title stringlengths 2 283 ⌀ | author stringlengths 4 41 ⌀ | year int64 2.01k 2.02k | month int64 1 12 | day int64 1 31 | content stringlengths 1 111k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
MLB’s iBeacon Project Enters Phase Two With Interactive Ballpark Attractions | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | was among the first to on a wide scale, installing them in 28 MLB ballparks across the U.S. last year to help iPhone owners check-in to games automatically and collect special offers. Now, the project is entering phase two, with a debut project at this year’s All-Star Game at Target Field that uses combined with in-park attractions to offer additional content and interactive features to the exhibits via their devices. There are nine separate attractions in Target Field that users of the updated can access, and MLB plans to roll out more iBeacons to additional ballparks over the coming year. The new phase also works in favor, demonstrating to potential iBeacon users what other kinds of functionality besides simple check-ins that the hyperlocal transmitters can enable for in-person customers and visitors. This attraction roll out seems like a prime example of how museums might be able to employ iBeacon tech, for instance. In addition to the new iBeacon features, MLB is also introducing other new updates to At Bat and At the Ballpark. At Bat will now make available live streams of the All-Start Game so long as they’re also MLB.TV Premium subscribers, and there will also be live video of the All-Star Futures Game and the Home Run Derby in the app when those events take place. I’m no expert, but I believe this ‘baseball’ is some kind of competitive adult sporting activity in which men strike whitish ovaloids with wood shanks and there might be spittoons involved. In any case, these updates should make enthusiasts of the game more able to really feel a part of its various excitations. |
Online Clothing Resale Store Twice Rolls Out Same-Day Pickup With Twice Local | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | Online fashion marketplace , which buys gently worn, quality women’s clothing from consumers then resells it via its own website, mobile and tablet applications, is today expanding into the offline world with the launch of a new service called . Following a similar trend among “push button services” that allow you to call up everything from to on demand, Twice Local sends someone to your home or workplace to pick up any garments you want to sell. The company, which competes to some extent with other online consignment shops and peer-to-peer marketplaces, including , , and others, typically sends its sellers a postage-paid bag which they load up with garments and ship back. Those garments are then analyzed at Twice’s San Francisco-based warehouse, and the customer is sent an offer from for those clothes that they can choose to accept (98 percent do, says CEO ). On average, sellers send in 15 garments, with maybe a dozen accepted for a payout of around $60. Most garments are basics, like a top that goes for $2 to $5, for example, but Twice has paid out as high as $100 for designer items. The mail-in service is easy to use but, explains Twice Director of Marketing , who’s leading the new Local program, “sometimes I find it hard to even make it to the mailbox.” Twice Local, she says, aims to make it even easier for people to try Twice without needing to first request a bag, stuff it and ship it back. And it’s especially convenient for people who have large amounts of clothing to sell, she notes. “People just hand us a pile of clothes – it’s very convenient.” The company, which , moved into its new warehouse in San Francisco’s Mission district this April. It’s from these headquarters that Twice Local will initially get off the ground. The company will pick up items from a 25-mile radius from San Francisco, we’re told. Today, 10 of Twice’s now 200 employees (!!!) have been trained on Twice Local, but Ready-Campbell says the company is prepared to quickly scale that number if need be thanks to its large staff. And San Francisco is only the beginning. Twice plans to bring its Local service to other metro areas soon, starting with L.A. The plan is to regroup a month after today’s debut, then firm up plans for its next market’s launch. Twice already has a heavier concentration of users in a number of metro areas around the U.S., including also New York, Chicago, parts of Texas, and, of course, many cities in California. The bigger goal with , beyond the convenience factor, is to help the company expand its inventory, says Ready-Campbell. Twice currently has over 50,000 items from over 400 brands. “This facility we have…should give us room to grow to over 100,000 SKUs, and that’s our game plan over the next 6 to 12 months,” he says. To get started with Twice Local, customers will need to schedule their pickups from the website (mobile app support is in the works) for same-day pickup up to two weeks in advance. And the pickups can be for as little as one item of clothing, the company says. The move to offer local pickup differentiates Twice from competitors who either rely on consumers selling and shipping items to each other by themselves, or sending in items via the mail. Twice will not only pick up local’s clothing, it will also prioritize getting those items online more quickly. Now that Twice has staff running all over town, the next obvious question is whether or not the company will launch same-day delivery next. “That’s a great idea, actually,” says Ready-Campbell. “We’ve talked about it – no plans right now – but it’s a pretty intriguing idea.” |
Misfit Moves Further Away From Hardware And Into Platform Territory With New Beddit Integration | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | The hardware wearable business is a tough gig, and today brings another reminder: Fitness and activity tracking startup has announced a new partnership with , a hardware maker that builds a smart sleep-monitoring system. The deal brings a co-branded device to Misfit’s lineup of offering, allowing the Misfit app to now also track advanced sleep information. Beddit allows Misfit users to measure things like respiration, heart rate, movement, snoring and ambient noise while they’re snoozing, with a thin sensor that resides between the user’s sheets and their bed. It’s designed to not even offer a pea-sized element of potential discomfort to a sleeper, and adds much more complexity versus the sleep tracking that Misfit’s Shine wearable already offered. The Misfit Shine was introduced last year, offering a wrist-worn tracker with special attention paid to design and fashion appeal. This wearable has received good reviews from critics and the buying public, but the company also recently announced a partnership with Pebble to bring its activity . At the time, Misfit CEO and co-founder explained to the Wall Street Journal that he saw no reason to “cling to a dying business” when it’s clear that activity-tracking hardware needs will likely be handled by Apple and others in the near future. This Beddit partnership is similar in that it offloads the heavy risk associated with building hardware to a company already doing what Misfit wants on its platform. Finnish company Beddit, which has long operated in the medical devices category, is essentially offering its existing hardware with a “Misfit” label affixed to the outside, and that is a likely model for Misfit to follow going forward, as it looks to become a key platform provider for a host of health- and wellness-related data. The question is whether this new identity isn’t also eventually subsumed by players like and , which have taken their own tentative first steps into building health software platforms. Makers of existing solutions will tout their proprietary algorithms and data-integration/reporting methods as key differentiators between themselves and the nascent Apple/Google platforms, but eventually a lot of these features could be moved in-house, as they have been for hardware sensors. Misfit isn’t standing still, however, and its initial partnerships have been select and smart as it moves to reinvent itself as something more than a hardware company. |
Google, Microsoft, IBM And Others Collaborate To Make Managing Docker Containers Easier | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | It’s not often that you see this combination of backers, but today, , , , , , and all banded together to support for managing Docker containers. Docker containers are quickly becoming the go-to technology for building and running distributed applications. Every major cloud vendor has gotten behind the Docker project over the last few months and Docker.io itself recently in a Series B round to continue expanding its services around the platform. Despite all of this support, managing Docker containers can still be a hassle at times, so a month ago, based on its work with containers in its own massive data centers. All of them will actively contribute to the projects. “Each company brings unique strengths, and together we will ensure that Kubernetes is a strong and open container management framework for any application and in any environment – whether in a private, public or hybrid cloud,” Google senior VP said in the announcement today. The idea behind containers is that developers can more easily deploy and scale their applications on different servers and in different clouds, so — or , to be precise — that it will support Kubernetes in Linux environments on its Azure platform. Microsoft will also work on supporting , a separate Docker-backed project, for composing network services on Azure, too. Docker itself will work on aligning libswarm with the Kubernetes framework. promises that it will bring Kubernetes to its hybrid cloud and says it will contribute code to this project and the Docker ecosystem in general “to ensure that containers are enterprise-grade, and is working with the community to create an open governance model around the project.” MesoSphere, CoreOS and SaltStack will work on integrating Kubernetes with their own technologies. MesoSphere, which late last year, will work on bringing its scheduling and management capabilities to Kubernetes customers, for example. As the CoreOS team tells me, Kubernetes already uses the CoreOS’s key value store that forms the backbone of CoreOS’s clusters. Overall, this seems like great news for the Docker project. Everybody on this list of Kubernetes backers was already supporting Docker in some form before, but getting this group of companies together to collaborate in the Docker ecosystem can only help its adoption (and may spell trouble for other virtualization technologies in the long run). |
How Smart Lending Dumbed Down | Julia Kukiewicz | 2,014 | 7 | 19 | Between 2008 and 2010, was doing something mind-bendingly stupid: sending letters from fake law firms to borrowers behind on their loans. It sounds like a bad office prank. They even took the firm names from employees — except when you consider that they did it 45,000 times and that it will cost them £2.25 million to give each injured party just £50 in compensation, as they were ordered to . It may even land them in court. wasn’t alone in sending faux-legal threats; in the past few weeks it’s emerged that many and the have using similar tactics for years, but the payday lender was the only one to create their law firm out of thin air. In an under regulated market, Wonga clearly weren’t too concerned about having to explain themselves. But under regulation alone isn’t enough to explain their actions. What does explain them is at the heart of their business and that of many other fin-tech lenders: prediction and collection. If ever there was a sector ripe for a little -style creative destruction, it was banking in 2008. Borrowing from mainstream lenders was, and remains, slow, confusing and difficult, particularly for people with poor credit histories. Startups like , and in the U.S., Wonga in the UK and and elsewhere promised an alternative: smart lending delivered efficiently, with transparent charges. Smart lending means big data. Really big. “All data is credit data,” the CEO of Zestcash said . “We just don’t know how to use it.” Wonga claims to use 8,000 data points to make a lending decision. Kreditech says it uses 15,000. By data they mean all the traditional identity checks and indicators that a borrower will repay, plus everything they can trawl from the depths of the Internet: social media; Google searches; court records; and any indicators that can be picked up from the context of the application down to the time of day and whether the applicant uses Firefox or IE. This extra data is the secret sauce of alternative lending. Some, like Philippines and Columbia-based , emphasize that social bonds predict and encourage repayments. Others, like Zestcash, simply say they have a better mousetrap: a more reliable way to pick out the most responsible borrowers. Every borrower is assessed by algorithm. As Wonga’s then chief executive put it in a Wired Money talk last year, “we’ve moved beyond anecdotal, judgment based decisions… we leave that to the machines.” But somewhere along the way, Wonga’s predictions started turning out to be wrong. The lender has always claimed to write off about 7 percent of their loans but , records show, they wrote off £76.8 million, or 41 p ercent, of their £185 million annual revenue. A investigation into the payday sector earlier this year noted that default costs “make up nearly half of total industry operating costs, suggesting that differences in lenders’ ability to assess risk may have a significant impact on their ability to compete.” Which brings us to the problem of calling in debts. According to Bank of England figures, default rates were rising even before 2009. Over the past few years, all lenders have started to take collections more seriously. As credit reference agency employee put it in a , “the focus was always on lending. Now the focus is on collections and people are running very fast to do what they do better.” Armed with the conviction that their data would predict defaults far better than the banks, Wonga may well have been underprepared for an environment where collection is as important as selection. They may also have underestimated the negative effect of their outsider status. For borrowers with multiple debts, an outsider they have no other affiliations with, like a current account or mortgage, can fall low on the list of repayment priorities, even one charging such a high interest rate. It’s telling that even big lenders felt the need to use letters from in-house legal teams to encourage borrowers to repay; they did it, they say, because letters with the bank’s own letterhead were ignored. A lender that has overestimated its predictive powers and underestimated its need to call in bad debt is apt to do very stupid things. Like make up a law firm. If other alternative lenders want to avoid doing the same they’ll need to stop treating big data like a crystal ball and start getting those creative minds to work on ways to collect repayments that don’t involve a subsidiary of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe. |
How The Big 5 Publishers Hobbled The Amazon Unlimited Launch | John Biggs | 2,014 | 7 | 19 | Unlimited was dubbed the of books. That is correct as long as you imagine a consisting of an endless array of low-budget indie releases and some major small-studio films. In truth, Amazon’s new features no books by , an issue on which has remained mum. I’ve asked Amazon for clarification but haven’t heard back. However, if you look at the list of popular titles on the Unlimited list, all of them are either published by smaller publishers – “smaller” being a relative term – or independent entities. Take , for example. It comes from , part of , an educational publisher. Michael Lewis’ comes from . And the real draw, the canon? That is owned by Pottermore Limited, J K Rowling’s business venture. In short, the big guys sat this one out. In fact, most major publishers have been working hard to create and invest in other partners. , for example, is a beneficiary of this anti-Amazon sentiment while houses like are funded by publishing insiders. Whether or not these services will bear fruit – or cash – is a different question. Again, as an indie author I know that . To be able to get paid by people who want to “try” your book is a good thing. However, the hullabaloo regarding Amazon’s move is still premature. With the war still raging and the Big 5 now realizing that Amazon is far less a friend than an enemy, things don’t look good for general, popular books on Unlimited. However, as evidenced by Netflix, a few blockbusters up front and a long list of mildly popular titles that warps off into infinity is a solid business model. Anecdotally, the service is a boon for kids who want to explore reading on electronic devices. My son, for his part, has already downloaded a few dozen Minecraft ebooks written, it appears, by robots or grade-schoolers. One book consists entirely of Minecraft memes taken from the Internet. Incidentally he still doesn’t want to read Harry Potter, even while it’s free. That fact should give the Big 5 pause. If Amazon can’t line their pockets, it’s willing to spread some of the wealth further afield and that means smaller paydays for the winners of Oprah’s Book Club. |
Immersive Infections | Adam Kujawa | 2,014 | 7 | 19 | Using your imagination, put yourself on top of a tall mountain, watching the most beautiful sunset over the clouds, all while mounted on your trusty dragon. Now you’re on a spaceship, traveling at hyperspeed toward an unknown planet full of mystery and danger. Finally you’re sitting across the table from your spouse who you haven’t seen in person in over a year, you both move in for a kiss when suddenly the world goes dark and you are staring right at the most horrific and violent images you have ever seen. Do you want to return to your romantic dinner? Well that will be $200. All of the images I painted for you above will be possible within the next 10 years, immersive technology will put the user into the digital shoes of their own avatars, experiencing video games, simulations, learning opportunities and even romance on new levels, so it goes without saying that while we can expect all that grandeur, there will be people who try to ruin it, for money. Our current technology mainly consists of interaction with an interface device, such as a keyboard, mouse and even touch screen, and a method for displaying data (i.e. your monitor); the feeling of full immersion isn’t possible — not yet anyway. With new technologies being developed every day we are looking at a bright future where users will be donning headsets, haptic feedback gloves and specialized glasses or contacts to interact with both the real and digital worlds in ways only written in science fiction. Worth it. Tech like the and are just the first steps being taken in an industry that has been relatively dormant for the last two decades. These devices allow for full or close-to-full immersion when watching movies, playing video games and maybe someday soon, conferencing with friends or coworkers. In addition to the full immersion devices that are on the way to us, we currently have a large trend of devices that augment reality, such as . As with all advancements in technology, eventually someone will find a way to hurt people with it. In this case, when we talk about technology that can implant you in a new reality, there is going to be a market for cyber criminals to modify that reality for their own gain. First we are going to talk about Immersive threats, which means the possible dangers associated with future full immersion technology (making it feel like you are somewhere you aren’t). I can say for certain that this kind of technology is going to be well funded, quickly developed and widely accepted. I say this because most of the efforts being put forth to develop this tech is being done so in the name of gaming. Gaming has historically been one of the greatest motivators of technological advancement, from graphics cards to processors to peripherals like your mouse or keyboard. Sure enough, we are going to see this technology adapted for other purposes after video games have made it the standard. When that happens though, you can be sure that the cyber criminals will be waiting to pounce. Our first threat is one that everyone is already familiar with — the ransomware lock screen. This method has been used by ransomware for years. Usually it’s nothing more than text that demands ransom payment. If we consider that this threat is the same as we would see on a desktop, why would it be unique to immersive tech? What if the malware accessed the output to the immersive device and was able to broadcast the ransom screen only on that device? A simple scan of the system would most likely remove the malware, and after that, you could go back to what you were doing. The threat for this method is annoying at best. Now we are going to step into the psychological attacks that can be performed with immersive tech, namely disturbing images flashing before your eyes. While ransomware would leave an image shown on your device for as long as it was running, a flashing image type of attack wouldn’t even be noticed until after it has assaulted the eyes of the user. The images could be something sexual in nature or violent or maybe both. Basically the opposite of this. After a few days of these images appearing on your device while in use, maybe they become more frequent and finally you are presented with popups advising you to pay the ransom if you want the visions to stop. This malware could also be removed with a scan and everything could go back to normal. However, the psychological damage that might have occurred would no doubt last much longer, with users not even sure they saw what they saw, until the malware revealed itself, they might very well believe they were losing their mind. It’s safe to assume that many users who utilize immersive visual technology will employ the same with audio; in this case that means loud 3D sound using noise canceling headphones. Now what used to be nothing more than a childish prank using videos will become a nightmare for victims of malware. (Image credit: Saturday Night Live, NBC Universal) Imagine you are playing an immersive game or watching a film, focusing very closely on the content and giving it your full attention. Suddenly a frightening sight appears before your eyes and the loudest scream you have ever heard invades your ears. Most screamers only have a split-second effect on their victims using traditional monitors, the user can look away, can laugh and escape the fear moments after it happens. For users using immersive tech, the same will not be true. Already we have seen users who have tested out devices like the , the same kind of games that are meant to shock and scare the player. The reaction of these players goes beyond what it would be just playing in the dark, leading to a complete breakdown of fear, unable to escape until they tear off their device. After the initial screamer screen fades, the user can go back to what they were doing and it might be hours before another one appears. At this point the amount of fear and anxiety of another screamer could drive a person to do crazy things, like pay cyber criminals ransom. This may also be easily removed from the system, but the guaranteed psychological damage will last a long time, resulting in nightmares and a fear to even touch their computers. A cyber criminal utilizing this method might want to demand the ransom beforehand, even warn the user of what might happen if they don’t pay. With enough victims the threat alone might just be enough. The final threat we are going to talk about in association with immersive tech doesn’t want to be found; it will wait and very quietly whisper into your ear — malware that speaks to the user, pushing them into either mind control or madness. The same can be done with subliminal messaging, hiding an almost completely transparent message into the eyes of the user, something that is less effective with normal tech, but without the ability to look away it becomes dangerous. I NEED CHEESEBURGERS! Depending on how the cyber criminals want to go, they could take up requests from less reputable companies to advertise their products, or they could just simply whisper madness. The criminals could then offer the user a way out by selling pills or some other kind of therapy that will “cure them.” After which they simply turn off the whispers until the time comes when they need more money. So now that we have looked into the threats associated with immersive tech and the kind of power being given to a cyber criminal who infects a user using these devices, we can say that most of the attacks will be aimed at torturing the user psychologically, considering they have their complete attention. What about augmented reality, though? Things like Google Glass? Well in that case you’ve got a completely different set of threats, although many of these might seem familiar to the desktop world. In reality they are able to steal, extort and spy with greater reach than they were ever allowed on a normal PC. One of the key components of Augmented Reality (AR) tech is its ability to facilitate interaction with the real world in new ways. This means that in order to provide digital content overlayed on the real world, these devices require the use of cameras. A camera attached to an AR device that is attached to you can be a very dangerous thing. Consider if you will, malware that can use said camera to take pictures during a user’s most private times. These instances are never meant to be seen by the public, but by using the connections to social media these devices will no doubt have available, a cyber criminal can post these pictures onto the user’s social media whenever they want. Of course the most likely scenario would be if the user refused to pay a ransom. Grandpa stopped following you on Facebook that day. A has already been created by some researchers so this threat is much more of a reality than anything else I have talked about so far. In addition to taking pictures and recording video, AR devices will be able to record sound for you. The upside of this is taking mental notes, communicating with the device hands-free and maybe even recording a song you hear on the radio to identify it later. The downside is that malicious software could record all of your juicy conversations for things like espionage or even identity theft. On the other side of the coin, built-in voice recognition software could be used to identify common product names or themes in your conversation and therefore used to tailor ads presented to you, which would be bad if that kind of thing bothered you. Obviously a huge threat of malware running on an AR device would be grabbing personal information while it watched you go about your day. In this case, all the cyber criminal needs to do is wait for you to look at your credit card to steal the numbers; alternatively they can wait until you access an ATM to figure out what your PIN is. Then by using your personal information, they could recreate your credit card and take out a chunk of cash from your account. Alternatively, they could use your credit card information and an analysis of your signature (also obtained from taking pictures where you look) to use your credit card while also copying your signature. Basically, the cyber criminals will be able to capture every aspect of your life and completely take it over. They can steal your Social Security number, birth date, addresses and family information. Of course the best course of action is to turn off these devices while you’re doing anything of a personal or secure nature. However, what happens when augmented reality goes beyond wearing a device on our face but having one implanted into our bodies? The final threat associated with augmented reality in the near future is the very thing the devices were designed to do — augment reality. The selling point of this technology is to make real life more functional from a digital point of view, which means GPS mapping, image and sound recognition, biometric monitoring and of course showing the user a world beyond what is actually there. Now imagine if malware had access to all of these functions and was running on your augmented device. What if you were using AR tech to navigate your vehicle? You might find yourself driving into a wall. At the same time, what if AR was used to make an occupied lane, suddenly unoccupied, sending the user crashing into another driver? “Wow, not a car in sight! This trip is going to be smooth!” Depending on the field of vision from the AR tech, the possibilities are endless: Full eye covering could blind, confuse and misdirect a user, while something like Google Glass might just be used to capture the attention of the user at inconvenient times or even provide false information. With all of the possible threats, should we just abandon our efforts to create immersive or augmented realities? Absolutely not! The benefits of this technology far outweigh any risks that can only be present if the developers of this technology fail to take due diligence in their engineering. Technology, historically, has moved at a very fast speed, usually with the unfortunate result of the tech including security holes and vulnerabilities that are used later by malicious actors. For as badly as I know that many of us (myself included) want this technology, I think it is far more important to take the proper time needed to make sure it can’t be abused, because the danger of having exploitable technology attached to your face is far greater than not having access to Facebook due to ransomware. |
11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want to Miss This Week | Travis Bernard | 2,014 | 7 | 19 | The week of 7/12 – 7/18 was a busy one for TechCrunch. Here’s the best of the best from this week. As a bonus, we also put together a gallery that features “ ” As it turns out, the average age of peak innovation is 40. Mark Zuckerberg and the other young superstars are the exception. 11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want to Miss This Week |
We Can No Longer Unbundle Microsoft Office | Tom Limongello | 2,014 | 7 | 19 | It’s summertime, so we know there’s pressure to ‘unbundle’ ourselves from work as much as we can. Yet when something comes up, we are reminded of how little unbundled mobile apps offer in terms of productivity. Sure, ’s illustrates how 20 years of Internet history has brought innumerable benefits of software unbundling. Tom Tunguz echoed that in a recent post on the great , which has super-powered CRM tools. But email and messaging aren’t the only services that are core to Office software, and unbundling has really only been great for improving tools to notify and pester. Even if it is nice to ‘snooze’ our work, isn’t it the documents that count? This spring we witnessed the big three OS manufacturers — , and — continue to unbundle their versions of Microsoft Office apps for mobile, including versions of . You’ve also seen Craig Federighi’s at Apple’s WWDC where he juggled all three Apple devices in order to demo the concept of app handoffs. At Google I/O we saw that Google Drive has improved mobile document syncing so that Google Drive isn’t totally useless on iOS and Android. These are all good things, and we can now safely say that the OS providers have now fully unbundled their productivity software. Yet “Sent from my iPhone” is still a valid excuse for putting off work, and ‘continuity’ does not change the 30+ year perception instilled by Microsoft Office that real work comes in file formats, like Word, Powerpoint and Excel. Ask any VC, and they will tell you that mobile apps should do just one thing really well. However, there are some startups out there who don’t want to follow the same playbook at Microsoft, Apple and Google. Those startups would argue that unbundled features favor the individual, but at the heart of productivity software are workflows that are set up for the good of a team. These startups don’t want to make widgets and extensions for the same old Office products; they want to roll up their own interfaces. They want to bundle to avoid the issues that plague mobile productivity, like needless app switching, poor syncing architecture, and feature and data silos. < In 2007, productivity reached the cloud when the EU forced Microsoft to open the file formats to OpenXML and add an x at the end of our familiar file extensions .pptx, .xlsx and .docx. Google Docs also quickly floated cloud versions of each Office document format. However, in the same year, Apple launched iPhone without a view to file storage on the device. Since then a lot of startup innovation came from Dropbox and Box unbundling file storage from the OS, but software that enables the creation and editing of files on touchscreen devices has been less of a concern. Three years ago, CEO started using OpenXML formats to bring Microsoft Office to iPad. Since then, the company opened its interface to file authoring tools from Office and Google Drive, and storage providers like Dropbox, Box and Hightail, Google Drive, and OneDrive, and will soon be hard at work adding Apple’s CloudDrive. CloudOn feels that if it focuses on providing the best compatibility and exportability across devices, then they can be the place where users can “preserve, render and manipulate” documents on mobile. Once CloudOn can maintain its goal of giving consumers a familiar look and feel and lossless publishing for all the most popular document creation and storage providers, they plan to optimize for touchscreens. CloudOn sees only single-digit-minute session times in files, so their next step is to enable gestures to edit charts and annotate text with your fingers to help make better use of that time. If we look at why bundling features across disciplines could improve a mobile app, Acompli has made it dead simple to figure out when you are free to meet from iPhone. I asked Javier Soltero, CEO and Co-Founder of about their new feature “Send Availability,” which lets you tap on your available time slots and push that formatted schedule right into the body of an email. He explained that bundling features across different productivity apps is nothing new for Microsoft or even Apple: Another startup with ‘cloud’ branding, , wants their mobile email client to be the dominant window to productivity on mobile. Co-Founder realized that 80 percent of searches from his toolbar in the first iteration of the CloudMagic product were used to search within email. Rohit explained that the reason we hadn’t seen apps improve much on Apple’s Mail for iPhone was because other apps were not able to run in the background and therefore relegated to IMAP, which didn’t include ways to store email for quick search. So, he moved in a different direction that enabled an ability to act upon emails immediately. CloudMagic now uses the card metaphor popularized by Google Now to bypass app switching. It integrates note taking and project management tools right into your email by using APIs from apps like Evernote and Trello to tag and delegate tasks from the email body. Rohit feels that the catch-all email addresses that started in the 2000s like were great if they performed a function like automated scheduling, but have since just become catch-alls that vaguely push work away from you but don’t provide real value. For some, the new markup feature on Apple’s OSX Yosemite doesn’t go far enough to bundle features into the email workflow. and his team of researchers at (PARC) are looking to get images into more Office application workflows. They started with computer vision research and applied to document authoring tools to create WYPIWYG (What You Perceive is What You Get) to interpret salient objects in common with what the user perceives, which allows tap-selection of meaningful objects in the scene. They would like to offer for all devices a bundled email service that includes uninhibited sketching, text, graphics, rich layout, and document markup in an email authoring tool. “An email message is no longer a string of characters, it’s a canvas that hosts mixed content and AI-driven authoring support,” Saund says. “‘Visual email’ should include lightweight feedback on documents and slides, design collaboration, engineering discussion, and sales conversations.” Quip, billed the “Word for the mobile generation,” claims to drastically from the workplace. I spoke with Quip’s head of Business Operations Molly Graham who only has an email address to communicate with people outside of her company. Quip’s take on mobile-first design is to tether each document to a messaging stream, so that you can talk about the document without attaching versions of documents to email. This goes a step further than track changes in Microsoft Word and Gtalk comments in Google docs, where in Quip the interface looks more like Facebook Messenger than just margin notes. Graham laughed as she showed there’s no need for a ‘spinner’ in Quip because documents are accessed instantly. This is called “collaborative syncing,” she says, and it is how Quip gets rid of “files” and versioning within the app, which still exists in Evernote as notes need to be reconciled as they are separate versions. “We think intermingling features is essential on mobile,” she adds. “There are two main things that people tell us about Quip that they love. First, integrating communication and messaging with content, and not having to switch to email to be able to talk to people about the document. The second thing they love is the integration of a checklist and a table into a document.” For Quip to maintain a lightweight user experience, it does have to let go of some control. Quip attempts to deliver easy formatting to serve the 80 percent of users who had used Excel for things like bachelor party RSVP lists, rather than financial models. At this stage Quip is there to help handle most of the document creation process, but is not looking to own that last mile of margin tweaking and print formatting. “We expect users to write in Quip and then format after they export back to Microsoft Word,” Graham says. “Our product is the best for that one paragraph that in a long document that 90 people have an opinion on and need to mark up.” Excel and PowerPoint are traditionally products that are seen as impossible to improve upon, but are spoken of in the same breath as old and outdated. They may not really be ready to get a mobile phone makeover, but iPad apps abound. Two startups in particular that are working out of , a FinTech accelerator in NYC, are focusing on the Office 1 percent problems. It is understood in the term “death by PowerPoint” that there’s a challenge when most MBAs, consultants and finance people who are not designers try to arrange information for public consumption, and this was recently trying to lend Mary Meeker a hand in cleaning up her yearly opus. takes a different strategy to rebuilding PowerPoint. Instead of looking at PowerPoint as a design tool, Pellucid fixes the design and enables archive search for thousands of financial accounting slide templates that an analyst would need to fill a pitch book such as ROE, EBITDA and other fun acronyms. Since the formatting is already set, analysts can just enter company names and based on the data sources that the bank they work for has licensed, Pellucid can fill in any of that data automatically and keep it up to date. However, the concept of live data in presentations is a shock to most bankers, so Adrian Crockett of Pellucid admits that it’s one of the first things he has to explain to new users. Of course, Pellucid offers the ability to snapshot data for use in later presentations. But Adrian stressed that in addition to Pellucid’s approach to removing grunt work for analysts, it is giving senior bankers access to live data right in the presentation that would normally require VPN access, logins, app switching and all other sorts of headaches to be able to access, especially on tablets. Of all the Office products, Excel is likely the toughest beast to slay. Dean Zarras’s stops short of mobile, but it is worth including as a cloud-based product that wants to improve upon Excel by making it a communication tool. Zarras feels Excel is not a communication tool because it is too easy to botch the communication of your idea when $F12 cell symbolism gets in the way, which is why ClearFactr toggles those cell references with a description in English of what’s happening in each cell. Whether you are in a bank, big corporate or even a small business, there is a tendency to have one person build a spreadsheet and only that person understands it. The big question most people have is, how much effort does a startup have to put in until there’s a value over just using Excel? Zarras says that when collaboration through natural language, version control and advanced auditing tools can let a user evaluate time-series data, and limit ‘spreadsheet risk’, then there is a value over Excel. I’m not saying you should start thinking of your MacBook as only an expensive suntanning reflector, and you may be thinking that running your business from your mobile phone would be a nightmare. But wouldn’t it be nice to just finish your work right on your phone? |
With 1M Sold In The Last Quarter, Google’s Chromebooks Are A Hit With Schools | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 19 | During its earnings call this week, announced that it — and its partners — sold a million to schools in the last quarter. Overall PC sales worldwide were about , according to Gartner’s latest numbers, so a million sales just to the education market is a pretty good number. In the early days of Chrome OS, it often seemed like a doomed project. Who, after all, would want to buy a laptop that would just run a browser? Google has one big advantage, though. It’s massive advertising income allows it to stick with projects, even if they don’t catch on right away. As web apps developed, Chromebooks started to get significantly more useful, and these days, when you can do almost everything on the web (and yes, I know Photoshop isn’t one of those things), only having access to web apps really isn’t such a big deal anymore. A lot of schools were sold on iPads right after those became available and students probably still prefer them over Chromebooks, but they are relatively expensive compared to Chromebooks and harder to manage. Google also offers admins easy ways to manage large Chromebook deployments from a single console while Apple is still when it comes to this. At its I/O developer conference last month, quietly that it was expanding its Google Play for Education app and e-book store from Android tablets to Chromebooks, too. That announcement didn’t get a lot of hype, but it’s a huge deal for Google’s push into the education market and for the schools that have bought into this ecosystem. As Rick Borovoy, Google’s product manager for Google Play for Education, told me back then, many schools deploy both tablets and Chromebooks for their students. has always been very strong in the educational market, but even though its hardware is arguably superior, it’s also much more expensive. And as long as U.S. schools have to hold bake sales to raise funds, a $200 Chromebook is simply within reach for more of them. , of course, has long been aware of Google’s push, too. It loves to (remember its ?), but the fact that it does so only means it is aware of the threat Google poses in the lucrative education and enterprise markets. It’s now with low-end, low-priced laptops, but while price definitely matters, Microsoft doesn’t have the full ecosystem available that has made Chromebooks so popular in schools. While it offers plenty of apps for textbooks, for example, Google lets schools fund a Google Play for Education account for teachers that allows them to easily buy apps and books for their whole class and for individual students. Microsoft and Apple should be concerned about Google’s success in schools. Once students get used to working with Google’s products, after all, they are likely to stick with them as they grow older. Apple and Microsoft used to play this game very well with its discounts for schools, but it feels like Google has clearly learned from this and is now a real challenger in this space. |
Gillmor Gang: Yotifications | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 7 | 19 | The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Alexia Tsotsis, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — react with nervous jokes as all eyes turn to the success of Yo, the single-minded communication app that has one thing on its little mind. But wait a minute, what’s surreally going on here as BetaWorks’ John Borthwick leads an investment round on the love child union of What’s App and Poke? Borthwick sees far beyond the atomization of app suites, most precisely a harnessing of the notification paradigm that some of the Gang see as the biggest threat to search and maybe the Web. Those who follow the show know there’s nothing more viral and strategic in this age of mobile disruption than notification politics, so batten down the hatches and climb aboard. Yo know what I mean? @stevegillmor, @alexia, @dannysullivan, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Supposed iPhone 6 Display Cover Faces The Sandpaper Test | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 19 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7ANcWQEUI8&w=854&h=510] The leaked component that’s being touted as the front screen of the upcoming iPhone 6 got a good workout in a video test by regular MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) when it first broke cover, and now Brownlee is back with a new video that takes the durability tests even further. This second round involves exposing the supposedly super-strong sapphire-based material to a true test of strength – scratching by sandpaper, a material with a much higher Mohs scale hardness rating than any steel knife or set of keys. In the video, you can see that Brownlee uses both garnet and emery-based sandpaper, both of which have Mohs scores that exceed the hardness of existing Gorilla Glass. These fall under the hardness rating of pure sapphire, however, which is second only to diamond when it comes to hardness for naturally occurring substances. The iPhone 5s, as you can see in the video, doesn’t stand up well to scratches administered by the sandpaper – but the iPhone 5s home button, which is pretty much pure sapphire, does. The so-called 6 display also isn’t immune to the effects of the sandpaper – but it does stand up much better to the abrasion than the display of its predecessor. And as Brownlee explains, it doesn’t matter so much that the screen suffered a few scratches under these extremely artificial testing conditions: Its overall durability and flexibility mean it should be safe from almost every real world threat it might encounter in your pockets or your bags. |
The Most Important M’s In M-Commerce | Phil Carter | 2,014 | 7 | 26 | A few customer groups are driving a disproportionate share of growth in smartphone use and mobile transactions. For entrepreneurs looking to build the , it pays to understand who these groups are, what their mobile activity looks like, and how to best serve them. When it comes to finding customers in mobile commerce, remember the Three Ms: moms, millennials and multinationals. Moms are a great consumer demographic, accounting for according to a 2009 survey by Boston Consulting Group. Moms are also smartphone power users. According to Edison Research, . The same study indicated moms spend an average of 8 hours and 37 minutes a day with media, 89 percent of moms report having their smartphone within arm’s length always or most of the time, and 42 percent of moms say their smartphone is the first thing in their hand every morning. The combination of moms driving a large majority of U.S. spending and being highly engaged smartphone users makes them the single-most powerful constituency , particularly in the retail enablement, mobile retail, marketplace, and on-demand service categories. Today, mothers tend to be constantly juggling activities, so whether your app is selling a product or a service, make her life simpler with a friendly user interface that she can navigate easily. Companies like and do a great job of this with their mobile apps. Entertainment and gamification also work well. increases shopper engagement and spend by wrapping a story around every piece of furniture and home décor it sells. Meanwhile, boosts loyalty and retention by personalizing a mom’s shopping experience and rewarding her with discounts for buying within a specified window of time. Finally, be respectful of her time and space. A mom has enough on her mind without your app constantly pinging her with push notifications, so make sure you build intelligence into your app so that you’re tailoring engagement to her unique rhythms. If it wasn’t obvious that today’s teens and twenty-somethings spend a lot of time on their smartphones, then a recent makes it clear. According to ComScore’s data, 81 percent of U.S. Millennials (defined as 18-34 year olds) owned a smartphone by the end of 2013 vs. 68 percent of 35-54 year olds and 40 percent of the 55+ population. Furthermore, 85 percent of millennials consume digital media on mobile versus 80 percent of 35-54 year olds and 58 percent of the 55+ population, and 18 percent of millennials are mobile-only, meaning they do all their Internet browsing, emailing, social networking, and news reading on a smartphone or tablet. That’s 3.5x the percentage of 35-54 year old mobile-only users and 6x the percentage of 55+ mobile-only users. millennials are driving growth in several categories like dating and fitness, and are also an important force in , particularly teen and college-age women who spend a lot of disposable income on apparel, accessories, and beauty products. Today’s teens have increasingly short attention spans, so to capture share of mind and wallet with this valuable demographic, an entrepreneur must first capture their imaginations. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. Apps targeting teens and twenty-somethings must demonstrate value quickly to gain acceptance, so skip the long onboarding process in favor of Facebook Connect or throw it out entirely and immerse users in your app’s experience from their very first click. Millennials are also hyper visual, as proven by the success of social apps like Snapchat, Instagram and Whisper. A picture is worth more than a thousand words because the average teen will only read the first 10. Finally, teens operate on smaller budgets, so make price points accessible to convert shoppers into buyers. According to data collected last year by Statista, . The four countries topping this list – United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore – are all from the Middle East or Asia. Meanwhile, a recent Pew Research Center report highlighted an , where a much higher percentage of mobile users (as high as 68 percent in Kenya) report regularly using phones to make or receive payments vs. a median of just 8 percent in other countries surveyed. Outside of traditional m-commerce, social messaging apps are booming in Southeast Asia where have accumulated hundreds of millions of registered users. The lack of a large installed base of PCs has allowed mobile penetration in many developing nations to outpace penetration in more industrialized parts of the world. This trend, paired with rapidly-rising GDPs among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China), Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan), and parts of the Middle East and Africa, indicate it’s only a matter of time before the global share of m-commerce shifts increasingly abroad, particularly in categories like . It’s difficult to prescribe a list of winning m-commerce strategies for multinationals because they exhibit fewer consistent patterns than moms and millennials, but a couple general principles are transferrable. First, know the cultural context you’re operating in. Digital goods may be a great monetization mechanic in Southeast Asia but not in other countries where there’s no cultural basis for valuing these items. Second, if you’re expanding an app outside its native market, localization matters. Even if all your users understand English, you’ll need to adapt your messaging to build emotional attachments. Crowdsourcing can be a powerful solution for this problem, as Facebook famously demonstrated when it . Finally, in markets without significant PC penetration, mobile-first design principles are even more important, as many users will be mobile-only. Moms, millennials, and multinationals certainly aren’t the only groups driving m-commerce. In today’s increasingly mobile world, smartphone penetration and usage is increasing across nearly every demographic. However, for m-commerce entrepreneurs looking to build the next big thing, targeting at least one of the three M’s represents an effective strategy for establishing a core of highly-engaged early adopters. Moms and millennials also tend to be above-average users of social media, creating greater potential for organic user acquisition and viral growth. Given how important moms, millennials, and multinationals are within the m-commerce ecosystem, understanding their usage behaviors and meeting their needs can be the key to building a great business on mobile. |
Eigenmorality And The Dark Enlightenment | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 7 | 19 | This is a post about good vs. evil and right vs. wrong, but don’t worry, it’s highly technical. Let’s start with Stormfront, the white-supremacist hate site that attracts circa 300,000 unique American visitors per month, and the recent of its members (and ) by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in the . Some numbers you probably didn’t expect: when you compare Stormfront users to people who go to the Yahoo News site, it turns out that the Stormfront crowd is twice as likely to visit nytimes.com … 64% identify their age as under 30 … no relationship between monthly membership registration and a state’s unemployment rate … Nearly 80 percent of Stormfront fans have more than 100 Facebook friends. Nearly 60 percent have more than 200. In related news, I was ego-googling the other day — look, I’m not proud of this, but I do it alone at home with all the doors and windows closed, and it doesn’t harm anyone — and I came across a response to one of my TC posts that ended with the line: Due to the heritability of poverty and low IQs, we propose eugenics as the most effective long term solution for controlling entitlement spending. I assumed this was some kind of Swiftian satire, but no, its author announces himself as part of the “Grey Enlightenment,” a version of the Dark Enlightenment neoreactionaries that Klint Finley wrote about . subsequently published an excellent on the neoreactionary movement, complemented well by Vocativ’s . (If you want a palate cleanser after reading those, here’s a lengthy .) Briefly, the neoreactionary movement: advocates an autocratic and neo-monarchical society. Its belief system is unapologetically reactionary, almost feudal … liberal progressivism is seen as a state religion … the darkly enlightened see social hierarchies as determined not by culture or opportunity but by the cold, hard destiny embedded in DNA. Hence their focus on “human biodiversity,” a.k.a. racism, and eugenics. I don’t want to spend too many words on Stormfront and the neoreactionaries here, as I do have a larger point to get to, but you may well be wondering: why pay any attention to these assholes at all? After all, Stormfront’s 300,000 American users per month is still less than 0.1% of the population, and it’s possible that the handful of neoreactionary bloggers are just trying to use shock value to get attention. Why feed the trolls? But I’m afraid I don’t think it’s that simple. For one thing, as hateful and wrongheaded as they may be, some of these people are clearly highly intelligent, and pour an enormous amount of effort into their work. It seems apparent to me that they’re not just doing it for shock value; they truly believe what they’re saying. I think it’s worth investigating how those beliefs form, and how and why their adherents cluster online. also suggests Neoreactionaries are explicitly courting wealthy elites in the tech sector as the most receptive and influential audience … the neoreactionaries do seem to be influencing the drift of Silicon Valley libertarianism, which is no small force today …but while I’m far from a libertarian, I’m largely unconvinced by what reads like an attempt to lump in with the Dark Enlightenment everyone who suggests “the status quo is pretty screwed up, maybe we should experiment with other sociopolitical systems” — you know, . I’m sure there are Valley figures who do sympathize; but I’m also sure they’re a distinct minority. It does seem clear, though, that technology has enabled the entire Dark Enlightenment movement. In part because it’s such a force multiplier that some people with tech skills have begun to think of themselves as part of a global elite, and then made the and concluded that this is because they are inherently better than other human beings; in part because, , the Internet allows people who would otherwise have been loner outcasts to band together. Circa 99% of the time this is a very good thing. The other 1%, though, gives us communities like “ ,” the misogynist hate site which became infamous after Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in Santa Barbara earlier this year. What interests me about hate sites and fascist ideologies is, again: how do people find their way to these communities, and why do they join them? How and why do they forge hateful and dehumanizing beliefs in the midst of a society which — finally, after many years — generally recognizes them as wrong? Well. Perhaps there might actually be a way to find out. In a formal, quantified, scientific way, no less. I give you MIT professor Scott Aaronson’s . It’s a terrific piece, but be advised, it’s written for a scientific audience, so it assumes that you know e.g. what an eigenvector is. (I confess I had to refresh my own memory , as I haven’t much encountered matrix mathematics in the wild since acquiring my EE degree mumblemumble years ago.) To very briefly extremely oversimplify, though, it suggests that we can use an algorithm similar to Google’s original PageRank to measure morality across the human population: A moral person is someone who cooperates with other moral people, and who refuses to cooperate with immoral people … How can we possibly know which people are moral? … linear algebra can come to the rescue! … by simply finding the principal eigenvector of the “cooperation matrix,” we then have our objective measure of morality for each individual. (He goes on to propose a second, largely separate notion, , which is even more interesting but probably outside the scope of this post. But you should go read about it.) We don’t have a planetary-scale graph of who with one another…but we actually have a reasonable approximation of who with one another. It’s called Facebook. Meaning, it seems to me, that we — by which I mean Facebook itself — may actually have the power to measure and quantify individual (relative) morality. (Which is presumably a vector in some kind of N-dimensional space rather than a single-digit rating from 1 to 10.) What’s more, Facebook could actually . So, in theory at least, it may already be within our power to identify some of the factors that cause otherwise intelligent people to adopt and propagate essentially fascist and misogynist ideas, such as Stormfront, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Red Pill. That, I think — unlike certain I could name — would be an experiment worth trying. |
Blockchain Releases New Android Wallet App To Put Bitcoin Into Everyone’s Hands | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 7 | 19 | Popular bitcoin wallet provider is releasing a major new version of its , allowing you to store, receive and send bitcoins directly from your Android phone. The key thinking behind the update is to make bitcoin more accessible. It hides the complexity of the protocol in order to encourage mainstream user adoption. “Our Android app has to do with making bitcoin so easy to use that people don’t even have to think about addresses for example,” co-founder and CEO Nicolas Cary told me in a phone interview. “That stuff exists in bitcoin, but just like there are complicated things happening in email, they are hidden.” So here’s what you can expect from the new app. If you want to send bitcoins to someone, you can just browse your address book and tap on someone’s name. After that, there are two possibilities. If this person is already a bitcoin user with an associated bitcoin address, it will simply send the bitcoins. If it’s someone new, it will send an email with a redemption code so that they can get their money. Also coming with today’s update, there is a map view of with merchants who accept bitcoins. “It’s a world’s first,” Cary said. “We verified every single one of these merchants and we’re bringing new ones every week.” Finally, there are a lot of education features. When you create a wallet, Blockchain will help you understand how to manage your bitcoins. It will tell you to set a very strong password and two-factor authentication, it will suggests backup solutions, and it will show you tutorial videos. “When you explain why bitcoin is valuable, 99 percent of people understand that it’s useful. But it gets a little intimidating when they actually start using bitcoin,” Cary said. As always with Blockchain, Cary also defended the company’s decentralized approach during our interview. Blockchain COO Peter Smith already at Disrupt NY that people shouldn’t trust bitcoin services that centralize everything. Most startups try to reproduce the old banking system and actually store bitcoins on their servers. As Mt.Gox has shown us, these services can be compromised. Instead, Blockchain develops open-source wallets, and the user is handling his or her own bitcoins. “We are more like a storage service, ” Cary said. “We store encrypted files as a backup. When a user logs into the website, it fetches that file and decrypts it. Blockchain never sees this user’s bitcoins.” It means that Blockchain can’t actually take a small transaction fee when a user sends bitcoins like other services. That’s why the company relies on advertisement. There are two million registered users on Blockchain.info and using the apps. Hundreds of millions of people visit Blockchain’s websites every month ( , and ). But the startup is still mostly known for its open source wallets. The company has upcoming updates for its other wallets as well. “The Android wallet is the first update to our wallets. We’re bringing branding, design and feature parity to Chrome, Firefox, the website and the mobile apps,” Cary said. Recently, Apple made a U-turn when it comes to wallet apps in the App Store. The company is now bitcoin transfer apps again. When I asked Cary whether the company has plans to come back to iOS, his answer was “yes, as soon as possible.” But it might not be in the App Store at first. “We are building an HTML5 wallet, and we’ve built a pairing solution for credentials,” he said. “We completely reengineered the QR code reader to work in HTML5. We’ll be open-sourcing that as well.” At a larger scale, as Blockchain is developing the most popular wallet apps in the world, it has the opportunity to improve how transactions are handled. If two Blockchain users want to exchange bitcoins, sharing an address through a QR code might not be the most elegant solution. Instead, the company could take advantage of its massive user base to switch to NFC or Bluetooth-LE. If two nearby users are using Blockchain’s apps, you could pick the other person’s name in a nearby list. “We’re doing some research and development,” Cary said. It might take a while, but these improvements might be a much-needed simplification of the bitcoin protocol to bring the cryptocurrency to the next ten million people. [gallery ids="1031961,1031962,1031963"] |
BMW Vs. Tesla: A Real Live Innovator’s Dilemma | Peter Yared | 2,014 | 7 | 26 | Jill Lepore genereated quite a fracas in Silicon Valley with her that questions disruptive innovation and posits that large incumbent companies often survive and subsume disruptive technology with small incremental gains. Fortunately, we have a live Petri dish: is an ongoing case study of a legacy manufacturer facing an innovator’s dilemma in the face of , a very aggressive new competitor with next-generation technology. Elon Musk has defined the standard for a future mass-produced electric car – it . In order to achieve that audacious goal, Tesla is embarking on a plan to build a “Gigafactory” capable of producing batteries at an efficient and lower cost that would make such a dream car feasible. Investors are betting that Tesla will be able to dominate the electric car market when it achieves scale, continuing a growth rate that values Tesla at $28 billion even though it only . It is interesting that Musk directly compared the Tesla’s upcoming mass market Model 3 directly to the BMW 3 series, given that BMW is now delivering its new i3 to the US market in accessible volumes. There are lots of great lessons for entrepreneurs to learn from watching the BMW versus Tesla battle since cars are so tangible and manufacturer sales tactics are so transparent. Even though it has a “3” in its name, the i3 is decidedly not a 3 series BMW. It is two feet shorter, and should instead be in the BMW 1 series product family. The i3’s electric range of 80-100 miles makes it more similar to electric cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt and nowhere close to a technological wonder like the Tesla Model S. Despite its limitations, the i3 is clearly resonating, with rave reviews and a price that is , indicating high initial demand in the United States. BMW has (mis)used the power of the 3 series brand to its benefit, and can now add features like longer length and range incrementally as battery technology improves. BMW invested tremendous resources in its electric car platform to develop an all-electric vehicle platform, and it is willing to integrate legacy technology in order to deliver immediate value to its customers. Conversely, Mercedes chose a partnership route and is . Both BMW and Mercedes are well ahead of Tesla in advanced vehicle technology like self-parking and cruise control that can automatically follow highway lanes and maintain distance from other vehicles. Rather than waiting for battery technology to evolve to make an all-electric car with a 200-mile range at a mid-range price point, BMW is selling an optional “range extender” consisting of a two cylinder motorcycle engine that maintains the batteries at a 5 percent power level and extends the car’s range an additional 80 miles. Since the range extender powers the batteries rather than a gas engine, the i3 is not a hybrid, but the range extender can be continually refilled so that the car is never stuck without power. It’s a total hack, but is well thought out and competitive. BMW’s engineers must have been giggling when they came up with this one. With the i3, BMW has delivered a “good enough” luxury electric car for the urban driver and average commuter, who can also optionally use the car for longer trips without having to plan for supercharger stations. Tesla shipped its first car in 2006 and is expecting sell , or roughly 17,500 units in the second half of 2014. BMW started selling i3’s in 2014 and sold 6,000 i3’s in the first half of the year, primarily in the European market, which now has 3 to 6 months waits for the car. Now that demand is spiking, BMW . The fact that a legacy manufacturer is on the verge of outselling Tesla in its own luxury electric segment in the first year of shipping is fascinating given Tesla’s superior product and years of market lead. While Tesla is right in attempting to disrupt the antiquated dealership business model, BMW will be able to leverage its extensive dealer network to deliver to consumers worldwide, and consumers can use web services like and to bypass the hassle of negotiating with dealers on the price of a new car and trade-in amount. BMW also has access to a deep well of financial incentives to drive consumers to buy cars. Auto manufacturers and their dealers are fighting Tesla with regulatory measures to slow the company down and limit market penetration. Tesla had to enter the market at the high-end in order to deliver batteries capable of long ranges at a margin that would deliver profits to fickle investors, years before it could deliver a mass market mid-range vehicle. BMW’s breadth enables it to enter at the mid-market and then move up into the ultra high-end next year in the U.S. with its . To BMW, the distinctive, urban-friendly i3 is essentially a rolling advertisement for BMW’s innovative and green future, so the company could even sell them at a loss and come out ahead. Tesla’s high-end first approach could turn into a liability as the Tesla S is quite large and therefore not well suited for urban environments – it is wider than and almost as long as a 7 series BMW. Large, luxury four door sedans are typically purchased by upper middle class men over the age of 35 which, as a member of the demographic, I unfortunately have to admit we’re not exactly the most hip crowd. BMW examined the market thoroughly and is targeting hip, young, urban professionals with the i3’s forward design, a smaller urban-friendly size, and the brand’s proven appeal with a younger demographic. The big question is what industry exactly are electric cars are disrupting? At first it seemed like the legacy auto manufacturers would not be able to step up to an electric car challenge. They have widely adopted hybrid electric cars, are now delivering somewhat competitive electric cars, and are continually experimenting with . From a broader view, it is possible that ExxonMobil and Chevron will be more disrupted by electric vehicles rather than BMW and Chevrolet. Elon Musk is an entrepreneurial hero who is concurrently disrupting the passenger vehicle, space transportation and electric utility industries. Some of the legacy companies in those industries were bound to wake up at some point and respond aggressively. Fortunately, Musk can rest assured that the United Launch Alliance will not be as agile against SpaceX as BMW has been against Tesla! |
11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want to Miss This Week (7/25) | Travis Bernard | 2,014 | 7 | 26 | It was earnings week at TechCrunch, so most of the coverage was dominated by reports about Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and Pandora. Fortunately there were a ton of other great stories from our writers. Here are the top stories from 7/19 to 7/25 on TechCrunch. A few other notable stories that didn’t quite make the list include over patents it holds related to noise-cancelling headphones, a , , and (We tried , but they didn’t respond). Hey – this is what startup people actually wear — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) If there are any other stories you think we might have missed in the recap, feel free to share in the comments section. |
Why A Stupid App Like Yo May Have Billion-Dollar Platform Potential | Sangeet Paul Choudary | 2,014 | 7 | 26 | Yo! Is tech turning too stupid for its own good? Attempts at building better healthcare systems do not get the kind of investor interest that a new app called Yo seems to be getting. While the whole world was deriding (and downloading) Yo, the company quietly (well, not quite so quietly) raised further funding at a $10 million valuation. Is the app worth $10 million? No. Will the app itself ever be worth $10 million? No. Is there the tiniest of possibilities that there’s a billion-dollar potential hidden behind the stupid app? Yo! Let’s look at a bit of history to set the future of Yo in context. While the likes of Android and Apple created an extendible platform with the smartphone, they continue to own most of the core user experience of the phone. Angry Birds and Pinterest may create apps for the phone, but they don’t really challenge the core use case of the phone. Most apps typically extend the phone to new use cases. However, every once in a while, a new experience emerges at the app layer to challenge the core experience of the phone. At the very basic level, these new experiences create compelling to the core experience. Evernote creates a substitute for the phone’s note-taking app, for instance, and Dropbox for the native cloud sync. Some substitute experiences in ways that the original experiences did not. Instagram turned the phone into a camera-centric community in a way that the phone’s camera app never had. WhatsApp turned the phone into communities of chatter with much more flexibility than the original messaging app. But the power of such substitutes can truly be realized when it ends up creating a new standard that dictates the core experience of not just the phone but of any app built on top of the phone. With such a move, the substitute becomes embedded into the platform layer of the phone. Curiously, Yo has the potential to play in such a space. As an app, Yo is utterly stupid. Let’s all agree to that. It probably isn’t worth a tiny fraction of its current valuation if we were to evaluate it as an app. But as a platform, Yo has an outside chance at a moonshot. Alerts and notifications are part of the core use experience of a phone. They come naked into the smartphone platform, and any app built on top of the smartphone leverages the alerts and notifications layer. This is where things get interesting: Yo isn’t about messaging; it’s about alerts and notifications. Yo’s potential to be much more than an app is in . As users, we hate alerts and notifications. No one’s particularly excited about interruptive alerts jumping up on the phone screen. Yet, in a short span of a few weeks, we’ve had millions of people downloading an app that does little more than send an alert. In fact, the alert doesn’t even mean anything, but usage continues to grow. If the history of standards is anything to go by, standards do not have to be technologically intense, they just need to get adopted fast enough. And Yo seems to be ticking that box for now. The Betamax vs. VHS battle is testament to the nuances of multi-sided adoption that standards require. For Yo’s moonshot chance at becoming a billion-dollar platform to work out, it has a long road ahead and an arduous journey . As with all development platforms, it needs to drive rapid and simultaneous adoption among consumers and developers. Yo has now opened itself as a platform and we’re already seeing “serious” use cases coming up. Israeli missile notification service, Red Alert, is using Yo to warn Israelis of incoming missile strikes. What Yo has going in its favor right now is the massive adoption among consumers. For all we know, this may just be a fad. But if this massive adoption continues, and if Yo can pull up its platform play and get enough developers building real value using Yo as a notification service for their apps, Yo has the potential to be the next big thing. The Christensen-Lepore debate notwithstanding, the next big thing has always started out looking stupid. The experts derided Wikipedia for its errors, no one saw beyond the filters of Instagram, Eric Schmidt called Twitter ‘poor man’s email’ and Airbnb was a hipster mattress-sharing website until it completely blindsided the hotel industry. Will Yo disrupt notifications? We can’t quite say at this point. But having seen the massive adoption, one has to believe that someone will. Notifications need a substitute. And given the massive growth in adoption, Yo may have as good a shot as any at it. While Yo may have fast-growing consumer adoption going for it, an alternate notification substitute (which will look just as stupid, if not more) may yet gather traction, surpass Yo’s adoption and get taken up by more developers. Any investment in Yo at this point is highly risky, not unlike one in a service some seven years back that allowed you to type 140 characters. Yo’s success or failure lies in its ability to kickstart a platform for notifications that one day becomes the standard for all apps using notifications. As an app it is little more than Facebook’s poke. But as a standard, it could become embedded in the workings of every other app out there. And that is Yo’s outside chance at venture scale returns. For all we know, Yo’s brilliance may yet lie in its apparent stupidity. |
Startups Are Finally Hacking Healthcare | Tim Chang | 2,014 | 7 | 26 | New companies are going around the traditional “front door” of FDA approval, insurers and healthcare institutions by launching ‘Healthcare 2.0’ companies that target consumers and self-insured employers, upending the health sector through the use of innovative digital and social technologies. At a recent forum we hosted for founders and leading industry execs playing in Healthcare 2.0, we compared notes and debated which startup business models and go-to-market-strategies have the best shot at permanently disrupting the healthcare business. This next generation of healthcare startup is first and foremost adopting a business to consumer model that can lead to business-to-business monetization. Successful companies are also combining premium services with extreme convenience, engaging social networks and communities, and experimenting with information coming from the proliferation of wearable devices that are beginning to penetrate consumer markets. In the self-directed Obamacare era, consumers are willing to take charge of their own wellness by managing their own data & health. Companies such as (engaging health assessments), (affordable & quality dental care), (small and medium-sized business focused healthcare management services), (digital health marketplace) and (digital therapeutics), have shown that reaching consumers through social and business-to-consumer web-based models can be followed by building links to the business side of the healthcare industry – insurers, payers, hospitals, and claims companies. The challenge is determining which partners you need and their motivations, because their non-transparent business models and closed-systems can be tricky to understand. But proving organic consumer adoption and engagement first will naturally pull in the interest of enterprises, payers, insurers, and institutions – they’ll see market demand from end users; which mitigates the risk of roll-outs into their own populations. One short cut might be for healthcare entrepreneurs to target self-insured employers first as a faster-moving and more forward-thinking channel to reach consumers, and to innovate on business models and incentive alignment – trying things like “freemium” SaaS, or engagement-based billing and payment. In the era of the “outsourced life” where mobile-first, on-demand services offer rides, food delivery, laundry, petcare and more, it may be easy to imagine the dental truck or “Uber of Doctors” coming to you with the press of a button on your smartphone. Companies like our portfolio investment in the Q&A network, , make finding and consulting with health practitioners easier through mobile and web apps. We have seen that users are even willing to pay out of pocket for concierge medical services like for prescription drugs, for doctor visits or for appointment scheduling. These services are convenient, premium in experience and instantly gratifying. As the healthcare market begins to resemble the e-commerce industry, I’m interested in seeing what the , , , , , , or of healthcare services would look like. People care deeply about their health, but it’s also deeply personal. They won’t always be willing to share details with social networks like Facebook or Twitter, but are keen to connect with others who can relate to their journey and experience. That’s an opportunity for vertical networks to arise — where it’s safe for users to tell their stories, ask for help, and learn from others. Consumers also seek expert advice, coaching and personalized help through direct relationships with real doctors, therapists, coaches and trainers. Experts care deeply what other experts think about them, and also seek connections with their peers. We believe that apps, machine learning/AI, and algorithmically curated content are not enough to change behaviors and affect outcomes. Coaches and cohorts are critical to get people to stick with anything – especially in health and wellness. Companies that are solving the motivation challenge through people-to-people connections, and using technology to scale include: (group fitness marketplace), (aka the LinkedIn for doctors), (developer of the first FICO score for health), (personalized coaching for weight loss), and ( personalized coaching for mental health). Wearables have taken off — first in the fitness space with step trackers and pulse readers, but those are examples of the very beginning of a health-and-fitness wearables revolution that will extend far beyond quantified self geeks and early adopters. We believe that within the next few years, we’ll see wearables expand to track continuous health data – heart rate, blood sugar, blood pressure, stress levels, respiration, brainwaves, posture, and even muscle activity. These trackers will also evolve from one-way passive reading to two-way reading and “writing,” where these wearables will be able to stimulate neural connections through electricity and ultrasound to write new code for the brain. Picture a device that includes data and expands to appliances and fixtures in the home, adding sensors, getting connected to the cloud, and opening up stores for apps with data-driven value-added services. That’s coming, too. Further, these devices will interact with other wearable devices used by healthcare professionals and health services providers to provide intelligence around reminders and tips for how to stay healthy. When this networked transformation happens, the power of the system will far exceed that of isolated wearables operating independently. Over time, this data can also be combined with confidential health record data to provide truly personalized medical updates and a comprehensive view of your health and habits (filling in all the gaps between medical checkups and doctor visits). As a result, insights over the continuous long view will start to catch systemic changes and pattern shifts long before problems become acute. Companies innovating with this model include and health trackers, and brainwave sensing and boosting, and the OMsignal line of biometric smartwear. Disrupting the healthcare industry is as difficult as ever, but entrepreneurs and investors are becoming more bullish given the size of the opportunity and with the recognition of patterns and a playbook that is beginning to work. Startups should simultaneously address both consumer-facing and business-to-business models, but often must begin by building up a strong consumer user base. That means curating a quality network of experts, coaches, and providers; launching on-demand, highly convenient offerings; and employing state of the art social, mobile and eCommerce practices. |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 10 | null |
Hacking In The 80’s, Your Summer Movie Guide | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 26 | We learn the best way to win the system in WarGames is to never let Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy start hacking in the first place, Ferris Bueller’s parents should have just bought him a car, not a computer (he hacks into the schools’ mainframe and erases the number of days he’s been absent), and that it’s way more fun to jump in a pool with babes than it is to work on your computer project in Real Genius. A new Youtube compilation from shows us just what Hollywood thought computer programming looked like in the 80’s and it’s hilarious. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUGQHdYUIEo&w=560&h=315] To compliment this amazing video clip, I bring you a bit of nostalgic movie magic with the top 5 of my favorite 80’s hacker clips: 1. – Machine learning, tic tac toe, a rogue computer on the brink of bringing about world destruction and a teenage boy seems to be the only person on the planet who can save us all: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo&w=420&h=315] 2. – A computer hacker gets sucked into a virtual reality game that has potentially fatal consequences. Okay, yes, the original is slow and there’s no cool Daft Punk appearances…or even music in the background. But I mean a young Jeff Bridges #amiright? [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcyCWEsbsPU&w=560&h=315] 3. – It wasn’t computer hacking that made this movie cool. It was simply Ferris. He was definitely “A righteous dude.” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N78Prb76Rs&w=420&h=315] 4. – There is a scene in this movie from 1984 where computer dork Gilbert Lowe actually hacks his way into Judy’s heart. While I had a hard time finding the exact individual clip on Youtube, you can click through to see it on DailyMotion. 5. – Richard Pryor isn’t happy with his paycheck so he uses a special hacking code to trick the computer system into giving him a lot more money. Notice how gigantic those computers were.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLw9OBV7HYA&w=560&h=315] Bonus – A clip from the TV show . The show didn’t last too long but this clip where one of the boys explains to a girl he likes that he’s not a nerd but a hacker is just great:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2–OkeuC6k&w=420&h=315] |
The First Trillion-Dollar Startup | Rhett Morris | 2,014 | 7 | 26 | In 1957, eight entrepreneurs decided to do something that seemed crazy. They launched a new tech company called in a small town south of San Francisco. The entrepreneurs had a difficult start, but Fairchild eventually became the first major computer chip company in the region. Although many people are familiar with success, few know the full extent of its impact. During the last year, our team at has traced the story of Fairchild and gathered intriguing new data. We uncovered something that was quite surprising: if the value Fairchild created is measured in today’s dollars, we believe the firm would qualify as the first trillion dollar startup in the world. The achievements of Fairchild’s co-founders are even more impressive when you consider where they occurred. The San Francisco Bay Area is now a thriving tech hub, but it was a . At that time, there were no venture capital investors in the region. Stanford University did not produce any of the major research on computer chip components and immigrants made up only a small percentage of the population. As the chart below illustrates, the San Francisco area was far behind other U.S. cities in the development of the transistor companies that made up the early computer chip industry. No one expected the region to become a hub for these technology businesses. Seven of the eight co-founders of Fairchild had recently moved to the San Francisco area from cities with more established transistor firms and investors. Three of these entrepreneurs – Jay Last, Bob Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts – had earned PhDs from MIT in Boston. Eugene Kleiner and Julius Blank were engineers in New York City, and Jean Hoerni and Gordon Moore had worked at Caltech near Los Angeles. (The final co-founder, Victor Grinich, was a former researcher and PhD student at Stanford.) They leveraged their professional networks in these cities to find two key supporters who helped them raise capital and sign contracts with their first customer. These connections set them on the path to success. After just three years, Fairchild’s annual revenues were over $20 million. By the mid-1960s, the group had invented a new product, the integrated circuit, and was generating $90 million in annual sales. Yet, this was only the beginning of the co-founders’ accomplishments. As Fairchild started to grow, employees began to leave the firm to launch new spin-off businesses. Many of these firms also grew quickly, inspiring other employees still working at the company. “You got these guys leaving and starting companies and the companies are running, working,” a former manager recalled. “You get a look around and look in the mirror and say, ‘Well, you know, how about you? What are you going to do?’” The eight co-founders supported a number of these new businesses. encouraged an employee to start a company that made the glass components Fairchild used in its manufacturing process. Noyce served on the board of , a local electronics equipment manufacturer, and mentored the company’s young founder. It wasn’t long before the entrepreneurs at Fairchild began to create their own spin-off firms. “That experience of starting this company and watching it grow – I thought I’d like to do that again,” recalled Last. In 1961, he partnered with three of his Fairchild co-founders to create Amelco, a new business that produced specialized devices. Two other co-founders, Moore and Noyce, left Fairchild several years later to start the computer chip firm Intel. The eight co-founders also reinvested their capital into a number of new local startups. In 1961, four of them helped to fund the Bay Area’s first venture capital firm. Another founder provided the financing that helped a former employee launch . When Moore and Noyce launched Intel, the other six co-founders helped to fund the new business. The growth of these new companies started to reshape the region. In just 12 years, the co-founders and former employees of Fairchild generated more than 30 spin-off companies and funded many more. By 1970, chip businesses in the San Francisco area employed a total of 12,000 people. “That’s part of the legacy of Fairchild that maybe doesn’t get the attention it should,” Moore has said. “Every time we came up with a new idea, we spawned two or three companies trying to exploit it.” The achievements of these companies eventually attracted attention. In 1971, a journalist named wrote an article about the success of computer chip companies in the Bay Area. The firms he profiled all produced chips using silicon and were located in a large valley south of San Francisco. Hoefler put these two facts together to create a new name for the region: Silicon Valley. Hoefler’s article and the name he coined have become quite famous, but there’s a critical part of his analysis that is often overlooked: Almost all of the silicon chip companies he profiled can be traced back to Fairchild and its co-founders. Fairchild’s success continued to fuel the growth of companies in the Valley in the years after Hoefler’s article was published. When was starting his career in the 1970s, he often rode his motorcycle to Noyce’s house and spent hours listening to the older entrepreneur’s advice. According to Noyce’s wife, Jobs also had a unique habit of calling their home around midnight. The first investor in Apple was also a former Fairchild employee. In 1972, Kleiner co-founded the venture firm Kleiner Perkins, which has gone on to invest in hundreds of companies, including Google and Symantec. While Kleiner was starting , a former Fairchild executive named was launching another venture firm called Sequoia Capital, which has also invested in several hundred companies, such as Cisco and LinkedIn. Many of the companies funded by these two firms were led by entrepreneurs and executives who have gone on to become important investors. Companies like , Netscape, and PayPal spawned investment firms such as Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective, and 500 Startups. Our team at Endeavor Insight recently worked to quantify the impact of Fairchild Semiconductor and its co-founders. We identified over 130 Bay Area tech companies that were trading on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. Our analysis indicates that about 70 percent of these firms can be traced directly back to the founders and employees of Fairchild. The total impact of these businesses is staggering. The 92 public companies that can be traced back to Fairchild are now worth about $2.1 trillion, which is more than the annual GDP of Canada, India, or Spain. These companies also employ over 800,000 people. If we look beyond the publicly traded businesses listed above, Fairchild’s impact is even greater. In total, we can trace over 2,000 companies back to the firm’s eight co-founders. This includes companies such as Instagram, Palantir, Pixar, Nest, WhatsApp, Yammer and YouTube. The story of Fairchild illustrates how entrepreneurs can reshape their local communities. When successful founders generate new spin-off companies, mentor others and act as early-stage investors it increases the opportunities available to new generations of entrepreneurs. The intellectual, social, and financial capital that successful founders reinvest into new companies strengthens the local entrepreneurship community and enables successful hubs, like the original Silicon Valley, to develop. Fairchild trades on the with a market capitalization of around $2 billion. However, the full value of the company can only be measured by tracing the way the firm’s success has been reinvested into new founders and companies. By this measure, Fairchild is the Valley’s first trillion-dollar startup. It might even be the most important entrepreneurial company of the last hundred years. |
How Informed Consent Has Failed | Mary DeRosa | 2,014 | 7 | 26 | The quote above from Chief Justice Roberts in has implications far beyond the holding of that case. In rejecting the government’s strained analogies to wallets and address books, the Chief Justice recognized that technology has fundamentally changed things. Smartphones are and the law can no longer ignore that difference. Informed consent is a subject long overdue for such a wake-up call. Two recent stories demonstrate how the traditional informed consent model for consumer data has failed utterly to adapt to changes in the way technology uses data. In late June, researchers published results of a study that manipulated the News Feed of some Facebook users. Their purpose was to determine whether changes in the tone (positive or negative) of a user’s News Feed would affect that user’s emotions, as evidenced by subsequent posts. This research that was . Facebook argues that its use of data was because it was “part of ongoing research (that) companies do to test different products.” Facebook’s Data Use Policy at the time contained no specific reference to testing or research, although such language was added a few months after this study. Meanwhile, Google announced at its recent developer conference a new application programming interface, or API, that will make it easier for developers to use Gmail data in their apps. Apps could access email before, , few developers have used it. By making access easier with the new API, Google hopes to cement Gmail’s popularity with users by increasing access to apps that will improve user experience. Informed consent is a fundamental protection for consumer privacy. The underlying notion is that there are many uses of private information to which consumers will willingly agree, particularly if it means improved service or greater convenience. But each consumer is different, so they need sufficient information to make an informed decision. The traditional model for obtaining consent is to provide information in writing and seek agreement. With digital uses of data, this information usually comes in “terms of service” that are long and dense. Consumers rarely make their way through the information, . The Facebook story demonstrates the fundamental breakdown of this informed consent model. Facebook argues its Data Use Policy covered the emotion research. . But even if Facebook is right – indeed, even if the newer language that mentions research were in play – this is an informed consent failure. Would anyone seriously argue that Facebook users this kind of manipulation of their News Feed or examination of their data for this purpose? Some consumers would knowingly consent to research like this, but it is unlikely that a single one actually did. The Google story raises a different problem: volume. Google, which already scans Gmail content, is now opening its users’ data to access by countless app developers. App developers are mostly small companies, often unsophisticated about privacy and legal issues. As a result, apps are notoriously risky, . So the result will be a torrent of new uses of sensitive personal data – on Gmail now, but presumably other email services will follow. Some apps will have privacy policies, some will not. Users may be asked to “opt in” to the app’s use of their data, but they are likely to know little about what that means. And they will be inundated with these opportunities. The current informed consent model is incapable of keeping up. If the traditional mechanism for ensuring informed consent is hopelessly antiquated, what should replace it? First, companies must finally step up. In a technology industry acclaimed for its innovation, we have seen almost no creative thinking about how to acquire meaningful consent. The data industry might see little benefit: users’ confusion means more flexibility for them. But that is short-sighted. The of revelation, outrage, and apology that has dogged data-dependent companies will only intensify as technology accesses increasingly sensitive data and privacy concerns grow. Companies should look for ways to minimize private data use. (Google’s API has a useful feature that allows developers to restrict data access only to information needed to send an email.) They should also seek simple, clear, technology-relevant ways to inform of specific data uses that depart from consumer expectations. Government, too, must adjust. The FTC has been active in this area, taking action against more extreme privacy violations. But it is not yet demanding an innovative approach or recognizing the fundamental failure of the current model. The first step – and the hardest – is the one the Supreme Court took in We must recognize that the way companies deal with consumer data is now. Informed consent policy can no longer ignore that difference. |
How To Save Books | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 7 | 26 | It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was a time of triumph, it was a time of disaster, it was the publishing industry in 2014, just after mighty fired a new salvo in its by its $10/month Kindle Unlimited book subscription service. At first glance this might have seemed and … Looking through books on my wishlist, can't find any available on the new Kindle Unlimited. — Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) Final count: Of my 136 Kindle books, 18 are available as part of Kindle Unlimited. Looks like subscribing wouldn't have saved me dough. — Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) …given the absence of any books from the “Big Five” publishers. But, , self-published authors now account for 31% of total daily [Amazon] ebook sales regardless of genre … self-published authors are now earning nearly 40% of all ebook royalties on the Kindle store meaning that Kindle Unlimited is unlikely to be a complete flop. Which is all that Amazon wants from it, for now; it seems clear that their long-term strategy is to slowly ratchet up the pressure on traditional publishers until they give in and accept a model like Amazon Video, wherein consumers can either purchase individual episodes/shows/movies (Instant Video) or join a subscription service (Prime Instant Video.) That’s the same model that Apple has adopted for music: iTunes for purchases, Beats for subscriptions. I have been for subscription services myself, largely because, as Danny Crichton , we’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends: 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 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. …or are there? I am currently in the midst of a multi-month sabbatical from my to write a new novel on my own dime, presumably because I am insane. I say this even though I am, well, a real writer, if you’ll pardon the condescending phrase, who has previously had published by Big Five publishers, DC Comics, etc. (The new book is near-future utopian/dystopian science fiction, since you ask.) So I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I’m beginning to think that treating books like music or movies might be bad for us all. Authors don’t get performance revenue unless they are already at the top of the heap. But we want good authors to be paid well, because if there’s no money in the literary talent pool, it will get very shallow indeed. So maybe we should focus on what books offer that music and movies mostly don’t; the intimate, personal, long-term connection between author and reader, forged over many hours. It seems to me that asking people to pay for a book that connection is forged is kind of crazy, if you want to maximize revenue; and asking people to pay for books that don’t connect is just plain wrong. So I’m somewhat amazed that no start-up or e-book platform has, as far as I know, yet tried a model wherein readers pay for books they read them. I’m not talking about “read three chapters and pay for the rest” or any irritating nonsense like that. I’m talking about giving entire e-books away for free and then asking their readers to pay for them immediately after they finish reading them. The single moment when readers most want to give authors their money is the moment they finish a book that has transported them to another world or revolutionized their view of this one. It seems senseless not to take advantage of that, now that technology makes it possible. In theory authors can ask this already, of course, but there’s copious evidence that if you make paying for things even a little bit difficult, the vast majority of people will let that stop them. For this model to work, it would have to be built into the e-book platform itself: a call-to-action screen that pops up immediately after the last page of the book, and/or from time to time thereafter if ignored, and asks/allows the user to pay as much as they want in as little as one click. Think of the tip buttons in Square terminals. It’s true that asking for money after a performance is currently perceived as both much less lucrative and much less socially prestigious, like passing the hat after busking rather than selling tickets to the concert in advance. But even those tickets are essentially payment for previous entertainment, too; how many people pay to see musicians they’ve never heard of whose music they don’t know? This model would mean bad books won’t make any money; I’m very OK with that. It’s true that readers may be reluctant to give as much to authors known to be zillionaires; I’m OK with that too. And obviously it implicitly puts an enormous amount of trust and faith in the average reader; again, I don’t see this as a problem. Note also that it could complement other business models–for instance, it would be added to any subscription service–and it would be an obvious way to monetize a site such as . While I don’t think much of the dinosaur publishing industry, I have no illusions about Amazon’s altruism either. If books are to thrive despite (or because of) that great leveling bulldozer called the Internet, then we authors need to leverage what books do that other media does not. It seems to me it would be worth at least experimenting with paying after reading, as counterintuitive as that may sound. |
A Microsoft Surface Revenue Bet | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | After the , I tweeted that I thought it would do pretty well in the market. I should have clarified that I meant that in the context of prior Surface sales, but I can’t edit tweets after the fact, so here we are. Valleywag’s didn’t agree, and so we made a friendly wager on the matter. https://twitter.com/alex/status/468786044930760704 https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/468786104741953536 https://twitter.com/alex/status/468786214670049281 https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/468786295050088448 https://twitter.com/alex/status/468786467804692480 https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/468786621119463424 https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/468786721111674880 https://twitter.com/alex/status/468787046958764032 https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/468787141141864448 reports its earnings tomorrow, and will provide a fresh Surface revenue number as part of that release. I’ve confirmed with the company that the specific Surface figure will be broken out, as per usual. It seems, however, that I somewhat borked myself in the bet. As it turns out, the $500 million figure was . Surface revenue in the last quarter was (this is why you should never 8-K when you can 10-Q). So I skewed the threshold north by depending on a rounded statistic. Even more, I presumed that all pre-ordered Surface Pro 3s would see their revenue tallied in the fiscal period. Not so. Only revenue from Surface Pro 3s running Intel Core i5 chips will be counted, as systems running i3 and i7 chips shipped after the end of the quarter, and thus their top line will land in Microsoft’s fiscal first quarter (the current calendar quarter). So a large chunk of revenue that I thought existed the quarter we bet on doesn’t. Oops. So if I could take out a re-bet, I’d lower my Surface revenue forecasts by 25 to 30 percent. Though, when I’m wrong, I like to do it at full speed. Please accept this post as an oblation for being quite probably overly optimistic. |
Ambi Climate Wants To Make Summers In Asia More Bearable | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | Created by a Hong Kong startup, is the latest entrant in the smart air conditioner market. The smartphone-controlled device is designed to work with split-unit air conditioners that have an infrared sensor and use machine learning to keep your home at a comfortable temperature while reducing energy consumption. Ambi Climate’s first target markets are in Asia, but it plans to roll out in other countries as well. It started raising funds on , an Asia-focused crowdfunding site, today. Ambi Climate is the first product from Ambi Labs, which was founded by Julian Lee, Paul Sykes, and Timothy Chang. Lee first became interested in adding a smartphone-controlled interface to his home air conditioner to keep his 12-year-old husky comfortable during the summer when Lee wasn’t at home. The device uses machine learning to take in information about your home, temperature preferences, and local weather patterns. Over the past two years, Ambi Labs surveyed 4,000 consumers in 10 Asian countries (China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Australia, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong). The startup found that many users keep their air conditioner unit set to the lowest temperature and then switch it off when it gets too cold. “The resulting ‘yo-yoing’ in temperature, as some of our research participants called it, is both uncomfortable and a waste of energy. They have also complained about needing to adjust their ACs as much as every 30 minutes, and some habitually wake up in the middle of the night to adjust the settings,” Ambi Labs’ communication strategist, Liz Choi, told TechCrunch in an email. Ambi Climate seeks to solve “yo yo-ing” by using machine learning to predict how conditions in a room will change. “Before you even feel uncomfortable, Ambi Climate will preemptively make changes to your AC settings to maintain your comfort. Ambi Climate achieves this by learning about your home (how it heats up and cools down), your local weather (e.g. if you have a west or east facing window), and by learning your preferences (e.g. what conditions you like at different times of the day). Based on results from our alpha testers, we can save up to 30% of AC energy consumption.” Ambi Labs is first targeting nine markets in Asia (Japan, Korea, Australia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Hong Kong) because of “their high propensity to adopt new technology, and a high penetration rate of smartphone ownership and air conditioner usage,” says Choi. In total, these seven countries have a total of about 95 million households and a 78 percent air conditioner unit penetration rate, compared to 37 percent in Asia overall, with most being infrared split units. “Among our geographical target markets, we perceive that there are 37 million households which have both split-unit ACs and smartphone usage. Considering that the average Asian household contains 1.7 ACs and our retail price of US$150, we project a long-term potential market size of over US$9.5 billion,” Choi adds. Ambi Climate’s main competitors include , which makes controllers for heating and air conditioning units; air conditioner controller ; and smart thermostat . Tado predicts when people will be at home and turns their ACs on and off accordingly, which Ambi Climate does not do because it found that most of its potential users in Asia turn on their units as soon as they get home. Like Sensibo, Ambi Climate focuses on maintaining a comfortable temperature, but Choi says Ambi Climate differentiates by also predicting the thermal environment and using Humidex instead of the PMV comfort rating system, which Sensibo uses. While Nest controls central AC’s, Ambi Climate works with infrared controlled units. The company is currently building 500 beta test units and plans to go into mass production in the first quarter of 2015 after Ambi Labs gathers beta tester feedback. After rolling out in Asia, Ambi Labs will target other markets where split-unit air conditioners are popular, including China, the Middle East and North Africa, and Southern Europe. For more information, check out Ambi Climate’s page. |
Airbnb Drops Homejoy From Cleaning Trial, Handybook Remains On In Three Test Markets | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | Earlier this year, began testing for hosts that would be offered at a slight discount to traditional maid services they’d book themselves. The idea was to improve the quality of the guest experience while offering a perk to hosts who frequently make their homes available to strangers. On the flip side, it had the potential to drive incremental volume to a couple of cleaning startups that it had partnered with for the trial. Last week, however, it notified hosts that one of the two startups it had partnered with for the trial would no longer be available for booking. The partner being left behind is , while will remain on as part of the trial. The cleaning trial began in ‘s home market of San Francisco, and over time expanded to New York and Los Angeles. Those were three markets that both and operated in. Late last year it , , to improve its quality of service and has been gradually looking to standardize expectations for homes that are listed on the platform. While has been careful to message the service as a test it could make more widely available to hosts in the future, cleaning is an obvious differentiator as the company is trying to position itself as a global hospitality brand. An earlier mentions both Homejoy and Handybook as partners for the trial, but last week Airbnb emailed hosts to tell them that Handybook would be the company’s partner for cleanings going forward. For Handybook, the change could mean a small increase in volume in a few of the markets it operates in. Having Airbnb as a partner could also help drive adoption in other markets, if the company decides to make cleaning services available in other cities. A representative from Homejoy confirmed that it was no longer working with Airbnb on the trial with the following statement: After careful consideration we decided to end our partnership together with Airbnb. Though we enjoyed collaborating with Airbnb, our focus remains on growing our core business globally and bringing happy homes to our community and improving the lives of our home service professionals. Here’s the email sent to Airbnb hosts: Hi [XXXX], We have an important update to share with you! Airbnb Cleaning is now partnering with Handybook in San Francisco. Hosts like you have told us that reliability and quality are paramount when it comes to a great cleaning service. We’ve built a successful product with Handybook in New York that focuses on these top priorities: 1) Reliability
Handybook guarantees service for any cleanings scheduled at least 24 hours in advance. In case of emergency, Handybook has a response team that ensures your guests arrive to a clean listing. 2) Quality
Handybook selects their top-rated cleaners for Airbnb hosts. These cleaners receive special Airbnb training so they understand what’s most important to hosts and guests. To make this transition seamless, Handybook will use the same cleaning preferences you’ve already set. If Homejoy has your keys, we’ll reach out to you about transferring them to Handybook or returning them to you. Take a look at Handybook’s pricing, below, which varies slightly from Homejoy’s. We’re excited to introduce you to Handybook’s cleaning service! Our goal is to make hosting easier for you, so if you have any questions simply reply to this email and we’ll get back to you right away. Best,
The Airbnb Cleaning Team |
Rocket Internet’s Easy Taxi Raises $40M Series D To Expand In Asia, Latin America | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 7 | 26 | , Rocket Internet’s taxi calling app, announced today that it has raised a Series D round of $40 million, led by with participation from , the investment arm of German retail giant Tengelmann Group. This brings Easy Taxi’s total as Rocket Internet seeks to establish Easy Taxi’s presence in emerging markets and defend against local competitors. This is in-line with Rocket Internet’s overall strategy, which is to take successful e-commerce startup models (like taxi calling apps) and bring them to markets that competitors have not yet entered or still have a relatively small footprint. In a statement, Easy Taxi co-CEO Tallis Gomes says the company, which launched in 2011, has added more than 150,000 drivers over the past year, bringing its total to about 185,000. The app is available in 160 cities in 30 countries, concentrated in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. has relatively little competition in the Middle East and Africa, where other taxi calling apps include , which have launched in a limited number of cities. In Southeast Asia, Easy Taxi faces more challengers, including , which claims to be the largest taxi app in that region. In April, GrabTaxi . Uber is also keenly focused on rolling out its services in Southeast Asian cities, but there it is instead of focusing on lower-priced options like uberX. “We are very proud to have secured this new round of funding, which will allow us to continue our growth trajectory in existing markets, advance our technology, scale our operations and improve our service towards more audiences and geographies,” said Easy Taxi co-CEO Dennis Wang. “In particular, the expertise of our new investors aligns with our ambition to further increase our market share in Asia and consolidate our leadership in Latin America.” |
Microsoft Open Tech Brings Support For More Open-Source Projects To Azure | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | At O’Reilly’s in Portland, Ore., today, Microsoft’s subsidiary two new partnerships that bring support for more open source technologies to the Microsoft Azure platform. Developers will now be able to use Azure with , for example, a service for creating machine images for multiple platforms from one source configuration. The other service the team now supports is , a tool for managing heterogeneous data center infrastructures. OpenNebula now supports hybrid cloud deployments on Azure, and existing OpenNebula users — many of which are large telecom firms — can now move their applications to Microsoft’s cloud. They could, of course, use Microsoft’s own Azure tools to manage these deployments, but many of these users have made deep investments in OpenNebula already. It’s worth noting that Amazon and a number of other cloud vendors already support this service on their platforms. “We believe in the coexistence of the private and public cloud, and all the team is excited about giving the OpenNebula users using the hybrid model the possibility of on-demand access to a leading cloud provider like Microsoft Azure,” said Rubén S. Montero, Chief Architect of the OpenNebula project in a statement today. As for Packer, Microsoft will soon allow developers to create their customized images (including on Windows Server), save them to Azure’s and then quickly launch them from there. While this may sound like a replacement for the likes of Chef and Puppet, Microsoft notes that it actually plays together nicely with these technologies. As Doug Mahugh, Microsoft Open Tech’s lead technical evangelist, and Robin Bender Ginn, a senior technical evangelist at Open Tech, told me earlier today, Microsoft OpenNebula’s existing users look at Azure as a virtual datacenter that they can now move to if they choose to move away from their existing solutions. Microsoft argues that these two new partnerships complement the work Open Tech is already doing in the cloud space. As Mahugh told me, the team is constantly looking at what developers are interested in and how it can support them. Right now, that’s containers (and virtualization in general), for example, so Open Tech teamed up with Google and others to , Google’s technology for , to Azure. For many people, the fact that Microsoft does open source still comes as a bit of a surprise, but as Open Tech launches more of these projects, this surprise is slowly making way for acceptance. Open Tech now has a rotating group of over 200 engineers who work on a large variety of projects, and their contributions are clearly starting to make a difference in how Microsoft is perceived in the open source world. “A few years ago, the news was that we were at these events [like OSCON],” Mahugh said. “Now, that’s not news anymore. Now people want to know what we’ve been doing lately.” |
How Monsieur Shook Up Disrupt SF With Its Bartending Robot | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | And we’re back with episode two of our video series, which shows the good, the bad, and the ugly moments startups go through when competing in the Disrupt competition. After enduring a few too many run-ins with the slow service at Applebee’s, the founders of set out to shake up the bartending industry. In case you missed our coverage of the company’s launch at Disrupt SF 2013, Monsieur is . With remote ordering, varying drink strength and consumption tracking, is quite possibly the world’s smartest bartender. Monsieur is brought to you by a group of Georgia Tech mechanical engineers and computer scientists. In true startup fashion, when Monsieur launched, the company was completely bootstrapped and running operations out of founder ‘ parent’s garage. To prototype the device, the team got creative and used plywood, spray paint and duct tape to figure out the mechanics behind creating the perfect drink. Monsieur has gone through many iterations since then and completed a following Disrupt last fall. The company raised $140,000 to bring the device to clubs, sports venue boxes, and other VIP venues. In a phone call this week, Monsieur’s chairman Paul Judge told TechCrunch that the company has completed a pilot at Philips Arena in Atlanta, and has been showcased by the National Restaurant Association, which has led to a surge in orders from restaurants and hotels. At the moment, Monsieur has several million dollars of orders in the pipeline in addition to the Kickstarter orders, and is on track to ship upwards of 1,000 units. As we get more comfortable with smarter devices and using , it’s not a huge leap to think a gizmo like Monsieur could take the place of self-service cocktail setups found at bottle service tables in nightclubs. Just this spring, we’ve seen the launch of for photographers and Google Ventures invested in a “ . Watch the video above to hear the behind-the-scenes story of how Monsieur got its start and what it was like for the founders as they competed in the startup Battlefield.
|
Fly Or Die: LG G Watch | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | Like anything in this world, the has its pros and its cons. It’s LG’s first venture into smartwatch territory, meaning that the company is just now figuring out its design aesthetic in the space. That said, it looks and feels surprisingly nice, with options for both black and gold. The G Watch also has pretty solid battery life, despite the fact that its 1.65-inch IPS 280×280 display is always on. However, our own in his review. The smartwatch is outfitted with a Snapdragon 400 1.2GHz processor with 512 MB RAM and 4GB of on-board storage. The question isn’t necessarily over the G Watch. It’s one of many new smartwatches in the market, all the way from the early Pebble to the forthcoming Moto 360. The more important question is whether you want a smartwatch. At $229, LG’s G Watch might not be the best option out there, especially if you’re willing to wait and see what other companies have in store and how the market reacts to them. If you don’t have time, the G Watch will still make you feel futuristic, according to guest co-host . So will the LG G Watch fly or die? Only time can tell. |
World Cup Provides A Boost To Netflix Due To Smart TV Adoption In Latin America | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | It might seem counter-intuitive, but will probably get a boost from the viewership of live sports — at least in Latin America. That’s because, in preparation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, a large number of consumers in the region upgraded their TVs to Internet-connected sets that can access its on-demand streaming service. Today in its , pointed to improved growth from a number of different new connected devices. That includes set-top boxes from Virgin Media in the U.K., as well as the availability of Netflix on TiVo boxes from Suddenlink, RCN, Grande, and Atlantic Broadband. It also highlighted its upcoming availability on Android TV connected devices from the likes of Sony, Sharp, and others. One of the side benefits from being on pretty much every connected TV platform is that, when someone upgrades their TV set, it will be instantly available. That appears to be the case in Latin America, where Netflix is seeing more viewers accessing its service from their new TVs than in any other market. From the letter: Post World Cup, the number of Smart TVs used for Netflix viewing in Latin American countries is at a new high; in fact, the percentage of viewing from Smart TVs in Latin America is higher than any other region we serve. Members accessing Netflix on a big screen generally watch more and retain better than members using smaller devices. While Netflix usually sees some decline in viewership during major sporting events like the Olympics or the World Cup, it stands to benefit from the number of consumers who will have direct access to its service on brand new TV sets. Thanks to the month-long tournament, it’s got a lot of potential new subscribers that could sign up now that their days aren’t filled with . After all, they’ve gotta watch something on those pretty new TVs, right? |
Another Screen Shot Of The Upcoming Windows Start Menu Leaks | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | Another week, another leak. Today we have a new, of the upcoming return of the Start Menu to . I won’t bore you; here it is: For reference, here’s the — keep in mind the design similarity and implied customizability of the Menu: And finally, what Microsoft showed off at Build: It appears that leaks are pointing in the same direction. As always, be wary of leaks, ‘leaks,’ and “leaks.” But if the Start menu did come out looking something like the above when it is released, I would not be surprised. Microsoft declined to comment. |
Watch iOS 8’s Latest Beta Transcribe Voice To Text In Near-Real Time | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av0ysFyXAlY&w=640&h=390] Apple’s iOS 8 beta 4 just hit the interwebs today, and among the new features found therein, there’s a cool new visualization of the iOS dictation feature (seen in the video above) that shows your words being transcribed almost in real-time as you say them. It’s a feature that previously appeared in Siri, but it’s new to the dictate option found in Messages and other places with text entry, and it’s pretty darn cool. This live text rendering is something that Microsoft also made a big deal about with , but it’s a feature that has more value than just impressing the pants off of users. It provides you with a live preview of what your phone is interpreting from your speech, which means that if you spot an error or it makes a mistake, you can see it as it happens instead of having to wait for the whole message to be processed and rendered as text. That should make for fewer errors and less frustration using the feature overall, which is more than just an aesthetically pleasing side effect of what is still also indeed a very cool thing to look at. |
Microsoft Starts Pre-Orders For The Surface Pro 3 Docking Station | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | revealed its Surface Pro 3 earlier this year, and now there’s a new accessory up for sale, following the official shipping launch of the new Surface last month. The new gadget is a , which provides a host of external input and output ports for the Surface Pro 3, including three USB 3.0 ports, a 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet port, and a security lock slot, along with some others. The new Microsoft dock replaces the existing Surface Pro dock, with a design designed to fit the new Surface Pro 3 snugly, propping up the tablet-style portable PC at a comfortable viewing angle, too. The other ports that it brings to the table include 2 USB 2.0 ports, a Mini DisplayPort on the dock (in addition to the one on the Surface Pro 3 itself) and a security lock slot so that people can’t just pick up your slate and walk away with it. With the USB 3.0 ports on the Surface Pro 3 itself, you get a total of six USB 3.0 ports to play with thanks to the new dock, and you can output video to two external monitors as well as the Surface Pro 3 screen itself. The Surface Pro 3 Docking Station is up for pre-order now, but it won’t ship until August 15, 2014, and it isn’t cheap at $199. It may well appeal to mobile workers who also want to keep the home fires lit when they’re in the office, however. |
Netflix Passes 50M Subscribers As It Reports Better Than Expected Q2 Revenue Of $1.34B | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | This afternoon following the closing bell, announced the financial results of its second quarter, including revenue of $1.34 billion and earnings per share of $1.15. Analysts had expected Netflix to report $1.33 billion in revenue and $1.16 per share in earnings. The company, which traded up around 1.7% during regular trading in a down market, is up around 1% after-hours following its mixed earnings report. Netflix’s year-ago second quarter in 2013 was , with top-line of $1.07 billion and earnings per share of $0.49. In its most recent three-quarter period, Netflix saw its total subscriber base grow by 1.69 million to 50.05 million. Its domestic subscriber base grew 570,000, to 36.24 million. Its international subscriber base grew 1.12 million, to 13.8 million. The company had predicted that it would add 1.46 million new subscribers in the period, ending at an estimated total of 49.81 million. It beat that forecast. In its , Netflix picked up 4 million new subscribers, of which 2.25 million were domestic. The company ended the period with around $1.7 billion in cash, equivalents, and short-term investments. Looking ahead, Netflix expect its second quarter revenue from streaming to total $1.224 billion, up from this quarter’s $1.146 billion. To that end, it expects its international loss from its streaming business abroad to grow from $15 million this period, to a nearly treble figure of $42 million. That’s a decent chunk of the $40 million revenue increase it expects from that business segment. The company indicated in its letter to investors that it will introduce “in-store gift cards” in the Fall. Recall that Netflix still has a large and healthy DVD business. Healthy in that it makes money, though its figures are in decline. The group contributed $92.8 million in profits during the quarter, on 6.3 million subscribers. Churn, oddly enough, is down, year-over-year, from 475,000 in the second quarter of 2013, to 391,000 in its most recent quarter. That decline could be due to the reductions coming from a smaller total subscriber pool. Investors have bid Netflix slightly higher following the report, meaning that the larger Netflix report didn’t fail to meet expectations, and contained no surprising material weaknesses, it seems, but also that the street isn’t blown away. The company’s net income of $71 million was up more than 100% from its year-ago tally. |
An iPad App To Make All Your Selfies Go 3D | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | Itseez3D, the first app to partner with computer vision technology company , can turn any picture you take with your iOS camera into a 3D object. Naturally, of the good sir : And I was convinced to get as well:
The app works by mounting the Structure Sensor to an iPad and then roving the camera eye every which way over the subject you are taking a 3D picture of. You could theoretically take a 3D picture of yourself but you’ll have to be sure to get every angle, not blink and hold the camera steady. Best to get a friend to help you with this instead. But just think of all the fun you’ll have turning you and your friends into virtual characters for gaming…or bobble head dolls. It works by uploading captured images into A 3D cloud such as and then implementing the image in a game, mobile app or downloading onto a 3D printer. This kind of tech used to require an expensive 3D scanning unit that was tied to a game console or a computer. Now anyone with an iPad and the Structure Sensor can create 3D models using objects they see around them. This opens up a world of possibilities for engineers, designers, inventors, architects and manufactures. One example might be an architect creating a 3D tour of what the building will look like inside and out before it’s ever built or an interior designer creating a virtual room to display their work. Using the app to create objects for Oculus Rift is another possibly cool application here. Occipital spokesman Adam Rodnitzky pointed out that virtual objects can interact precisely with the geometry of the physical world in Oculus, including occlusions. Fans of the Battle Star Galactica prequel will most likely get a kick out of a game that uses their own precise likeness in a hologram world. As you can see in the pictures above, the augmented reality technology of Occipital can capture some pretty high quality imaging using the ItSeez3D app as well. Printing exact objects into the real world mainly depends on the quality of the 3D printer. However, objects kept in virtual reality can remain intact. The Structure Sensor that works with ItSeez3D was launched on a this last fall. That campaign raised over $100k in the first 3 hours and continued on rake in a total of nearly $1.3M from over 3500 backers. That campaign challenged developers to create reality games and mobile apps using the Structure SDK. “We recognized the immense potential of Structure Sensor early on, and Itseez3D represents our efforts to weave advanced computer vision technology,” says Itseez3D creator Victor Erukhimov. While the app is designed for iPad, a good hacker will be able to rig it for use on any iOS device, including a smartphone. It can technically hook up with any iOS device that has a Lightning dock connector. Occipital is also considering making a sensor to fit specifically on phone cameras so users can make 3D models of any object on the go and then upload that to the cloud to, say, 3D print it at a later date. While Structure Sensor will be required to scan images, users can still download Itseez3D to view sample models. While this is the first third party app offering from Occipital, they’ve made it easy for more like it coming down the line. Developers are able to use the Structure SDK to create an app in Xcode and hit deploy. Occipital also bundles a few other in-house apps for gaming and other applications to use with the Structure Sensor. The actual Structure Sensor from Occipital runs for $379, or $499 with the app bundle. ItSeez3D is free in the . Not sure Alex or I need a 3D bobble head of ourselves on our desks (trust, turns up all the time here), but it is kinda cool to think of playing myself in a virtual game or walking through and seeing what a building will look like in 3D before it’s built. |
Facebook’s $2 Billion Acquisition Of Oculus Closes, Now Official | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | now owns . The of the virtual reality pioneer announced in March has been approved by regulators and today become official. The FCC’s anti-trust team greenlighted the deal in April. Now it has passed the California Department Of Corporations fairness hearing and will go into effect. The exact price of the acquisition came out to $2,001,985,000. The VR startup still plans to operate somewhat independently and maintain its main offices in the Irvine and Los Angeles areas. “We’re looking forward to an exciting future together, building the next computing platform and reimagining the way people communicate,” the companies said in a joint statement. Along with the $400 million in cash and roughly $1.6 billion in stock that paid for , an additional $300 million in cash and stock incentives will be awarded to Oculus if it hits certain milestones. The $1.6 billion in stock was based on a $69.35 share price average from the 20 trading days preceding Wall Street at the deal, with Facebook’s share price sinking from $64.89 to $60.38 in the day after the acquisition was announced. $FB would fall as low as $56.75 but has since recovered to close at $69.40. “We’re going to focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games. Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this,” Facebook CEO said at the time of the initial announcement. So beyond playing first-person shooters and flying spaceships, Oculus could reinvent meetings, messaging, social events and more. We’ll see in September when Oculus reveals what it’s been working on at its first . |
The Majority Of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | Though the app stores continue to fill up with ever more mobile applications, the reality is that most of these are not sustainable businesses. According to a new report out this morning, half (50%) of iOS developers and even more (64%) Android developers are operating below the “app poverty line” of $500 per app per month. This detail was one of many released in (for Q3 2014), which was based on a large-scale online developer survey and one-to-one interviews with mobile app developers. This report included the responses from over 10,000 developers from 137 countries worldwide, taking place over 5 weeks in April and May. That mobile app developers are challenged in getting their apps , downloaded and then actually used, is a well-known fact. But seeing the figures associated with exactly how tough it is out there is rather revealing. It seems the “1%” is not only a term applicable to the economy as a whole – it’s also taking place within the app store economy, too. The report’s authors detail the specifics around the trend where a tiny fraction of developers – actually, it’s 1.6% to be exact – generate most of the app store revenue. Slyly referencing the “ ,” the report’s analysis groups the estimated 2.9 million mobile app developers worldwide into a handful of different categories for easy reference: the “have-nothings,” the “poverty-stricken,” the “strugglers,” and the “haves.” And, as you can tell, most of these categories don’t sound too great. Accounting for 47% of app developers, the “have nothings” include the 24% of app developers – who are interested in making money, it should be noted – who make nothing at all. Meanwhile, 23% make something, but it’s under $100 per month. These developers are sometimes unable to cover the basic costs of development PCs, test devices, and an account to publish apps, the report states. However, in case you’re wondering why , it’s because those who prioritize iOS app development are less likely to find themselves in this group, with 35% earning $0-$100 per month, versus the 49% of Android developers. There’s also a portion of the app developer population (35%), some of whom aren’t interested in making money. The report refers to these part-timers as “hobbyists” or “explorers,” who may be just testing the waters, or working on apps that have yet to launch. Still, more than half of this crowd is interested in making some money from their applications, while less than half make $0 per month. Meanwhile, 22% are “poverty stricken” developers whose apps make $100 to $1,000 per app per month. At this rate, the companies behind the apps couldn’t afford standard app developer salaries. 15% of developers make between $100-$500 per app per month and 7% make between $500-$1,000 per app per month. When combined with the above “have nots,” that means 62% of developers are below the “app poverty line” of $500 per app per month, and some 69% can’t sustain full-time development. The “strugglers” are a bit more fortunate. 19% of developers earn $1,000 to $10,000 per app per month, which could either be a supplement to full-time work or even a something of a good living, if in the high-end of that band. But these apps also tend to be more complex, requiring more development effort, and possibly ongoing server costs which can cut into the developer’s bottom line. Finally, there are the “haves.” The top 12% make more than $10,000 per app per month. 17% of iOS-first developers are in this group versus 9% of Android-first developers. To give you a sense of this group’s members: a rank-100 grossing game on iOS in the U.S. would expect to make $10,000 per day. However, , only the top 1.6% of developers make more than $500,000 per app per month, but of those who do, some are earning tens of millions per month. The next 2% – those who make between $100,000 and $500,000 per month – are making more than 96.4% of the rest of the app developers out there. “More than 50% of app businesses are not sustainable at current revenue levels, even if we exclude the part-time developers that don’t need to make any money to continue,” states the report. “A massive 60-70% may not be sustainable long-term, since developers with in-demand skills will move on to more promising opportunities.” The interesting thing about these numbers, besides just indicating how hard it is to have an app really hit big, is that the market economics are actually encouraging developers and users alike to see most apps as disposable things, not businesses you remain committed to long-term. These days, many mobile app startups look more like resumés for developers who will soon abandon their work following acqui-hire M&A deals. And the continuous exits and new launches – where some startups are even being scooped up pre-launch – are creating an app consumer user base which thinks of apps as things that will quickly disappear (if you’re not Facebook, I suppose). That makes it harder for many users today to buy into claims that an app wants to be your go-to home for important, lasting communications – like messaging clients aimed at businesses or the apps that want to store all your precious photo memories. And of course, most games have limited life-spans, too. But on the flip side, today’s younger consumers are wired differently from their Gen X or Y (and older) counterparts. They’re fine with impermanent messages, data loss be damned. This group of consumers is an ideal audience for the increasingly disposable nature of mobile apps – at least while the current consumer app continues. |
RadiumOne Issues Not-Quite-Apology For Ousting CEO Who Pled Guilty To Domestic Violence | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | Ad platform RadiumOne and its former CEO have issued a that is intended to “bring an end to all disputes they have had.” RadiumOne in April following media criticism of his of misdemeanor battery and domestic violence battery. “The Board did not intend to hurt Gurbaksh,” the statement reads. The words “sorry” or “apologize” weren’t used, but the joint statement says the two parties have resolved their dispute. Though it’s not explicitly stated here, the language suggests that this could be connected to some undisclosed settlement behind the scenes, such as agreeing to compensate Chahal for his termination. “This statement released today reflects an agreement between RadiumOne and Gurbaksh Chahal to bring an end to all disputes they have had,” the statement begins. The announcement could draw criticism to RadiumOne; many supported its decision to banish Chahal after police said they had a security video of him hitting his girlfriend 117 times on August 5, 2013 (the video was thrown out of court). The Board had always intended Gurbaksh to lead the company, and recognizes the enormous contributions he has made to RadiumOne. The Board knows that many people, including Gurbaksh and his family, have suffered tremendously. The Board did not intend to hurt Gurbaksh or his family by its decision, and recognizes that Gurbaksh’s termination made an already difficult situation for Gurbaksh and his family worse. The company also notes: “From its inception in 2009, RadiumOne grew tremendously, and quickly became profitable and valuable, under the leadership of its founder and last CEO, .” This contradicts the internal memo from RadiumOne attained by Re/code after Chahal was fired. That memo said: “Given recent developments, it became clear that Gurbaksh’s ability to lead the company had been severely compromised by the legal proceedings and ensuing developments.” You have left me with no other options but to seek legal recourse. And, now will have to face severe legal consequences individually for this in the court of law.” Today’s statement indicates he’s no longer suing. That could mean that RadiumOne agreed to settle with Chahal. With the company trying to go public, it may have thought it was better to remove uncertainty and quash the legal attack with a cash or stock settlement rather than letting it loom over the IPO. Chahal is now working on launching a new startup called , which is a marketing platform for handling all sorts of programmatic and real-time bid advertising plus analytics from one piece of software. Unfortunately, the sullied reputation of its founder may make it tough to get off the ground. The full joint statement is below: |
Latest iOS 8 Beta Update Includes Tips, An App That Shows Features You Might Miss | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | Announced , iOS 8 slightly refines the look debuted last year while adding a bunch of new features like the ability to interact with notifications, smoothly transition between working on your phone and laptop, and new ways to message people. Since its announcement, Apple has steadily rolled out these new features and apps in periodic beta releases. As and other Apple blogs picked up this morning, the latest release includes a new Tips app pointing out features and shortcuts that aren’t immediately apparent, as well as the steps necessary to turn them on or off in settings. In addition to the app, the company has also launched a for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Both the app and site currently show the same tips, like how to respond to an iMessage directly from a notification in iOS 8 or how to use Siri without pushing any buttons. Both methods of accessing tips also let users leave feedback. The iOS app in the current beta lets you “Like” a tip, while the web page has buttons for “Helpful” or “Not helpful” under each trick. While there are only six tricks shown at the moment, Apple says that it’ll be adding one per week. At that rate, it should have all of the major new features in iOS 8 covered — assuming the Tips app makes it to the final consumer release this fall. |
Yahoo Buys Mobile Analytics Firm Flurry For North Of $200M | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | has made no secret of its ambitions and advances in mobile, reporting 450 million monthly active users and search and display mobile ad revenues growing 100%. In CEO Marissa Mayer’s words, Yahoo is a “mobile first company.” Now, sources say that Yahoo has closed in on an acquisition that could potentially boost its role in mobile further: it is buying , the mobile app analytics and advertising startup, with a price that could be anywhere between $300 million and $1 billion. Kara Swisher is also reporting that Yahoo in the company. : A source is telling us that the price was substantially lower, clocking at around $200-$300M. And Yahoo has . As one on a Secret note about the rumor described it, “The price will be low if it’s value[d] as an ad tech company, high if it’s valued based on the analytics SDK footprint. Marisa [sic] likes to overpay for things.” We have reached out both to and for comment. We’d been hearing for a while now that Flurry was on the market, with one source suggesting it was looking for a price of around $700 million – $800 million. Other potential buyers, we heard, included Amazon. But given how far Amazon itself has advanced in building to court more developers, it looks like that ship sailed on its own. The Secret posted about a Flurry sale to Yahoo is now deleted, it seems, but this is how it looked: One source close to Flurry says the company has been “racing toward a sale” and confirmed that Yahoo was looking like the most likely buyer for a while now, with a sale made public by the end of the summer. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in San Francisco, Flurry is one of the largest companies in the area of app analytics. It’s an area that has seen some consolidation. For example, Onavo was . AppAnnie has . And Twitter has also made a number of acquisitions that have boosted its mobile analytics capabilities. In Flurry’s own , “Since the launch of the smartphone, Flurry has helped grow the app economy into a $100+ billion industry.” By that, it’s referring to the fact that it works with some 170,000 developers, picking up data from 150 billion app sessions each month, to provide information to app publishers about their audiences, app usage and app performance, providing insights to improve how apps work. And to improve how apps make money. Flurry uses that data, for example, to power its advertising platform, which is used by brands to target specific audiences on apps in Flurry’s network, and by developers to monetise their apps with more relevant inventory. It has raised close to $74 million, with backers including Borealis Ventures, Crosslink Capital, DFJ, Draper Richards, First Round, InterWest Parnters, Menlo Ventures and Union Square Ventures. Of course, Yahoo seems to be a strong candidate for . But you can see where Flurry fits well with Yahoo’s existing business focus, specifically across mobile, advertising and B2B products. Especially as the company continues to see on its more legacy businesses like desktop display advertising revenue and search revenue. Specifically, what Flurry could give to Yahoo is not just a boost in mobile advertising revenues, but, as Yahoo builds out its ad tech business, a more central role in how others are monetising and using mobile. Effectively, this gives Yahoo another strong string to its mobile bow: while it builds out its own apps and app inventory, and advertising to run across them, Yahoo could be bringing in a platform that could become the go-to place for other mobile players to boost and develop their own app businesses. “Flurry draws in more behavioral data from mobile apps than any other company, and we put it to work to help app marketers build a high quality audience,” Flurry . “Flurry serves video, banners and interstitial ads using the most advanced targeting technology in mobile today to increase installs, campaign ROI and retention. Cross promoting your own apps is always free with Flurry.” Yahoo says that the 450 million monthly active mobile users it recorded in Q2 was over 100% growth over two years (in 2012 the figure was 200 million). Mayer, in her earnings report remarks, also noted that the time spent by its audience on mobile was up by 79% in the last year. She said that the company has “more than 400 Yahoos working exclusively on building iOS and Android apps.” She also mentioned mobile search as a place for further concentration — an area where Flurry’s mobile app analytics could also come in usefully. “We really believe that the mobile search experience to be completely different than that of traditional desktop search,” she said. “There is a clear opportunity here and we are continuing to look at ways to deliver more innovative, more intuitive search experiences on mobile phones.” In the search for new growth and business lines that could potentially give the company a stronger counterbalance against Google, Yahoo has been building up its mobile business, both in terms of products and talent to develop and run them. A lot of this has come by way of acquisitions. Since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO in 2012, there have been either directly or indirectly related to mobile products (we’re listing them below for those interested in keeping track). That’s not counting IntoNow, a social TV app Yahoo acquired in 2011 before Mayer joined the company. IntoNow’s co-founder and CEO Adam Cahan is now the SVP overseeing all mobile and emerging products at Yahoo. Recent mobile acquisitions, most recent first: (H/T ) |
Tango Luring Developers To Its Platform With New $25 Million Global Games Fund | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | Months after raising more than , is looking to stand out in the messaging app space by built on its network and even make investments in exceptional developers. This comes a bit more more than a year after to third-party game developers with the release of its software development kit. At the time, the company said that it was having such success with games running within its app that it would be ranked on app store charts in the games category. Like Secret and other social apps, keeps track of identity using your phone number and the contacts in your phone’s address book to build its social graph. This means that when you start up a game with Tango functionality, you don’t have to re-find your friends to add them in yet another app. According to Jim Ying, Tango’s new VP of games publishing, acting as a social layer across dozens of games has increased user engagement two- to three-fold. A year into its efforts as a gaming platform, Tango has more than 40 partners and adds 2-4 games games per week. Ying says Tango plans to continue adding games at roughly the same pace with its new publishing efforts, though it will be aiming at bringing in more high-quality free-to-play titles monetized by in-app purchases. The is simple: Tango has 200 million highly-engaged users who are used to trying out games featured in its messaging app. Like Facebook, it can get people to download a game with prominent placement of install ads and get users to come back through social features and even ads outside of their app. Ying adds that they aren’t looking to promote or invest in “flash in the pan” viral hits like Flappy bird, but something that will keep gamers coming back to interact with their friends. While it’s , developers making clones of the biggest hits should look for other opportunities. Over the last few years, messaging apps have become ecosystems in themselves, offering chat, voice and video calling, games, stickers, music, and more. With gaming dominating app store downloads and revenue, becoming a game developer, publisher, and platform is a bet that the trend will continue and that Tango can carve out a niche as a place for people to play games together. |
Watch Two Teams Of Gamers Compete For $6.5M Right Now | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | It’s Monday which means you, my friend, deserve a break. As it turns out, today is the final day of , a Dota 2 — that’s a video game, in case you are quite behind — tournament that has a total prize pool of more than $10 million. The finals, which are live right now, will divvy up to the two winning teams. Whichever can take down the best of five series will walk away with more than $5 million, or around half of the total prize pool. Never heard of Dota 2? It’s on ESPN now, and has millions of players around the world. Hundreds of thousands are tuning into the tournament. Grab a coffee, and take a peek:
|
General Harmonics Is Basically Pied Piper From “Silicon Valley” | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | is a small startup from Canada that’s looking to revolutionize the way we stream media. And rather than risk sounding like I’m writing some kind of self-parody, I’ll be blunt about it: they’re basically Pied Piper from HBO’s Silicon Valley, only with a few decades more experience and technology that’s way farther along. For those unfamiliar with the show, the protagonists have started a company that makes compression software that makes files incredibly small, allowing for faster downloads and taking up less storage than they would otherwise. What General Harmonic’s technology does is similar in outcome but entirely different in implementation. Instead of compressing files down to ever smaller sizes, the company looks at media as or very detailed descriptions of the parts they’re composed of. For instance, that means that a song is seen in terms of its vocals and the instruments played. The description of each of those elements takes up less space than the actual digital audio file would — so much less, General Harmonics claims it can deliver CD-quality music in one-twentieth the original file size. In a demo app tested on AT&T’s 3G service last week (we were indoors and suffering from a bad connection), the company showed off some of what their encoding system allows for. You can have a -like feature where you hold your phone up to playing music and the app can immediately determine where you are in the song, download it, and sync up audio, and show lyrics for that exact part of the song — all in the time that Shazam would have taken to figure out what a song was. Or, if you overheard a song you like on Pandora, you could put your phone up to the speaker and have it instantly start playing the music video synced with the music already playing. Songs can also carry other data, like which artists are playing which instruments in specific portions of songs. General Harmonics eventually wants to expose all of that data about media encoded in its format through an application programming interface, allowing for things like games that can access the music you’re playing to influence what’s happening as you play. One could also envision a future version of that lets users instantly create new, high-quality mixes of songs from within the web app by tweaking and blending different parts of songs on the fly. With , it’s becoming increasingly important for users to be able to receive their content instantly. People no longer think they should have to plug in their phone to sync with their computer’s library of downloaded media — they want it accessible right away at any time. Reducing the amount of data that needs to be pushed to deliver the same or better quality music has advantages for companies and consumers. Big streamers like , , or Apple could significantly cut down on server costs — or, more likely, serve customers better for the same level of spending. General Harmonic’s technology could have the biggest impact in developing markets in Africa and Asia, where but many lack access to the 4G and LTE networks available in the United States and Europe. Those people could receive many of the benefits of modern infrastructure without needing all of the hardware if they don’t need to send around as many bits. After seven years operating in stealth, General Harmonics is now out looking for strategic partners to roll out its technology. Obviously, the music distribution platforms are essentially settled at this point; the company has no plans to become a music subscription service and compete with Pandora, Beats, and Spotify for the attention of music lovers. The only plausible outcome is to get their technology into the hands of as many big players as it can. The company confirmed that it plans to white-label and license its technology over the coming months, and that it had meetings with several prominent firms in the media space in Silicon Valley early last week, though a spokesperson declined to comment on the particular companies. |
4 MusicTech Insights From Wall Street Journal Writer Taylor Swift | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | When millions of people point camera-phones at you while you sing, you learn a thing about music and technology. You could laugh at pop starlet Taylor Swift for her fluffy teddy bear of a column in the today, or chide the WSJ for printing it, but there are some poignant nuggets of knowledge in there. Swift (and her ghost writers) prefaces the whole discussion with some controversial logic that “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.” That contradicts a popular theory that “ ” which says that music is a loss leader for artists to sell concert tickets and merchandise, and for platforms to sell devices and . But once she zooms in, Swift’s perspective from years in the spotlight produces some strong tactical insights. Taylor Swift brought out Jennifer Lopez for one night on her Red tour to surprise her fans. Image Credit: Mizz Swift says “I walked out onstage every night of my stadium tour last year knowing almost every fan had already seen the show online”. Preventing that footage from being shot in arenas full of teen girls would be impossible, so if she plays the same set every night, fans will walk away bored. That’s why she brings out unique guest stars and more every night so the experience is always fresh. Flash in the pan singles don’t earn money the way they did back when they were bundled with albums or at least sold as downloads. Meanwhile, free access via platforms like YouTube mean fans can burn through their love of a shallow song quickly. Swift explains people “are buying only the ones that hit them like an arrow through the heart.” She likens music to three types of relationships: quick flings with songs you dance to and then forget, stronger relationships with albums you remember but that pass, and connecting with an artist on such a deep emotional level that they become “The One” and you listen to them for life. The real success comes with being The One. Musicians and other celebrities have sidestepped the record labels, managers, retail stores, and press and now connect to fans directly through Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and the like. Swift explains, “The casting director chose the actress with more Twitter followers”. Artists can’t just be artists any more, they have to be community managers. Music sales, tour success, commercial tie-ins and more depend on being able to rally one’s fan base. “I haven’t been asked for an autograph since the invention of the with a front-facing camera. The only memento ‘kids these days’ want is a selfie” says Swift. And since people actually share selfies, that’s great for artists…if they leverage them. Celebrities should be asking fans to mention their official account when they post the photo and ask friends to follow them so they can virally grow their audience. All four of these ideas tie in to a single theme: Adapt to the (often scary) inevitabilities of change. You can’t stop piracy, the overall decreasing sales, or the rise of the networked fan base’s power. But if you’re flexible with what it means to be an artist, you reduce the risks and score big with the new opportunities. |
Airbnb Showdown On San Francisco’s November Ballot Averted For The Time Being | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | It looks like Airbnb is going to get a reprieve on facing a huge regulatory showdown on November’s ballot in San Francisco. A former planning commissioner and affordable housing activists that would have clarified rules on short-term rentals throughout the city. It would have been far stricter than a set of rules supervisor David Chiu had been working on for the past two years with input from Airbnb. The group said today that they’re pulling their proposed initiative because it seems like they might be able to work out a compromise legislatively, instead of going through the initiative process. Even though they had collected more than 15,700 signatures to qualify for the ballot’s deadline today, they’re holding off and will reconsider for the November 2015 ballot instead. Even though Airbnb has been headquartered out of San Francisco for the past six years, it’s operating in a legal gray area. Technically, you need a conditional use permit to offer residential rentals for less than 30 days. That hasn’t stopped San Francisco hosts from listing thousands of spaces on the platform, however. Activists had raised concerns around how Airbnb hosts may be subverting rent control and zoning laws that are meant to keep housing affordable to long-term San Francisco residents. “We have the worst housing crunch since the 1906 earthquake,” said Dale Carlson, one of the main proponents of the initiative. “This is not the time to be cannibalizing our housing stock for tourists.” Chiu’s competing legislation would have limited Airbnb hosts to renting out their spaces for 90 days of the year. But this group, which includes former planning commissioner Douglas J. Engmann and housing activist Calvin Welch, felt like it didn’t go far enough. Their proposed initiative would have called for a public registry of all hosts, who would have to show permission from their landlords and proof of insurance. It would also have required hosts to follow existing zoning regulations, which could limit spaces to certain parts of the city instead of neighborhoods across town. “We think neighborhoods should have a say in whether this activity is legalized in their neighborhoods, instead of providing a blanket rezoning of the city,” Carlson said. That doesn’t mean this will be a cakewalk for Airbnb. “I think [Chiu’s] legislation is dead,” Carlson said. “I didn’t find a single supervisor who was ready to back him.” He added, “It was very easy for us to get the signatures. People are not happy. It’s a remarkable thing that a company like Airbnb can reach a $10 billion valuation with a business model that is dependent on people willingly defying the law.” Airbnb said in a statement: “We have long believed that we can all work together to fashion responsible rules that protect the public interest and let San Franciscans share the home in which they live. We look forward to working with everyone on legislative proposals as we move forward.” The company is seeing regulatory blowback in some of its other most popular markets. The company has been running a campaign throughout New York City subways touting the benefits of hosting in terms of tourism and tax revenue. |
TubeMogul Wants To Go Public For $11-$13 Per Share, Raising Up To $93.4M | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | When TubeMogul , it indicated that it would offer up to $75 million of its shares for sale. That figure was soft. Today, TubeMogul — $11 to $13 per unit — meaning that it could sell up to $93.4 million of its stock in the flotation. The company’s revenue has grown quickly, as had its losses until recently. It recorded a $7.4 million loss in 2013, the highest of its three reported year-long periods. However, in the first quarter of 2014, the company’s revenue — $22.02 million, up from $9.58 million in the year-ago quarter — came attached to a slim $767,000 loss, down from $1.90 million the year before. So, quick revenue growth and falling losses? In today’s market that could very well be a palatable combination. We’ve seen a decent string of recent IPOs, with Arista Networks, MobileIron, and GoPro all performing well when entering the public markets. With profitability just out of its reach, TubeMogul may benefit from the lift those successful offerings might provide. As TechCrunch , the company had strong gross margins — we called them “SaaS-like” — of 66 percent in 2013. The company has , making its offering interesting. It isn’t uncommon now to see companies going public, raising a fraction of their previously raised capital in the process. TubeMogul is a smaller IPO for a lesser-known company. This isn’t Box, in other words, but its nearly $100 million potential haul is important to note not only for its market niche, but also in that it will be a fresh indicator of investor sentiment. With the NASDAQ at 4,451, anything is possible. As a caveat to that: When the company filed to go public, AdAge that a few companies that it found to be at least analogous had suffered since their debut, highlighting and . Those companies have seen steep declines in their market value in the past year. It’s worth pointing out that many companies in TubeMogul’s space have either gone public, or been acquired. After TubeMogul hits go, the only private, unacquired firm in the space will be BrightRoll. All told, it looks like TubeMogul is full speed ahead. We’ll bring you more once they cross the wire and start to trade. |
Seeing Opportunities In The US, itBit Relocates To NYC, Names New CEO | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | As the local governments across the U.S. begin taking the first steps to embrace bitcoin, startups like are working feverishly to stake their claims. The company, which raised to launch a bitcoin exchange for institutional investors, is relocating from its current base in Singapore to New York in order to get in on the ground floor of one of the potential hubs for bitcoin trading in the U.S. New York’s regulator , the superintendent of financial services, has come out in favor of the cryptocurrency, and the city and state are in the process of finalizing their position on how best to regulate it. It is with that backdrop that itBit moves to the U.S. and has named one of the founding partners of its backer Liberty City Ventures, Charles Cascarilla, as the company’s new chief executive. In a blog post on the company’s site, Cascarilla writes that former chief executive Rich Teo will remain with the company to keep developing its Asian presence. The company has also hired Andrew Chang, another of Liberty City Ventures’ founding partners, as chief operating officer. “Bitcoin has become mainstream, the volume of bitcoin trading has grown exponentially, and the majority of bitcoin trading now takes place in the U.S.,” Cascarilla writes. “Regulators are getting clearer about their policies and we’re hopeful that we will be able to serve U.S. investors soon.” The company had waited until a clearer picture of the U.S. regulatory framework emerged before it launched its services in the States, in part because it wanted to make sure it could adhere to all regulations before it began servicing clients. And what a difference a year makes. When Liberty City Ventures , the price of bitcoin was around $120; now that figure is . Startups like , and have raised significant rounds of funding to help take bitcoin mainstream. It almost seems like itBit is coming a bit late to this party, but perhaps the company’s slow and steady approach actually will win this race.
|
BlackBerry Explains The Passport, Its Square Tablet… Phone Thing | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | BlackBerry previously gave us a sneak peek at a device that’s as category-busting as the revolutionary Padfone, called the Passport. I expressed my regarding the wisdom of the design decisions made in creating this 4.5-inch square thing with a hardware keyboard then. But now it’s BlackBerry’s turn behind the Passport, with a blog post in which it avoids calling it either a phone or a tablet directly. The blog post asks “Why?” in italics on a line all its own, so BlackBerry at least is aware this is a weird device that has some people, like myself, scratching their heads. The 4.5-inch screen on the gadget is square, not rectangular, meaning it’s almost as wide as two iPhones placed side-by-side. The answer to “Why?” begins with something about academic typology, which isn’t a great way to explain a design decision for a mobile device in my opinion. But wait! The academic stuff means that the Passport is supposedly the optimal size for reading e-books, paging through documents and reading the text-heavy portions of the web. WHICH IS WHAT BUSINESS PEOPLE DO! BlackBerry blogger Matt Young goes on to articulate a few different scenarios where the Passport’s unique ID will make it an ideal digital companion, including for architects and real estate professionals switching between blueprints and contract docs; doctors checking X-rays and patient info forms; financiers watching the stock market bob up and down; and writers looking for the joys only a real physical keyboard can bring. I remain skeptical, but BlackBerry is at least taking a different approach to the smartphone/tablet/whatever-mobile-computer, the design of all which has been largely normalized over the past few years. Basically, though, at this point the only question that remains is whether this is a better or worse idea than the noveltylicious curved screen smartphone. |
The Privacy Implications Of NSA Searches Should Not Be Minimized | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | The Obama administration on Sunday attempted to downplay the about the NSA’s broad data sweeps under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA). In response, officials that “the agency routinely filters out the communications of Americans and information that is of no intelligence value.” The administration’s response quickly jumping to the NSA’s defense is in line with its previous pattern of standing in front of the agency whenever damaging news leaked about its practices. Soon after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s first revelations were published last year, President Barack Obama . His stance softened as public outcry grew, and he suggested reforms including of the collection of telephony metadata program in January. Almost half of the communications in a large trove collected under Section 702 that Snowden supplied to The Post last year contained e-mail addresses or other details the NSA identified as belonging to U.S. citizens. More than 65,000 references were “masked” to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 email addresses in the files that were not minimized that could be linked to Americans. In the same initial June 2013 speech, Obama said Americans’ emails weren’t being collected. The government’s claim that information found to be “of no intelligence value” is filtered seems farcical when the report revealed that the Snowden cache included a photo of a young girl smiling in front of a mosque and school children’s academic transcripts. It is reasonable that the White House would defend its agency’s ongoing programs. It becomes problematic when its vindications of the intelligence apparatus go so far that they’re wrong. Government officials failed to realize the extent of the information Snowden took. For instance, as recently as May, former NSA director Keith Alexander : “He didn’t get this data.” The NSA repeated that it has “very strict controls” on the so-called “raw” data collected by the 702 searches. But this weekend’s report challenges those claims. One has to wonder if Snowden was able to get around the government’s “very strict controls” protecting this data, who else could and where it could be leaked next? The Obama administration was lucky this time. The Post showed discretion. Although they alluded to personal pictures and medical records, they kept the identities of those caught up in the sweeps private. The reporters also made decisions to not hinder ongoing government operations, vaguely mentioning some of the national security gains the U.S. has made by continuing the searches under 702. But especially with reports of another leaker circulating the public sphere, the administration should be focused on how these programs could be reformed effectively, rather than making statements they’ll need to dial back later. |
Box’s Q1 Revenue Nearly Doubles As Its Losses Expand A More Modest 13% | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | This afternoon, Box pulled the trigger on its , detailing its fiscal first quarter financial performance. For the three-month period, Box had revenue of $45.3 million, and a loss of $38.5 million. The revenue figure is up 93.6 percent, and the loss total is up a more modest 13 percent. So Box managed to nearly double its year-over-year revenue, with only a modest addition to its loss rate. Naturally, losing more than $38 million on revenue of $45 million means you are still nearly spending twice your top line in total, but the numbers are an improvement over what Box reported for its last year. The company had a GAAP net loss margin of 85 percent in the quarter, which was down from 112 percent in its fiscal 2014. We’re currently in Box’s fiscal 2015, for what it’s worth. For its most recent fiscal full year, Box had revenue of $124 million, and losses on a GAAP basis of $168 million. For the period, Box had billings of $44.2 million, up from $28.38 million the year prior. The numbers would have been better if Box had managed a in losses. However, its revenue growth rate could assuage that concern, at least partially. For comparison, in its fiscal 2013, Box had average revenue of roughly $31 million per quarter, so this first-quarter figure, while obviously far superior than its first-quarter 2013 tally, is a thinner percentage better than its last-year average. That could imply lower quarter-on-quarter growth. Box burned substantial cash in the quarter. In its first S-1, it indicated that it ended January 31 of 2014 with $108.85 million in cash. It ended its most recent quarter, three months later, with $79.26 million. |
Keith Rabois’ Homebuying Startup OpenDoor Raises $9.95M From Everyone | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | Well. It seems like a lot of Valley investors want to see the process of buying homes become a lot more efficient. After Khosla Ventures VC and to make buying homes as simple as clicking a few buttons, a horde of Valley angels and VCs started circling. The company, now called , just closed $9.95 million in what appears to be an insane party round. (To be clear though, Khosla Ventures is the lead.) Who’s involved? Paypal co-founder Max Levchin, Former YouTube and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu, Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, Yammer co-founder David Sacks, Angelist’s Naval Ravikant, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Initialized Capital’s Harjeet Taggar, Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian, Former Twitter vice president Elad Gil, Blippy co-founder David King, Flixster co-founder Joe Greenstein, Angel investor Mike Greenfield, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, Path’s Dave Morin, Facebook vice president Dan Rose, Trevor Traina, Resolute Ventures’ Mike Hirshland, Caffeinated Capital’s Ray Tonsing, Felicis’ Aydin Senkut, True Ventures’ Om Malik, Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, Crunchfund’s Michael Arrington (who disclaimer: founded TechCrunch) and SV Angel. Before you start worrying about real estate speculators, OpenDoor is launching in three markets outside of California and is only for owner-occupied homes. Co-founder Eric Wu did not specify which markets, but he said the company is more concerned with markets where there isn’t a lot of liquidity or demand. “The Bay Area is a unique market. It’s pretty rare. If you’re an owner here, there’s a fair bit of certainty that if you list your home on a service like MLS with a real estate agent, you’ll see offers within seven days,” he said. In contrast, Wu said the rest of the $20 trillion U.S. residential real estate market is one of the least liquid kinds of markets even though it represents such a vital kind of asset to Americans across the country. He argues this lack of liquidity ties people to debt and jobs or locations that may not benefit them anymore. Real estate transactions often take more than 90 days and homeowners often don’t have enough capital for a down payment or a mortgage, which makes home buying stressful. Wu didn’t go into how the product will work, because it has yet to launch. But he said, “Were trying to take the 90-day process, convert into a few clicks online and make it simple easy and fast.” Wu used to be head of geo and social products at real estate listings platform Trulia, so he has years of experience in the space. He and Rabois are joined by two other co-founders, Ian Wong and JD Ross. Wong used to lead data science at Square and Ross oversaw product at Addepar. |
Compromise Will Shape The Wearables Market | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | Just as fitness apps and wearables are , the is giving consumers their first maybe-viable smartwatches. In the coming months and years, this new category will force consumers to make a similar decision as that between Microsoft’s unified approach to operating systems and Apple’s intentional divergence of iOS and Mac OS X. Windows 8 was famously designed to be an operating system with It would provide a unified experience across every category of devices including tablets, laptops and desktops. This meant designing an interface that could handle multiple types of input, including keyboards, mice, touch, and styli, as well as multiple form factors, from small tablets that can fit in a coat pocket to all-in-ones that can do double duty as a television. Apple has taken the opposite approach. It designs its devices to make the right compromises for their form-factors, optimizing the So far, the conflict between those philosophies has resulted in lukewarm reactions to Windows 8 on traditional PCs and the iPad vastly outselling its Windows 8 tablet competitors — to the point where Microsoft moved the goal post by arguing that its own Surface 3 tablet is really competing against the Macbook Air. Just as the Surface is a mix between a laptop and a tablet, Android Wear devices have some features from fitness-centric wearables and some from your smartphone. They can keep track of your steps and heart rate, and in the future one can envision smartwatch makers throwing in all kinds of sensors that give more health information. They do so at the expense of a certain required bulkiness to fit in sensors, batteries and screens, as well as the need to have an interface that facilitates more complex interactions like getting directions. On the other end of the wearables spectrum, there are devices like the that strip out everything but sensors and wireless radios. These devices are more comfortable, have better battery life, and essentially no user experience on the device itself. These devices will only become cheaper as the market expands and sensors become smaller and less expensive to make. It’ll be interesting to see which philosophy wins over consumers. Do people want one device on their wrist in the same way that they generally want one phone, picking the device with the fewest compromises for what they’d use it for? Or will people choose to buy several devices purpose-built for their specific interests or health concerns, like getting one wristband for weight-lifting and another for monitoring sleep habits? Or maybe people will get over the fact that they look like dorks and just start wearing multiple devices, using a smartwatch on one wrist for notifications and voice searches and hot-swapping devices full of sensors on their other wrist depending on what they’re doing. With Android Wear only hitting the market today and Apple’s “iWatch” announcement supposedly coming in October, it’s too early to know how this will play out. Both companies seem to be hedging their bets — Google is offering Android Wear and , while Apple is apparently going to offer its own watch as well as the for keeping track of data from a multitude of devices. |
Facebook Tries Being A TV Channel With New Mobile Video Player | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | If you watch one of a friend’s videos, Facebook will now try to get you to watch more with a new carousel of suggested videos that appears after you view one in the mobile News Feed. Reminiscent of YouTube’s Related Videos, Facebook confirms the existence of this fresh laidback experience in Facebook for iOS that I spotted over the weekend. It lets you quickly watch a series of videos before jumping back to the feed. The feature could encourage more Facebook video uploading by getting people more views and Likes on their mini-movies. It also opens up a powerful advertising opportunity to pipe in sponsored video suggestions like those served by Facebook’s . After I asked, Facebook confirmed the existence of the updated mobile player, saying “this is a new feature we are testing on mobile to help people find more videos they might be interested in.” For now it’s only for organic video content uploaded to Facebook, doesn’t include ads, and the test is only available to a subset of Facebook’s users. The suggested video player only appears after watching some people’s direct uploads to Facebook, not YouTube videos or clips on other third parties. Videos in the feed autoplay, but tapping on one enlarges it to full screen. One it finishes playing in portrait mode, the video shrinks and a black video recommendation carousel of “more from [that friend] and others” appears at the bottom. You may be able to try it by watching my friend of his , which activated the carousel for me. Tapping a video swaps it into the main window. In a slick design trick, the carousel darkens while you’re watching video and brightens up if you touch it to scroll through the suggestions. The carousel resembles the “related news” suggestions Facebook shows on news links in the we feed. The carousel makes watching multiple videos in a row exceedingly easy. Rather than dumping you back on the feed when you finish the first one, it keeps the video player open. The idea seems to be that if you go through the effort to open the full-screen player, you’re probably in the mood to watch more videos. Video suggestions like this could be a big deal for Facebook. First, the more that people watch videos, the more that people will post them. Right now Facebook is battling YouTube and Vine to own the world’s user-generated videos and the monetization potential they deliver. Second, video views let Facebook soak up more of users’ time. This attention makes Facebook more powerful by entrenching it in people’s lives, denying competitors the engagement, and generating data on what content and friends people like best. Driving video views hasn’t been a big focus for Facebook lately, though, as over the past few years it folded the videos section of people’s profiles into a buried “Videos” album. Third, more passive video consumption like this could be a great way for Facebook to break into smart TVs. Reading status updates from the couch could be tough and too much work, but watching video after video or a slideshow of friends’ photos could be a great laidback experience. And finally, wherever you have content discovery you have an opportunity for sponsored recommendations. Facebook could slot its like movie trailers into the carousel, racking up extra views it can charge top-dollar for. That will be even easier now that Facebook has , which we broke the news was a $400 million to $500 million dollar acquisition. In a , it trumpets the ability to reach more people than TV networks. To make this all work, , which I’ve been saying for eight months now. It’s archaic by modern standards. There’s no multi-shot recording, image stabilization, filters, light enhancement, drawing, or other features found in Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat. Facebook did recently , which I hope points to interest in developing a more enticing video creation flow. If better uploading was combined with a breezy way to consume videos, Facebook could evolve past its roots in photo-sharing and become a true home for full-motion windows into our friends’ lives. |
Isis Mobile Wallet Rebrands To Distance Itself From Militant Group ISIS | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | , the mobile wallet platform backed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon here in the U.S., has decided to rebrand after its name became synonymous with “ ,” an Islamic militant group linked to sectarian violence against civilians and government forces in Iraq and Syria, the company is announcing today. That the two organizations share a name is entirely coincidental, but it’s not been great for Isis (the wallet), in terms of either public perception or general SEO. The company doesn’t have a replacement name picked out at this time, it says, but will introduce the new brand in the “coming months.” The mobile platform includes that lets consumers pay at point-of-sale via NFC chips built into their mobile handsets, or by using select “Isis Ready” NFC cases designed for the NFC-less iPhone. The wallet today supports a limited number of credit cards, including those from American Express/Amex Serve, Chase, and Wells Fargo. (Amex is also an investor.) Formed in 2010, Isis has not really taken off in the U.S., not only because Apple has yet to introduce an NFC-supported iPhone, but also because NFC is not accepted everywhere, and it faces a number of competitors – including Google Wallet and the banks themselves, who to retain control of their customers. In a statement released today by Isis CEO Michael Abbott, the company says it originally chose the brand “Isis” because they wanted a name that “brought to life our company and our values.” “Above all, we wanted a brand that captured the simplicity of our mobile wallet experience,” he says. “Recently, we have observed with growing concern a militant group whose name, when translated into English, is Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – often referenced by the acronym ISIS,” he explains. “We have no interest in sharing a name with a group whose name has become synonymous with violence and our hearts go out to those who are suffering,” he adds. The company is now actively working on a new brand, but stresses that the business focus and consumer experience will remain the same going forward — this is a name change alone. Ironically, the rebranding decision from the mobile operators comes after ISIS (the militant group) itself from its earlier name, also known as the “Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham,” to just “Islamic State.” |
Microsoft Brings Yammer To More Office 365 Plans For Free | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | Microsoft is to more of its Office 365 SKUs, making the latter a more tempting offer. Educational and medium-business packages of Office 365 now come with Yammer. Microsoft added the social product to enterprise Office 365 SKUs late last year. Office 365 is Microsoft’s answer to the modern software world. Office, long a massive and manageable cash cow, has to adapt or be sliced by a thousand cuts until more nimble, cloud-base offerings eat its market. The company wants Office 365 to be a compelling offer, as there is normal human reticence to buying anything on endless subscription — you are willfully picking a negative cash-flow to your personal net worth, which isn’t too fun. But with all Office 365 SKUs now sporting a , and on the business end, Yammer for free, the value proposition is clearer. An open question: How healthy is Yammer? When’s the last time Microsoft talked about Yammer by itself and not in the context of other products? |
Box Picks Up $150M More As It Waits For Favorable IPO Winds | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | Box, a file-storage and management firm, has raised another $150 million from TPG and Coatue, . The company had , making its total funding in excess of $550 million. TechCrunch has confirmed the amount through a source. Previously, Box , with its S-1 document detailing rapid revenue growth. Its top line expanded from $59 million in 2012 to $124 million in 2013. During that period, however, Box’s losses grew as well, from $113 million in 2012 to $169 million in 2013. The company is widely expected to update its S-1 filing in , detailing its fiscal first-quarter results. Box’s IPO was filed, but never launched as the company ran face first into declining market sentiment. Other companies that have recently gone public have priced modestly, or had a history of GAAP profits. Box, presumably, wants to price aggressively. The fresh capital will allow Box to put off an offering until it deems the market ready. How long that will take will likely hinge on its updated filing — if Box can show strong revenue growth and slowing losses, investors may be ready to tie the knot soon. If Box shows quick growth, and still-widening losses, it could be problematic for the cloud-based company. Box faces competition from young companies like Dropbox and giants alike. The cloud storage space is among the hottest fronts of the larger , and Box wants to keep growing. According to the Journal, the new capital values the company at $2.4 billion, a 20 percent increase on its previous $2 billion valuation that was set when Box raised $100 million last December. |
null | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 21 | null |
Germany Unhappy With U.S. Over Allegations Of A Double Agent Assisting In Continued Spying | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | The U.S. got caught to spy on the German group created to investigate the U.S.’s spying on Germany — at least according to the most recent crop of embarrassing allegations into the . And German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not pleased. Earlier today in China, the chancellor that if the allegations prove true, they would contradict the sort of cooperation that should exist among allies. That’s putting it lightly. Germany over the flap. The United States also with the European stalwart. It became known in the wake of the Snowden revelations that the NSA had of Chancellor Merkel and her predecessor, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The U.S. government indicating that it wasn’t monitoring her phone, and that it wouldn’t in the future. The past tense was noticeably missing. Germany decided that the action warranted a parliamentary investigation. The accused double spy is said to have shared information regarding that inquiry into the NSA with the U.S. government itself. There isn’t much like spying into the group set up to investigate your past spying. You must award the United States government at least some credit for its persistence. If the allegations prove true, it will be a fresh blow for relations between the United States and Germany, as well as an embarrassment to both countries. Component to the Snowden revelations has been a steady drumbeat of information regarding how the U.S.’s surveillance apparatus treats the privacy of foreign individuals. Which is to say that it acts as if they have and deserve none. This goes from the ground up, not exempting the leaders of key allies. If Germany catches the United States with its hand in the cookie jar twice in such rapid succession, you have to wonder what is next. Hell, we could be in no time. |
3D Camera Startup Matterport Raises $16 Million Series B Led By DCM | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | 3D camera marker wants to give customers the tools they need to make photo-realistic models of real-world spaces. And to do so, the company has raised a new $16 million round of financing. The funding was led by DCM, with AME Cloud Ventures also participating. Other investors include Lux Capital, Felicis Ventures, Greylock Partners, Navitas Capital, AMD Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Rothenberg Ventures, Sling Media co-founder Blake Krikorian, and Crate & Barrel founder Gordon Segal. Along with the funding, Sling Media co-founder Jason Krikorian is joining the company’s board. Y Combinator graduate Matterport makes a $4,500 3D capture camera, along with a backend cloud storage platform for media shot with the camera, and software apps for viewing and navigating around those models. To start, Matterport is targeting the real-estate market to enable brokers and real estate agents to capture and display realistic models of properties that are available for rent or sale. While Matterport’s products have all existed within its own ecosystem of hardware and software, the company hopes to open up to enable other hardware and software to access its technology with the funding. At some point, Matterport will enable users to shoot 3D models with their own smartphones, tablets, and accessory 3D cameras running Matterport 3D Capture software. And it’s building a 3D application framework that third-party developers will be able to use to deliver content captured with its hardware and apps. |
Blek Comes To Android, And I Get Stuck On Level 23 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | Earlier this year, iOS game Blek drew critical cheers and enthusiastic reviews from gamers. Android fans who watched from the sidelines but haven’t yet actually Blekked can now . The game uses a curious drawing mechanic as its only moving part basically, allowing the player to sketch a line with their finger that then becomes an animated in-game element whose purpose is to destroy colored circles. The game is charming, well-designed and challenging while keeping things casual, and it includes a good soundtrack with cool sound effects. I actually hadn’t ever played it on iOS, despite its popularity and media attention, mostly because until my vacation last week I haven’t had time to play much of anything. Luckily, the Android version has let me have a second crack at Blek, especially thanks to the fact that I’ve been using Android devices consistently over the last little while in order to give Android Wear a thorough testing. [gallery ids="1026032,1026033,1026034"] Let me say that, based on my experience of around an hour or so of play time, Blek is great and I love it. But let me also say that I hate it and it is terrible. That second opinion is strictly a knee-jerk reaction based on the fact that I can’t get past level 23 despite having cruised along with only minor hiccups until now. Blek is $2.99, and for that price you get the opportunity to beat level 23 and shame me deeply for my inability to do so. |
Mac OS X Gets The Dark Theme We’ve All Been Waiting For In Yosemite Preview 3 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | Apple’s desktop operating system got a little more fashionable with the new seeded to developers today. The update, which can be installed by registered developers who have the existing preview version on their machines through the Mac App Store, lets users enable Dark Mode, a highly coveted feature that impressed when it was unveiled at WWDC in June, but that Apple hadn’t actually turned on until now. 9to5Mac has screens of the dark mode in action, and it’s beautiful to behold. The feature likely won’t even be appreciated by most, but it’s something that could actually affect the user experience more than you might think, since it applies not only to the Mac’s persistent menu bar but also to the top bar that appears on each app window and the dock background. For now, it seems to be only partially complete, but at least it’s enabled for testing. The change could theoretically be less distracting, which is a big benefit for graphic designers and others staring at their screens all day and trying to edit photos and create interfaces of their own. Here’s what I really like about this: It’s dark, not light. And that’s pretty much it. |
Aereo, The Company Without A Plan B, Finds A Plan C | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | When was and , it seemed as if the TV streaming service was out of options. But on Wednesday, Aereo lawyers indicating that the company now considers itself a cable provider. It now believes that it should not have to stop its services because, if it can obtain a license, it is entitled to the same protections under the law as other cable providers paying royalty fees. The letter comes a week after CEO to change existing copyright laws. That makes it the backup, backup plan for the company if the Supreme Court did not rule in its favor. When the Supreme Court handed its ruling down in favor of the broadcasting companies in June, it largely based its decision on the idea that the company was equivalent to service provided by a traditional cable provider, not merely an equipment provider. Aereo is now trying to use that ruling to its advantage. “The Supreme Court’s holding that Aereo is a cable system under the Copyright Act is significant because, as a cable system, Aereo is now entitled to the benefits of the copyright statutory license pursuant to the Copyright Act,” the company’s lawyers said in their letter to the lower court’s judge. “Aereo is proceeding to file the necessary statements of account and royalty fees.” The broadcasters, however, say Aereo can’t qualify for this defense because of its past statements before both the Supreme Court and the lower court that it was not a cable provider. Aereo also argues that even if the lower court did not view the company as a cable provider, it should still limit the “scope” of any injunction it places on the service because the Supreme Court ruled “Aereo only publicly performs when its technology allows near simultaneous transmission of over the air television broadcasts to its users.” Currently Aereo only faces a preliminary injunction, but it suspended its service voluntarily. Aereo’s lawyers wrote that the Supreme Court affirmed “non-simultaneous playback from copies created by consumers.” Perhaps if the service can’t continue in its current form, we could see the company continue with options for users to playback TV shows later. Kanojia sent subscribers a copy of the lawyers’ letter in an email Wednesday. Although it’s not clear whether Aereo will continue in its original form as a cable provider or adapt its offerings to some sort of playback service, today’s action shows the company is not ready to give up yet. |
TechCrunch Disrupt Europe Meetups: London, July 11 And Berlin, July 17 | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | European startups! , our stupendous conference, is coming to London in October. To tell you all more about it, we’re taking TechCrunch on the road this summer. For starters, we’re having some big TechCrunch Meetups this Friday at , July 11, and Thursday, July 17. In Berlin we are partnering with the excellent and their Closing Party!
The TechCrunch London Summer Meetup will be in a central London location on Friday July 11 at a venue to be announced soon. . This is an informal meetup to meet the TechCrunch writing team based in London and learn about what happens at Disrupt Europe. We’ll have free beer and wine 5pm-8pm. If you’d like to pitch at the event in London, email mike butcher AT techCrunch.com, subject line “LondonCrunch” with this info: • Startup Name
• Website URL
• Contact Email
• CrunchBase Profile URL
• Describe your startup in 75 words or fewer
• Founders’ bios in 75 words or fewer
• Have you launched?
• Got funding and from who? Note, we’d like you to to apply to this pitch-off. The pitches will be 90 seconds with no slides. We’ll email you telling you who has been selected to pitch. (If you DON’T get a confirmation email that you’re pitching, then you’re not pitching.) Anyone who wants to present at the event please bring a memory stick with ONE screenshot, informational page or PowerPoint slide. JUST ONE. The winner gets a free table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in London and one runner-up gets two tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Europe. Myself, Ingrid Lunden, Natasha Lomas and John Biggs will be in attendance so practice your elevator pitch. You do not have to be a London or UK startup to apply. ALL are welcome.
We have extended the deadline to submit applications for the Startup Battlefield at . Both Europe and non-Europe based teams are eligible to apply. If you have already publicly launched, then . Disrupt Europe is on October 20-21 in London, plus there is a preceding free weekend hackathon, so put it in your diaries now! And . Up for grabs is the £30,000 prize, the coveted “Disrupt Cup,” as well as feedback from the likes of SV Angel, Index Ventures, 500 Startups, TechStars, Angelpad and Seedcamp, among others. Plus, of course, masses of media attention and new user sign-ups. Lastly, meet TechCrunch at the following locations over the summer! 8th July
Meet TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher at
July 11th
Location:
Time: 5pm-8pm
With Ingrid Lunden, Mike Butcher, Natasha Lomas, Steve O’Hear
9 July – 11 July
Meet TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher at
Thu, 17 July
Tech Open Air Closing Party Sponsored by TechCrunch
Meet TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher and International Editor Ingrid Lunden at .
Wednesday 23rd July
TechCrunch Meetup & BBQ with (please contact them for details)
Sept 3-4
Meet TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher at
Sept 5
Meet TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher at
15-17 September
Meet TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher at DLD Tel Aviv
Thu, 25 September
Meet TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher at |
Finally, A Way To Find Movies Worth Watching On Netflix | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | is like the candy dish at your grandmother’s house. Most of the movies are crap, but you know, buried somewhere in there, is something worth your time. is a site dedicated to finding the Werther’s Originals in Netflix based on ratings. It’s simple enough: Set the filter to exclude movies rated under a certain amount, select the year the movie was released and then the genre. After that, hit Filter and the site returns movies currently available for streaming on Netflix. Click the cover art to go to that title on Netflix. It’s as easy as that. Sadly, there’s not a mobile app but the site does work well on mobile browsers. Sites like this demonstrate Netflix’s glaring issue of not having a logical content management system. It’s a library only browsable from 10 feet back. You know there’s something good in there, but you can’t get close enough to see what’s truly available. Until Netflix institutes a better search, users will increasingly turn to sites like A Better Queue to use Netflix. Or they’ll turn to , which in my experience, does a better job showing users what’s available for their precious TV viewing time. |
US Gov Declassifies 3 FISA Court Orders Commanding The Collection Of Telephone Metadata | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | Today on the , the United States government three declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) primary orders regarding the controversial telephony metadata program that collects information about the phone calls placed by Americans. ( , , .) The telephony metadata program, revealed last year in the , has been the subject of sustained controversy. Privacy advocates view the program as overly invasive, as it collects information about the daily activities of every American’s domestic communications. The program doesn’t collect content — i.e. the actual communications executed over the phone. Instead it collects information about the calls, such as when they were placed, to whom, and the like. In 2006, then-Senator Joe Biden, now the United States Vice President, did an admirable job why the collection of metadata is disconcerting: I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing. If I know every single phone call that you made, I am able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. And the real question here is: What do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with Al Qaeda? And we’re going to trust the president and the vice president of the United States that they’re doing the right thing? Don’t count me in on that.” The trio of declassified orders is similar, often sharing language. They are also quite akin to , released on . Each of the newly released primary orders dates from 2009, stretching from July to December of that year. That timeframe matters. It’s when the made what it refers to as a “technical modification” to its internal policies, limiting its analysts from “going beyond three ‘hops’ from an identifier used to query the [business record] metadata” that it had collected. The three documents are interesting, because they demonstrate a change in policy at the NSA. An from June 2009 indicated the coming policy change, stating the following: The date that the policy was changed was August 17, 2009. Both latter primary orders contain a footnote noting that date. It appears, therefore, that analysts had freer range before that data to query more than three hops. For clarity, I’ve asked the NSA to confirm the point. According to IC On The Record, the court decisions detail authorization of the collection of telephony metadata “under Section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Act [FISA].” It’s worth noting that Section 215 of the Patriot Act widened that FISA provision to allow for broader collection. That interpretation has . President Obama has for the three-hop rule to be cut down to two. That would dramatically curtail the program. The documents are worth reading, but here are a few highlights: The documents are at times heavily redacted. The following is a good example: That section, you might think, would be worth reading. |
Fuel-Cell Cars Are Going To Get A Big Boost In California Next Year | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | We , but thanks to investments from the and Toyota, we’ll have something just as futuristic: the makings of a functioning hydrogen economy in California. That month, will open 19 new hydrogen fueling stations in the state of California with $27.2 million in grant funding from the and a $7.2 million loan from . Another 9 will open in the state through grant money distributed to other proposals from the state. With the number of hydrogen fuel stations more than quadrupling from the current 9, car companies will finally be able to release fuel cell vehicles with demonstrable advantages over battery electric vehicles. Toyota, for instance, unveiled its (pictured above at this year’s CES) in Tokyo last fall and promises it will be ready for mass production next year. The car is about the size of a Camry and has an electric motor powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. Thanks to a high-pressure tank, it’s able to store enough hydrogen gas to drive for more than 300 miles without refueling — 40 miles more than even the highest-end Tesla Model S — with no environmentally harmful emissions. In a phone call, Toyota’s National Manager of Advanced Technologies Craig Scott explained that the technology for fuel cell vehicles has been ready for a few years now, but the infrastructure still wasn’t there to make them practical for most drivers. Even though their theoretical range is much further than electric cars with a battery, people simply wouldn’t be able to leave areas where hydrogen stations existed if they bought or leased one because the next station would be too far away. The simultaneous and the release of cars that can take advantage of them from Toyota, Honda and Hyundai in 2015 will have accelerating effects on the industry overall. Because of the availability of stations, Toyota is now able to move their hydrogen platform into mass production, which brings significant cost savings as the company can start bringing in parts from its other powertrains and build fewer parts “by hand” in limited quantities. FirstElement Fuel CEO Joel Ewanick told me this morning that there will be significant savings to future hydrogen station deployment thanks to these early investments as well. As the number of pumps increases, Ewanick told me that the cost to build a station could drop by 50% over the next decade, with fuel costs dropping by 30-40 percent. And within five years, those Ewanick says FirstElement’s stations will be profitable, as “it’s a very simple business model.” What makes hydrogen vehicles so tantalizing is the fact that they can produce zero emissions with the range of a fossil-fuel-powered car. That zero comes with an asterisk, however: Some hydrogen is sourced in more environmentally friendly ways than others. If you’re using electricity from coal to turn water into hydrogen, it isn’t very clean. Ewanick says that 33 percent of hydrogen at FirstElement stations in Southern California will come from renewable biogas (the ), while 35 percent will come from the same in the northern half of the state. “We could spend a lot more to bring that up to 100%,” he says, but the prices involved wouldn’t work well for them or drivers. It should be noted that while there will be hydrogen stations within driving distance in most metropolitan areas of California after next year’s rollout, it’s still not going to be as convenient as filling up your car with gasoline today. As an example, here’s FirstElement’s map of upcoming stations in the Bay Area; I wouldn’t want to drive that far out of my way to fill up a car if I lived in San Francisco: California wants to have 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2025, and it’s spending the money to make that happen. So far, its has invested more than $400 million in projects boosting hydrogen, biofuels, and electricity for transportation. |
HotelQuickly Raises $4.5 Million To Double-Down On Last Minute Hotel Booking In Asia-Pacific | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | Last-minute hotel booking app — whose founding team includes two ex-Rocket Internet executives — has raised a further $4.5 million in funding as it doubles-down on the Asia-Pacific market — and, perhaps in the longer-term, keep San Francisco-based and heavily funded at bay when and if it enters the region. The Series A round, which adds to the of external funding previously raised, is being led by the publicly listed Tokyo-based company , best known for its mobile games, with participation from , CEO and Chairman of Thai-based Minor International. , Hong Kong-headquarted lets users book “last minute” hotel rooms at heavily discounted prices, via an iOS, BB10 and Android app. Specifically, the app presents a list of up to 6 curated offers, based on a user’s location, which are only available for booking on the same day. Meanwhile, the draw for hotels that partner with is that it offers an efficient way to shift spare inventory without eating into their existing market or diminishing their brand via overt discounting. Notably, however, , from which HotelQuickly surely took its inspiration, has yet to enter Asia, despite talking up its aim for “ ,” name checking the region in particular after it raised a further $45 million in a Series D round. Instead, HotelQuickly counts , a -owned online travel agent, as its main competitor. “They are controlling the market to a large extent, making customers think they have the best prices,” HotelQuickly co-founder and CEO tells me. “However, our rates are on average 28% cheaper than what they manage to offer, and luckily, more and more users seem to realize that they can save a good amount of money by booking last minute.” He also name-checks Europe’s as gaining popularity in Asia-Pacific, while in Australia the biggest player is Wotif, which was acquired by Expedia just this week. “There is no noteworthy last-minute only hotel booking app in APAC yet,” adds Laboutka, “most likely due to the difficult market conditions and the limited availability of reliable infrastructure.” It should be noted, however, that also operates in Asia. Either way, and perhaps unsurprisingly, localisation and understanding local market conditions appear to be key. “Our members travel through the region, and it is a big challenge to offer a product of equal quality in such a diverse and fragmented geography,” says . “Localization is utmost important, without it there is limited hope for success. HotelQuickly is localized to 5 Asian languages plus English, and we see most of our bookings coming from members using the app in their native language — simply because English is not (yet) very commonly spoken here in Asia.” To that end, new investor GREE should help. The company recently launched its own Japan-based, last-minute booking service Tonight, and the investment forms the basis for a partnership between GREE and HotelQuickly aimed at “enhancing their respective services through personnel exchange, the sharing of technical expertise, and other collaboration.” |
Lyft Will Move Ahead With NYC Launch Despite Regulatory Pushback | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | On-demand ride-sharing startup will move ahead with its this Friday, despite warnings from the local taxi regulator that its service is not authorized to operate in the city. Two days before launch, is already facing regulatory hurdles in New York, as the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission has said the company does not comply with its safety requirements or licensing criteria. “Lyft has not complied with T.L.C.’s safety requirements and other licensing criteria to verify the integrity and qualifications of the drivers or vehicles used in their service, and Lyft does not hold a license to dispatch cars to pick up passengers,” the commission said in a statement. The TLC also warned that drivers who are caught operating outside of its regulations could lose their vehicles and be fined up to $2,000. Lyft, of course, has dealt with enforcement activities in other markets before, but maintains operations in all of the markets in which it has launched. New York, however, has a powerful taxi lobby and a regulatory environment that has been unfriendly to companies that rely on peer-to-peer services. As it relates to New York City, Lyft maintains that public safety is not the real issue, as it holds drivers to a higher standard than the TLC requirements. Furthermore, the company plans to move ahead with launch despite the regulator’s warnings. At a pre-launch meetup in Brooklyn attended by a few hundred drivers this evening, Lyft president John Zimmer told them that the company would stand behind the community and would aid them in the case of any enforcement actions taken by the TLC. That could include covering any fines or citations issued or legal fees associated with them. Lyft spokesperson Erin Simpson also sent the following statement: Lyft will offer a new and much needed transportation option for New Yorkers in the areas of the city where existing options are lacking. This improvement in transportation will provide important opportunities that New Yorkers want and deserve. We’ll continue to work with all stakeholders to create a path forward. Our focus remains on the community, who will be the ultimate beneficiaries. Where we differ with the TLC is that we do not believe its licensing and base station rules apply to the Lyft ridesharing model. It’s important to clarify that our differences of opinion are not about safety standards, and that’s because we put safety first. In new markets when we begin conversation with local regulators, we always find a way to ensure that communities have Lyft. We’re certainly different from the status quo, but that is our strength. Today we’re releasing our Safety Commitment (attached). We will never waver in keeping our drivers and passengers safe. This is Lyft’s commitment to our community and yours. Atttached with the statement Lyft sent the on its commitment to safety.
|
Twitterball | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | In the old days of — at least ‘old’ by Silicon Valley 2.0 standards, which is anything over five years — you could count on a couple of things. First, Twitter would go down almost every time people started really seriously using it. There’s a reason ‘fail whale’ is still part of our vocabulary. The second is that every time that there was a major event during which Twitter’s construction-paper servers managed to stay up, Twitter PR would . Most tweets, most re-tweets, most memes, you get the drill. And, like clockwork, Twitter PR would bash out a blog post describing the new peak and why it was so awesome and fantastic. A Google returns hundreds of news articles related to record Twitter moments. Or you can just ask anyone covering the space how repetitive it’s gotten — Twitter record pieces fit in the journalistic lexicon somewhere between momentum number posts and X site is down posts. Yesterday, another record was hit during the absolute massacre that was the Brazil v. Germany match at the World Cup. , with a peak of over 580,000 being sent as Germany scored its 5th goal. There. Now I’ve contributed to the colophon of Twitter record news, a long and illustrious journalistic centipede of regurgitated statistics. Those numbers, if you’re tracking, are also bigger than the Super Bowl’s number of tweets (24.9 million) earlier this year — and Twitter growth only accounts for part of that differential, as it’s been growing but not that fast. We can attribute that to a few things, but the fact that the World Cup is actually a international championship is probably one of them. And Twitter’s international user base is actually growing a ton faster than the U.S., with over 78 percent outside its borders . And, let’s not forget, more online than the Super Bowl, too. The brutal dominance of Twitter over live events like sports is evidenced by the sentiment that was attached to this tweet I sent yesterday: Twitter is indubitably covering the BRA v. GER match better than ESPN. — Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) A football-themed tweet by my co-editor Alexia also provoked a similar response: Only thing missing is Brazil scoring a goal on itself. — Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) I joked yesterday that the perfect combo for watching the World Cup was (I am not a Spanish speaker) and Twitter. The combination of the raw enthusiasm of the channel’s announcers and the running commentary on Twitter produced a potent cocktail that matched, for me, the kind of thing that happens when my fantasy (American) football league gets together to watch a game we all have skin on. It all blends together in a Sporgy of trash talk, context, banter and enthusiasm that makes for the next best thing to being there. Anecdotally, the World Cup feels like a big moment for Twitter and sports. I’ve seen more uptake of the personalized profile makeovers than I’ve ever seen by a promotional Twitter effort before, for instance. And surprisingly few grumpy ‘ugh sportsball’ tweets. The narrative, especially over the past couple of years, has always been ‘Facebook vs. Twitter’. And many of certainly seem to reflect that the network views Twitter as competing for time that could be spent on Facebook. But everything competes for time. This is the truth that the best product designers in Silicon Valley, and the best people in media and publishing etc., know: There is only one finite, precious resource and it is not money. It’s time. Twitter’s pry bar, its tool to lever away a few precious minutes of your attention span each day, is the fact that it provides a continuous stream of crowd-generated context. That’s what I meant by “covering it better than ESPN.” Broadcast-only mediums like TV are at an immediate disadvantage when things are happening in real time. Not only are they rarely up to the (not minute, second), but they’re also lacking any context that isn’t provided on the screen or via an anchor or commentator. Given a source of immediate news, I would take Twitter over television any day. But the fact that it’s ‘faster’ is just part of the equation. As I mentioned earlier, it’s about the amount of context that’s provided. There’s a reason that people scroll to the bottom of an article about a game or movie or football match to read the comments — they want to know whether other people have the same opinion they do, or something to add that will put it in context for them. Twitter isn’t just ‘stuff, quickly’, it’s a human-powered difference engine that quickly churns through fact and fiction to produce a rough cut of the truth. That doesn’t eliminate the need for deeper thought or other kinds of media, of course, but it completely unique. There is nothing else like it, for sporting events or anything else that’s happening in real time. I don’t know whether Twitter will be able to make a go of it in a business sense, though its ad department does seem to be . But the mere fact that it has existed means that, in one form or another, it will always exist. There is no such thing as the future web without a mechanism for the real-time flow of information. And, for now, Twitter is that mechanism. And a pretty good way to watch . Image Credit: |
Forget “OK Glass,” MindRDR Is A Google Glass App You Control With Your Thoughts | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | has made a name for itself (somewhat ) as head-mounted hardware that you can control with your voice and a sliding finger. Now, a team based out of interactive studio in London, is launching a new app that it hopes will kickstart an even more seamless way of interacting with the device: with the power of your mind. , as the app is called, links up Google Glass with another piece of head-mounted hardware, the EEG biosensor, to create a communication loop. The Neurosky biosensor picks up on brainwaves that correlate to your ability to focus. The app then translates these brainwaves into a meter reading that gets superimposed on the camera view in Google Glass. As you “focus” more with your mind, the meter goes up, and the app takes a photograph of what you are seeing in front of you. Focus some more, and the meter goes up again and the photo gets posted to Twitter. Like this: Av. Meditation: 47 💫 Av. Attention: 50 👀 💭 😎 — MindRDR (@mind_rdr) and this: Av. Meditation: 58 💫 Av. Attention: 49 👀 💭 😎 — MindRDR (@mind_rdr) It’s an early, and somewhat primitive vision of how your mind can control Glass. Yes, there are devices out there that have even more sensors on them, although that can start to get very expensive (the Neurosky retails for £71 in the UK, while Google Glass costs £1,000 and the app is free). And to be honest, the current hook-up is pretty primitive, too. When I arrived for a demonstration earlier today, one of This Place’s account managers was cooling Glass down under the air conditioner. And that’s before you start to put on two different bits of headgear. It can be a little clumsy. But all this isn’t the point: The idea here is that this is a minimum viable product, a first step that can be developed further — for example, to create applications to “train” people to concentrate better, or to play games, maybe to help suggest places to get a coffee when your sensor picks up that you’re tired, or for medical applications, for example for people with mobility problems. And potentially, you could build out the basic concept with more, lighter and easier-to-use sensors. This Place says that among those who have taken an interest are Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist who is nearly paralysed because of a progressive motor neuron disease. To that end, while This Place continues its own development, it has also for others to use it and expand on it, as well. Visiting This Place earlier today for a demonstration, Chloe Kirton, This Place’s creative director who had originally conceived of MindRDR, told me that the idea is somewhat related to the kind of work her colleagues do every day for paying clients. (MindRDR, to be clear, is not a paid project and was not developed for any client; rather it’s in the vein of other London-based creative agencies like UsTwo, where employees are encouraged to work on creative projects that are completely outside of their day-to-day client work.) A typical project for This Place, she says, is working on user experience and user interfaces for large Internet properties. “When touchscreens first became mainstream it forced the tech industry to really rethink the user experience,” she says. “Could this become the basis of a new kind of user interface? Could the future be about an interface that disappears altogether?” Part of the interest, too, came out of Kirton’s awareness of some of Google Glass’s shortcomings. “We saw the problems,” she says. Speaking out loud to your device is unnatural and could be downright awkward in some cases. And the finger sliding and tapping is not great, either. “After a while your arm gets tired,” she says. “You get Glass elbow. We wanted to think of something that was natural and accessible for everyone.” Google Glass, for all the drawbacks, has become a reference point that has inspired some interesting applications and concepts for where wearable technology may take us in the future. That’s included , and how Glass can be and other clinicians. Kirton says that MindRDR is so far the only app that links up Google Glass with brainwave-reading technology. This Place’s video for how it works, including screenshots from inside the app, is below: [vimeo 99915694 w=500 h=281] |
mNectar Raises $7M For New Kinds Of Mobile Ads That Let People Test-Drive Apps | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | First, there were teeny mobile banner ads pioneered by companies like , which Google bought for $750 million. Then there were full-screen interstitial ads. Those gave way to mobile video ads and then Facebook’s behemoth of a targeted mobile ad network. So what’s next in mobile advertising? A company called is betting that consumers will want to test drive mobile apps from right within ads. They’ve raised $7 million from NEA to do it. Rick Yang, a principal from the firm, is joining the board. “When you buy music, I like to listen to a song for 30 to 60 seconds before buying an album. I thought this was fundamentally broken for apps,” said CEO . “Mobile advertising is broken. With static interstitials, there’s not enough information for a user to make a decision.” units are full-screen, interactive ads that let you trial a game or app for a short amount of time. They’ve racked up a client list, including , , GREE, King, Wooga, Zeptolab and Zynga. Each mNectar unit is like a full-screen interstitial without any wrapper around the ad unit. You can test drive a few kinds of their ads here. The costs are roughly $3 to $7 per install. “It’s a high range, but we don’t force or preset pricing, and advertisers keep coming back to buy again,” said Nguyen, who was previously at another gaming monetization startup called Pocket Change. Marketing and user acquisition for apps has always been a persistent issue within the Android and iOS app stores. There have been many solutions over the years, from earlier scammier attempts to game the rankings to App Store search optimization. As both stores have become increasingly crowded with north of 2 million apps, developers have had to become savvier and more data-driven about how their markets work. That has meant that hyper-specific targeting has become increasingly important, along with new kinds of interactive mobile ad formats. That’s where mNectar would come in. [vimeo 99758768 w=500 h=281] from on . |
Homestar Runner Will Return! | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | The system… is down.
The system… is down.
The system… is no longer down? Back in April, Homestar Runner . It was the tiniest of updates and the site went quiet again shortly thereafter, but the Internet’s collective 90s kid heart still jumped for joy. Was this a dry run? Were they playing with the idea of bringing Homestar back from the dead? Yep! The site’s co-creator, Matt Chapman, popped into an episode of to chat about the history of Homestar — but in the last 15 minutes or so, they get to talking about its future. The too-long-didn’t-listen version: both of the brothers behind the show really really want to bring it back. The traffic they saw from their itty-bitty April update suggests people want it — but they know that may very well be a fluke. So they’re taking it slow. As for why they let it taper off in the first place? Life just got too busy. Around the time that Homestar stopped seeing updates, the show’s co-creators got pulled into writing for series like and Disney’s . But they’ve missed it ever since. The consensus was that we stopped because we didn’t want to do it, and I hate for people to think that we’ve just been sitting in a pool, with a martini, laughing at the Internet, like “You fools! We’ll never make you a Strongbad email again!” It’s very much the opposite. My brother and I have lived the last 3 years thinking, in our brains, that we’d make a new cartoon next week.” Would the goal be to return to making this a full time thing? I’d just love to be making cartoons with these characters again. If it looks like there’s a possibility of doing this full time again, that’s amazing… I don’t want to set expectations too high, but needless to say, we’re jonesing to do this again. If they can get the ball rolling again, Matt says the first bit of new content should show up by fall. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 7 | null |
Bitcoin Foundation Hires Lobbying Group To Take The Cryptocurrency To Washington | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | Today the Bitcoin Foundation that it has retained a lobbying group to press its interests in the nations capital. The selected firm, Thorsen French Advocacy, will “introduce Bitcoin and the foundation to Capitol Hill offices,” according to the foundation. Consider it a sign of the times. Lobbying and political activity has among technology companies, as their business has come under increasing scrutiny. Technology has become increasingly political — think net neutrality, spectrum auctions, antitrust concerns, and even search engines forced to censor results as examples — as politics has become increasingly technological. Bitcoin isn’t immune to the trend. The cryptocurrency is an interesting case, however, as it is designed to work apart from government purview, and some of its supporters hew closer to a more libertarian political philosophy. Why, then, would the Bitcoin Foundation want friends in Washington? It addressed the issue in its note announcing the move, stating that bitcoin “doesn’t need governments’ permission” to exist and operate, but also that those same governments “will have a large role in determining Bitcoin’s adoption rate.” Correct. Rumors of new, stronger regulation of bitcoin in China, for example, can of the currency. Bitcoin saw its price decline in the wake of an IRS decision to , and not a currency, raising thorny tax questions. It matters, in other words, what governments think, and do, because they have influence and regulatory power over the banking industries of the world, which are, functionally, still the conduits and gateways into bitcoin for most people. Bitcoin recently enjoyed a that it has largely retained. It currently trades just north of $600, or a little more than half of its 52-week highs. |
Leaked Documents Show How Yelp Thinks It’s Getting Screwed By Google | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | Documents leaked to TechCrunch from inside allege that Google is manipulating its search results to favor content over Yelp content. The materials accuse of blatantly highlighting its own products in searches made in the US but not in Europe in order to avoid angering EU regulators who are reviewing Google antitrust complaints. The source tells me these screenshots and study are what’s being passed around internally at Yelp to demonstrate that Google’s tactics are unfair. Yelp recently joined a formal complaint about the leniency of an EU antitrust settlement with Google, the today, and my source says these documents helped inspired this action. European Commissioner For Competition Joaquín Almunia In early 2013, Google won a settlement in the U.S. over similar antitrust concerns, which because its practice of directing traffic to its own services like Google+ were deemed legal. Yelp and other complainants don’t want Google to get off so easy in Europe. The current EU antitrust settlement proposal is being pushed by European Commissioner For Competition Joaquín Almunia. It would let Google off without an admission of guilt or fines for using its search engine to hinder competitors in local business listings and comparison shopping, fines that could soar into the billions of dollars. I’m awaiting a response from both Google and Yelp regarding the implications of the documents below. But how exactly Google demoted competitors in Google search results wasn’t totally clear. These documents try to make it obvious. “hotels sf” search results on Google.com for searches from the US TechCrunch’s screenshot of what’s populated in the Google card at the top right of search results when you click in the carousel. The first is two screenshots of the same and , where the EU’s antitrust regulators are based. In the US Google.com results above, you’ll notice a big, prominent black carousel at the top of the screen that features Google+ reviews. The first is two screenshots of the same Google.com search (for “hotels sf”). on Google.com and another from , where the EU’s antitrust regulators are based. In the U.S. Google.com results above, you’ll notice a prominent black carousel at the top of the screen that features Google+ reviews. Clicking the links populates a large Google content card in the bottom right where the map is. It takes up about half the width of the screen with links to book a hotel room through Google, get directions on Google Maps, follow the business or write a review of it via Google+, and explore related Google search queries. Between the carousel, Google content window, and Google keyword ads, depending on your screen size there are almost no organic search results above the fold. These just six months after Google won the FTC settlement. But if you do the same search from Google.bg, you won’t see the carousel or the big Google content card, but rather just Google Maps with some pins on it with less in the way of organic results. “hotels sf” results from google.be (the Belgian site) on searches from the US or from Europe on gooogle.com. People in the U.S. can compare the results for themselves by clicking to see U.S. results and to see European results. My source says Yelp believes this is because Google wants to downplay in front of the EU regulators how it manipulates results until a lenient settlement passes. The source says that in some cases, even searching on Google.com from a European IP address will illustrate less aggressive marketing of Google’s own services like Google+, suggesting Google is actively trying to hide these result formats from people in Europe. The second document is a deck labeled “confidential” that reports the findings of a user-behavior study run by Yelp regarding where users click in Google search results pages. [scribd id=233260174 key=key-6xfEvpy08EEZpIewddhW mode=scroll] It shows that in some cases, when someone searches a restaurant’s name and the word “yelp” in hopes of finding reviews, the first result Google returns is the restaurant’s webpage with Google content attached like Google Places reviews, a “Write a review” button, a link to its Google+ page, and a Google Maps link. The Yelp page of that restaurant, which the user was presumably searching for, is shown second. Yelp’s study findings The study finds that about 20 percent of people looking for the San Francisco restaurant with the search “Gary Danko Yelp” go to the Google+-infused result for the restaurant’s website, which Yelp thinks it should be getting. Of course, some of the 40 clicks from the small (and therefore less credible) study were likely people who decided they’d rather just go to the Gary Danko website instead regardless of whether it was first or second in the results, rather than having been duped. You can see how Google puts its Google+-infused website links ahead of Yelp’s by Yelp’s conclusions and allegations based on the study Google’s defense has typically been that it’s delivering answers to users instead of links in order to get them the information they want faster. The question for EU regulators will be whether Google prioritizing speed with its own properties over the organic results of its competitors constitutes a benign service to users or an antitrust violation. |
Connected TV Market Crosses 1B Devices As Google Pins Its Hopes On Android TV | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | A new report from puts the global market for connected TV devices at over 1 billion currently installed units, which include smart TVs, set-top boxes like the , game consoles, connected Blu-ray players and more. The market is predicted to double in size between now and 2018, reaching the 2 billion mark, with smart TVs carrying embedded platforms as the main segment to watch. Set-top boxes is the other type of device that’s poised to lead the growth, and has announced that its new project Android TV will be a platform available to both categories. Android TV is Google’s second stab at the connected TV device market, after it first tried the waters with Google TV beginning a few years ago. That effort met with tepid response from consumers, but Android TV is a complete rethink of its connected media device strategy. The new platform puts an emphasis on content first, highlighting stuff you’re likely to watch from various sources installed on your platform. Apps take second stage, and games round out the content-delivery package. But what Android TV has going for it above all other competing solutions is the simplicity of the interface, and the similarity it has to the relatively mindless experience of idly browsing TV to watch via traditional cable and satellite delivery methods. From the Strategy Analytics report, we learn that Apple TV is the current leader of the market, with around 35 percent of the 2013 share of devices. Google and each had shares in the teens, with the research firm predicting a surge by Google because of the success of the , and opportunities presented by the Android TV boxes coming up from Razer and Asus this fall. Pricing and availability will determine how much influence those have, however. In the end, Google has learned a lot from Google TV and Chromecast, and Android TV clearly has input from both experiences. To capitalize on the growth coming up in the next few years, it’ll have to make sure Android TV comes in at the price point and with the convenience factor (i.e. preinstalled on a variety of new devices) that consumers appreciate with the company’s increasingly powerful streaming stick. |
Advocacy Groups, Lawmakers Condemn NSA Surveillance Of Muslim-Americans | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | Response to a detailing surveillance of Muslim-Americans by the U.S. government has been swift and negative, with condemnation piling up from privacy and religious organizations alike. Delivering on a long-held promise, journalist today the names of five prominent Muslim-Americans who were under governmental surveillance for years. The group included professors and activists and even a candidate for political office. It’s precisely the set of people who the government claims to not spy on domestically. The (EFF) and a collection of dozens of religious organizations each criticized the revelations, saying they recalled previous decades that saw governmental overreach into the private lives of activists. The FBI, implicated in the report, is infamous for its of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. The agency went as far as to mail him an urging suicide. Given that track record, the number of American targets on the list that Greenwald published is troubling. Greenwald’s report, published on The Intercept, contained thousands of surveillance targets, hundreds of which were Americans. Thousands more were marked as “unknown,” regarding their citizenship. The EFF’s is plain: EFF unambiguously condemns government surveillance of people based on the exercise of their First Amendment rights. The government’s surveillance of prominent Muslim activists based on constitutionally protected activity fails the test of a democratic society that values freedom of expression, religious freedom, and adherence to the rule of law. The collected , also signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, demands a “full public accounting” of the material published and calls for stronger privacy protections. The letter directly alleges that the government is “targeting entire communities — particularly American Muslims — for secret surveillance based on their race, religion, ethnicity or national origin.” The letter also cites a lack of knowledge due to excessive government secrecy. For a first step, it asks that the government provide “the public with the information necessary to meaningfully assess the First Look report.” That seems unlikely. Amnesty International , calling the surveillance of the five “apparently arbitrary,” and demanding “comprehensive surveillance reform legislation” to pass. The Department of Justice, in a released comment, stated that it “is entirely false that U.S. intelligence agencies conduct electronic surveillance of political, religious or activist figures solely because they disagree with public policies or criticize the government, or for exercising constitutional rights.” But the White House and lawmakers on Wednesday called the reported use of a racial slur in intelligence agency training materials unacceptable. The Intercept leaked a 2005 training document for intelligence community employees on how to format an internal Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) memo. In the place a surveillance target’s identity would go, the agency uses the placeholder “Mohammed Raghead.” White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the use of racial slurs is “both unacceptable and inconsistent with the country’s core values,” and the White House takes the allegations ‘“very seriously.” “Upon learning of this matter the White House immediately requested that the Director of National Intelligence undertake an assessment of Intelligence Community policies, training standards or directives that promote diversity and tolerance, and as necessary, make any recommendations changes or additional reforms.” The NSA declined to comment on the authenticity of the memo but said the agency would not approve the use of such a slur in official training materials. Some lawmakers went further than the White House’s criticism of the training memo, condemning the agencies for targeting particular religious groups. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has staunchly supported reigning in intelligence agencies, called the slur in the memo “appalling,” but went on to say it would be “even more troubling” if that type of sentiment were informing intelligence activities. “I appreciate the NSA spokeswoman’s statement that racial and ethnic stereotypes and slurs are unacceptable. However, our intelligence leadership must make clear not just that racial and ethnic slurs are unacceptable, but that targeting Americans based on their religion is unacceptable as well,” Wyden said in a statement Wednesday. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to Congress, called the NSA’s activity “wrong.” “I share the concerns of many Americans who feel the NSA has violated their civil liberties by monitoring them without cause,” Ellison said. “Muslim-Americans continue to face bigotry and hatred, but the NSA’s former spying practices undermines our entire nation’s progress towards greater inclusion. […] The United States Government must protect all Americans no matter what they believe, the color of their skin, where they’re from or who they love.” |
Googler, And Former DARPA Director, Regina Dugan Joins Zynga’s Board Of Directors | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | is announcing a new addition to its board of directors — , vice president of engineering and head of the Advanced Technology and Projects group at Google. In a memo sent to the company’s employees, CEO said Dugan will be “a true catalyst for creative thinking at Zynga.” As , Dugan’s team is working on projects like a temporary electronic tattoo that can unlock your smartphone. (She described the group as “pirates trying to do epic shit.”) Before joining Google/Motorola Mobility, Dugan served as director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as — she was the agency’s first female leader. Zynga’s press release highlights a bunch of media-related honors as well, but I’m partial to reporter Liz Gannes’ complimentary description: “ .” The appointment follows of co-founder and CEO from Zynga’s board last month. Those departures meant that Zynga was no longer in compliance with a NASDAQ listing rule that required boards to have a majority of independent directors, . With Dugan’s appointment, Zynga should be compliant again. There are now five independent directors (Dugan, Stanley J. Meresman, Sunil Paul, Ellen F. Smirnoff, and John Doerr, who is now the lead independent director). The other board members are founder and chairman Mark Pincus, Bing Gordon and Mattrick. Dugan will chair the board’s nominating and governance committee and will also be a member of the product committee. In the release, she said: I believe we need to play. Zynga is full of creative thinkers who embrace the power of play. Einstein famously stated that ‘combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought,’ and this spirit is embodied in Zynga’s products, which have brought new technology to games. Games that help people connect, share, rest and energize through play. I look forward to working with Don and the board on the company’s next chapter Despite some high-profile struggles and layoffs, in its most recent earnings report. At the time, it also announced that Pincus (who was last year) would be stepping down from an operational role at the company. You can see the regulatory filing related to Dugan’s appointment . The filing also mentions Mattrick vesting stock as a result of his first anniversary at the company, and a related stock sale “to satisfy the Company’s statutory tax withholding obligations in connection with the vesting of the [restricted stock units].” |
Tinder’s Sean Rad To Join Us At Disrupt SF 2014 | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | , the co-inventor of the hottest dating game in the land, will be joining us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 to chat about the success of and its plans for monetization. Tinder is also currently the subject of served by its former VP of Marketing , which we have The app in its present iteration has been around since 2012, but Rad’s story begins much earlier. He’s a serial entrepreneur, founding companies like and , which launched at Disrupt NY 2012, before shifting focus to Tinder. He has helped to grow the company from a project at a hackathon to an app that now boasts 10 million matches and 750 million swipes per day. For those not in the dating scene, Tinder is a mobile app that shows you pictures of people in your area. You swipe left if you’re not into it and swipe right if you’re down. If someone else also swiped right on you, then you’re matched and able to chat. Tinder’s design was inspired by a deck of cards, and its game-like interface stretches all the way into the messaging: “Keep playing!” the app urges you after a match. Rad has been there from the very beginning, and should not only be able to shed light on his own company, but help us with insights on the future of the online dating world. We’re excited to have him back. Along with launching Cardify at the event in 2012, he sat down with TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis last year at Disrupt Berlin 2013 but, since then, a lot has changed in Tinder’s world. He joins other notable speakers such as and . Tickets for Disrupt SF are currently available at the early-bird pricing, which ends on July 15. And if you’re interested in sponsoring the event, to our sponsorship team for more info. |
Android Wear Needs To Be More Thoughtful About Bugging You | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | Upon picking up the from Google’s I/O developer event recently, I immediately thought that I’d be making a permanent switch from the , my current watch. It’s thinner, has a step counter, and a sensor for getting your resting heart rate — not quite as advanced as what the Basis is packing, but I’m not a fitness nut. It also lets you do some pretty neat things. If you watched the Android Wear section of the keynote, you saw Google show off features like ordering a ride via in seconds or . Granted, you can already do both of those things on your phone and they work really well, but it’s clear that in a few years you might be able to do a whole lot of things with a quick voice command to your wrist that will save time compared to the control mechanisms we’re used to today. Not many apps include Android Wear functionality today, so in reality, for Google’s smartwatch platform is instant access to , the search giant’s contextual service for telling you what you need to know when you need to know it. As it stands today, Google Now isn’t quite as impressive on your wrist as it is in your pocket. Yes, it can show a card saying that your flight is on time if an email was sent to you Gmail account, but in most circumstances it isn’t showing something actually relevant to what you’re doing. On a recent trip to Los Angeles, it kept trying to show nearby bus stations – even though I kept using driving directions from to get around and always choose BART over busses to get around San Francisco. If you’re active on social networks, the current notification system on Android Wear will keep your wrist buzzing. Twitter mentions, favorites, and retweets show up as they come in, as do certain Facebook notifications (I received birthday reminders and messages, and saw other people receive friend request approval notifications). You don’t yet have the ability to delineate which notifications are worth seeing and which don’t need to show up at all. That’s not to say you have no control over notifications. You have the ability to mute them, but only on an app-by-app basis. Then there’s the Gear Live’s overzealousness when it comes to demanding your attention. By default, the screen is always on. That makes sense, considering the primary function of a watch is to display the time so you can glance at it. But there are two levels of “on” for the Gear Live — a mostly black screen with white numbers showing the time, and the colorful Google Now-like interface shown in most demos. Even though the mostly black screen is fine at a glance, the Gear Live really wants to jump to that latter level. It makes me want to check to see if there’s a new card waiting for me whenever it lights up — I mean, why would it if there weren’t something worth seeing? Unfortunately, that’s usually not the case. The screen would light up, I’d swipe to see what Google thought was so important for me to see, and there’d either be no cards waiting for me or a card telling me the weather in my current city. Useful in the morning or before I head out for dinner, but not enough to be worth drawing my attention multiple times per day. My Basis, on the other hand, always has the same two things showing when I check it: the time and a small graphic representing how close I am to reaching my daily step goal. The interface is essentially as complex as an old-school pedometer, with steps, calories, and heart rate always a tap away. I never have the problem of hoping to see something only to be disappointed. If we’re going to all have smartwatches tied to our phones, they should be designed with that paradigm in mind. They should expect us to already have a constant stream of interactive data coming in at all times — which means that when we look at our wrists, it should only show what’s really important in a particular moment. For what it’s worth, Google has shown that it realizes apps have to be different on this new form factor. In , it told developers to be mindful of their impact on user battery life and time, suggesting ways that they could keep the amount of time interacting with an app to a minimum. On its for Android Wear developers, the company also suggests how developers can “focus on not stopping the user” and avoid being “a constant shoulder tapper.” So it’s probably pretty likely that these first apps aren’t representative of what users will experience once developers figure out what they need to do differently. Eventually, I imagine I won’t get a notification on my wrist every time I’m mentioned on Twitter while I’m at work because Twitter will see that I just favorited something on Tweetdeck in my browser. Same thing with not having anything to look at when I unlock my screen — eventually, there will be so many apps with information waiting for me that I’ll have the opposite complaint. As for the aggressive attention-seeking of the device itself, Google simply needs to be a little more thoughtful with its presets. Yes, I could change a setting so that my Gear Live’s screen isn’t always on by default, but that eliminates the benefit of Android Wear being “glance-able.” I’d rather it only dropped me into the card interface if there are actually cards with information I haven’t seen yet. I’m not particularly worried about Google Now on Android Wear, either. It’s probably the best example of Google’s philosophy in action. Just guessing here, but it wouldn’t be surprising to hear that they’re already collecting data on how often people use various cards to determine what’s worth pushing to your wrist in the future. |
Ultratext Is A Simple GIF-Making App That Works With iMessage | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | There’s nothing more obnoxious than texting someone who doesn’t respond (at least somewhat) promptly. And their excuse? “ Ha, no more, my so-called friends, no more! A new app called will help get their attention by letting you easily create colorful, flashing GIF messages you can quickly send via iMessage. The app is also just really fun to use. Despite the ever-growing number of mobile messaging clients on the market, iMessage is still the platform to beat for iPhone users, simply because it’s the default. And while iMessage has long supported sending GIFs, the process of doing so has been sort of cumbersome – you would have to go to a website offering GIFs, open up the GIF in another window, press and hold your finger down on the GIF, tap “copy,” then paste into the iMessage interface. Ultratext’s GIF creation process is much simpler. After you install the app, you simply type in the text you want to turn into a GIF, optionally add photos or tap the color wheel to change the text’s background or font color, then tap “Return.” On the following screen, you can choose where the message gets shared. Though most users will tap the big green button for “text message,” Ultratext also lets you post to Instagram, Facebook or Vimeo, or share via email. When receiving your iMessage, your friend’s iPhone notification screen won’t show the animated GIF in action – they won’t see the flashing image in all its glory until they open up iMessage itself. But the notifications interface include the GIF’s first photo alongside your message. So you might want to start off your GIF with some eye-catching word like or to get their attention. Ultratext was dreamed up by Santa Monica-based iOS developer Andrew Farmer and web designer and developer Jonathan Thomas, who resides in San Francisco. The two teamed up a couple of years ago to work on apps after meeting through a mutual friend, but work part time to “pay the bills,” says Farmer. He notes that they’re not “a real company,” and have instead just been dabbling with app development. “Most of [the apps] were not hits and have been pulled from the App Store,” Farmer explains. However, it was through one of these that the idea for Ultratext came about. “We recently made an app that let people add overlays onto videos,” says Farmer. “It didn’t work out because the creation process was too involved. We discovered that people really want to make something cool in seconds. While we were walking through San Francisco one day we came up with the keyboard interface idea,” he says. The idea works. In fact, my only complaint is that the app automatically adds text to accompany your message which reads “Made with Ultratext for iOS” and includes an App Store link. You can backspace to delete the text, of course, but Farmer has another idea. “We are going to charge $1 for removal of the download link from iMessage,” he says. Sold! The team is now thinking about selling additional content that can be injected into your Ultratext, like “canned meme-like images,” for example. In the meantime, Ultratext is a free download . |
PayPal Makes Good On Its Braintree Acquisition With Launch Of New Developer Tools, The Braintree v.zero SDK | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 9 | Payments gateway is making its first significant product announcement since its by last year, with the launch of a jointly developed Braintree SDK (software development kit) for developers. The new toolset is being called the “Braintree v.zero SDK” to indicate how it’s been rebuilt from the ground up, and is said to be easier and quicker to integrate within web, mobile web and native mobile applications. previously offered SDKs for developers looking to accept payments within their applications, and this is meant to replace those earlier versions as the new Braintree experience. While the standout feature, of course, is the inclusion of PayPal as a payment method, the new SDK has actually been built in such a way that turning on or off PayPal, as well as any future payment methods Braintree chooses to integrate, will be as simple as flipping a switch. As Braintree CEO explains, once the new SDK is installed, developers will be able to simply toggle a setting within their Braintree control panels to begin supporting PayPal. This, he says, helps to “future proof” the technology, as the company plans to offer more payment methods in the months ahead. “We have a huge international business, and non-card payment methods are very important in a lot of countries internationally. So [this new SDK offers] a seamless path for us to now add those to these buying experiences so developers and merchants don’t have extra work to do,” says Ready. Asked if this change would also allow Braintree to easily add support for cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, in the future, Ready says “you’re on the right path,” but notes the company has nothing to announce on that front at this time. (Bitcoin, and all the other alt-coins, can be seen as something of a competitor to PayPal as an alternative way to pay online, so it would be odd to see support for such a thing in a PayPal-owned product. More likely, the “non-card” payment methods being planned are those that allow international customers to pay online instead of credit cards.) The new SDK also introduces a “drop-in” user interface that makes it easier for early-stage startups to use the Braintree service without a lot of extra integration work. However, for larger merchants, the ability to fully customize the SDK to make the Braintree checkout flow appear like a native part of the merchant’s own site or app is still supported. The SDK now takes about 15 minutes to install and configure, where before it took around 30, notes Ready. “But the really big step forward is what you get for that 15 minutes,” he adds. Previously, developers would have to build their checkout experiences for iOS, then for Android, then for web and mobile web, Ready explains. “That’s many weeks worth of work for the developer. We’ve now said we’re eliminating all that…plus we’re adding the PayPal integration.” Over the past several weeks, a number of beta testers have been using the v.zero SDK, including GitHub, ParkWhiz, Chargify and Jane.com – the latter of which reports that after a week of integrating with the new APIs, more than 11 percent of its payment volume is now comes from PayPal. is planning to integrate the SDK in the weeks ahead, as well. Braintree is today making the SDK publicly available to its tens of thousands of merchant customers. Other Braintree customers include Airbnb, Angry Birds (Rovio), Uber, HotelTonight, Fab, LivingSocial, OpenTable, Poshmark, TaskRabbit, Animoto, Basecamp, CloudFlare, . At the time of its , Braintree reported $12 billion in total volume, and more than $4 billion in mobile. As of last quarter, the company announced 25 percent quarter-over-quarter growth, and is now enabling one-touch buying for 60 million consumers. On the Venmo side of the business, Braintree says it’s doing more than $1 billion in annual volume, and that’s growing more than 60 percent quarter-over-quarter. |
Ezeecube Is A Stackable, All Inclusive Media Center For Your Home | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | wants to be the all-in-one media hub for your home. You can use it to wirelessly back up photos and other files from all your mobile devices and cameras, while removing duplicates and organizing with its photo management software. It also functions as a home media cloud so you can access your files anywhere, while streaming photos and videos to iOS and Android devices, or Windows and Mac PCs. It can even play vintage video games. has , with more than $121,000 currently raised and is now seeking money for is stretch goals before it ends on August 3. Pledges that come with a device currently start at $39 for an EzeeTuner and $42 for a DIY EzeeDrive. The device is modular so you can add features and functions, like extra storage space or disk players, in up to four different modules. Ezeecube is powered by a Linux (Yocto) operating system that runs EzeeCube’s pre-configured . [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EHbwsZuDbg&w=640&h=360] , a former senior technology analyst at Goldman Sachs, developed Ezeecube after his family got fed up with trying to organize their photo files. “My wife and mother-in-law were frustrated with their phone full of photos of our young daughter. I was frustrated helping them backup on my computer, managing another computer for playing movies and yet another computer for other data backup,” he says. “Ariane asked me ‘you build systems for your companies to solve these problems, can’t you build one for us?’ Knowing many friends have similar frustration, I left Goldman Sachs about a year ago to build this.” Ezeecube differentiates from other media centers by being extendable without any wires, setup, or installation (Jaiswal says user friendliness was a top priority); automatically finding duplicates and organizing photos into different categories (like “Holiday” or “Faces”); and being ready for multimedia with pre-installed XBMC. The device uses open source software to attract developers who want to find different uses for EzeeCube. ” With the open source and open standard stackable units, EzeeCube’s use is only limited by the imagination of developers. They can build their own home automation unit or webcam unit, etc., and simply stack on top,” says Jaiswal. Modules currently available include an EzeeCube with a built-in 1TB hard drive that can be upgraded to 2TB; one without a built-in hard drive; the EzeeTuner, which lets you watch and record live TV; EzeeGame, which allows you to play Sega Genesis and Nintendo SNES cartridges on a XBMC retro player emulator (this will be produced if the campaign hits its stretch goal of $125,000); and a Blu-Ray drive called EzeePlay. EzeeCube connects to other devices through 802.11n wi-fi and Bluetooth 3.0. DLNA, and AirPlay. Its built-in hard drives have a dual-core 1GHz Cortex-A9 processor; 1GB of DDR3 RAM; and 4GB of flash storage, in addition to the 1TB hard drive. The back features slots for SD card, USB 2.0, micro-USB; HDMI 1.4; optical audio; and ethernet. Jaiswal says he is confident that Ezeecube will ship by Christmas: “We already have our designs ready, right now we are in the process of making some changes for production and also upgrade our hardware specs requested by our backers. We have engaged factories and consultants who have decades of experience in production.” |
Crave’s Vesper Is A Vibrator That Hides In Plain Sight | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | In a market filled with , stands out by making vibrators that are not only elegant and discreet, but also multifunctional. For example, , the first vibe it produced, charges through USB and can also be used as a thumb drive. Now , which , has released its newest product, , a small vibrator that also doubles as a pendant, for those of you who get a thrill from wearing your sex toys. Crave, which was founded by industrial designer and entrepreneur , seeks to make sex toys that are discreet without being apologetic. Like Duet, the multi-speed Vesper is also USB rechargeable and is made from stainless steel. It looks like the pencil pendant worn by Joan on “Mad Men” or a small bolt (in a pinch, you can probably also use it to hold your IKEA furniture together). Vesper is already in production and is currently taking pre-orders on Tilt (the site formerly known as Crowdtilt), starting from $49 for a silver-plated Vesper. Other options include rose gold and 24-karat gold plating. Vibrators are set to ship by early September. |
Y Combinator-Backed ListRunner Eliminates Hospital Paperwork | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | A majority of a doctor’s time is spent jotting down notes about a patient for the next doctor on duty over and over again with a pen and paper, according to . His new Y Combinator-backed startup, , promises to eliminate this paperwork with a mobile app. You’d think this problem would have already been solved with modern technology. We have smartphones and iPads now for this, right? But using most modern tech to communicate a patient’s private info to each doctor violates privacy and isn’t . Of course, we do have electronic medical records. Chowdury laughs at this. “Electronic medical records. It’s like you just open up your email and hit print screen and use that to manage your day right now,” he says. That’s not good enough for doctors like Stanford Hospital surgeon Matthew Wetschler, who says you have to go back to your desk to enter something or use a really backward system. So doctors end up using pen and paper when they are actually face-to-face with patients. ListRunner, on the other hand, creates a digital record within the app that can be taken on-the-go and shared on a private network with other doctors. It works on both iOS or Android and it stays on, even if your phone hits a dead zone or isn’t near Wi-Fi. The most important part here, though, is that the app is HIPAA-compliant. “We call ourselves scut monkeys sometimes because we are buried in paperwork and writing things over and over again instead of actually attending to the patient,” Chowdury tells me. Scrum, in his meaning of the word, is menial tasks with incremental impact that you do over and over again. A Rhodes Scholar with a an MD and a Ph.D. in medical information systems, Chowdury was finishing med school when he first noticed this flaw in the hospital system. It wasn’t until he got involved in health hackathons that he figured out how to solve the problem doctors had with paper. He and his co-founders, engineer Dominic Savoie and Dr. Trevor Chan, were participating in these health hackathons together when the three started discussing joining forces. In order to be useful, the app had to be reliable, HIPAA-compliant, work on any device, protect privacy and work offline in case of emergency or lack of Wi-Fi. One very basic prototype later and ListRunner debuted for the first time at a event in Capetown, South Africa. They shut the app down after its debut, thinking it was just a prototype that needed building out. “We started to get all these complaints that the app wasn’t working,” says Chowdury. “We had no idea people were actually using it. There just isn’t anything else out there that lets you keep sharable, digital records while you are actually interacting with your patients.” Dr. Corey Rood, who works out of Children’s Medical Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, was a bit skeptical. “I don’t know that many entities would feel comfortable having secure medical info on cell phones, even through an app.” His main concern seemed to be fitting all that info into a small space on your smartphone. Chowdury said that was a common question. “Most of the doctors we speak to, want to display as much information as possible on one screen on their phone because they are used to a paper sheet. In fact, I always say that our biggest competitor is paper.” Co-founder Savoie put it like this: “It’s like if you printed out your emails in the morning, answered them on paper with a pencil, and then would type them back in Gmail at the end of the day. The EMR isn’t designed to help teams collaborate at the ward level. ListRunner is more like a bug tracker or project management tool whereas the EMR is more like a wiki with the official info.” Chowdury showed me how doctors fold the note paper they use in half and want just a certain amount of info to fit all on one part of the page. He then told me that over 80 percent of medical error happens with miscommunication during hand-offs. The also confirmed those numbers. Wetschler believes something like Listrunner would be very useful to him. “You can’t expect us to just drop how we work in the real world when we get to the hospital. We use our smartphones to communicate. I guarantee you doctors are still texting each other about patients because of this, whether they admit it or not.” The ListRunner app just released a private beta version, which is being tested in 15 hospitals worldwide. “The rapid adoption in South Africa taught us to do a slow rollout while we test and make it better,” Chowdury says. “A lot of the info doctors put on this app is mission critical.” The team plans to show off what they’ve created at Y Combinator Demo Day on Aug 19 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Those interested can get an early demo by clicking . |
Alibaba Invests $120M In Kabam At A Valuation Above $1B | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | Chinese conglomerate is making another big investment in an American startup. The that the company is investing $120 million in mobile game developer Kabam, best known for such games as and for buying the COO confirmed to me today the $120 million figure and that the investment brought Kabam’s valuation above $1 billion. Along with the investment, the WSJ notes that the deal also includes an agreement to publish Kabam’s games across ‘s apps in China, including and . “Truly successful games companies have to be globally successful,” Kabam CEO told the WSJ. “This strategic collaboration with Alibaba provides Kabam the resources, infrastructure and distribution to help bring our current and future durable franchise games to China and elsewhere in Asia and make an immediate impact.” According to Wakeford, Kabam is taking a pragmatic approach to its new efforts in China. While the country offers a huge opportunity — representing approximately 50 percent of the global gaming market — there are significant issues that Kabam had to consider. “The Chinese market is very complicated,” he told me during our call. “You’ve got to deal with fragmentation in the Android ecosystem, [many] different types of devices, different payment SDKs… a lot of work goes into culturalizing a game for the market.” Wakeford says that Kabam did a lot of market and user research to determine what game to launch in China, taking extra care to look at genre and intellectual property preferences (Kabam makes games from the Fast & Furious, Lord of the Rings, and Godfather franchises, among others). Based on that research, the company decided that a Lord of the Rings title set for release in the U.S. later this year will serve as Kabam’s launch title across Alibaba’s platforms. This collaboration is the latest in a series of investments and talks between Alibaba and American startups in recent months. In March, , and earlier this week it was reported that the company was . Alibaba has only recently started bringing Western games to its audience. Back in May, the company released indie title . By comparison, that move was barely dipping its toes in the water — as Kabam notes , games like and have each generated more than US$100 million in revenue. |
Strengthened Senate NSA Reform Measure Is ‘A Good First Step’ | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | Earlier this week, Sen. Patrick Leahy introduced a strengthened version of the to praise from tech companies, privacy groups and editorial board. As that initial applause settled, Rep. Zoe Lofgren argued on Thursday that the legislation would only rein in parts of the nation’s intelligence apparatus. The Congresswoman did note that the bill is “an improvement” on the House’s watered-down version that recently passed. Most notably, the Senate’s FREEDOM Act does not include provisions to address programs conducted under , which allows the government to target the communications of foreign persons outside the United States. Under Section 702 authority, the National Security Agency (NSA) often sweeps up the communications of U.S. citizens who aren’t being targeted, and holds onto it. has reported on extensive use — abuse, to some — of the program as revealed in files leaked to reporters by former government contractor Edward Snowden. Lofgren said the FREEDOM Act “falls short” by failing to reform Section 702. “Chairman Leahy’s bill is an encouraging improvement in many respects, and I applaud him for that. But I am disappointed it omits an essential restriction on the collection and use of American communications under 702 authority,” said the California Democrat in a statement. After the House of the FREEDOM Act that lost the support of many privacy advocates, Lofgren led the charge to pass an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill to cut funding for so-called “backdoor searches.” Backdoor searches occur when intelligence agencies query data collected and stored under Section 702 for the communications of Americans. The NSA can’t collect the communications of United States citizens on purpose, but whatever it collects “incidentally” and stores in its efforts to collect the communications of foreign targets is fair game. So, provided that it has collected and stored the communications of a U.S. citizen, the NSA can search that information under the authority of Section 702 without a warrant. The practice is controversial. The amendment Lofgren sponsored in June with overwhelming support in the House, but Section 702 and backdoor searches were conspicuously missing from Leahy’s measure, presumably due to compromises the senator made to gain support from the White House. Dozens of privacy groups Wednesday to lawmakers, calling the Senate version of the bill “a good first step.” And that’s a good way to think of the FREEDOM Act. It returns measures previously weakened in the House’s mark-ups, enhancing transparency provisions and reforms to the FISA Court. But as lawmakers and privacy groups push for this bill to see the floor, they shouldn’t forget about 702. |
Free, France’s T-Mobile, Wants To Acquire T-Mobile For $15 Billion | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | France’s , Free, just announced that it wanted to acquire T-Mobile US. The WSJ first the story. Free then confirmed the bid in a . was already in talks with for a potential acquisition. Now, Free (also known as Iliad) is offering $15 billion in cash for 56.6 percent of the American company at $33 per share. Overall, Free says that it values T-Mobile at a 42 percent premium compared to T-Mobile’s share price of $25.4 before rumors of the Sprint acquisition started making the rounds. Shares opened at $31.02 before rumors of Free’s bid surfaced. This deal makes a lot of sense as T-Mobile is very reminiscent of Free’s strategy. In fact, T-Mobile’s uncarrier campaign could be inspired by its French counterpart. Free is one of the major Internet service providers in France. It only started operating its mobile network in 2012. It is the so-called fourth mobile carrier, has a small 3G and LTE network and relies a lot on its current partnership with Orange. Yet, the scrappy company was able to provide truly unlimited offers for a fraction of the price. Imagine unlimited talk, unlimited SMS and MMS messages, tethering and, even more important, unlimited data with a speed reduction after 20GB. All of this costs $25 a month (€20). And there is no contract. You can leave whenever you want. T-Mobile adopted a similar strategy with unsubsidized phones, no contract and unlimited data. Prices are still much more expensive in the U.S., but that might be due to the larger territory. Both companies now even offer free roaming in some countries. Now, T-Mobile investors can expect a bidding war between Sprint and Free. Many were concerned that a Sprint acquistion would create antitrust issues. The Department of Justice already AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile, so it could happen again. As Free doesn’t operate in the U.S., it doesn’t have a problem on this front. But Free is an even company than T-Mobile. Its market capitalization is just $16 billion (€12 billion), so it would need to find strong banking partners to find all the needed cash to acquire T-Mobile. Nothing is done yet, but today’s news just made T-Mobile’s future much more interesting. |
eBay Reports More Diverse Staff Than Other Tech Companies | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | eBay maintains one of the highest rates of gender diversity in the tech industry — 42 percent of its total employees are female. Women make up 24 percent of the company’s tech employees. Although this may seem like a relatively low number when considering women make up almost 50 percent of the company’s non-tech employees, it puts it slightly ahead of Pinterest, . Facebook, Google and Twitter recently . Only about 10 percent of tech employees are female at Twitter, and the numbers aren’t much better at Facebook and Google, at 15 and 18 percent respectively. eBay may be experiencing slightly higher rates of gender diversity than its peers due to proactive recruiting measures the company has taken. Three years ago, President and CEO launched the to “attract and engage women to build lasting careers at eBay.” The result: The number of women in leadership doubled, and now 28 percent of the company’s leaders are female. This is a promising sign, as tech companies rolling out diversity numbers commit to adopting similar initiatives in an effort to diversify their staffs. When it comes to ethnic diversity, it seems the company still has some work to do. Although in all positions, 7 percent of employees are black and 5 percent are Hispanic, that number dips when looking at tech and leadership positions specifically, where each ethnic group makes up 2 percent of employees. More than half of tech employees at Facebook, Google and Twitter are white, but at eBay, Asian employees are the most well-represented ethnicity in tech positions. |
GoPro Falls 8% After Reporting Stronger-Than-Expected Q2 Revenue Of $244.6M | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | Today marked GoPro’s as a public company. The camera firm traded up more than 3.5 percent in regular hours before its release. GoPro had roughly doubled from its IPO price of $24 heading into reporting its second-quarter financial results. For the second quarter, had revenue of $244.6 million, up 38.1 percent year-over-year, and earnings per share of $0.08 on a non-GAAP basis. Analysts had expected GoPro to earn $0.06 per share (non-GAAP) on revenue of $237.73 million. For comparison, in the first quarter of 2014, GoPro had revenue of $235 million. Investors were therefore not expecting much in the way of sequential revenue growth. In after-hours trading, GoPro is down more around 8 percent. Why is the firm down so sharply if it managed to beat guidance? The firm’s investors appear to have priced into its value a higher growth delta than what it managed to record. Using normal accounting methods, GoPro lost $19.8 million in the quarter, or $0.24 per diluted share. By comparison, GoPro was profitable on a GAAP basis in its first quarter of 2014. In its year-ago quarter, the company also lost money, with a GAAP net loss of $5.1 million, or $0.06. The company ended the quarter with just over $100 million in cash. Another $200 million from its IPO will show up on its next-quarter earnings report. GoPro had a massive run following its initial public offering. It has a lot to prove if it wants to command the rich valuation that investors afforded it. In this first report, it failed to live up to expectations. |
Amazon’s Android App Store Opens Up Shop In Egypt, Singapore And 39 Other Countries | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | If you’re thinking about launching your Android app on Amazon’s App Store, your potential market just got quite a bit bigger. This morning, Amazon is rolling out their App Store in 41 new places, bumping the grand total up to 236 countries and territories. At this point, it’s getting tough to think of a region where Amazon’s App Store up and running. Today’s expansions are focused on Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. One catch worth noting: just because Amazon sell your app in a new country doesn’t mean they necessarily . If your app goes against a region’s laws or local restrictions, Amazon won’t allow it to be published there. It seems Amazon is mostly counting on developers to declare what their apps contain — but if a government comes knocking with a takedown request for a specific app, I wouldn’t expect Amazon to put up much of a fight. Here’s the full list of countries coming online today (if you’re looking for the full list of countries supported by Amazon, ): |
.@HiddenCash Revealed: Making Generosity Go Viral | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | , and you’ll make someone’s day. Teach someone to give, and they’ll make a difference for a lifetime.The anonymous duo behind the didn’t quite realize that was the point when they started hiding envelopes of money and tweeting clues to their locations. With over 700,000 Twitter followers, they’ve become de facto leaders of an accidental movement to remind people there’s some good in the world and inspire them to pay it forward. The previously unnamed half of @HiddenCash agreed to reveal his identity to me, along with the story of how it all started, on a cool night in San Francisco’s Mission District. His name is Yan Budman, and he fittingly works a the Director of Marketing at Indiegogo, which lets people donate to creative projects. Budman’s eyes squinch up to make room for the giant smiles he’s prone to. It’s the contented grin of a thirty-something nice-guy who’s recently spent a lot of time watching people overwhelmed with glee thanks to his clandestine adventures. This and the people they touched. @HiddenCash began after his longtime pal Jason Buzi (previously outed via voice recognition from a phone interview in May) came into a little money from a business deal. Buzi had always been generous, having donated to charities, done volunteer work, and organized The Great Waterballoon Toss in Dolores Park. Driving through the Mission together around midnight, Buzi noticed a man who seemed down on his luck on the side of the road. He tried to hand some money to him, but scared him off. “There’s probably a better way to do this,” Budman said. “Like what? We’ll just hide money around?” Buzi replied. It turned out to be that simple. Buzi had never heard of Twitter but Budman had been onboard since 2008. He quickly snapped a photo of Buzi’s fist filled with money, and grabbed the handle @HiddenCash. The duo hid the first few wads of dough near some of their favorite businesses like and , where they hoped people would donate to instructors or buy some strangers a cup of joe. The started rolling in immediately. Followers for the money, even if they didn’t find it. @HiddenCash started talking up the idea of people sharing the cash they found to make an impact on someone else. Several successful cash hunters pledged to , with one planning to use the money they found to buy books for a community library. After few more “drops,” Budman tells me, “addiction set in.” Suddenly, the whole thing took off. Within two weeks , the project had been featured on top news outlets like the BBC, and the Twitter account had boomed to a half million followers. “People were just coming out and meeting each other and really connecting in a positive way. The majority of people weren’t even finding money. There were a lot of parents of kids who were like ‘I went to the beach and they didn’t find anything but they want to give their allowance to the homeless or someone on their way home’. It started creating this movement.” https://twitter.com/briana_surae/statuses/487306278096486400 At first glance, giving money to Twitter-equipped strangers doesn’t seem like the most effective way to do good in the world. @HiddenCash flies in the face of great data-driven philanthropy organizations like , which helps donors deliver the most impact for their dollar by recommending charities with low overhead and a record of success. Anti-malaria mosquito nets, treating parasitic infections, and giving directly to extremely low-income individuals are all highly efficient means of reducing suffering. According to the math, @HiddenCash might seem like a frivolous waste. If someone can afford a smartphone and data plan, how badly can they really need the money? That’s a legitimate criticism. However, it ignores the unquantifiable way @HiddenCash inspires people to be more generous. Budman admits “for a lot of people, $100 isn’t a game-changer” but explains “it can generate a ripple effect that creates a less selfish society.” That’s why the retweet makes Twitter the perfect place for @HiddenCash. The concept can go viral. “The amazing thing about this technology is that it allows ideas like this to spread. If everyone around the world does these things, like gives away 10 percent of their income or volunteers 10 percent of their time, the impact is huge,” Budman says. Nice! Some of the winners are really , @Thepacifics — Grace Mendoza (@ProducerGrace) Budman and Buzi have taken the show on the road. There’s now been around 100 drops totaling around $50,000 across over a dozen cities, including New York, Houston, Mexico City, and London. The pair have learned a thing or two, as well. They stick to hiding the envelopes in open areas so there’s less danger of someone getting hurt if there’s a stampede of scavenger hunters. Budman also shoots for less populated areas. He tells me he almost got caught doing a drop at the bench in front of San Francisco’s Painted Ladies apartments — of Full House fame. “I had to sit there long enough that people wouldn’t be suspicious when I walked away because there’s been a few times where people thought they ‘saw the guy’.” This is what did to Hermosa Beach in SoCal this morn, so awesome! : — Derry London ✈️ (@Derry_London) I hope that after this story reveals his identity, he won’t have anyone stalking him or tagging him with a location tracker to unfairly scoop up the drops. Luckily, the duo isn’t alone. “Now there are hundreds of accounts that have been created all over the world, in Russia, in the smallest towns, replicating the same model because it’s so easy to do. That’s the beauty of Twitter,” Budman tells me. “The model is open sourced. People have told us they can’t give away a lot of money but this has inspired them to do what they can. It’s given them faith in humanity.” The @HiddenCash boys are considering how to propel the project. They’ve been approached about creating a TV show and have discussed raising funds to pay for the drops. Budman suddenly gets serious for a moment. With the weight of 700,000 followers turning to him for inspiration, he says “We want to keep it growing without selling out.” For now the team is grappling with how to keep a strong signal to noise ratio on the Twitter account. “The challenge is to regionalize the content, though a lot of people have said they love following along from the story even if they’re in Ohio.” The secret identity of @HiddenCash: Yan Budman In an age of vast income inequality and The Giving Pledge, the average person can feel like their philanthropic efforts are merely a drop in the ocean. But as Budman and I left the little back-alley SF bar where we’d met, he looked up at a graffiti mural illuminated by the sun and told me there’s great power in the “element of surprise.” It can take a lot to fulfill someone’s expectations. But if they don’t expect something good will happen, it doesn’t take much to lift their spirits: Pay for the toll of a driver behind you; give $20 to a street musician; buy a round of beers for strangers. “Anything that makes an impact with a small group of people and inspires them to do the same,” Budman proclaims. Turns out isn’t about the scavenger hunt or even the money. It’s about reminding people that they, too, can conjure up the joy of serendipitous generosity. Budman concludes: “We’re not some angels. Anyone can do this.” |
Meet EVO, San Francisco’s Answer To The Ultimate Urban Utility Bike | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | Every couple of years, the launches a contest designed to surface new ideas in bike design from teams across the country. The project this year has tasked designers from five cities to build what they believe is the “ultimate urban utility bike.” into the contest is EVO, a collaboration between , 4130 Cycle Works, and . The team built a bike that took into account new 3D metal printing techniques, while also creating a flexible system for adding modular accessories. The plug-and-play accessory system will enable cyclists to easily add and remove things like storage racks, baby carriers, or even surfboard attachments, depending on what they planned to do or where they wanted to go on any given day. With a quick-connect mounting system and a symmetrical frame design, EVO can be used for carrying different loads of cargo, more or less interchangeably on the front or rear of the bike. Because the lugs are 3D-printed, EVO can be very quickly assembled by just welding together a few pieces of straight tubing onto them. That reduces a ton of the man hours associated with fitting various pieces of the frame together. It’s worth noting that this is very much a concept design and the cost to build would probably be a little out of the price range for average consumers. However, if the EVO came to be, it wouldn’t be the first time a designer took an Oregon Manifest bike and built it for real. A few years ago, a San Francisco-based team from built the first version of the , which went on to a and recently shipped its first production run of its urban utility e-bike. Anyway, check out the video above for more info on EVO, and be sure to on the . Voting ends August 3 at Noon PST. |
LinkedIn Launches A Standalone Sales Navigator To Help Users With “Social Selling” | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | is fleshing out its tools for salespeople today with a new version of its Sales Navigator. The biggest difference — the Sales Navigator is now a standalone product rather than an additional set of features on the main LinkedIn site. Vice President of Sales Solution and Group Product Manager walked me through the new product last week. The idea, basically, is to give you up-to-date information from LinkedIn about potential leads. Rekhi argued that the Sales Navigator is part of “the transformation in how you buy and sell products,” particularly when it comes to business-to-business sales. The old system of cold calling is increasingly ineffective, he said: “Buyers are essentially saying, ‘I want you to find me if I’m the right person; I want you to be informed about me; I want you to go in through a warm introduction.'” He added that social selling consists of four main steps — establishing a presence on social networks, finding the right people, engaging with those people, and building trust. The Sales Navigator tries to cover all four points. It will recommend the sales leads you should be connecting with on the site, allow you to track updates and news related to important leads and companies (thanks to ), and find mutual connections — including other people at your company — who can introduce you. In the past, we’ve suggested that , but in this case, the familiar phrase about a product being complementary rather than competitive seems to be true. In fact, the Sales Navigator integrates with both Salesforce and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft Dynamics. You may also have noticed that Rekhi’s outline of social selling doesn’t include actually making a sale. So how do you know if the Sales Navigator is worth ? Well, Rekhi said that salespeople who take this approach are 51 percent more likely to hit their quotas, compared to those who don’t. Plus, he suggested customers can always use their own products and systems to measure the return on investment. The new Sales Navigator is currently available for desktop and mobile web, and the company has plans to launch mobile apps, as well. You can read more in . |
Facebook Slingshot’s First Update Makes It Conversational With Reactions To Reactions | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | Facebook’s standalone photosharing app is sidestepping its core mechanic by letting people send that are instantly viewable, thanks to its first update for and that just went out. This solves Slingshot’s biggest problem: the inability to carry on a normal conversation. Finding friends is easier now too thanks to an aggregated My People list, and it could get more viral thanks to the new option to send SMS invites to Facebook friends and your phone contacts. As you can see in the example above, Joey slinged Drew a shot of a clothing store. To see it, Drew had to first sling a shot back to Joey. But then Drew could instantly react to Joey’s shopping pic with a question of “What shop is that?” Before, Joey wouldn’t have any way to directly respond. He’d have to react to one of Drew’s unrelated shots with a non-sequitur, or sling a new shot that Drew would have to unlock. Now with the new reactions to reactions feature, Joey can immediately react to Drew’s question with text, photo or a video. In this case, he slung a photo of the store’s sign. Reactions have easily been my favorite part of Slingshot, as I highlight in the hands-on video above. The ability to instantly send a laugh or terrified face back was what felt sorely lacking in Snapchat…that was until . Last week it added the option to double tap someone who snapped you to immediately compose a reply that’s addressed to just them and skips the friend-selector screen. But Slingshot’s split-screen reactions also permit fun experiences like face mashes, where you react to a selfie by replacing their chin with yours to make some silly/scary chimera. Users will surely come up with new tricks for reactions to reactions. Still, the feature is a bit risky. Rather than sending a new shot to carry on a thread, which you might have sent to other friends as well, you might stick with one-to-one slinging. Fewer mass-slings means fewer people getting notifications that tempt them to re-engage with the app. Slingshot thrives when you get to unlock tons of photos and videos with a single one sent, and reactions to reactions could thin those stockpiles. I’ve been surprised how sticky Slingshot is, but the question remains whether it can gain mainstream popularity. It’s steadily slipped on the charts since launch, though there’s been a little pickup in the last few days, according to . Facebook quickly pushed the app internationally after the U.S. launch, but hasn’t been throwing much cross-promotion at it. That may be necessary sooner rather than later. Slingshot thrives on network effect, and feels hollow if only a few friends are using it. If Facebook can’t get new users hooked before early adopters churn out, Slingshot might fade from people’s memory, no matter how many shots they have waiting to be unlocked. |
LinkedIn Beats The Street In Q2 On Sales Of $534M, EPS Of $0.51 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | With social networks and handily beating analyst estimates for Q2 earnings, today and showed that rising tides are lifting its boat, too. Revenue for the second quarter was $534 million and its EPS (non-GAAP diluted) was $0.51 as the company also raised its guidance for Q3 and the full year. The company’s is up by around 8% in after-hours trading to $195 a share. Analysts LinkedIn to post earnings per share (EPS) of $0.39 (non-GAAP diluted) on revenues of $511 million. As a point of comparison, on sales of $473 million and EPS of $0.38. Today’s revenue numbers are up 47% on a year ago, when LinkedIn posted revenue of $364 million in Q2 2013. “LinkedIn delivered strong financial results in the second quarter while maintaining investment in our member and customer offerings,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, in a statement. “We made significant progress against several key strategic priorities including increasing the scale of job opportunities on LinkedIn; expanding our professional publishing platform; and continuing the strategic shift towards content marketing through Sponsored Updates.” LinkedIn, however, also posted a GAAP net loss for the quarter of $1.0 million, versus net income of $3.7 million a year ago. Non-GAAP, the net income was $63 million, versus $44 million in Q2 2013. On the back of its generally strong results, LinkedIn also raised its revenue guidance for the quarter ahead and the full year, above the estimates from analysts. It says it expects to Q3 revenues of $543-547 million, versus First Call and FactSet revenue estimates of $541m. For the full year, it bumped up numbers by $75 million to $2.140-2.150 billion; First Call and FactSet both estimate $2.12 billion. LinkedIn, a social network built around people’s professional/working connections, passed the registered user mark in Q1. But while LinkedIn has evolved into the most ubiquitous of the “professional” social networking platforms in places like the U.S. and Europe, many have wondered how the company’s growth will fare in the future. (Indeed, LinkedIn’s stock has been because of the slowing revenue growth, even when LinkedIn has actually beaten estimates. At market close today, it was at , down significantly from a 52-week high of nearly $258/share.) LinkedIn’s growth question is focused on a few key areas: in terms of picking up new users beyond the white-collar workers who are its current bread and butter; moving into new geographies; and maximising revenues on users that the company already has. In the last quarter, LinkedIn made some key moves to bolster the third of these areas, building revenue potential from its current user base. They included the acquisition of . Bizo provides targeting and analytics for business — technology that LinkedIn intends to integrate with its current products to, in LinkedIn’s own words, breat a “more powerful tool for brands that want to build stronger relationships with professionals.” In other words, this will help build out LinkedIn’s advertising and marketing business — one area that people will be scrutinizing when they compare LinkedIn with other publicly-listed social networks like Facebook and Twitter, who are pushing hard on their ad sales, specifically in the area of mobile. Mobile, overall, is another area where LinkedIn has been working hard to build a bigger audience. It already has a large audience accessing the site from mobile devices — 45% of traffic from its 313 million users comes from mobile, Weiner noted today — so this is about trying to capitalize on that. In addition to relaunching its main mobile app, it’s also been looking at ways of expanding its audience through different apps and services — for example through its , a relaunch of its Contacts app that hints at how the company wants to build leverage new technology and concepts like anticipatory computing and AI to make interacting and using LinkedIn less taxing and more seamless. (More use, after all, translates to more data and more revenue opportunities for social networks.) This quarter, LinkedIn shifted around its accounting a bit and put its recruitment media products into talent solutions from their previous home of marketing solutions — which essentially makes sense since now it’s in the same category as LinkedIn’s other job-related businesses. Revenues for both of these categories, along with premium subscriptions, all rose by over 40% over last year, with talent solutions reaping the biggest growth (49%) and biggest sales of all at $322 million, keeping its position at an even 60% of revenues compared to last year. Marketing solutions and premium subscriptions were roughly equal in their revenue contribution at $106 million and $105 million, respectively, both up 44% and each accounting for 20% of overall sales. We’ll listen in to the conference call in a bit to see whether LinkedIn or analysts have anything to say on this front. One thing I would point out is that although LinkedIn is trying to position itself as a community platform and a place to visit more than when you are looking for a job (or to hire someone), it seems like this remains at the heart of its business. (And to be clear it is not one that it is ignoring — witness the company’s acquisition of Bright to boost its job listings.) In its non-recruitment business, another data point reported today: LinkedIn is now seeing 30,000 weekly long-form posts “after ramping posting capability to 15 million LinkedIn members,” the company writes. “Since launching in February, traffic to publisher and Influencer posts has risen more than 100%.” |
Tesla Beats In Q2 With Non-GAAP Revenue Of $858M On Delivery Of 7,579 Cars | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | just its second-quarter financial results, including non-GAAP revenue of $858 million, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.11. That non-GAAP revenue figure is up 55 percent from the year-ago period. The company delivered 7,579 cars in the quarter, and built 8,763. Tesla indicated that it is “on track” to deliver more than 35,000 cars in the year, matching prior guidance. Analysts had expected that the company would report non-GAAP revenue of $810.61 million, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.04. Using normal accounting metrics, Tesla had revenue of $769 million in the period, and lost $0.50 per share. The company’s Model S leasing program makes determining its revenue less than simple. On a GAAP basis, Tesla lost $62 million in the quarter. Its non-GAAP net income totaled $16 million. Tesla slipped nearly 2.5 percent in regular trading. The company is up more than 2 percent following its earnings beat. Earlier today Tesla announced that it has partnered with Panasonic for its Gigafactory, an installation that will build large quantities batteries. The deal will see the two companies collaborate, with Panasonic bringing manufacturing assets and battery components. Investors shrugged at the news. Following the company reporting its earnings, its shares initially, before recovering. I think that there is quite a bit of confusion regarding the company’s GAAP and non-GAAP figures. Looking forward, Tesla intends to build 9,000 cars in the third quarter. The company stated in its letter to shareholders that a two-week planned cessation of production during the current quarter brought its potential production down from 11,000 units. The implication is that the company can ramp up delivery of its Model S sedans in the short-term. Tesla expects to be “marginally” profitable using non-GAAP figures in the third quarter. If you had been hoping for traditional profit from the car company in the near-term, prepare for disappointment. But don’t worry too much. Tesla has around $2.6 billion in cash and equivalents, giving it more than ample runway to fund its own operations. And now, for everyone’s favorite Tesla chart: The reconciliation of GAAP and non-GAAP financial performance: Finally, Tesla expects its delivery rate to reach 100,000 per year on a run-rate basis by the end of the year. That would set the firm up for large revenue growth in 2015. It has to find buyers for all those cars, of course. |
Play Chef With Forage’s Twist On Restaurant Delivery | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | San Francisco is a great town for foodies and , the brainchild of founders and has emerged as an option for those who want to cook their favorite restaurant dishes at home. The service, which launches today, gathers all the ingredients used in selected restaurant recipes and hand-delivers them right to your door. The promise is that amateur chefs will be able to make these same great meals as the pros in under 20 minutes. The LaFaves joined forces with their co-founder and CTO Josh Fraser at to create this twist on the crowded restaurant meal-delivery startup trend. It’s since piqued the interest of Twitter’s Ev Williams and Whole Foods Board Member Hass Hassan, both of whom have invested an undisclosed, but modest, sum into the company, according to Emily LaFave. Forage pairs up with notable SF restaurants like Dosa and Hapa Ramen, and then sources ingredients from some of their more popular dishes. Alta SF’s pierogies tend to sell out before 8 pm every night, for instance. But folks can order from Forage to get the same exact ingredients, and then follow its instructions to make those same dishes in the comfort of their own homes. The idea came from Emily’s background working in restaurant kitchens and culinary school. “We could cook anything in less than 20 minutes,” she says. “This isn’t about chopping your onions for you. Think pork ramen stock and fresh ramen noodles from Hapa Ramen, fresh pierogi dough from Alta SF, dosa batter from DOSA, or Greek marinated meats from Souvla, all restaurants in San Francisco.” Emily believes Forage picks up where Foodzie left off by incorporating a restaurant cooking element instead of just delivering food items. in a combo cash and stock deal a couple years back. While most of the dishes are sourced from SF restaurants, Forage will deliver their meal kits all over California. Emily mentions plans to expand beyond the Golden State as things get rolling, but the main goal for now is to teach the foodies in California how to cook like a restaurant chef. “I believe most people will build their cooking skills by showing up and cooking each week, not through a culinary program like most professionals,” she says. “You can learn something even in 20 minutes.” The cost for the meals is $60 a week, which buys you four credits. Each credit equals a meal serving, for a flat price of $15 each. You don’t get to choose which dishes you want when you want them, however. Each week has a specific food theme. Some weeks it’s all South Indian meals, while another might be Greek or Eastern European. The meals are selected each week by Forage’s editorial team and head chef Stephen Beaumier (formerly of Cyrus, Quince and Noma). Foragers, as those who order from the site are called, can also submit meals they would like to see shared at some point. Forage then does the legwork to connect with the restaurant and get access to their recipes. “With the innovation in the delivery model and chef derived ingredients, we can create fresher, higher quality, and more interesting ingredients to speed up cooking time and maximize flavor,” Emily says. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.