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay — an extension of a strategic partnership between the two launched last year. All fine and well, but in a game of scale, where we are starting to see some very clear leaders, will Napster, despite its legendary, renegade brand, have what it takes to win over new users, keep margins and overall revenues strong, and maintain bargaining power with labels large and small? Right now the company says its catalogue totals some 32 million tracks, with about 80% of listening on its platform happening on mobile devices. Photo: |
Uber Gets Down To Business With New Travel Expense Tools And Concur Integration | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | On-demand ride-hailing service has spent four years building a perfect transportation alternative to taxis and black car services in cities around the world. But until today it’s just been focused on consumer travel. Now the company is going after a huge new opportunity by changing the way business users can book and expense rides on its platform. The company is launching a new offering, called Uber for Business, which is designed to make it easier for users to bill trips directly to their company while working. On the flip side, is providing participating companies with a centralized dashboard which they can use to keep track of rides that have been expensed. The new product is basically an acknowledgment that many consumers have been using Uber for both personal and business use cases, but their employers didn’t have a good way to manage those expenses. “Ever since we started, businesses and corporations have been asking us to design something with business in mind,” Uber SVP of business told me in a phone interview. Uber for Business will provide travel managers with a dashboard for inviting employees into a shared payment account for rides made on the platform. Once invited, employees need only click a link to connect their personal Uber accounts to their company’s business account. Once that’s done, users will be able to quickly toggle between personal and business accounts. If it’s a business ride, their Uber receipts will be automatically added to their expense reports. That cuts out a lot of hassle when it comes to filing expenses. For travel managers, the new dashboard will provide greater visibility into ground transportation booked by employees. According to Michael, most ground transportation expensed to date consisted of some combination of travel vouchers, paper taxi receipts, credit card taxi receipts, and no receipts. Uber will change that by providing more data and analytics for measuring spend across an organization. But most importantly, accepting Uber will most likely mean saving money. In most markets, at least in the U.S., Uber is priced below the cost of a taxi, making it a more affordable alternative for getting around. Even if employers don’t explicitly opt-in to Uber for Business, the company is still making it easy for many business users to expense their trips. That’s because Uber has announced a partnership with business travel and expense management company . That integration will allow any of the 25 million Concur users around the world to link their accounts and automatically send Uber receipts to their expense reports. In addition to all that, users who have American Express corporate cards will get the same membership rewards benefits as personal cardholders. Building on a partnership that Uber announced with AmEx earlier this summer, corporate cardholders will be able to earn double points on Uber rides and pay for Uber travel in the same way that personal AmEx cardholders can. Targeting business travelers seems to be all the rage these days among startups. After all, it was just a few hours ago that Airbnb announced its own partnership with to simplify the process of booking and expensing stays on its platform. With those moves, Uber is going after a potential tens of billions of dollars in travel expenditures, according to Michael. By positioning itself not just as one option accepted by travel managers, but the preferred option, Uber could see a huge increase in rides by business travelers. |
Dive Into Fates Forever, Startup Battlefield’s First MOBA Game | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | When Jason Citron in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, it was impressive but many would say they weren’t surprised. Gamers have undoubtably heard of Jason’s previous success, , one of the first and most significant social platforms for mobile games on iOS and Android. Basically the concept behind Xbox live for the iPhone. Not bad for a 24-year-old. After growing the platform to support 120 million players and ultimately selling OpenFeint to Japanese mobile gaming company , Citron set his sights on tablets. “Most great games are actually reinterpretations of existing games with a new user interface,” says . Tablets are “genuinely a new way to engage with the game,” and no one was moving to create core gaming experiences on the platform. In last year’s San Francisco Startup Battlefield, the company announced invites to its private alpha. Since then they’ve raised $8.2 million from and on July 4 launched worldwide to an Apple editor’s choice feature. With that kind of traction, Citron assures me the company is rapidly hiring. Check out this week’s Road To Disrupt above to get an inside look at the making of . |
With Apple’s Novel Acquisition, A Chance To Reinvent The Book | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | , a Boise, Idaho-based startup billed as a “ for Books,” is a key move in the battle over the future of our printed-and-bound friends. When we combine this information with , we can start to gaze into the future of publishing. Well, okay, maybe not. But these sorts of analytical tools are indeed the first step in an attempt to rebuild the concept of the book. goal through its Book Genome Project was to categorize every single line of text on a host of different dimensions, from level of sexual content to the types of themes and motifs an author used in his or her writing. Once all of that data was compiled and analyzed, the company could use its algorithm to definitively recommend an enjoyable book to read. acquisition of the startup dovetails with similar initiatives undertaken by Amazon and its use of data flowing in from its Kindle devices. With both companies offering extensive online stores for ebooks, such technology has the potential to greatly improve the consumer shopping experience. That is certainly interesting, but to me, the far more fundamental change that such data unlocks is around the publishing loop, not the retail one. Publishing a book today still feels antiquated, despite the incredible progress made with the internet. There isn’t the same level of immediacy with readers that is offered by other types of entertainment, nor is feedback between authors and readers particularly close. That feedback loop is critical, because books face incredible competition from other media for our attention. It’s easy to spend the afternoon watching videos on YouTube or Netflix, or zone out listening to music from Spotify and Pandora. Using algorithms and simple user interfaces, these sites actively encourage us to move from one piece of content to the next, never giving us a reason to stop consuming. But books have been a far harder medium to stream, and for good reason. They have many qualities that make them difficult to assemble together on a consumption platform. Each one is lengthy, creating an immediate burden on the part of the reader before even the first page is opened. And they often start slow, since exposition of a world generally leads. There is no equivalent to a seven-second video that can provide an immediate payoff in the first moments of interaction. That’s the format as it has been in the past, but who says that the format has to remain stagnant? Let me give two imagined examples of what we could do. One option may be to borrow the old concept of serial fiction. Many of the most popular works in fiction today come from authors who pump out reams of pages. Given the nearly constant production of this material, why can’t we provide a channel so that these writers can write an on-going series in a serialized format? It’s sort of the textual equivalent of a soap opera, which is ironic since many of these popular novels are romantic or criminal. We don’t have to stop there though. Imagine opening up an invented world to multiple writers, who could write within this common environment. Readers could follow the stories that interest them, providing them the freedom to roam within a fictional world and craft their own journey through the text. It’s sort of like fan fiction with better production values, and it has the potential to turn a staid reading experience into one far more immersive. These changes to books don’t just have to affect fiction though. Imagine taking the same sort of nonlinear thinking to areas like textbooks or historical works. A math textbook could adapt to a reader over time, providing more or less proofs and solutions as it understood a reader’s needs. A history book could allow us to dive deeper on certain subjects that engaged us, while summarizing those that we are less interested in. In all of these cases, we are removing the strict linear rigidity of books. That’s where the importance of data like BookLamp’s comes from. With better data informing our user interface, we no longer have to see books as static, but rather as a canvas for readers to engage with. Frankly, that’s been the most disappointing part of all of the launched unlimited book services, whether from startups or from large companies. There has been a real hesitation to innovate around the concept of books despite the immersive nature of text. Medium does something in this direction, and to a certain degree, so does Quora. But neither startup targets fiction, or even full-length nonfiction. Part of that hesitation certainly comes from writers, who are used to the contours of a novel or nonfiction work and are not yearning to change. One of the great values of writing books is the extensive monopoly an author has over his or her subject, and few authors want to give up that power. While books may indeed be immersive, such control over a reader is far less pronounced in reality. Readers don’t read books for hours at a time, and they are already reading them in places less akin to solitude like the subway or office break room. Distractions are ever-present, since many of us read on devices where notifications can interrupt our experience at any time. While some purists may hate this “immersive” or “entertaining” approach to books, we don’t need to worry that these new experiences are going to somehow eliminate great literature. Rather, we are starting to see the creation of a new modality for users, who can have the freedom to interact with text in ways that are impossible with music or videos. While there will always be a place for the linear book, we shouldn’t forget that some of the most celebrated works of literature from Dickens and Dostoevsky were written as serial fiction. Ultimately, what I expect to see is a convergence between long-form narratives and books. The idea of length will start to erode as we build our experience based on our own goals and motivations. Maybe we want to read a thousand pages about Facebook or the Middle East, or maybe we want a much narrower engagement. Better data will allow publishers to finally be able to target both customers with the same work — changing the publishing loop forever. While all of this may not be good for books as we have traditionally known them, we have a real opportunity to make the written word competitive again with videos and music. Rather than rueing its end, we should be embracing the bright future of books instead. |
Facebook Forces Users Worldwide To Download Messenger For Mobile Chat | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | Over the next few days, will stop allowing messaging in its main iPhone and Android apps, and force all their users around the world to . Facebook first to use Messenger back in April, but after seeing “positive results” in terms of engagement, its rolling out the plan to the everyone. Facebook tells me people on Messenger reply about 20% faster, and not supporting multiple version of mobile chat will help it make both its main apps and Messenger better. Mobile web, iPad, feature phone, Windows Phone, Paper, and desktop users can still message in their main Facebook apps or sites like before, and will be spared from this forced migration for now. Previously, people could chat from a Messages tab in Facebook’s smartphone apps. They also had the option to download Messenger, which would turn the Messages tab into a notifications hub and shortcut that would when tapped. Soon, though, iPhone and Android users will be forced into this bouncing around. They’ll get a few optional notices to download Messenger before chat eventually stops working in the main apps. Facebook will also send an email to people the change will impact that explains why it’s happening. That little clock-wielding otter in the notification about the switch is cute, but he’s definitely going to annoy some people. In what could be viewed as an attempt to avoid too much press attention Facebook declined to publish a blog post about the change. Instead, it’s notifying users directly, and it contacted me with this official statement: “In the next few days, we’re continuing to notify more people that if they want to send and receive Facebook messages, they’ll need to download the Messenger app. As we’ve said, our goal is to focus development efforts on making Messenger the best mobile messaging experience possible and avoid the confusion of having separate Facebook mobile messaging experiences. Messenger is used by more than 200 million people every month, and we’ll keep working to make it an even more engaging way to connect with people.” Facebook is replacing the Messages tab with a Messenger shortcut in its main apps (left), which fast-switches users into Messenger with an option to hop back (right) While the rationale for the forced migration might be logical, that doesn’t mean it will sit well with users. Some people might simply not want to worry about managing two different Facebook apps. Others might have enjoyed the Chat Heads interface that allowed message multi-tasking, so they could chat over the top of what they were doing. But Facebook counters that people send more photos, group messages, videos, stickers, and audio clips while using Messenger. That’s supposedly means they’re having a better experience. With 200 million users on Messenger sending 12 billion messages a day, Facebook wants to unify its efforts around the app and skip out on maintaining code for a parallel version inside its main apps. You can watch Messenger’s designers explain why they built the fast-switching shortcut in this hands-on demo and interview: Messenger really is a much cleaner, faster, more fun way to send Messages. And it’s been getting better over the last few months. It recently added , and a slick split-screen selfie button for quickly capturing . At version 8, it’s a mature and stable standalone app, unlike the nascent if they want to check in. However, the heavy-handed move could still repulse people who are already weary of Facebook. With plenty of other messaging apps as well as SMS available, they have plenty of places to taking their mobile chatting. According to the data and given enough time for the dust to settle, the move might be a smart way to boost messaging usage and acclimate users to Facebook’s that also includes Paper and Slingshot. Eventually it could also make Facebook money, as last week CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that . But for now, Facebook might be hurting public opinion of itself, and reinforcing the perception that it changes whatever it desires without regards to what users want. Zuckerberg seems content to play the long game. |
Rising Share Prices Could Ignite A New Tech Acquisition Spree | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | In early 2014, a number of high-profile acquisitions were locked in at prices that many found confusing. The good times are probably coming back. Companies that compete across numerous technology strata like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are trading near record highs — or at least, the highest . Those same companies are all incredibly cash-rich. The result of that combustible milieu is that we could see a new wave of big acquisitions. The logic is pretty simple: When your stock price is high, buy shit with it. The small percentage of your total shares that are actively traded are up, driving your whole valuation north. Why not use that headroom to buy toys or upstart firms that could pose a threat to your cash flows? Investors are essentially granting you short-run paper value to use as a weapon. A few examples will help. When Facebook bought WhatsApp in February, its shares were trading for around $68 each. Facebook traded for less than $24 per share in the summer doldrums of 2013. Its impressive run into the New Year saw its stock hit (then) all-time highs between late January and March. Facebook bought , and . $21 billion in deals in just over a month, near a local maximum of its share price. Surprise. Facebook’s shares receded as did the stock price of other technology firms as investors temporarily soured on tech stocks. Keep in mind that when Facebook’s share price declined, the cost of its acquisitions declined — when you buy something with stock, and that stock value declines, you bought it at a discount. It’s like buying something with dollars, and then watching the value of those dollars decline, while the thing you bought theoretically appreciates in value. There is a material incentive to pull the trigger on acquisitions when your company is trading at a higher share price. Tech stocks are back up, the NASDAQ is nearly at 4,500, and IPOs of companies that have . Get ready. In the era in which gets picked up by Salesforce for , on annual recurring revenue that I’m hearing was under $5 million, things are going to be interesting. I asked venture capitalist if the current market conditions will lead to a strong acquisition field in the short-term. He agrees that it will. Lemkin thinks the cycle could last as long as 24 months. If he’s right, things should stay bright for quite some time. , CEO of , a company still in beta that provides analytics on the share price of companies across several industries, also linked the rising share prices to aggressive purchases in a comment to TechCrunch: With stock markets pushing all time highs across the board, companies want to use this newfound value in their shares as part of negotiating agreements. Even with cash on hand, corporations are making offers of both cash and stock for startups as it’s an easy way to acquire a company without putting a large dent on the corporate cash accounts. When the large tech companies compete from , every edge is worth buying so that your competition can’t do the same. That drives up prices. Fear is a great tool to push the price of an acquisition — Salesforce didn’t buy RelateIQ for its short-term revenue. Who gets picked up? Pinterest, Box and Dropbox are obvious thoughts. Keep in mind that a purchase can be at a rich valuation, even if the dollar amount is small — big purchases at big multiples make more noise, but small companies can still exit for sums that defy logic. Not all big-dollar acquisitions are foolish, though they can lead to . Facebook’s , for example. Adding to the above is the need for all platform companies constantly upping the ante on where they compete. Everyone needs analytics, we recently learned. Who knew! TechCrunch’s summed up that episode: Apple bought , Facebook bought and Twitter bought . If you’re a modern web company that has any interest in mobile, it pays to be deadly serious about analytics. The in-house market intelligence that a widely adopted analytics and crash-reporting package can bring you is beyond gold in the mobile era. These companies know that and they’re willing to earmark a significant chunk of change to ensure that their flow of data remains fresh and influential in their decision making. Whether those are product decisions or related to future M&A. So there are moments when the companies will run in a pack. But each platform company has unique DNA, making its potential purchase list different. Google wouldn’t , Apple wouldn’t , and Microsoft wouldn’t — kidding on that last one. All told we should see an active second half of 2014. Place your bets on who will get acquired and for how much in the comments. |
Fleet Unveils An App For Late Night Rides Between Silicon Valley And San Francisco | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | Newcomers to Silicon Valley are often shocked at how appallingly bad the transit options between San Francisco and the rest of the region can be. It’s a legacy of fragmented regional governance where nine different counties created at least 10 different semi-overlapping public rail and bus systems. BART was originally going to connect the entire region but two counties dropped out in the 1960s, leaving the system with partial coverage of the Bay. operated by Southern Pacific in the 19th century was sufficient and turned it into what is now today called Caltrain, the main train route connecting San Francisco with Silicon Valley. However, today Caltrain is standing-room during peak commute hours. Then given that weekly ridership has more than doubled since 2004, may not be enough to keep up with increased demand. Caltrain also doesn’t operate much past midnight, leaving younger tech workers who live in the South Bay with few options to get home after going out in the city. So we’re seeing some more entrepreneurial approaches to handling regional transit. , a startup founded by a couple Stanford students, is the most recent attempt. They’re offering group rides between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m when trains are scarce or when the system is closed. They have shuttles stopping about a half-dozen Caltrain stations in San Francisco, Millbrae, San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Jose. Each car or shuttle seats between five and 15 people and the cost ranges from $6 to $18, which is much cheaper than an Uber or Lyft. “Transit was especially hard for us at Stanford,” said . “Between here and San Francisco, it’s really challenging, especially at odd hours of the day or when the Caltrain is closed. Alternatives are also fairly expensive.” A few weeks ago, you had to call up or fill out an e-mail form . But now, . You request a ride, pick a stop and specify a number of riders. They are part of a wave of startups, that are experimenting with scheduled and group transport in Uber and Lyft’s wake. Other companies include which is looking at similar routes between the city and South Bay but at commute hours. There are also bus companies like and that are handling group routes within San Francisco. Fleet is part of the . |
TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon: Get Your Tickets! | Jeffery Bennett | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | We’ve got details regarding the upcoming Disrupt Hackathon you’ll want to hear. You wouldn’t want to miss out on one of the greatest all-night hacking events on the planet, would you? The Disrupt Hackathon is the all-weekend event that kicks off TechCrunch Disrupt. Starting on Saturday, September 6th at 12:30pm, hackers will have 24-hours(ish) to build a working concept, bringing it from soup to nuts to the stage. Following an all-night programming extravaganza, teams will be given exactly one minute to present their working concept in a crowded auditorium in front of the industry’s elite. In addition, to help get you up and running on the latest and greatest in tech, we’re putting together some amazing API workshops. If you’re on the fence, here are some great reasons you should toss your hat into the ring: ( )
Hacking will commence on Sat. Sept 6th @ 12:30pm.
Presentations will begin on Sun. Sept. 7th @ 11:00am. We’ll be releasing tickets in batches of 250. The first batch is now available at: Traditionally, we’ve offered free tickets to Disrupt for competitors. This year, we’ll continue that tradition, but with a twist: Our judges will rate all presentations, and only the top 75 teams will receive tickets. That’s all we’ve got for now. For up-to-the-date news on all things Disrupt, follow on Twitter. |
Jonathan Teo And Justin Caldbeck Raise $125 Million For Binary Capital | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | Former managing director and former managing director have closed their first fund together. Back in March, we reported that the two had , and now they’ve . The two, who had previously made early investments in companies like Snapchat, Instagram, Whisper and TaskRabbit, apparently hope to use that money to write checks of about $3 million to $5 million for other consumer-facing companies. |
Blockchain Bitcoin Wallet Is Back In The Apple App Store | John Biggs | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | Since pulled wallets from the App Store in January, cryptocurrency fans have been at once calling for the ban to be rescinded and bad-mouthing Cupertino. Now, seven months later, Apple has decided to allow Blockchain.info to publish their app, a very basic – but useful – bitcoin app that securely connects to your wallet and allows you to send and receive bitcoin on the go. “This signals a major shift for Apple — they are embracing digital currency development. It is also a pivotal moment for Bitcoin in general. This telegraphs from the world’s leading consumer technology company they are ready for Bitcoin,” said of the Blockchain team. [gallery ids="1036029,1036028,1036027"] The app allows you to create a new wallet right on the phone or connect to your current wallet via a QR code. When you fire up the app for the first time, you’re prompted to pair your device with . All of your transactions are immediately available and you can send BTC to another wallet by shooting the QR code for your recipient or keying in a wallet address. The app is protected by a PIN that you must enter before accessing your coins. Apple began looking more favorably at cryptocurrencies after the . Apple removed the apps originally due to an “unresolved issue” which, as expected, the company did not elaborate on. Blockchain.info is the first bitcoin wallet on the app store and will be adding new features including a “bitcoin map” of merchants who accept bitcoin. Given that services like PayPal and banking apps are available on iOS, it was hard to fathom why Apple pulled the apps. To hear bitcoin fans talk about it, however, a great injustice has been reversed. |
Going The Distance With A Smart Shoe Made In India | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | Forget Google Glass or Jawbone Up, the next wave in wearable tech might just be a smart shoe from India. The , meaning “take me along” in Hindi, has a Bluetooth enabled shoe insert that hooks up with Google Maps and buzzes to let you know which way to turn on your chosen route. Created by , the shoe hooks up with an app that syncs with Google Maps, tracks your steps and counts your calories burned. The shoe itself can be used for jogging around town. At this point you’re probably thinking this is some sort of high tech for runners, but the Lechal has much wider applications than that. The insert fits inside pretty much any shoe in your closet. Want to listen to tunes while driving instead of Siri navigation? The Lechal could vibrate to let you know when to turn instead. It can be used for hands-free biking, hiking, walking, tourists not wanting to look down at a map every five seconds as well. The original idea for the shoe was actually to help the visually impaired navigate the world around them. About 90% of the world’s visually impaired live in developing countries, according to the . Around 20% in India alone. As in the video below, users can also drop a pin on the map on their phone to meet up with others at a certain destination. The shoes apply haptic feedback to guide the wearer at the right turn to meet up with friends or to get wherever they need to be. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucK6jhdRlUY&w=560&h=315] The footwear also comes with something called Smart Assist, which alerts you if your phone is not in close proximity. It’s not actually the first smart shoe tech, but it is the first to take on navigation. created a smart shoe to track people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia a couple of years back, but they didn’t apply it to haptic learning, navigation or personal fitness. The idea and design for the Lechal came from two American educated Indian engineers, Krispian Lawrence and Anirudh Sharma. Both life long friends, the two went back to India and formed in the newly formed state of in 2011. The company quickly grew to a solid 50 employees currently. The Lechal is Ducere’s first product, and is expected to retail for around $100 to $150 this September. |
Beats Music Mobile App Gets Recommendation Tweaking, Verified Profiles And More | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | has updated its with a few new features, including a way to tune the Beats recommendation engine manually for better suggestions, a new history view for The Sentence, the Songza-like Madlibs playback engine, and Verified Badges, which add a checkmark to celebrity profiles so you know they’re the real deal. The Beats Music app also has some player improvements that deliver better playback and general performance, as is often the case with software updates. This is the first significant update to the music app following the announcement that Apple would be acquiring the Beats Music brand along with Beats Electronics. The changes seem to address feedback provided by users and make available some functionality that reviewers thought was potentially missing. The app has also received the same updates across all mobile platforms, as mentioned, and not just on iOS. While the company isn’t yet officially owned by Apple and therefore probably not on any Apple product roadmap, this is potentially a promising sign for those on non-Apple hardware who are users of the service and hope to see their software updated in time with the iOS release. Via . |
The Most Important Factor Of Startup Success | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | Whenever you think of startups, you very likely think of young people brimming with ideas sitting in garages and dorm rooms and solving problems with technology. We are conditioned in a way to consider the idea even over the person who came up with it, but after listening to entrepreneurs, I’ve come to learn, it’s not about the quality of the product idea or even the founders, it’s about the team that grows with the company because if that’s not right, the nascent company probably won’t succeed. A company is typically founded by one or a few committed people who carry their vision forward to create some kind of product: an Apple computer, Amazon.com, eBay, Facebook or Salesforce.com. All of these companies had one or more people who had the vision and the commitment to see it through to success.They all have great backstories about how they came to be (even if some of them like probably aren’t true.) After that initial burst of founding energy, it takes hard work to define and articulate a vision to employees who come on board afterward. The founders have to find a way to set goals, even with the understanding that the target is always going to be moving and they have adjust as they go along. , a serial entrepreneur who has started several successful companies says forming the right core team is absolutely crucial. At a talk at the last month, she likened it to a military operation. “My colleagues would be jet lagged, food deprived, sleep deprived –and they would have a meeting. You have to perform,” she says “Imagine you’re a marine. Be on top of your game. You’re on a mission and a lot of times it’s like a battle, but with the right team and the right beliefs you are going to get through it,” she said. , co-founder and managing director at in Berlin says finding the right people beyond that core founder group is even more crucial because it’s one thing to form that core team, but it’s another to begin to articulate a vision to newer people as they join the company. “One of the core qualities that we look for in founders is his ability to articulate and communicate a vision for the company well. It sounds trivial, but it really isn’t,” he said. He added, “It requires a lot of empathy to take a step back and think through how this closely knit culture might feel to someone who just joined. There’s always an inner circle, the first employees, highest up in the food chain, closest to the founders, who are well-informed and on board, but you really want to have everyone involved, engaged and fired up to maximize output –and to create a great place to work,” Horstmann explained. , a co-founder at Berlin startup, , one of the companies being funded by Project A explained her 4-year-old company is up to 20 people right now, and they are in the process of hiring more employees. As part of that process, she and her fellow co-founders are meeting to define the mission of their company, so these new employees can clearly understand and execute it. “This is a serious thing. This is what we are figuring out: communicating and creating a vision and putting down on paper the vision we are going to communicate to employees,” she said. , a co-founder at Project A startup says the founding members have to come to an agreement and present a united front to employees. “We have different discussion around the founder’s team and how you behave around employees. It’s important to get along and have strong discussions around where vision is going to go.” , another Boston TechJam speaker, and a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup CardStar, Inc to Constant Contact in January 2012, likens new startup employees to a roller coaster ride because as he points out, starting a company is in fact a wild ride and being part of that, especially at the beginning takes individuals who are at least partly risk takers. “As entrepreneurs when we start a company, it’s the wildest ride of our lives. When you are putting a team together, they are getting on that ride. How do you recognize people on your team. What are their triggers and how do you manage them,” he asked. He offers some concrete help saying transparency is absolutely the key. You have to be honest with your employees about what’s happening. Secondly, he says focus on that team and alignment of people and finally empower your team to drive your company’s success. He even offered a formula to help define that: People + Execution = Success. He added that conversely if you have a toxic team it’s going to undermine your mission and very likely will lead to failure. Horstmann believes that transparency is really the key element here. “A main lesson in all of this was transparency, especially in regard to internal, sensitive information. In the past, companies tended to be overly cautious about leaks. But today, we find that founders will gain more than they’ll potentially lose when sharing results, news and data with their extended teams. People will buy in better into the vision and be more receptive to a founder who explains his plan going forward based on that information,” Horstmann explained. Eyeota’s Prokop says her company has incorporated (objectives and key results) system to help measure how well new employees are doing against the objectives the company has defined. Her company has certain objectives broken down by quarter and the goals help define how each employee will contribute to achieving those objectives. She says this approach is particularly useful to startups like hers because it really brings discipline to the process and forces them to define that clear vision to help produce strongly defined goals for the employees who must work to achieve them. This is particularly challenging in an early startup environment where jobs are not always clearly defined, especially among early employees. Prokop says early employees need to be flexible around their jobs and be like baseball’s utility infielders playing a lot of positions. You have to jump in and help across a lot of departments because there is so much to be done and there is a general lack of expertise you see across departments in larger organizations.. Much like Miller from Constant Contact, Prokop says it’s important to find those right people because she says a lot of people think they want to work for a startup, but they just don’t understand what that entails. She says there are new priorities and shifting targets all the time and not everyone can handle that. Minodes’ Wegner says the core team shouldn’t be afraid to argue about the vision and clash about what they want the company to represent, but when you’re done, present it to the employees like you mean it or you’ll foster confusion. He adds, you also have to trust them enough to give them opportunities to try new things within the framework of the larger goals of the organization –and it’s a hard line to find sometimes. “It’s important for your team to know where they are going. If it’s not clear, employees get confused and lose track of the success factors, but at the same time, you need to give people the opportunity to try things,” he said. Startups come and go for a lot of reasons, but a lot of good ideas fail because the founding team fails to take into consideration the people factors. It’s one thing to come up with the great idea, it’s another to pull together the right group of people to execute it. It’s not always going to be easy to do, but it’s absolutely the most likely factor that’s going to determine your startup’s success or failure. It’s essential you get it right. |
Vinod Khosla To Speak At Disrupt SF | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | We’re excited to announce that will once again take the Disrupt SF stage. The last , Khosla dropped a bomb by saying that 70-80 percent of VCs actually add ‘negative value’ to their invested companies — and only 5 percent, or less, added anything at all. Khosla is the founder of , a venture capital firm that focuses on funding environmentally friendly technologies in addition to the standard lot of Internet, computing, mobile and silicon technology companies. And, as you can see from his on-stage presence at Disrupt, he’s known as a keen investor that isn’t afraid to speak his mind. Khosla Ventures invests in a diverse range of companies, including , the , code challenge community , home-buying startup , and Uber and Lyft competitor . They’ve also taken an interest in the and on-demand grocery startup . Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy Systems, a pioneer in electronic design automation, and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, a multinational vendor of computers, computer software and hardware, and information technology services that Oracle bought in 2009. Before that, Khosla was a general partner at , and he continues to manage KPCB funds through KP X. In a time when investments in biofuels is , Khosla and his VC firm remain invested in clean fuel technologies. For instance, Khosla committed to a $25 million investment in KiOR, Inc. in addition to the $25 million his firm invested. They’ve also recently participated in a $15 million Series B round , an agricultural biotechnology company that discovers natural microbial products, as well as a $60 million series D round for bio-ethanol company . We’re excited to see what other advice Khosla has for us at , and we hope you’ll join us. He joins our growing list of speakers that includes , and . Tickets for Disrupt are available for purchase, and if you’d like to help sponsor the event, are available. |
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Favr.tt Brings On CEO To Raise Funding For Its Social Shopping App | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | Back in 2012, London and New York based launched as a “social marketplace” where users were rewarded for promoting products they like. The company raised $1.4 million from Notion Capital and Octopus. Another in the arena is , which has raised $4 million, or which raised $2 million. There’s something about these social shopping startups that European investors like – probably because of the early access to revenue models. Now another company plans to enter a similar space. is a privately funded social shopping app for consumers and – in particular – social influencers that rewards them directly with cash when others click and buy on items they’ve linked to via affiliate links. What makes it stand out is its focus on mobile, via and apps. It launched quietly a couple of months ago but it’s now stepping on the gas. Today London tech startup veteran has joined as CEO, alongside co-founder Matthew Woolf, CTO. Prior to Favr.tt, Martinez led a number of VC-backed startups to exit, such as Escape Velocity and Jutel Visual Radio Oulu, and she was the first employee at Moo.com. She’s also worked at Goldman Sachs, Cable & Wireless, and Nokia in its heyday. ’s graph database matches people with products, and rewards users’ social influence with cash-back commissions. Whereas a user would have to sign up to an affiliate scheme to share an affiliate link, with Favr.tt, a user just searches for a product and Favr.tt brings them back to the affiliate link, which is linked to their account. When they share it, any sale commission is credited directly to their bank account. The company now plans to raise further funding with a view to launching in the US, the idea being to turn social media into one big affiliate marketing marketplace, effectively turning it from a B2B proposition into a consumer-facing phenomenon. ”If you are Skimlinks your clients are big publisher sites, but for us our client is Facebook and Twitter,” Martinez tells me. “This is where our users publish the opportunities, as we are 100% user generated content.” In the parlance of the trade, it “monetises peer-2-many” recommendations and may well amplify social influence for brands. That’s assuming it doesn’t get sullied by the usual problems with spammy affiliate marketing. Favr.tt competes in two ways with existing businesses. First is the “cash-back payments to consumers” model, where catalogue-style discounted outlets such as Quidco give you money back on in-store spending — but only on a store-by-store basis. There are also cash-back credit cards. Another model is companies that might pay you a few cents when you search for a flight on a search engine with affiliate deals. But with Favr.tt users get cash sent to their PayPal accounts from any purchase, or any purchase made by others who click their social shopping links. This taps into users who also recommend things on social media. There are differences between all these social shopping sites, however. “We are taking payments on shopa so it’s much more of a marketplace than the guys at favr.tt which is affiliate based,” says Peter Janes, founder and CEO of Shopa. Favr.tt looks and sounds like a good idea, but when your Twitter and Facebook feeds get a little over-cooked with products pushed by your ‘friends’ you know whether it’s actually worked or not. |
Thinknum Raises $1M Seed Round To Give Financial Analysts Better Tools | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | , a financial tech startup that develops tools for analysts, announced today that it has raised $1 million in seed funding led by Pejman Mar Ventures (an investment firm that has also seeded companies like , , and ), with participation from ; ; ; 645 Angels; and HKB Capital. The funding will be used to add more software engineers to support Thinknum’s growth. Founded in 2013 by and , wants to free financial analysts from the confines of spreadsheets and give them better tools to value companies, with improved access to key data and an environment designed to allow sharing and collaborating on models, instead of emailing spreadsheets back and forth. Ugwi and Zhen also hope to expand into emerging markets to give analysts who are disconnected from the global investment community access to improved financial tools. For more information about Thinknum, read TechCrunch’s . Since TechCrunch profiled Thinknum, the platform has improved its user interface and launched “private workspaces,” a feature that lets users keep their work private or collaborate with other analysts, for a monthly subscription fee of $200. The company also released a portfolio tool for analysts that allows them compare thousands of companies at the same time and apply specific metrics and financial models to them. Zhen says that the number of models Thinknum users have created have gone up 200% and the platform now has coverage for 92% of all US companies. “Greg and I started Thinknum because we saw no solution for managing our own user generated content while we were analysts on Wall Street. Traders and analysts currently use ad-hoc spreadsheets for building models. Thinknum is the first web platform for financial modeling. We are disrupting the $25 billion financial data industry,” said Zhen. |
Senate Expected To Unveil Broad NSA Reform Bill Tomorrow | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | U.S. Senator is expected to introduce a version of the USA FREEDOM Act (UFA) tomorrow that is far stronger than what the enfeebled House of Representatives managed to pass earlier this year. According , the bill not only curtails the bulk surveillance of American’s call metadata — the first program detailed by the leaks — but would also reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to include an opposition voice to the government’s arguments, and force some form of public disclosure of information regarding the court’s decisions. It also contracts the terms that the government could use to request call metadata from telephone companies. Given the Times’ summary, it doesn’t appear that the bill would close so-called “ ” searches of Americans’ communications. Backdoor searches have come under withering scrutiny due to the . The full text will be the real test, of course, but it does seem that what Leahy has put together is stronger than the . That bill was infamously shoved through in a hurry, after being so weakened that around half of its original co-sponsors voted against it. What the House passed cannot be called reform. The proposed bill would at least close the door on the telephony metadata program, but it will be important to look into its ability to more broadly end bulk collection of data relating to the communications of American citizens. The NSA has a wide, diverse set of surveillance tools that range from demanding data from Internet companies through PRISM, to tapping the fiber cables that make up the Internet itself. Merely ending the NSA’s pooling of our call records is not enough — by far — when it comes to shuttering overly intrusive surveillance programs that we currently fund. The Times’ dismount is worth a moment of meditation: Over all, the bill represents a breakthrough in the struggle against the growth of government surveillance power. The Senate should pass it without further dilution, putting pressure on the House to do the same. That’s a mildly sobering reminder that even if the Senate manages to pass something that would have material impact on the NSA, it would only have cleared one chamber. The Senate bill has been put together in collaboration with the executive branch, implying that friction in the House could be less than we might expect. I’ve heard that the House bill was drastically impacted by the current administration’s input. We’ll have to see. Tomorrow is big day for potential reform. Strap in. |
Tango Teases “Music Pix,” A Social App For Making Instant Photo Slideshows | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | , the mobile messaging platform that a massive $280 million from Alibaba earlier this year, has quietly rolled out a new photo-sharing application called . The app lets you share your photos along with a song, in order to create 30-second customized slideshows. [ , see below.] In the app’s description on iTunes, Tango notes that you won’t need to drag, crop or zoom your photos before sending them out – Tango Music Pix does the editing work for you. That makes the new app sound like something of a competitor to Animoto. However, also focuses on the business crowd who want to make quick slideshows for work-related purposes – like a realtor showing off a house for sale to potential buyers, for example. But Tango Music Pix is more squarely aimed at the consumer market, as a slideshow builder that lets you quickly post to Facebook, Twitter, Tango’s flagship messaging app, or share via email. There are several other apps that play in this general space, too, including and , for instance. Music Pix is not Tango’s first effort at building standalone applications that work with its main Tango messaging app. The company follows the playbook of Asian messaging apps like , which offers dozens of complementary apps that work alongside LINE, including games, as well as apps that offer other tools, stickers, cards, and more. Tango’s app lineup today includes a variety of , too, from racing games to cards games and even a Flappy Bird clone. However, Music Pix would be the company’s first social application to exist outside its main messaging app. It seems Tango’s Music Pix was not ready for prime time. Shortly after publication, the app disappeared from the iTunes App Store where it was available as a free download. However, if you were able to grab it before Tango pulled it out, you can still use the app to build your slideshows. One problem I had with the app during testing was that it loaded up your photo gallery from oldest to newest. That made it difficult to scroll to and select your most recent photos. The app also crashed, but that could be an iOS 8 beta bug, so your mileage may vary. In any event, it’s clear that Tango didn’t want anyone finding out about Music Pix just yet. |
Pogoseat Raises $2.3 Million To Offer Discounted Seat Upgrades At Sporting Events | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | Los Angeles-based has built a mobile app that enables fans who attend sporting events to instantly upgrade their seats or purchase a number of different in-game experiences. Now the company is looking to expand, thanks to $2.3 million in seed funding from a wide range of investors. Pogoseat began by offering a simple way to allow sports fans who show up to an event to improve their view of the action by purchasing seat upgrades through its own app, or through the apps of its partners. Fans could purchase upgrades the day of a game, or even during the middle of a game, and get seats closer to the field. That enabled sports franchises to incremental revenue to be collected for seats that were otherwise unsold or no one was sitting in. Launching with the Golden State Warriors, Pogoseat has signed up a number of clients that use its tools to make more money and drive loyalty among their biggest fans. In addition to the Warriors, customers include the Sacramento Kings, the San Francisco Giants, The Anaheim Ducks, the Brooklyn Nets, and the Arena Football League, all of which are using Pogoseat as a way to offer a better experience to their fans. For them, switching seats is just one new revenue stream, as Pogoseat and partners believe there are a number of other ways that they can improve the fan experience. Whether that means booking time with a team’s mascot or making putting a message on the big screen, Pogoseat is increasingly being used to power the purchase of on-the-fly, in-game experiences. Increasingly, franchises are offering up points systems to season ticket holders that enable fans to purchase these experiences as a loyalty reward for showing up to the games. With that product now available, Pogoseat is not only looking to grow its number of sports clients, but it is also hoping to expand into other events. Most notably, that includes concerts and other events, where users could either upgrade their seats or pay at the event for merchandise or better event access. To help it expand, the company has raised $2.3 million in seed funding to start making the technology more widely available to sports franchises. Investors include Structure Capital, SK Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, KDDI and Global Brain Open Innovation Fund, Jillian Manus’ Broad Strategy Fund, Tylt Lab, Universal Music Group, Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke, Joshua Schacter, Kima Ventures, XG Ventures, the owners of the Sacramento Kings, and the minority owner of the Golden State Warriors. |
Turner Media Camp Demo Day Highlights Five New Startups | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | It’s like summer camp, but for grownups, according to a video shown as and culminated Thursday as a batch of startups made presentations to a room of investors. The five startups spent 12 weeks in workshops and networking events with media leaders, talking about how their products could be applied to solve problems facing the industry. Each company also received $20,000 in seed funding. The incubator exclusively for media startups and has previously hosted startups like and . opened the event with seven pieces of advice for startups based on his experience building up the annual music, film and interactive conference. “If you aren’t mistakes, you aren’t innovating enough,” Forrest advised the companies. These five startups are already innovating the industry, from the way you get the news to how you check your phone. , said he wanted to find a way to keep readers engaged as “drive-by readers” increased. helps media publishers connect readers with other content they might be interested in with a combination of curation and machine learning. It provides related links, personalized content and allows publishers to push custom content on an article page. has already partnered with several large brands including PBS, and it currently is raising a seed round. Singel said readers were much more likely to engage with multiple posts on a website using Contextly on a website not running it. A few years ago, founder was watching TV with a friend for hours, and every time a commercial came on she was on her phone. TV viewers increasingly are multitasking on their laptops and mobile devices as they watch television, but little has been done to connect the ads viewers are seeing on their TV’s with the ads on their devices. Enter . Using big data, the app predicts what TV shows the viewer is likely watching and then allows companies to push targeted advertising to that user’s mobile devices. As someone who watches way too much TV, it’s a little creepy to think using my location, age and gender, an app could know what I was watching, but the app seems to have the potential to make a lot of revenue from advertising. – How is a celebrity with thousands of followers supposed to answer all the questions they get when they do a Twitter Q&A or a Reddit Ask Me Anything? They can’t, leaving their fans frustrated. That’s where comes in. The startup allows celebrities and brands to host Q&A’s in real time, letting fans who ask questions that get the most votes to participate in a one on one conversation with the host that can be viewed by all their followers. Co-founders and said early sessions have engaged users for hours. The pair, who worked together designing games at , are raising seed funding. CEO & Founder was working in investment banking in New York. With social media blocked on her computer, she was constantly checking her phone, and she was getting bored of her phone’s generic lock screen photo. But now with , which launched , users can see content on their lock screen. If they swipe right, they unlock their phone as usual, but if they swipe left, they can engage with the content. The startup recently launched a feature that allows multiple ads or short news stories to appear on a users lock screen. Kim says since the average phone user looks at the screen about 110 times a day, there is a potential to make 8.9 billion impressions on Android phones in the United States alone.
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Fonts In Chrome For Windows Will Look Better Soon | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | Google the latest of its browser today, and if you’re a Windows user on a machine that runs at least Vista, fonts will now look better on your screen. That’s because the Chrome 37 Beta now supports Microsoft’s , a technology that improves the way fonts look on modern screens. For the longest time, Google didn’t support this and instead used ‘ Graphics Device interface — which is based on technology from the mid-80s, when LED screens were still far off and computers were much slower. Users have long to make this switch, but the company says that it “required extensive re-architecting and streamlining of Chrome’s font rendering engine,” so it probably wasn’t the highest priority for the team. The new version also now supports subpixel font scaling, which enables smooth animations of text between font sizes, and better support for touch events on very high-resolution displays. While the new font-rendering system is the highlight of this release, Google is also adding the HTML5 <dialog> element to its browser to allow developers to create dialog boxes in their web apps. Other additions include support for the — which makes it easier for developers to create secure web apps — and support for a few other developer features like access to the number of cores on a machine and easier access to the user’s preferred language. also thankfully one of the most annoying HTML features: showModalDialog. Very few sites use this, but the ones that do can hold your screen hostage until you actually interact with the dialog. |
ClassWallet Is Bringing Classroom Money Management To A School Near You | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | When it comes to keeping track of money for classroom expenses, collecting cash for field trips is just the tip of the iceberg. There are several common issues that every teacher faces when it comes to money, or lack of money, in the classroom. And most stem from how it’s managed. Today, is launching out of private beta to offer up a better way for teachers to collect, manage, track, and even spend discretionary money for the classroom. was founded by Jamie Rosenberg, an attorney turned edtech entrepreneur. Previously he had founded the well-known , which in the past 13 years has raised and distributed over $25M to 150,000 classrooms. In Rosenberg’s experience, whether a teacher is raising money for supplies, collecting money for a field trip, or receiving funds from a grant or the district itself, putting the money into an appropriate account, making it accessible, and tracking it all become major pain points. For example, last year, the Jacksonville Teacher of the Year won a $500 grant from a local education fund. In order to distribute the funds, the Foundation wrote a check to the teacher. To use the funds for her classroom, the teacher had to submit the check to her school, which in turn submitted it to the district, which deposited the money in a bank. Now the teacher has two options: Either spend her own money and submit reimbursement, which follows the same teacher to school to district and back process; or she can request a purchase order for the supplies she would like to purchase. What’s more, according to Rosenberg, is that legislation in education has been following a “movement among thought leaders to push decisions closer to the child.” While this may mean students getting supplies and tools more inline with their needs, the paperwork headache is likely to get worse for teachers. The process as it stands now can take two months and cost more than a few erasers to complete. ClassWallet was built to streamline this workflow and has a lot of useful bells and whistles built in. In the same grant scenario, the Foundation submits the check directly to the district who deposits the money into the teacher’s Class Wallet. Voila, money accessible. From there, the teacher can purchase from vendors directly in the application. ClassWallet has partnered with Best Buy, Office Depot, Scholastic, School Specialty, Carson Delosa, and others to give teacher easy access to any and all supplies they may need. ClassWallet also recognizes that not all purchases are made online. For offline purchase, ClassWallet enables teachers, through a partnership with and , to move money from their ClassWallet account to a prepaid MasterCard that can be used for things like field trips. All transactions are tracked and can easily be exported as a PDF to share with school or district administration. Teachers are able to set up fundraising campaigns, message and thank supporters from inside the platform. ClassWallet has had 500 teachers in its invite-only beta for the past few months, and their takeaways are clear. Every teacher has the same problems, regardless of district, state, grade level, or years of experience. One of the major challenges of edtech is selling into the education system, which is notoriously strapped for money. There are plenty of apps and tools that teachers love but districts are unable or unwilling to budget for. ClassWallet hopes to avoid that fate by providing a service that saves significant time and money, creating a “need to have product” for the education system in the same way Clever has. The founding team’s experience and network from Adopt a Classroom should play a role as well. ClassWallet recently joined – accelerator and ramping up to serve the upcoming back to school season. |
Amazon Isn’t Killing Writing, The Market Is | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | war on publishers reached a crescendo yesterday with , a subscription plan that would allow readers to pay $9.99 per month for unlimited access to the Kindle ebook library. No longer content with simply demanding steeper discounts from publishers like Hachette — — Amazon is finally reaching its end goal: the complete dissolution of the traditional book business model through a vertically integrated publishing platform, from writer to Kindle. The idea of a “Netflix for Books” has been a popular startup theme for a while, and Kindle Unlimited certainly enters a crowded field. raised , and recently . Yet, only Amazon currently has the scale to see such a plan become an industry standard, with an estimated 65 percent market share. As a writer, I am supposed to feel wary of this turn of events. By capping the total price paid per month for books, Amazon is theoretically limiting its upside revenue from book sales. Adults in America either read a lot of books, or not that many at all, . An unlimited plan is expected to put a ceiling on a reader’s total expenses for books, therefore capping the costs of the most lucrative customers. Readers will spend less, writers will be paid less, books will disappear, and the Earth will hurtle toward the sun due to an increase in fiber from the decrease in paper pulping. Or so I am supposed to believe. The truth is, we are witnessing a bad Hollywood remake of a bad Hollywood remake of the Content Wars of the 1990s and 2000s. First it was music around Napster and later Apple; then video with and ; and now, books with Amazon (in 2D!). The plot remains the same: The traditional publishers of content defend their business models against the assault of the Internet. There’s some suspense, and then the Internet wins. But there is one crucial difference — a plot twist that makes this third installment a bit of a thriller. Just yesterday, , one of the largest deals in the media industry in years. Both companies face competitive pressure from streaming companies like as well as multi-channel networks like Maker Studios, . Part of this consolidation trend is the revenue that can come from scale. In video, there are tremendous opportunities for companies to build value from derivative products in other channels. the franchises that can form the basis for new content across mediums. A single hit film can result in the creation of film sequels, television shows, books, magazines, comics, toys, and video games. The film is just an entrée to that wider, more-profitable universe of products. This loss leader approach in the video market also applies to artists in the music industry. and royalty payments show that even the top artists at peak popularity may receive only half a million dollars a month for their music streamed on the service, which must be split with producers, distributers, marketers, and others. But the real money for these pop artists . Lady Gaga, for instance, had gross revenues of $227.4 million across the 201 shows in her tour. These business models do apply to a very small handful of writers, who can option their or to make a fortune. But unlike up-and-coming artists in video or audio, the plot twist for books is that there are almost no alternative revenue sources for writers. Nearly all the work a writer does in marketing and external relations is to sell actual copies of books. Book talks and lectures are generally unpaid, and contributed articles to magazines and newspapers to market a book often pay a low fee if they pay one at all, and rarely if ever share in advertising revenue. The only alternative publishing model is around consulting, using a book as a customer acquisition strategy. That only works in the business and psychology section of the bookstore, and isn’t that useful for the rest of the aisles. And that ultimately is the part of Kindle Unlimited that is perhaps most ominous, and why authors have been so passionate about the issue of ebook prices. Driving the prices lower isn’t likely to expand the market of readers, since book prices don’t seem to be the deciding factor on whether someone reads a book (time is). But those lower prices directly shrink the incomes of authors, who lack any other means of translating their sales into additional revenue. That’s why I don’t think the big revolution for writers and other content producers will come from Amazon, but rather from startups like , which allow producers to build audiences directly and develop their own direct subscription model with their most fervent fans. That would be a surprise dénouement in this final episode of the Content Wars, but a welcome one for creators around the world. |
To Signal Broader Ambitions, Mobile Ad Company HasOffers Changes Its Name To Tune | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | has been a tricky startup to write about — partly because ad attribution isn’t inherently sexy, but mostly because of the name. Yes, there’s HasOffers the company and HasOffers the product, but at this point it’s probably best known for a different service, , which allows mobile developers to see which ads are actually leading to app installs, engagement, and purchases. CEO acknowledged that there has been “a lot of confusion about what is HasOffers versus MobileAppTracking.” He said the team has known for a while that “this is not going to be the long-term naming architecture” and that it wanted “a more flexible, bigger name.” That’s why the company is announcing a new name today — . The existing HasOffers and MobileAppTracking products will continue to exist, but they’ll now be known as HasOffers by Tune and MobileAppTracking by Tune. (HasOffers, by the way, allows online advertisers to manage relationships with multiple publishers.) And this gives the company room to launch new products under the Tune brand. Hamilton didn’t get specific about what those new products will be, but he did offer a broader vision. “The goal of Tune is to make mobile marketing better for everyone,” he said. “We’re here to support the entire ecosystem with technology — not just marketers, not just publishing platforms.” Apparently the name, the logo, and so on are the result of a nine-month rebranding process. Hamilton said it took this long because he wanted to make sure the entire company was involved with the process. (Plus, it’s not easy to secure Tune URLs around the world.) So why Tune? In part, it reflects the idea of helping customers “tune their marketing campaigns better,” but Hamilton also chose it because it’s fun. “We thought it would be more valuable for us to have fun with this name and be really broad and exciting, rather than try to be too descriptive and too perfectly matched for what we did,” he said. After bootstrapping since it was founded in 2009, led by Accel last year. It was in the headlines more recently for being . Hamilton is making the announcement on-stage today at the company’s Postback conference. You can see the full Tune team in the photo above, and |
With Echo, The Team Behind Laundry Startup Prim Fights Push Notification Overload | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | Back in January, startup . Now its founders are ready to talk about what they’re doing next — and no, it’s not laundry-related. The team has built an app for lockscreens that helps users manage what can sometimes feel like a barrage of push notifications. Co-founders Xuwen Cao and Yin Yin Wu said this was an issue they faced when working on Prim. They recalled receiving push notifications while driving and scrambling for their phones — sometimes it really was something urgent and Prim-related; sometimes it was just a notification. With the free Echo app, notifications are now automatically sorted into different categories, namely work, social, media, priority, and spam. You can look at notifications from each category, but your phone will only wake up for priority messages — so if you’re (say) driving and get a push from your phone, you’ll know (theoretically) that it’s something important. And you can set reminders to return to notifications later. The company is technically the same one as Prim, and like Prim, the team consists solely of Cao and Wu (minus some contract drivers). They quietly launched an alpha version of the app a few weeks, and you can see a demo in the video below. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6-ZCcGZnYk&w=560&h=315] As an owner (oops), I wasn’t able to try Echo out myself, but it has already attracted some positive writeups on app- and Android-focused blogs. For example, as “an attractive alternative for sufferers of notification overload.” Plus, the review’s one major gripe, that users don’t get any say in how things are categorized, has already been fixed — notifications still get assigned a category automatically, but you can do a long right swipe to reassign them. Cao and Wu also acknowledged that Google is working to improve the lock screen interface and notifications in Android, but they predicted that as these updates roll out, “We’ll be much further along.” For one thing, they plan to make the app more aware of context — as Wu put it in an email, “When you are on a date, [Tinder] notifications should not appear. You want to see Secret alerts at home, and not in a meeting.” As for making money, they said they’re currently focused on user growth, but they see a number of monetization opportunities, particularly when it comes to promoting apps. That sounds like it could be potentially annoying, but Wu pointed out that these promotions would only show up at relevant moments — for example, you might see a promotion for a social app when you’re looking at your social notifications. And the pair talked a little bit about went wrong with . Wu said that the real issue had been working with laundromats — the smaller ones couldn’t handle much additional laundry, while the larger ones often offered delivery service on their own. “We realized that for us to have a sustainable source of supply, we’d need to go and open our own laundry facilities,” Wu said. That shouldn’t be a problem with Echo. Plus, Shu said they spent “a good amount of time” talking to people about the product to make sure they were solving a real need. Similarly, they wanted to make sure they had solid user retention numbers before they made a big promotional push. So among initial users, they said 25 percent uses the app every day, and the average user engages with Echo more than 40 times a day. Android users can . iPhone owners like me are out of luck, however. Apple doesn’t really allow developers to have this kind of access to the lockscreen, and Wu added, “Android is just growing so fast. It makes sense for us to focus on where the trend is heading.” |
Care.com Acquires Subscription Kids’ Goods Startup Citrus Lane In Up To $48.6M Deal | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | , the listed Massachusetts-based company that runs an online marketplace for finding and managing family care resources such as babysitters and elder caregivers, announced today that it has acquired , the e-commerce startup that sells monthly subscription boxes of products aimed at babies and kids. The total deal value is up to $48.6 million total, said in a press release published this afternoon. Of that, $22.9 million is in cash, $8.1 million is in equity, and $17.6 million is available in earn out payments of cash and equity over the next two years, pursuant to the achievement of certain business milestones. The deal is a nice multiple on ‘s annual revenue, which was $6 million in 2013, and is expected to double to $12 million this year. The three-year-old Citrus Lane, which has more than 400,000 members and 45,000 paying subscribers, has raised from investors including and . It’s a smart target for Care.com, as Citrus Lane is a strong company with a stellar team. As I wrote two years ago after interviewing Citrus Lane founder and CEO for a TechCrunch article, “Talking to Finley, what was especially compelling to me (and something that I imagine attracted investors as well) is that Citrus Lane’s founders seem to be the full package: They have real technical and business chops, but are also women themselves who understand the needs of their customer base. ‘We have a really great technology and quant marketing teams, and we are building all sorts of algorithmic understanding that we’re confident will run circles around other companies in the space,’ Finley said. ‘But the secret and the heart of this is that we really believe in the customer, and we believe in the mission of helping moms find the right products for their kids.'” Citrus Lane will be run as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Care.com going forward, led by Finley, who will serve as an SVP of the company. Care.com, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, has a market cap of $320 million. |
IBM Slips After Reporting Better-Than-Expected Revenue Of $24.36B, Non-GAAP EPS Of $4.32 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | managed to best market expectations in the second quarter, but its shares have traded down since it of its second quarter’s financial results, which included revenue of $24.36 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $4.32. On a GAAP basis, IBM earned $4.12 per share. Analysts had IBM to report non-GAAP earnings per share of $4.29, on revenue of $24.13 billion. Its revenue tally was down 2 percent year-over-year. IBM touts in its release that its cloud top line has grown “more than” 50 percent in 2014 thus far. The company also notes that “mobile revenue” has expanded “more than” 100 percent in calendar 2014. However, those incomes are likely minor when compared to its legacy revenue streams, making their impact small. Its Services business saw its revenue slip 1 percent, to $13.9 billion. Software revenue for IBM managed a 1 percent gain, to $6.5 billion. IBM’s hardware business saw its revenues fall 11 percent on a year-over-year basis, to $3.3 billion. The company ended the period with total debt of $46.5 billion, up from its second quarter 2013 tally of $39.7 billion. IBM ended the period with $9.7 billion in cash. The company’s half-year operating net income — non-GAAP — is flat compared to the year prior. Why is IBM down when it managed to beat expectations? It could be that its reiterated target for $18 per share in 2014 non-GAAP EPS wasn’t what investors were hoping for. In a period of low growth, reaffirming past targets doesn’t inspire confidence. Potentially also at issue is IBM’s declining revenue in what it calls “growth markets” and the BRIC countries — down, 7 percent and 2 percent, respectively. IBM CEO had normally positive words for the quarter: “In the second quarter, we made further progress on our transformation. We performed well in our strategic imperatives around cloud, big data and analytics, security and mobile.” Investors are less impressed. Two days ago IBM announced a that will see the two companies pair up to take on the enterprise market. IBM was rewarded with a moderate bounce following the news. It could be that any reaction to its somewhat positive earnings was already priced into its shares. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 28 | null |
Funding The Right Stuff | Ryan Sarver | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | People are saying that Silicon Valley venture capitalists have lost their way. They argue that we invest far too much money in startups that are either addressing trivial markets or problems that affect a few privileged 20-somethings. “The entire Bay Area appears to have given up on solving anything but its own problems,” wrote Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal on July 7 in an article titled “ ” While I get his point, I think his conclusions are deeply flawed. His argument misses the mark in two major ways. First, Mims makes the claim that money isn’t flowing where it should and points at startups focused on food delivery services or anonymous social networks to buttress the claim. Instead, he proposes that money should go toward “research and development that transforms lives, in fields such as energy, medicine or food safety, rather than just optimizing advertising platforms.” I think we can all agree that investing in R&D in those fields is worthwhile. But underneath the statement is a knock on areas that aren’t energy, medicine or food safety, and a belief that the companies getting funded today outside of those recognized categories are somehow unworthy. That argument unfortunately falls prey to the misconception that what seems trivial today will always be trivial. History demonstrates otherwise. Look no further than , or , companies Mims himself singles out as transformative. Every one of these venture-backed companies was deemed trivial in its infancy. When Google launched, many people thought it was silly to invest in yet another search engine when there were already plenty of them. Google, of course, has gone on to be not just a phenomenal global business but also an innovator in vital areas that range from medicine to energy. Facebook and Twitter were both considered inconsequential social toys in their early years, only to go on and become fundamental platforms for connecting people, supporting free speech and even taking part in overthrowing oppressive governments. Uber, originally conceived as a way for “privileged 20-somethings” to get on-demand private drivers, is already transforming the entire transportation industry, creating 20,000 new jobs a month, and getting people to buy fewer cars because rides are cheap, reliable and always available. began as just another messaging app. But it has made global communication free to users who otherwise could not afford it. Time and time again, companies at inception are laughed at for being silly or for only solving the needs of a small, usually well-to-do population. In time, though, these same companies can evolve and touch hundreds of millions and even billions of people around the world, enriching their lives in ways few imagined. The second flaw in Mims’ argument is that money isn’t flowing into the right businesses. He notes that 37 percent of venture capital – the highest percentage since data collection began in 1995 – is taken up by software companies as evidence for his criticism. This is a confusing argument since software is such a broad investment category and one that encompasses the very same sectors he would like to see improved. In fact, in many cases, software is exactly how we can fix some of the most vexing problems Mims raises. If you want to address our transportation infrastructure, for instance, you don’t invest in taxi organizations. You invest in software-driven startups like Uber. In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously wrote that “ .” What he meant by that is that more and more industries are experiencing disruptions and gaining value thanks to software-driven breakthroughs. If we believe Andreessen, and all the evidence suggests we should, then more investment in software makes total sense. But back to where venture dollars are actually going. In a recent post by my colleague Tomasz Tunguz, titled “ ,” we do see that money is flowing in to some fundamentally important areas. The top five fastest-growing categories for early-stage investments, from 2009 to 2013 are, in order, the Android Ecosystem, Hardware & Software, Big Data, Aerospace, and Health & Wellness. Sure, we are often wrong, funding plenty of startups that never meet their potential for myriad reasons. Indeed, roughly nine out of 10 venture-backed companies ultimately fail. This gives cynics plenty of ammunition to suggest that investments and intentions are misguided. But our job as investors is to see around the corner, beyond what is just in front of us and try to sketch out a story where some simple idea can go on to be the next Twitter, Facebook, Google or Uber. Our job is to be optimists, seeing beyond frivolity and instead focusing on the potential for greatness. We may miss more often than we’d like. But that doesn’t mean we won’t still continue to look out for those seemingly trivial ideas that can transform not just industries but also people’s lives. |
HP Appoints CEO Meg Whitman To Chairman Of The Board | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | just gained a bit more power within . The company’s Board of Directors has appointed her to the chairman’s spot of earlier this week. Whitman was already serving as president and CEO of HP. She came on board following a tumultuous period of always-shifting leadership within HP and immediately set out to stabilize the company. “I’m extremely pleased that the board has elected Meg its chairman and Pat lead independent director,” said Ralph Whitworth, departing chairman of HP’s board said in a released statement. “Meg and Pat are unwavering in their commitment to the corporate governance, capital allocation and management incentive principles that drove our decisions these past three years. They will stick to and strengthen the critical practices and disciplines we’ve put in place. HP is in great hands.” Whitworth resigned earlier this week citing health concerns. He had been with HP since 2011 and served as interim chairman since April 2013. HP also moved current director Pat Russo to lead independent director and appointed Klaus Kleinfeld, chief executive and chairman of Alcoa, to the company’s board, bringing the total number of board members to 12. This is just Whitman’s latest move within HP’s political machine. The company’s stock is currently trading up in after-hours following the news of Whitman’s appointment. The street likes Meg Whitman. Developing… |
Google’s Business Chief Leaves The Company After A Decade | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | Buried deep in ’s earnings release this afternoon was word of a pretty big management shift: , the company’s Chief Business Officer, is leaving after a decade with the company. He will be taking a role at as their Vice Chairman, and as CEO of their SoftBank Internet and Media subsidiary. Omid Kordestani, who has been an adviser to Larry Page since stepping down from his role as Senior VP of Worldwide Sales in 2009, will take over Nikesh’s role for the time being. Larry Page commented on the news on : After almost ten years, Nikesh Arora our Chief Business Officer, has decided to leave Google to join one of our partners, SoftBank, as Vice Chairman of SoftBank Corp. and CEO of SoftBank Internet and Media. I remember first meeting him at the British Museum, which for some reason Sergey had decided would be a good interview location. Nikesh has been a tremendous leader, adviser and mentor to many Googlers — including me. We have learned a lot together, and had a lot of fun along the way. Omid Kordestani, who was our business founder and led our sales teams for many years, will be stepping in to lead our business organization for now. When we hired Omid we had no business people so we had all the engineers interview him around a ping pong table. I think he survived because he is actually an engineer! Omid has always been one of my closest advisors, especially since I became CEO again in 2011. He personifies the entrepreneurial spirit that is so important to Google. There is nothing Omid doesn’t know about Google, our customers and partners, and I know that under his leadership the team will excel. Thank you googlers for your support and love in the last 10 years. Will miss all of you. Looking forward to the next adventure. — Nikesh Arora (@nikesharora) |
Longtime Apple Board Member Bill Campbell Retiring, BlackRock Co-Founder Susan Wagner To Replace Him | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | has had a seat in Apple’s boardroom for 17 years, yet he joined the company in 1983 as vice president of Marketing. Next to Apple co-founders and Mike Markkula, he’s the company’s longest-serving board member. Apple announced today that he will be stepping down. co-founder will be taking his spot. Wagner comes to Apple from BlackRock, an asset-management company, which she co-founded in 1988. She will continue to sit on BlackRock’s board. “Sue is a pioneer in the financial industry and we are excited to welcome her to Apple’s board of directors,” said , Apple’s CEO, in a released statement. “We believe her strong experience, especially in M&A and building a global business across both developed and emerging markets, will be extremely valuable as Apple continues to grow around the world.” Bill Campbell has served as a corporate director on Apple’s board of directors since 1997, the year Steve Jobs returned to the company. Campbell is currently the chairman at Intuit where he also served as the CEO from 1994 to 1998. Bill Campbell has left an immeasurable impression on Apple. He will be missed. |
Twitter Acquires CardSpring To Power In-Tweet Commerce And Offers | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | it’s acquired to enable “in-the-moment commerce experiences.” CardSpring is an application platform that lets developers build card-linked offers electronic coupons, loyalty cards, and virtual currencies that work with credit cards and other types of payments. Twitter will keep the service open. writes “At Twitter, we will continue to grow the adoption of our platform and work with our publisher, financial, and retail partners to create new, innovative commerce experiences for consumers.” Twitter explained that “we’ve already given users the ability to get , surprise someone with a , or even add items to their — all directly from a Tweet. As we work on the future of commerce on Twitter, we’re confident the CardSpring team and the technology they’ve built are a great fit ” For more details on CardSpring, . Twitter could use CardSpring to enable . For example, you could get a discount offered in tweet from a merchant that would ask you to enter your credit card number (or perhaps one day pull it from a card you have on fil with Twitter). When you make a purchase at that merchant later, online or offline, CardSpring would recognize your card number and apply the discount. It would then report back to the merchant with analytics on the performance of the offer. These online-to-offline promotions could make Twitter more relevant to local businesses who want to drive brick-and-mortar sales, not just retweets and follows. Last year CardSpring launched a full-fledged commerce analytics system that jacks into a merchants existing in-store point of sale system. It lets businesses track how their sales are connected to online promotions through services like Foursquare, Trialpay, Thanx, MOGL, Roximity, Moblico, and OnStripe. CardSpring was founded a few years ago by a group of former Netscape engineers and executives. It had from , , , , , , , and . While CardSpring had an impressive array of merchants and developers already working with it, Twitter will give it a powerful way to distribute offers built on its platform. The acquisition could give Twitter a weapon in the battle to be the web’s social commerce portal. Earlier today Facebook began testing a Buy button that lets ecommerce shoppers make purchases straight from the News Feed. But Twitter may have the edge here for one important reason: the retweet. When people like something on Facebook, they Like it. But on Twitter, they retweet, instantly amplifying the message to their own followers. While Facebook has a Share button on feed posts, its culture focuses on original content. Twitter happily embraces its re-sharing culture, which is very attractive to businesses because it gives them free earned reach. That means whether a merchant simply tweets a CardSpring offer or buys ads to show it to more users, if it delights people they’ll retweet it, netting the business new potential customers. |
Google’s Q2 Revenue Of $15.96B Beats, But Its Non-GAAP EPS Of $6.08 Disappoints | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | Today after the bell its second quarter financial results, including net revenue (ex-TAC) of $12.67 billion, and $6.08 in non-GAAP earnings per share. Google gross revenue for the period came in at $15.96 billion Analysts had expected that Google would report $12.32 billion in ex-TAC (net) revenue, $15.62 billion in gross revenue, and earnings per share of $6.25. In its , Google had net revenue of $12.2 billion and earnings per share of $6.27. Down more than 1.5 percent in regular trading, Google is following its mixed earnings. Investors appear to be more enthused by its revenue beat than its profit miss. However, picking up a slim 0.74 percent after-hours isn’t much of a pop. Google also today announced that , its chief business officer, is leaving Google to join as its vice chairman of the company and CEO of SoftBank Internet and Media. He had been with Google since 2004 and held numerous roles there, including serving as president of its Global Sales Operations and Business Development from 2009 to 2010, its president for Europe, Middle East and Africa from 2007 to 2009 and as its vice president of Europe Operations from 2004 to 2007. He will be replaced by , Google’s business founder and senior adviser to the office of the CEO and founders at Google. Google’s GAAP net income for the period totaled $3.42 billion. The company ended the period with cash and equivalents of $58.72 billion. Google is among the upper-cadre of technology firms in terms of its cash position — it has reserves sufficient to allow for any internal investment that it wants, and could purchase most public companies. Paid clicks advanced 25 percent on a year-over-year basis, or 2 percent on a sequential quarter basis. Cost per click slid 6 percent year-over-year. That compares favorably to Google’s 9 percent year-over-year fall that it recorded in its sequentially previous period. Revenue generated from its own sites totaled $10.94 billion in the quarter, up 23 percent year-over-year, representing 69 percent of Google’s total revenue. Top line generated from its network segment was $3.42 billion, up 7 percent on a year-over-year basis. The company’s spend on acquiring traffic was up in terms of total dollars on a year-over-year bassi — $3.29 billion over a previous $3.01 billion — but as a percentage of revenue is down from 25 percent to 23 percent. Google generated $9.33 billion in revenue outside of the United States, or 58 percent of its total revenue. For you data wonks, Google’s operating expenses were 35 percent of revenue in the quarter, up 1 percent compared to 2013, and its cost of revenue was a slim 18 percent in the period. Google’s strong revenue growth but slimmer-than-expected profits could cause investors to worry that the company’s expense controls aren’t in ship-shape. We’ll be tuning into Google’s call shortly, and will have more when the company answers questions regarding its results. |
Microsoft Is Closing Its Entertainment Studios, But Narrow Focus Is Likely Better For Xbox | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | let the ax begin to fall today, to come over the course of the next year, a move . A big part of that is going to be ex- staff, but Microsoft is also shuttering its nascent Xbox Entertainment Studios, according to an email memo unearthed by . The email talks about how Xbox Entertainment Studios will be closed in an effort to streamline the Xbox unit, and in truth, the XES experiment was probably ill-fated from the start. Note first that Microsoft is concerned with according to CEO , and that’s a big motivator behind the decision to close down a big chunk of Nokia’s operations, and behind narrowing the focus of the Xbox business as well. In his original memo foreshadowing this move, Nadella talked about Xbox and how it had to regain its focus on gaming, and how it could help Microsoft’s mobile business because so much of mobile is built on the mobile user’s affinity for gaming. Microsoft isn’t killing everything – the Atari documentary it created and its Halo series are going to continue as originally planned. But otherwise, the slate appears wiped clean. This is definitely a move designed to signal that Xbox head Phil Spencer is all about focusing and building the core of Microsoft in keeping with the wishes of his boss. Bringing premium content to the Xbox ecosystem wasn’t hard to understand from a strategy perspective. Microsoft already has a healthy base of subscription customers on hand with its Xbox Live service that it could have provided in-house shows to. Provided what the company developed was well received, the material might have helped grow Live’s customer base, and potentially shore up its churn. Original content is a flag that just about ever tech company seems to want to fly these days; and are engaging in building their own shows, films and programming, buoyed perhaps by the success of cable networks like HBO and streaming companies like , and by the studio model that has sprung up around YouTube. The lure is clear: own the content and you absolutely own the advertising revenue and any spin-off revenue potential, too. There are licensing deals, product placement opportunities, and a whole host of possible lines of business that extend beyond basic display and video ads with original content. , via its Amazon Studios play, has executed a similar effort under its Prime aegis. However, Apple, Google, and now Microsoft each appear content to provide software and hardware platforms, but not use their own resources to directly create content they could lock inside their own ecosystems. And that’s probably for the best; while building an own-content business has plenty of potential in terms of drawing in new revenue opportunities and more dedicated business, it’s not something you can run as a hobby or side project. Microsoft can also still seek out originals, but it will now place the brunt of the actual content creation on external partners, which is likely what it should’ve done from the start. |
Expect Labs Lands In-Q-Tel Investment, Will Help U.S. Intelligence Integrate Its MindMeld Technology | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | TechCrunch Startup Battlefield alum has closed a strategic investment and software development agreement with , the investment arm of the U.S. Intelligence community. Last week, for building smart voice controls and content discovery into apps or websites, They let you intuitively dig through a large data set using voice controls — for instance, you could search IMDB for “The Life Aquatic” by asking, “What is that Wes Anderson movie where Bill Murray is an oceanographer?” While the company wasn’t able to give specifics due to the nature of In-Q-Tel’s efforts, Expect Labs CEO told TechCrunch that they will be helping In-Q-Tel and the government agencies it works with to create better tools for digging through large sets of information using the same MindMeld technology it offers to anyone else. In its other deals of a similar nature, Expect Labs uses its familiarity with MindMeld to get a partner up and running using the technology. That might mean taking a large dataset that’s already in use and adapting it to be used as a knowledge graph for the MindMeld APIs or looking at a partner’s existing apps or needs and seeing how their APIs could be deployed most effectively. Expect Labs wasn’t able to give an exact figure for the investment from In-Q-Tel. have come in from Google Ventures, Intel Capital, Greylock Partners, and others. |
Product Hunt Founder Ryan Hoover To Speak At Disrupt SF | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | didn’t exist a year ago. Over the past six months, the community-powered news website for tech product launches became a Silicon Valley darling. This is largely thanks to its founder Ryan Hoover, who will be joining us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014. At first, Product Hunt was just a small experiment. In November 2013, Hoover started an email list with his friends. Every day, recipients would get an email with the best new tech products. As Paul Graham would say, it was . Hoover kept working on Product Hunt on the side. It only became his full-time job a few months ago. The site is now read by some high-profile tech people, including people working for Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Greylock Partners, SV Angel, Redpoint Ventures, Betaworks, 500 Startups and most of TechCrunch. Earlier today Product Hunt announced it is in the current Y Combinator batch. But given Product Hunt’s early success, Hoover Y Combinator. Why would you give up 7 percent of your company if you are already doing fine without Y Combinator’s help? In the end, Hoover doesn’t regret his decision at all. “It was too good of an opportunity,” he said. Why do people keep coming back to Product Hunt? What makes it fascinating? There are three reasons. First, it’s never been so cheap to create a startup. You only need one or two talented engineers, computers and a bit of time to create a minimum viable product. For example, PikiChat was built in . But it also means that it has become very difficult to grab users’ attention. This is where Product Hunt is useful. Everyone can submit a product on Product Hunt, and the community comes together and upvotes a product if it’s good. And top products will grab the attention of newsletter subscribers, lurkers and more. When you compare that to app discovery on the App Store and Play Store, Product Hunt is taking a refreshing approach. Many app developers now pay for installs to climb the top free chart. Product Hunt is free and it levels the playing field. Second, you can find great conversations on Product Hunt. In many cases, founders of the company are there to answer comments. They do so because it’s a great way to get feedback from people who don’t know you personally. Many startup founders told me that Product Hunt was a great way to find their first 200 or 300 beta users. Finally, there is a recurring theme when I talk with Hoover. As the Product Hunt community is getting bigger, many products first appear on Product Hunt before getting press coverage. Facebook’s Slingshot was immediately trending on Product Hunt when it appeared in the App Store. Product Hunters were talking about Yo a couple of weeks before the tech press covering it. There are dozens of examples like these. Product Hunt is now facing difficult challenges as well. For example, the site is still invite-only. Existing community members can now invite new users to comment on Product Hunt, but it doesn’t solve the bigger issue. Product Hunt as we know it is still a smallish site that is easy to keep up with and moderate. Can it scale to hundreds of thousands or even millions of users? Hoover will be able to answer this question in person at , which will take place September 8-10 at San Francisco’s Pier 48. If you’re interested in joining us, tickets are at early bird pricing levels. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the event, to our sponsorship team for more info. |
The FCC Has Received More Than 1,000,000 Comments On Net Neutrality | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has received more than 1 million comments from the public regarding its proposed net neutrality rules. According to the FCC’s Gigi Sohn, had been submitted by noon today on the East Coast. Around 21 hours before her note on the new figure, Sohn that the FCC had received more than 900,000 comments. So it appears that there is a late surge in input. Earlier this week, under crushing traffic, the FCC for the first round of public comment to Friday, to allow everyone a chance to submit their views. Companies like Comcast and Netflix have weighed in during the extended period, as well as, it appears, a huge number of private individuals. The issue of net neutrality, and especially the FCC’s current notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), has caught on in the public domain in impressive fashion. It will be interesting to see what the final tally will come to. It doesn’t appear that the comments for net neutrality will best, in their abundance, that the FCC racked up following the Janet Jackson-Super Bowl imbroglio. (For a NPRM, however, this is a record, Sohn notes.) The next question is whether FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will be swayed by the copious correspondence. As we kick into the second half of the debate of the NPRM, the market will have its eyes trained on his comments for any indication that his views on the idea of paid prioritization have changed. |
Photo App Flayvr Rebrands As MyRoll, Aiming To Become Your Default Mobile Gallery | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | Three months after taking on a new , the Tel Aviv-based startup known for the Flayvr photo album app is undergoing some big changes. Today the company is officially rebranding as , and launching updated versions of its apps for and that aim to be the go-to replacement for the default smartphone photo gallery. In an interview in San Francisco this week, founder and CEO Ron Levy said that the goal of the company going forward is to be “more than just an app that organizes your photos and videos.” MyRoll is “replacing and reinventing the gallery experience,” he said. Though over the past two years Flayvr had attracted more than 2 million users who processed nearly 1.5 billion photos through the app, Levy says that the new experience is targeted at servicing an even wider audience. MyRoll incorporates the core functionality of Flayvr, which was known for into distinct albums, and expands it into an app that’s meant to be the go-to photo viewing experience on your phone. MyRoll’s photo grouping technology is purportedly more personalized than Flayvr’s, learning from each user’s photo-taking and organizing behavior to surface and highlight the most relevant photos. The app has also expanded its sharing options, making it easy to share individual photos or entire albums with others through text, email, and social networks such as WhatsApp and Facebook. The experience is intuitive and well-designed, and is perhaps best understood by seeing it. You can check it out in the promotional video produced by MyRoll that’s embedded below:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzE5wOBZOHA] Right now the app is completely free, and MyRoll, which has 10 full-time staff, does not generate revenue. In the future, Levy says that MyRoll could monetize by offering premium photo storage and sharing options in the cloud. Of course, cloud-oriented photo organizing and sharing is an incredibly crowded space, with tech giants such as Facebook, Apple, Google, and Dropbox all angling for the top spot on users’ home screens. In all, MyRoll is a smart and well-designed replacement for the built-in phone gallery experience that comes with every smartphone. But as it works to grow into a sustainable money-making company in the months ahead, it will come up against much more formidable competition. |
Facebook Tests Buy Button To Let You Purchase Stuff Without Leaving Facebook | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | Facebook is trying out letting you pay for ecommerce purchases from other businesses without leaving its site or app. For now it won’t be charging the few small and medium-sized businesses in the US to test on their News Feed Pages posts and ads. When I asked if Facebook would be charging businesses for the feature eventually, it said “it was not disqualifying that option” in the future. Rather than clicking away to a merchant’s site, the Buy button lets you complete the entire purchase flow within Facebook, which could boost conversion rates and endear retailers to the social network. You can use a credit card you have on file with Facebook, enter new payment details and save them for future use, or just checkout and not store your payment info. The feature is privacy safe, and Facebook won’t pass payment details on to other advertisers. Users who have Facebook made several forays into ecommerce over the years. It tried a Pinterest-style with buy buttons that led off-site back in 2012. It enabled on-site payments to charities with its , last year. And most recently, it’s been testing an ” feature that automatically enters your payment details when you’re making a purchase in a third-party ecommerce app. Now it’s experimenting with letting you make purchases of physical good from for-profit ecommerce retailers entirely within its walled garden. A Buy button recently , indicating it too wants to try hosting ecommerce transactions. The method could also be how Pinterest eventually gets deeper into ecommerce. If the test is successful and rolls out, Facebook could eventually earn money on the feature by charging a fee or revenue share in exchange for processing payment and improving conversion rates. It could also use the purchases to prove return on investment to advertisers, encouraging them to buy bigger campaigns. Collecting credit card info could also help Facebook with other commerce-related initiatives. Whether its websites, apps, social media, or ads, with ecommerce, it all comes down to conversion rate. Can you make someone who might be interested in buying something actually complete the purchase. The problem is this usually involves a narrowing funnel where each step of the process hemorrhages potential customers. Two especially lossy steps are getting the customer to the checkout screen, and having them painstakingly enter their credit card number. Facebook effectively eliminates both these steps with the Buy button. You don’t have to leave the comforting blue chrome of Facebook and your friends. And even if you’ve never bought something from a merchant before, you don’t have to re-enter your payment details if you’ve already stored them on Facebook. You just click Buy, and click again to confirm, and the item is on its way to your door. It’s like the candy they sell in the grocery line. You’re already at checkout with your credit card out, so it’s easy to make an impulse purchase. By shaving down the time and effort from interest to purchase, Facebook could get more people plopping down cash for ecommerce purchases. That’s something retailers might be very willing to pay for. |
Silicon Valley’s Real Estate Crunch Is A Golden Opportunity For Other American Cities | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | Curse CEO Hubert Thieblot moved his company headquarters to “Rocket City” Huntsville, Alabama from San Francisco last year. When CEO told his employees last year that he was moving the company’s San Francisco headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama last year, they thought he was crazy. About 20 of his employees quit because they didn’t want to relocate. “It was very controversial,” said Thieblot, who had lived and run the company out of San Francisco for at least five years. “A lot of people did not like me for that decision.” But today, the profitable, 110-person person company operates out of an Alabama city with a population of just under 200,000 people and the highest number of Ph.Ds per square mile given Huntsville’s history with NASA as the nation’s “Rocket City.” Curse too from the China-centric venture firm GGV Capital. “If you want to build a long-term company, you might have a better chance of keeping people outside of San Francisco,” Thieblot said. “The job market is too crazy here.” Indeed, the cost of living and commercial real estate is also pricing smaller startups out of San Francisco. I’m seeing bootstrapped founders, who have yet to a take full round of funding, trickle into surrounding cities like Oakland, Daly City and the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, if they’re not considering urban hubs in other parts of the country altogether. , a British entrepreneur who co-founded , wrote a good post about this when to dream up new projects. “If you’re trying to bootstrap, being based in San Francisco is awful,” . “The leading cause of startup death is running out of money. Moving to a cheap city and doubling (or more!) your company’s runway will more than likely vastly increase your chances of eventual success.” Are we supposed to cry for these entrepreneurs, like the teachers, public servants, artists and the elderly who have already faced several decades of gentrification in San Francisco? Um, no. Not really. From a national perspective, it’s a good thing to see these job opportunities become more geographically diversified. (I mean, .) From 2012 to 2013, San Francisco The city grew by more than 30,000 people to a . While the rest of the country is only starting to see the kind of job recovery that may make the Federal Reserve finally raise interest rates later this year, the San Francisco Bay Area is bursting at the seams. The city is at its highest employment levels ever and the population is expected to . The city grew by 32,207 people between 2010 and 2013, but . But we won’t be building enough housing anytime soon. We’re supposed to be doing 5,000 units a year to meet Mayor Ed Lee’s housing goal, but that’s more than the city has produced in any single year since at least the 1960s. Similarly, commercial rents are nearing dot-com period highs. The Information reported last week that , just shy of the dot-com bubble peak of $67.20 in the third quarter of 2000. Commercial real estate developers are all before they run into a nearly twenty-year-old San Francisco law called Prop M, that caps the amount of office space that can be built in a given time period. Many startups are coping by operating distributed teams, with one founder here in Silicon Valley and another working with engineers in a different part of the country (or world). , a veteran founder and is backed by Benchmark in his , works in Burlingame while his co-founder Brandon Kitkouski is based around Dallas. “His family’s in Texas. He’s got a nice house. If he had it in the Bay Area, it would cost millions of dollars,” Citron said. “He was commuting for awhile, but that was hard. The Bay Area is at capacity. It’s freaking expensive.” (And by the way, why is housing affordable in Texas? . Am I saying we should be Houston? No. I’m just pointing out policy trade-offs.) Similarly, , , splits her startup between San Francisco and Portland. Her co-founder moved back to Oregon after living in San Francisco for many years. “It’s been a good thing for us,” she said. “We’ve been looking to hire engineers and it’s just really hard to do it here because it’s so competitive and expensive. But he has a network and is able to find talent there.” Andreessen Horowitz is incubating , a “search engine for digital nomads” that helps knowledge workers maximize their quality of life through re-location. Some of the Valley’s best-known investors are also encouraging geographic diversification. is , which will help knowledge workers improve their quality of life by moving to places that maximize the difference between their cost of living and take-home pay. , arguing that other regions across the U.S. should remove regulatory hurdles around specific technologies they want to attract — be they self-driving car, stem cell or Bitcoin-related startups. Is this bad for the Valley over the long-run? Between giants like Google, Facebook and Apple and then later-stage companies like Uber, Square, Dropbox and Twitter, the region has a healthy mix of employers. Yet the heated real estate market favors capital-rich, growth-stage companies right now, often at the expense of other kinds of creative experimentation, be it a longstanding artist’s collective or a not-yet-Ramen-profitable entrepreneur. The cost of living and the competition for talent simply doesn’t give startups a lot of time to find product-market fit here unless they’ve raised a lot of capital. In contrast, Google, founded in 1998, and Facebook, founded in 2004, came of age when the Valley was weathering slower economic times and it was easier and cheaper to form a cluster of AAA technical talent inside any single company. Is that worrisome? Maybe a little. When you look at other cities that have historically been dependent on a single industry like Detroit, the population declines started after power consolidated to a handful of companies like GM, Ford and Chrysler, which then began distributing their plants around the country in the 1950s to avoid the risk of production disruptions from worker strikes. (These changes predated competition from Asian auto manufacturers by at least a generation.) Ideally, you want a mix of firm sizes, and younger and older companies. But ultimately, these things come and go in waves, and the Bay Area is an undeniably attractive place to live no matter what. A decade ago, t Cities have to maintain a certain equilibrium between people moving out and people moving in. Right now, the escalating costs and sheer limits of Bay Area’s housing and transit infrastructure are tilting that balance back out to the rest of the country. So if you’re a mayor of another U.S. city and you want to attract jobs, now would be a good time to drop by a Y Combinator or 500 Startups demo day to make a pitch. We have our hands full. |
JerkTech Startups Shut Down Or Pivot. Good Riddance. | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | and , the two startups last week called emblems of exploitative , have both changed their ways. ReservationHop announced Tuesday a away from its site that stole and resold dinner reservations without compensating restaurant owners. Meanwhile, MonkeyParking has complied with its cease-and-desist order from San Francisco by its service that took a fee for letting drivers auction off public parking spots. Sorry, I’m not sorry this happened. Cue the world’s tiniest violin. Check out my piece “ ” to see what all the hubbub was about. Yes, there should be a way to capture the value of people willing to pay for prime reservations at hot eateries. And yes, we need to find a way to improve street parking to reduce traffic and pollution. But not like this. It’s nice to hear that ReservationHop founder Brian Mayer “spent a lot of time in the last couple days speaking and meeting with restaurant owners personally, offering my apologies for the troubles we may have caused them and discussing how we may work together.” Alongside the hate, all the media attention proved there was a lot of interest in a paid secondary market for reservations. Now “ReservationHop is doing a ‘soft pivot’ to address the same customer demand, and in addition .” That’s disrupting with care. Rather than scalping a publicly available resource and pocketing the proceeds, ReservationHop will look to split the profits with the restaurants. By bringing his technology to their analog businesses, both benefit, and a revenue split is fair. We’ll see what happens with MonkeyParking. Initially it seemed reluctant to admit it was coining off a public resource, telling the “We’re not going to stop it because we do not think there is something wrong with it.” However it did add “but there is something to be understood and regulated and maybe integrated into the municipality to provide a valuable service.” Now it says “we are currently reviewing our service to clarify our value proposition and avoid any future misunderstandings.” If San Francisco were running its own parking space app that funneled money into the city, or ParkingMonkey gave it a significant cut, that would be more acceptable. I came down hard on both these startups last week because the technology has the opportunity to make the world a better place, but it can also be an instrument of greed and villainy. Both of these companies were in their infancy, and it’s standard to experiment to see what works. But I strongly believe that the tech community has a responsibility to nudge startups in a benevolent direction. That doesn’t mean you can’t make money, grow aggressively, and out-compete obsolete business models. I just think we can do that without plundering the community like a bunch of Captain Planet villains. So disrupt with care. |
Amazon Asks FAA For Permission To Test Its Delivery Drones | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | has the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for exemption from rules in the United States. The online shopping company recently by showing off small unmanned aircraft that it claims will be able to deliver parcels to consumers in 30 minutes. The drone delivery service, called Prime Air, could greatly speed up Amazon’s delivery times, creating a competitive advantage for it over other digital marketplaces and lowering the time-threshold advantage that traditional stores still enjoy over their online competition. Amazon’s plans are not small. “One day, seeing Amazon Prime Air will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road today, resulting in enormous benefits for consumers across the nation,” the company adds. It asks for the exemption so that it can be ready to launch its drones when the legal framework is in place for it to do so. The drones, it claims, are on their eight and ninth generation, and can fly up to 50 miles per hour. The FAA is currently testing drones at a number of locations in the United States, but has come under criticism that its work has been too slow thus far to meet set targets. If true, the FAA could in fact retard the growth of the drone industry, something that Amazon obviously thinks will be large. Why is there foot-dragging about drones? There are rules in place that allow hobbyists to have fun, of course, but commercial use has been frowned on by the government for some time. You can understand their concerns: The FAA is tasked with keeping the skies safe. What happens when a drone accidentally flies into a commercial air pattern and takes out the cockpit window and a few hundred people. That’s a dire hypothetical, but you get the drift. I’d love to lay wagers on what major technology company is the into drone technology on Amazon’s scale. Microsoft probably has something in the lab. Google is more focused on cars, and Apple? Well, I don’t see that happening. Also, when will the first drone-first e-commerce company launch to take on Amazon. And finally, how much venture capital money will be expended in whatever becomes the drone sector rat-race to become Big Drone. Let’s hope it’s not the next clean tech. |
Men’s Style Startup Dash Hudson Raises $400K Led By Former Groupon CTO Paul Gauthier | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | , a startup aiming to make twentysomething men a little less clueless about style, is announcing that it raised $400,000 in seed funding. More impressive than the amount of funding was who participated — co-founder and CEO said the round was led by , Groupon’s CTO from 2010 to 2013, as well as founding CTO at search pioneer Inktomi. Other investors include , founder of . Rankin argued tha is addressing a “white space” in the market by creating a mobile-focused service that’s aimed at young men. “The guy that we want to help out, he’s exiting college, and not necessarily moving into the suit-and-tie world,” but still looking to level up his personal fashion. Rankin added, “He has a good sense of personal style, and he’s also accessing style in a new way.” And yes, Rankin using the word “style” very deliberately: “Guys don’t think in terms of fashion, guys think in terms of style.” So when you download the app (it’s available for both iOS and Android), it asks you a few questions about your personal style, like the kinds of clothes you wear into the office. (I was grateful to see that “T-shirts” was an option.) Based on your answers, it suggests different stylists for you to follow, creating a news feed of different products that they recommend. If you see something you like, Dash Hudson will buy it for you. Behind the scenes, Rankin said the app is algorithmically finding the different products, then the experts write up short posts about them. You can also post requests about what you’re looking for and the stylists will respond. Looking ahead, Rankin said that after a period of making sure early users like the product, he’s feeling good about user engagement (25 percent of users use the app more than once a week) and is preparing to get more aggressive about marketing and user acquisition. And hey, if it catches on in the tech industry, maybe won’t be necessary. |
Cell Phone Unlocking Bill Clears Senate Committee | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | Consumers are a step closer to being able to easily transfer their cell phones to other wireless carriers, after a Senate committee a cell phone unlocking bill Thursday. The House passed similar legislation in February, and the bill is now expected to see a full Senate vote. would reinstate a ruling by the Librarian of Congress that would allow consumers to transfer or “unlock” their phones without violating existing copyright rules. The bill was first introduced by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., last year. “Consumers should be able to use their existing cell phones when they move their service to a new wireless provider,” Leahy said. “With today’s strong bipartisan vote in the Judiciary Committee, I hope the full Senate can soon take up this important legislation that supports consumer rights.” Between 2006 and 2012, the Library of Congress made an exception for cell phones that allowed users to transfer their cell phones to different wireless carriers after their existing contracts expired. But in 2012, the Library did not make an exception for phones purchased after January 26, 2013. A petition opposing this decision on the White House website gained more In addition to unlocking cell phones, the bill directs the Library to consider whether other wireless devices, like tablets, should have unlocking eligibility. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., co-sponsored the legislation and said consumers should have a choice. “This bipartisan legislation allows consumers to unlock their current phones when the terms of their contracts are up, so when they switch carriers they aren’t forced into purchasing a new device,” the senator said in a news release. “It saves people money, promotes competition in the wireless market, and gives consumers more choice. It’s just commonsense.” AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint did not immediately respond with comment, but Jot Carpenter, the vice president of CTIA-The Wireless Association, said the amended bill struck a balance with the wireless companies. “We appreciate the Judiciary Committee’s effort to strike an appropriate balance by authorizing unlocking without imposing obligations on carriers,” the trade group vice president said. “We view the bill approved today as consistent with Chairman Leahy’s original proposal, which was intended to relieve consumer confusion stemming from the Copyright Office’s 2012 decision.” |
MonkeyParking Shuts Down In San Francisco For Now | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | , that made the Internet get all shouty last week, is “temporarily disabled” in San Francisco following a cease-and-desist letter from the city. In case you missed all the hubbub, MonkeyParking allowed drivers to make money when leaving a parking spot by selling the spot to another driver. Turns out the City of San Francisco, with its already absolutely awful parking problems, wasn’t too happy about this idea. Neither . While the app’s owner said he had no intentions to halt operations despite the legal order, plans like that tend to change when you’re staring down the barrel of a massive lawsuit. The gave MonkeyParking until July 11th (that’s tomorrow, at the time of publishing) to close up shop. After that, SF’s attorneys would come looking for $2,500 per violation of California’s Unfair Competition law. MonkeyParking says , but only after they’ve figured out how “to clarify [their] value proposition and avoid any future misunderstandings”, and how to exist “within the intent and letter of the law and in full cooperation with the local authorities.” |
D-Wave Systems Raises $28.4 Million Round | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | Quantum computing technology company has raised a new round of funding, according to a . This latest round, the largest since a , brings the company’s total funding to approximately $160 million. Investments in the round came from new and include Fidelity Canada Fund, , , and the . This comes weeks after a recent controversy regarding whether or not the company’s quantum computers — employed by the likes of Lockheed Martin, Google, and NASA — actually offer “quantum speedup,” solving problems faster than a traditional computer. Here’s how summarized the study that started the controversy: The first thing to know about the D-Wave Two is that it is not a general quantum computer—it’s what is called a quantum annealer, which should, in theory, be capable of solving certain types of optimization and sorting problems exponentially faster than a classical computer. To test it, the authors of the Science paper tested 1,000 randomly chosen cost-function problems on both the D-Wave Two and a classical annealer. They found that, overall, the D-Wave did not exhibit quantum speedup on the set of problems used. The group phrased its findings very diplomatically. “This does not mean the device cannot have quantum speedup,” lead author Matthias Troyer says. “It just means that in the tests we conducted, [quantum speedup] was not there.” Researchers from Google’s artificial intelligence lab responded with a from tests. Their view: the researchers simply weren’t running tests difficult enough to show the benefits of quantum hardware. “This funding is a strong endorsement of D-Wave’s ability to deliver the first viable quantum computer to organizations in need of a new caliber of computing,” said D-Wave Systems CEO Vern Brownell in a press release. “For quantum computing to achieve its enormous potential in such diverse areas as genetically personalized medicine, mission planning, systems optimization and machine learning, we need to build a software ecosystem through partnerships with world experts. This new capital will allow us to fund the software development and personnel needed to deliver the first quantum applications.” TechCrunch’s sat down with D-Wave CEO last December for an in-depth look at the company and the race to build a quantum computer: |
Our Polyglot Nightmare | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | The diversity of human languages has been on the decline for decades. With the rise of globalized communications and business, the world has accelerated its shedding of unpopular languages, as speakers increasingly focus their efforts on those that afford them the most economic and social opportunities. The loss of these languages has even spawned efforts like the to attempt to save them from extinction. Those same fundamental forces have been even stronger in the startup community, where teams regularly work across the world’s time zones. Yet, programming languages have not met the same fate as their human language cousins. Quite the contrary, there has been something of a golden age these past few years for programming languages moving out of theory and into practice, with a profusion of new and newly popular ones that are finding uses across startups and large companies alike. It’s always exciting to see the construction of new tools for programmers, which can potentially increase productivity and give us the products we want, faster. But that linguistic diversity also has a darker side for engineering teams, which must work with multiple languages just to launch their product, let alone maintain it. To get a sense of what I mean, consider a typical startup looking to deliver an application for users on web and mobile. For the frontend, the developers will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript at a minimum, and potentially more languages depending on the exact libraries chosen. For the Android and iPhone apps, the team would have to use the native languages of those two platforms, namely Java and Objective-C (and now, of course, ). And to connect all of this, the team would have to build a backend, which probably involves another language like Python, Ruby, or Go, as well as database query languages. But that sort of analysis is anecdotal. RedMonk, which has developed a ranking system for programming languages, and showed that “ .” Their data indicates that while the top rankings have been relatively constant, a number of new languages are starting to break out in popularity. Much as the rise of “ ” in the 20th century transformed the solitary scientist into a research team, the growing complexity of our development environment is requiring us to build larger engineering teams with more individual specialists. That specialization has important ramifications for the job market, particularly in a market as constrained as Silicon Valley engineers. It also means we are fragmenting our development efforts, potentially retarding the evolution of our libraries and toolkits. Perhaps most ominously though, it limits the contributions of indie developers and small startup teams, who can’t write for certain platforms due to limit of their own talents. While that’s a lot to be concerned about (and I’ll talk more about this later), diversity in programming languages is not necessarily all negative. Obviously, there are diverse uses for code, whether it be for embedded systems, highly reliable systems like air-traffic control, or simply test environments for new startup ideas. Using the right tool for the job can certainly improve productivity. But source code serves two purposes. It allows one engineer to explain to another engineer what a program should do, and it also allows an engineer to dictate to a computer how it should operate. The greater the profusion of languages, the tougher the first type of communication is. Even so, there are three main underlying causes for the widening fragmentation in our programming environments. First, the adoption speed of new languages has accelerated. This is largely caused by the Internet itself, which has allowed developers to more rapidly spread awareness of new programming languages through better tutorials, references, and code examples. In addition, tools like GitHub have encouraged more engineers to get involved in library development, which can make a new language viable much faster than in the past. Corporate sponsorship for new languages is strong, whether from with Dart and Go or with Swift. Finally, engineers seem more willing to pick up new languages than in the past. One wonders whether ’s call for has pushed people to use lesser-known ones. While faster adoption ensures that powerful tools become widely available, it poses a real challenge to engineers, who must accelerate their education in order to stay current. Mastery of a particular language is now harder, since polyglots have to divide their time across multiple environments. Just take Apple’s Swift, which is likely to become the standard for iOS development. While knowledge gained from Objective-C won’t entirely be thrown out, every iOS engineer has to learn new idioms to fully take advantage of Swift. The second main cause is the need to develop on multiple platforms. Developers in the tech industry are now programming for the web, mobile devices, cloud infrastructure, multicore processors, and wearables among other examples. Each of these platforms has unique performance characteristics and requirements, which means that one language may have a vastly different utility compared to another. For instance, languages like Go and Erlang are useful in a server cluster where concurrency is important, but would probably have less value on a wearable, where processing power may be concentrated on a single chip. Third, this diversity in platforms is matched by the variety of language paradigms vying for the attention of developers. Functional programming languages, which have classically been something of a curiosity of academics and some dedicated enthusiasts, have now become more widely popular through languages like Scala and Haskell, in large part due to greater recognition of their value for handling web applications. Given these underlying causes, it seems unlikely that the polyglot nightmare is going away anytime soon. The costs, though, are steep. The challenge is not just that the number of languages is increasing, but that the number of of environments is becoming bewildering. As companies begin to use their own unique set of technologies, finding the right engineer with exactly the needed skills is tough, and engineers have to spend more time generalizing their skills in order to stay on the frontier of the discipline. Sadly, startups rarely want to provide the resources required to train a new hire, instead expecting programmers to be productive from day one. More broadly within the programming community, our increasing fragmentation also means that we are dividing our efforts on building up existing libraries. Our programming time is limited, particularly on the open-source projects that form the bedrock of any usable language. If we spread our efforts more thinly across projects, we risk losing the productivity advantage of having multiple languages in the first place. Ultimately, we are witnessing a collective action problem that is, frankly, impossible to fix. While there may be no “solution”, startups can avoid the polyglot issue by simply being deeply cognizant of exactly what languages they are committing resources to. Engineering managers should be incredibly cautious about introducing new languages into existing infrastructure, and also doubly cautious about moving from an existing popular language for one more on the frontier. Sometimes a performance hit may be worth a bit more cohesion on a team. As we continue to ask how engineering can become more inclusive, one way is to ensure that the knowledge required to perform well in the industry is as minimal as possible. While being a polyglot is certainly a requirement of today’s software developers, we can all do our part to ensure that skill requirements are not increasing out of proportion for what our engineering talent can provide. No engineer should have to be a UN interpreter just to build their dream. |
Facebook Launches “Out-App Purchase” Ads | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | What if in-app purchases didn’t have to happen in-app? Rather than indirectly helping developers monetize with ads that drive them installs and re-engagement, letting them sell Facebook desktop game virtual goods straight from ads in the News Feed or sidebar. But an even more lucrative opportunity could be bringing these “out-app purchase” ads to mobile. They could let earn money even if the 30 percent cut on in-app purchases goes to or . Facebook already has the infrastructure in place, between re-engagement ads, coupon code auto-fill, and plenty of mobile feed impressions where it could place these ads. For now, though, these out-app purchase ads can ony be , and Facebook told me it had nothing to share about future plans to do more to inspire mobile purchases. But on desktop, the ads are already working and they let Facebook double-dip. Developers pay to show the ads, then pay Facebook a 30 percent cut of desktop in-game purchases. Kixeye used the out-app purchase ads to sell discounted virtual currency in its Facebook game Battle Pirates. The ads to buy $10 worth of in-game credit for $5 got a 10 percent click-through rate (way higher than the average), a 50 percent conversion rate for people who had paid in the game before, and a 14 percent conversion rate for users who hadn’t previously paid. Kixeye went whale spearing as well, getting a 5,000 percent return on investment by targeting their biggest spenders with ads for $500 worth of currency for $250. These ads surely benefited from the big discounts Kixeye was handing out, but since the goods are virtual, it doesn’t have much to lose. The new ad format may have caught some extra eyes, too. Of course there’s an argument to be made that these types of ads prey on social gaming addicts who spend real money on pointless, fake virtual goods. Many Facebook desktop games are framed as “entertainment” when in fact they’re rather than any lasting satisfaction. But like it or not, that’s business. And it could be an even bigger one on mobile. Right now Facebook earns much of its $1 billion mobile ad revenue each quarter indirectly helping developers get more people into their apps through install and re-engagement ads. These allow developers to get seen despite overcrowded app stores and homescreens. As the popularity of the freemium model grows and more games don’t make you pay up front, the ROI on these ads becomes less clear. Monetization through in-app purchases isn’t directly connected to the user clicking on a Facebook ad — they have to be hooked on an app enough to see value in spending money on it when they’ve seen all of the free content. If Facebook could bring its out-app purchase ads to mobile, it could prove obvious ROI like in the Kixeye example above. Of course, they probably couldn’t sell virtual goods from the mobile News Feed as they can on the desktop, since iOS and Android don’t allow in-app purchases to happen outside of their respective app stores. Still, Facebook could show ads that in apps that can’t be navigated to normally. Alternatively, it could use the to show a discount code in the ad, which when clicked would pop you into the app and auto-fill the code so you didn’t have to enter it manually. Imagine if you already played a mobile game but beat all the levels. A few months later, the developer releases new levels as a $2 in-app purchase. Facebook could show an out-app purchase ad in its mobile feed that deeplinked you into the app where you could pay a discounted $1 rate to unlock the levels. Or rather than the conversion-focused re-engagement ad to the right telling people to generally “Shop Now,” Facebook could show a discounted sweater deal only available through the ad click. These would essentially be Facebook’s existing re-framed for driving immediate purchases. What developer wants engagement when they can get cold hard cash? Facebook is now . The big blue social network is especially equipped to push these ads because they know so much about us. Not only does it have our identity, social graph, and interests, its SDKs, Facebook Connect options, and auto-fill billing info e-commerce feature mean its learning tons about our behavior in other apps. Plus, with Facebook starting to track our real-time location, and hear what we’re listening to or watching, it’s collecting context about what we’re doing at any given moment and therefore what ads we might want to see. It could also lean on for assistance. As former Facebook lead designer , personalization is about identity, graphs, behavior and context. Personalized ads that lead straight to in-app purchases could be a boon to developers and become Facebook’s after app install ads. |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 17 | null |
After 7 Years Of Searching, Halo 3’s Last Easter Egg Has Been Found | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | Halo 3 has — but 7 years after the game’s release, you’d probably figure they’d all been found by now, right? Nope! As the series’ more hardcore fans already know quite well, there was one last easter egg that had found… until now. Content with the idea that they knew everything there was to know about the game, Halo 3 players were clued in on the existence of back in 2012. In a community Q&A blog post, Bungie developer Jon Cable dropped the first breadcrumb: Are there any Easter eggs from your past games that surprised you at how quickly they were found or any that surprised you at how long they took to find? Definitely the IWHBYD skull in H3. But you cheated. There is one Easter egg in Halo 3 that I don’t think anyone has found – I stumbled across it in code a while back. It only happens on a specific day…so good luck.
A , fellow Bungie coder Adrian Perez added one more small detail: the egg would only appear on a certain loading screen. In response to a question about his “proudest moment [at Bungie]”: Showing my wife the Easter egg I put in the halo 3 loading screen for her – the one that nobody has found yet. For the next two years, the trail went cold. It took a bit of poking around the code to find it, but modder finally found the missing egg. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nkn2VyWa30&start=60&w=528&h=297] The trick? It’s a two parter: first, the player needs to start a new game and immediately press and hold both of the controller’s thumbsticks. This tweaks the game’s load screen a bit, revealing a larger chunk of the spinning Halo ring than is normally shown. The second piece of the puzzle: it has to be December 25th (or, at least, the Xbox has to be SET to December 25th.) If both of those things are true, the easter egg will appear emblazened on the Halo itself: “Happy Birthday, Lauren!” — a special message for Adrian’s Wife. Is it the most exciting easter egg ever? Eh, maybe not. It’s more than . But it’s damned cute, and it’s nice to know this case has finally been cracked. [Via ] |
Microsoft Closer To Removing European ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Requests | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | says it will “soon” launch a form to process requests to remove information on its search engine Bing under the so-called . “We’re continuing to work out the details on how we plan to implement the recent ruling by the European Court of Justice and expect to launch a form soon for EU residents to submit requests,” a spokesperson for the company said. Microsoft’s commitment to move forward with a form quickly is a shift from its previous stance. In the month following the European Union court’s May ruling, Microsoft said it was reviewing how the court’s decision should be implemented. The ruling gives individuals the that appears in search engine’s results in the EU for queries of their names. , which controls , acted much more quickly. It posted a form to submit requests in late May and began . So far, the search engine has received more than 70,000 requests. Microsoft and other smaller search engines like and are also subject to the court’s ruling. DuckDuckGo did not immediately respond to request for comment. Valerie Combs, a spokeswoman for Ask.com, said its process was in development. “Our legal and compliance team is in the process of developing policies and procedures around the very limited number of requests we’ve received to date, which we are handling on a case by case basis,” she wrote in an email. |
Satya Nadella’s Vision For A New Microsoft | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | CEO an detailing his vision for the company’s future. The new chief executive used the missive as a way to signal an intentional break with the past. That break? Sharpening its “devices and services” strategy to focus on “productivity and platforms.” I spoke with Nadella this morning and asked what the change in language meant. Devices and services, he said, is equivalent to his oft-repeated “cloud-first and mobile-first” moniker. Productivity and platforms is more “specific” regarding what Microsoft can bring to the market that is unique. Other companies can be mobile-first and cloud-first, he added, meaning that while operating according to those principles is likely intelligent, it won’t set Microsoft apart from its competition. Component to the idea of building something unique is the simple fact that large technology companies are competing across a rising set of services, making them more similar even as they look to set themselves apart. Microsoft, Nadella noted, lives in a world of platform heterogeneity, reaffirming his intent to build everywhere. Nadella wants to do his “best work, even on the iPad.*” This means that non-Windows-based experiences won’t be set at a feature or design deficit when compared to what the company builds for its own platforms. So if Microsoft intends to compete across platforms as other firms do, how can the company differentiate itself, as Nadella indicated was his goal? In his view, the company has to build “bar-none [the] best productivity apps.” His point appears to be that Microsoft’s productivity assets are market-leading (correct) and thus one of its competitive advantages is leveraging the Office suite across the platforms that it doesn’t control over others. The is a good indication that Nadella, at least in the short-term, is correct. Nadella is hitting the gas in this regard, with the launch of Office for Android approaching. But productivity is only part of Microsoft’s product line up, so could it provide a company-wide lift? In a sense yes. If Office 365 excels across platforms, it could bring more users into the larger Microsoft services orbit, aligning them more closely with its platforms. And platform momentum brings developers in from the cold. The opposite is true as well, naturally: Wherever a modern technology company operates at a disadvantage, or fails to complete, it implicitly limits its platform buy-in from consumers and businesses. Moving to the cloud, it’s worth keeping in mind that the price of cloud storage is , spurred in no small part by the price war underway among , and . Will the price of cloud computing itself follow suit? Nadella said that there is a “broad commoditization” of services of that sort and that players in the market will be “aggressive” in their pricing, perhaps even subsidizing some offerings to grind up market share. Nadella did indicate that there will be an “equilibrium” following the pricing conflicts. It remains to be seen how much prices can decline before they resemble zero. To understand the market, view storage from the perspective of ‘s recently launched cloud storage product that will provide businesses users 200 gigabytes for $5 per user per month. Apply that to all services vended across the Internet in which the operating costs rest with the provider, and not an external party. , for example, can’t decrease its price over time to fend off Xbox Music, because its costs are largely externally fixed by record companies. But with cloud storage and computing, the companies that are selling the product have tens of billions in cash and don’t care about short-term margins for these services. If lowering your price will get more developers through the door building with your tools and on and for your platform, you do it. To paraphrase the old trend cliché: Prices are down and to the left. Differentiation will come, in Nadella’s vision, from the players who add the most value on top of the more basic services. This mirrors the argument that the basic service layers — compute and storage and so forth — , current market dynamics aside. Finally, Nadella noted that “all strategy gets eaten by culture,” underscoring his letter’s mention that previous methods of business would not be held as sacred at Microsoft. As a company, Microsoft is known for a history of internal conflict. ( .) After decades of stability, Nadella’s point appears to be that Microsoft’s former culture would consume his new vision for the company. As such, the culture itself has to change. Implicit to Nadella’s note is the point that the Microsoft that existed before, which generated mammoth profits, is not well-fitted to where the market is today and will be in the future. You don’t issue a call to action for change when none is needed. The document is a decent encapsulation of Nadella’s view of what Microsoft should become: Quicker to market, stronger of product, and competitive everywhere. This is no small challenge. It’s now up to Nadella not only to live up to his own vision, but to convince more than 100,000 employees to do the same. |
Apple’s Living Library | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | Oh the . If you’re a movie fan, especially one who was around for the beginning of the DVD revolution 18 years ago, those words will strike a chord. It’s the practice of a studio putting out a crappy bare-bones edition of a DVD to home video and following it up weeks or months later with a full-on loaded edition featuring extras like director’s commentary, alternate endings and other goodies. The height of the DVD era even saw triple or quadruple dips with movies in novelty packaging or coupled with toys. A , though some basic extra features have become almost mandatory in recent years. As a film buff born before the Internet, I was forced to glean knowledge from magazines and the rare TV interview. DVD special features (especially director’s commentary) opened up a magical doorway into the filmmaking process behind many of my most-loved movies — and even allowed me to develop an appreciation for films that I didn’t even think I liked. At its peak, my DVD collection topped out at around 500 movies, including Criterion Collections, special editions and just about any other print of a movie I could find with a documentary or commentary track. Which is why I’m pretty excited that has finally made its Extra content, which is much of the same stuff, available on Apple TV for the first time with the release of iTunes 11.3 and v6.2 of the software for its set-top box today. Though I had access to that content on my Mac, I watch most of my movies on the iPad or Apple TV, and I couldn’t see them there. The new iTunes Extra system (it has been built anew, it’s not just tacked on) allows for even more enhanced features. There’s scene jumping, which drops you right into the best bits of movies like Frozen (parents will love that). All of the content attached to HD movies is also now presented in HD, which is a good upgrade. One of the most intriguing components of the new iTunes Extras system is that they aren’t set in stone. Because they’re based on a flexible framework that Apple offers to studios, and they’re served from the cloud, they can be added to over time. There is potential here to create a living library that allows additional content to be served to your existing library. That’s a big selling point for digital purchases over physical ones, just as many studios are finally getting on the digital bandwagon. No longer is the thinking that digital editions must be tied to physical releases, or that they have to be the ‘movie only’. Apple has created an expandable, updated structure for special features that studios can use as a selling point — and that users can access anywhere once iOS 8 ships with iTunes Extra support later this year. Note that this new iTunes Extra system appears to require that studios update their listings with the new framework, so not all movies that you have iTunes Extras for will show up as having them on Apple TV yet. That should happen over time, though. A bunch of titles appear to be available at launch like Iron Man 4, Man of Steel, Brave, American Hustle and Grand Budapest Hotel. The second coming of cloud services? Not exactly. But still a good chance to use the word ‘finally’ in conjunction with Apple. And a hopeful development that may help set the tone of the way that the other streaming movie services will work in the future. “The fact that this is cloud-based… allows us instant access to update and enhance the experience at a later time,” said Jason Spivak, exec VP worldwide digital distribution for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment . Variety also notes that some studios are even looking to do ‘other stuff’ than just what’s come before: That makes iTunes Extras “a living, breathing experience,” said Rebecca Sosa, head of digital distribution for indie studio A24. “This can broaden the palette of what we do with our filmmakers.” Attempts at this , of course, but there were always stumbling blocks — whether a particular player was capable of accessing a Blu-ray’s wacky special features, or whether there was web access. Now that they’ve got a (pretty) powerful processor behind it and a guaranteed Internet connection to play with it will be interesting to see how studios battle for attention and purchases. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll actually update the content over time, rather than issuing new versions. After all, a digital double-dip is even worse because you don’t have a to show for it: |
FTC Takes Legal Action Against Amazon For Unauthorized In-app Purchases | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | The Federal Trade Commission , alleging the company billed parents for millions of dollars of in-app purchases that their children made without their consent. The filing follows ’s refusal to comply with the FTC’s request to implement a “consent” model similar to the one Apple conceded to earlier this year, last week. 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. But in the new filing today, the FTC accused the company, which keeps 30 percent of in-app charges, of allowing “children playing these kids’ games to spend unlimited amounts of money to pay for virtual items within the apps such as ‘coins,’ ‘stars,’ and ‘acorns’ without parental involvement.” “Amazon’s in-app system allowed children to incur unlimited charges on their parents’ accounts without permission,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez in a statement Thursday. “Even Amazon’s own employees recognized the serious problem its process created. We are seeking refunds for affected parents and a court order to ensure that Amazon gets parents’ consent for in-app purchases.” Amazon first began in-app charges in November 2011, and at that time the FTC alleges there were no password protections against children making unauthorized purchases. The FTC says this left parents with large bills, and that Amazon employees were aware it was causing problems, according to internal emails included in the complaint. One email said this is “…clearly causing problems for a large percentage of our customers,” and added that the situation was a “near house on fire.” The FTC says Amazon’s first protection against such purchases did not come until March 2012, when the company introduced a feature that required the account owner to enter a password for in-app purchases more than $20. Children continued to make unlimited purchases under this amount, the FTC says, until early 2013, when parents had to enter a password for a single in-app purchase. However similar to ’s system that the FTC raised concerns about earlier this year, children were able to continue to make purchases for at least 15 minutes after the password was entered. The FTC alleges this loophole wasn’t closed until early 2014. Earlier this year, the FTC settled a similar suit with Apple 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. But Amazon says it has already been refunding customers who complained of such purchases, and it refuses to settle and will take this case to court. Amazon also maintains that it had safeguards in place to prevent such purchases. The company now gives parents the option of requiring a PIN for every in-app purchase. Amazon also offers Kindle FreeTime, an app that allows parents to disable web browsing and purchasing content. Geoffrey Manne, executive director of the International Center for Law and Economics, says Amazon’s case is “very strong.” Manne recently testified before the House Commerce Committee on the recent Apple case. He said in order for the FTC to win, they would have to prove that customers could not “reasonably avoid” making such purchases. He notes the FTC’s complaint fails to point out safeguards Amazon had in place for parents, such as FreeTime. “There’s a chance that this gets thrown out on a motion to dismiss,” Manne said. As the FTC targets Amazon, some have noted that could also get caught up in a similar complaint for in-app purchases. When the FTC first addressed this issue with Apple last year, the company’s general counsel pointed its finger at its competitor Google, saying its system also had flaws that allowed children to make these kinds of purchases. Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Manne said the outcome of the Amazon case will likely determine whether the FTC pursues a complaint against Google. “If they win this one, why wouldn’t they? It would be a no brainer,” Manne said. “ But as I said don’t think they’re going to win this one.” |
Elon Musk Donates $1 Million To The Oatmeal’s Nikola Tesla Museum | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | Back in May, cartoonist (or, as his momma named him, Matthew Inman) publicly reached out to and asked for help in his mission to build a museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla. Musk had named a company after ; surely he’d want to help with a museum in his honor, right? Yep! At 2 A.M. the next morning, Elon responded by tweet: “I would be happy to help”. I would be happy to help — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Two months later (on Nikola Tesla’s birthday, no less!), we now know what Elon’s help looks like: a cool million bucks. According to a , Musk called him up last week and pledged two things: This isn’t the museum’s first big cash injection, though it’s almost certainly the largest made by an individual. The whole thing started when The Oatmeal decided to buy Tesla’s old laboratory to save it from being torn down, managing to raise roughly $1.3 million. That was enough to the lab — but to turn it into a museum? They’d need to find roughly $8 million more. Elon’s contribution doesn’t get them all the way there, but it’s one helluva start. Happy birthday, Nikola Tesla! $1 million from Elon Musk! And a supercharging station! Thank you, Mr. Musk!!! — Tesla Science Center (@teslascience) |
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