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TechCrunch Open Sources Its WordPress Async Task Library | Nicolas Vincent | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | Back in early 2012, when the TechCrunch developer team (Nicolas Vincent, Alex Khadiwala, Eric Mann, and John Bloch) started working on the , one of the main goals was to improve site performance. During the development process, we implemented several tools to help achieve that goal. One of the approaches we took was to offload time-consuming tasks into background tasks. We built a library called to structure those background tasks. In June, we gave a presentation called “ ” in which we talked about some of our approaches to performance. There was a lot of interest in our asynchronous tasks from the audience, and people wanted to know if they could get the code anywhere and use it. We’re happy to announce that, as of today, the WP Async Task library is open source and . We’re big believers in the power of open source software and want to give back to the community that’s provided us with our publishing platform. Check out the code and look at the documentation on in your own code. We try to reduce the number of processes that could lead to blocking and increased load times for each page. That usually occurs when “a process that is blocked is waiting for some event, such as a resource becoming available or the completion of an operation.” On the TechCrunch site, loading CrunchBase cards on article pages is an example of a process that could slow down the site, since the information needed for each card becomes available via the CrunchBase API. To improve performance, we cache a copy of their data for about 12 hours. But when we initially retrieve that data or refresh it, we don’t want the API call to affect our page load time. In both instances, we instead kick off an asynchronous call back to our site with the instruction to retrieve and cache this data to be available the next time it is needed, instead of waiting for a response from their API. Meanwhile, if we have a cached version of the data, we use that with the card. In that way, the CrunchBase card isn’t rendered for that page load. On the previous TechCrunch design, page load time could take more than 17 seconds for a page to load. Since the redesign, we’ve improved overall performance by 5 to 8 times by implementing the WP Async Task library, among other important back-end and front-end improvements. Below you can watch the video of Nicolas and Alex at Big Media & Enterprise Meetup San Francisco in June 2014. We also would like to give a special thanks to developers, John Bloch and Eric Mann. [wpvideo AiE7LfPM] |
Wikipedia Revamps Its iOS App With Offline Access, Support For Editing While On The Go | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | has today made a significant update to its iOS application, which most noticeably features a cleaner, “distraction-free” design, as well as the ability to edit Wikipedia articles from your smartphone or tablet device. Under the hood, the app received a number of other improvements as well, including speed increases, offline access, a reading history, and more. The changes on iOS follow the launch of a similarly revamped Android app, which rolled out last month. Today, some users don’t think of accessing Wikipedia via a native application on their iOS devices, especially because Apple’s mobile operating system includes with the online encyclopedia. In iOS 8, this also allows users to search and read article snippets directly from the iOS interface itself, . Meanwhile, the Apple App Store offers a large number of third-party Wikipedia clients, many of which include offline access as their differentiating feature. With the revamped app, however, readers may see less need for those third-party experiences, it seems. The Wikimedia Foundation claims that with update, it paid attention to the important details, like “how quickly the app starts, how fast pages and images load, and how quickly search results are returned.” “The updated app has been totally rewritten from the ground up in native code,” explains Wikipedia product manager Dan Garry. “With this new rebuild, our primary focus was on speed…The result is a snappy experience allowing Wikipedia readers to get to the content they’re looking for faster than ever before. Our official app is the fastest way to get into the content of Wikipedia.” Also noticeable is the new look, which more heavily emphasizes the actual content, while the navigation, search, and sharing features are less obtrusively displayed. Most importantly, perhaps, is that Wikipedia iOS users can now edit articles from their phones or tablets, even if they’re not logged in. This feature first arrived on Android, and is also something that the third-party apps don’t currently offer. And finally, Wikipedia has partnered with network operators around the world to provide its content free of data charges through an effort known as “Wikipedia Zero,” which focuses on delivering access to this resource in developing and emerging markets. The new app is . |
Microsoft Loses Email Privacy Case With U.S. Gov, Will Appeal | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | lost an appeal today, as a federal judge ordered that it must . During this process, it has been Microsoft’s contention that a warrant issued by the U.S. doesn’t have legal standing because the data being sought is stored abroad. Judge Loretta A. Preska disagreed. It’s not clear whether the person who owns the email being sought by the warrant is a U.S. citizen. The judge Microsoft time to appeal her ruling, which, the company tells TechCrunch, it will do. This is Microsoft’s second loss on the issue. In a written statement, Microsoft’s top lawyer Brad Smith stated that the “only issue that was certain this morning was that the District Court’s decision would not represent the final step in this process” and that Microsoft “will appeal promptly and continue to advocate that people’s email deserves strong privacy protection in the U.S. and around the world.” Several technology companies for Microsoft’s suit in the time leading up to today’s appeal — Apple and Cisco filed an amicus brief in Microsoft’s favor. Other companies and groups had also made noise in the same direction as Redmond. Presumably, when Microsoft takes up its case again, those same allies will remain in its corner. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft changes its argument in the face of today’s defeat. In the light of the recent NSA revelations, expending the effort to protect user privacy is a worthy exercise. Customers that are not based in the same country as a potential technology vendor may not want their data stored in the other country, given that their status as “foreigners” on that soil could leave them with little legal protection. So they might want their data stored in their own country, or at least in a location where they can have a reasonable expectation of privacy. In this case, Microsoft is working to protect the data of its foreign users from the legal reach of the United States government. If it fails, segregating user data in foreign data centers will leave those users vulnerable, unprotected from the legal arm of the U.S. government, provided that the company storing the data in question is based in the United States. Microsoft will presumably continue to appeal until it wins or runs out of higher courts. We’ll see which happens first. |
You Can Now Watch (Some) Shows On Hulu For Android Without Hulu Plus | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | Up until today, Hulu’s mobile app was mostly useless for anyone who didn’t want to cough up 8 bucks a month for Hulu Plus. You were free to watch ad-supported shows on your computer’s browser — but once you went mobile, you were out of luck. Seems Hulu is reconsidering that approach. In an , Hulu’s Android app has picked up the ability to watch select shows without requiring you to be on Hulu Plus. Will you be able to watch that Hulu has to offer? Nah — you’ll only get the last episode or two of each show that would normally be available without a Plus account on Hulu.com. And even there, it sounds like licensing quirks have prevented some shows from making the jump to free on mobile. But free stuff is free stuff — and next time you’re bored on the bus and are just to watch Gordon Ramsay critique some kitchen/hotel/delicious-looking-food-you-can’t-eat, you’ll be glad to know this works now. No word yet on whether other platforms will be getting similar access. |
The One-Horse Race: 85% Of The 300M Smartphones Shipped In Q2 Were Android | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | Another milestone for Google’s in its unstoppable march to mobile dominance: the operating system accounted for 85% of all smartphones shipped in Q2 — its highest ever proportion, according to a new report from . Google’s win comes at a loss for everyone else, and interestingly amid a growth in decline for the smartphone market overall. Apple, Windows Phone and BlackBerry all lost market share, and while there were nearly 300 million (295.2 million, to be exact) smartphone units shipped for sale in the quarter, smartphone growth has nearly halved compared to a year ago. And it could come at a loss for Google, too — Android is over its dominant position, according to a report in Reuters. An investigation could get triggered if Android is found to have more than 80% market share in the European market. However, it looks like, for now, Google may still be clear of that. Strategy Analytics says that Android accounted for 73% of all smartphones shipped in Europe in Q2. A report from that was released earlier today noted that Android has a 74% share in Europe at the moment based on sales surveys (not shipments) that Kantar takes in five key markets in the region. In tablets, Android now stands at some globally as well, too. As for which device makers are seeing the most business, the that Samsung remains firmly in the lead, although its market share has declined back to 25% compared to nearly 33% a year ago (with units also declining slightly to 74.5 million). Although Apple’s unit numbers are up to just over 35 million, its share, like Samsung’s, has declined, and is now at just under 12% (versus over 13% a year ago). While platforms are seeing more and more consolidation on to Android, in handsets, the field is more open. Apart from Samsung, all the other handset makers in the top six saw their numbers grow. Notably, Chinese upstart Xiaomi has now entered the top-six rankings for the first time, too, with just over 5% market share (see tables below). Strategy Analytics says that while smartphone sales continue to grow, it’s at a significantly slower rate than in the past. The 295 million units shipped in Q2 represents yearly growth of 27% compared to 49% a year ago. Why? In part, it’s because, while emerging markets are still growing strong, and have large populations, they are, at this point, still not making up for the slowing sales in more developed, large markets like Europe and the U.S. which came earlier to the smartphone craze. Emerging markets mean more price pressure and consumers that may have significantly less disposable income, and think their very basic feature phones do a good enough job, apps or no apps. “Global smartphone growth in the current quarter is at its lowest level for five years, and there are wide variations by region,” Linda Sui, a director at the research firm, notes in a statement. “Africa and Asia are booming, while North America and Europe are maturing.” Nevertheless, the changing tides have played squarely into Google’s hand. OEMs have been producing low-cost smartphones based on Android for years already, buoyed by the OS being free to license and the growing ecosystem of apps and services to use based on Android. Yes, Microsoft has more recently also moved to make its Windows Phone platform free to license, and Nokia has been pushing low-cost Lumia smartphones for a while now, but this looks like it’s too little, too late: Strategy Analytics notes that Windows Phone share of shipments was only 3%, down from 4% a year ago, because of sluggish growth in the two huge, key markets of China and the U.S. Indeed, a lot of the competitive fight has moved very much into the low end of the market. Apple and its iPhone, Strategy Analytics’ Woody Oh notes, also lost a percentage point “because of its limited presence at the lower end of the smartphone market.” Apple accounted for just under 12% of smartphone shipments (which is not the same as sales but is related in that it points to what retailers believe will be selling well, based on what has already sold well). What we have shaping up, as research director Neil Mawston describes it, is effectively a one-horse race: “Like the PC market, Android is on the verge of turning smartphone platforms into a one-horse race,” he writes.”Its low-cost services and user-friendly software remain wildly attractive to hardware makers, operators and consumers worldwide. Rival OS vendors are going to have to do something revolutionary to overturn Android’s huge lead in smartphone shipments.” What could that revolutionary move be? Mawston believes Apple’s “push into the big-screen phablet market” and Mozilla’s continuing efforts in low-cost Firefox mobile devices “are the only major threats to Android’s continued growth at this stage.” Given that Firefox has yet to set the world on fire, and phablets are just larger screens but little more in the way of functionality, it seems like a pretty feeble fight, if that’s as revolutionary as it’s going to get. Image: |
Chartboost, Chukong Link Up To Bring Mobile Game Cross-Promotion To Chinese Developers | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | Now the world’s biggest smartphone market, China represents a wealth of still-growing opportunities for mobile game developers. While are fretting that the so-called “Gold Rush” is over, China’s market is still growing rapidly . But the mainland Chinese market is pretty impenetrable to outsiders, with its own contained ecosystem of more than 200 different app stores along with different cultural tastes and preferences. That’s why one of the country’s largest game developers, Chukong, is partnering with San Francisco’s to bring their cross-promotion and monetization tools to Chinese developers. Chukong, which built an early breakout hit called Fishing Joy, has more than 63 million monthly active users. It has a multi-pronged model where it operates a gaming studio, builds developer tools and publishes games from third-party developers. Chartboost is a gaming-focused startup that began as a free cross-promotion network for app makers that wanted to market their work in other apps. It has since evolved into offering direct deals, where separate developers can sell promotional space to each other based on installs. While the rest of the mobile advertising market has faced an onslaught of competition from juggernaut Facebook, in the last quarter, Chartboost has managed to hold its own by focusing exclusively on game developers, the most lucrative part of the app ecosystem. Before the partnership, Chartboost recently localized its offerings in the Chinese language. |
FCC Questions Verizon’s Limits On Unlimited Data | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler on Wednesday on its plans to slow down the data of the top 5 percent of 4G LTE unlimited users. For the past two and half years, Verizon has engaged in a process commonly known as throttling that slows down the data of the top 5 percent of the heaviest 3G data users. On Friday the company announced this policy, which they’ve termed would be expanded to 4G LTE unlimited data users in October. But Wheeler won’t let that happen so fast. In the letter to Verizon, he wrote that he was “deeply troubled” by the announcement. He said if Verizon describes this policy as “network management,” under the Commission’s rules it would have to base such management on network architecture or technology — not specific plans. “I know of no past Commission statement that would treat as ‘reasonable network management’ a decision to slow traffic to a user who has paid, after all, for ‘unlimited’ service,” Wheeler wrote. But this practice is — most major carriers have been doing this since they introduced tiered data plans in an attempt to move users away from the unlimited plans that were offered in the early days of smart phones. Once it became popular to stream large amounts of data like video or music on your mobile device, service providers looked to shift away from these types of data plans. As an AT&T subscriber whose data has been “throttled,” I can say firsthand it’s really annoying. If you’re paying for unlimited data . In the letter, Wheeler asked Verizon a series of questions, all asking the company how it could justify this practice under existing regulations. We’ll be tracking Verizon’s response. Hopefully this inquiry could be the beginning of the end to an unfair practice phone companies use that target some of their oldest and most loyal customers. |
The Philips Hue Tap Proves An Elegant Accessory For Connected Smart Lights | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | The system provides lighting that you can control with your smartphone, and automate with location gating and time-based alarms. But for all its fancy magic, I still find myself using physical lightswitches to turn my Hue system on and off, in larger part because often it takes more steps to unlock my iPhone, find the Hue app, open it and select the “All off” or desired scene button. seems to have acknowledged that with the new Hue Tap kinetic light switch, which is an elegant solution to the one noteworthy failing of Hue before now. The Hue Tap connects to your existing bridge with a simple setup process that involves just holding a button on the device to help it find your bridge automatically. Mine connected easily and once it was connected, it was relatively easy to assign custom functions to each of the Tap’s four distinct buttons – three small inset ones, and the entire face of the Tap, which is itself a button, too. [gallery ids="1037543,1037546,1037547"] You can set the buttons to perform a number of tasks, including setting them to one of the scenes you’ve created in the Hue app for your phone, or turning off all the lights entirely. The one issue that’s slightly bothersome is that a button must be assigned to turn off all the lights – simply pressing one of the buttons assigned a scene a second time doesn’t turn the lights off as you might expect. Hue Tap comes with a mounting plate that has adhesive strips already attached, so it’s ready to attach to your wall. These work really well and bond in just a few seconds, and then you can screw off the Tap with a simple counterclockwise motion to take with you around the house. I ended up mounting mine at the top of the stairs to my bedroom where I always wish I had a switch for the downstairs lights, and then I detach the Tap and take it with me to bed so I can turn the lights off before I go to sleep. Philips is committed to building a vast ecosystem around its Hue lighting system, and the Tap is a great example of how they’re listening to feedback and shoring up any deficiencies in how the Hues currently work and interact with one another. A single bridge can support up to 25, though at $60 a pop you probably don’t need that many. It’s a great addition from Philips, however, and owning at least one should provide a nice upgrade for your existing Hue setup. |
Entrepreneurs Tackle Earthquake Safety, Urban Planning Tech In SF’s EIR Program | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 30 |
While heavily funded companies like , and capture the spotlight as companies that controversially shape city life around transportation and space, cities and their governments have a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes needs too. That’s the premise behind San Francisco’s entrepreneur-in-residence program, which pairs tech founders with city government workers in everything from the planning department to the transit agency. This is “civic tech,” or software that aids local governments in responding to the needs of their citizens. Think of it as a form of enterprise software for governance. In San Francisco’s EIR program, six startups voluntarily work alongside city officials for 16 weeks. (No, there isn’t some kind of equity component where the city invests in companies. Entrepreneurs get the benefit of learning first-hand alongside their prospective government customers.) Six companies showed off prototypes or concepts in City Hall this morning: Berkeley-based would be a pretty cool tool for people who had childhood obsessions with Will Wright’s SimCity. It’s a software tool for urban planners that lets them test all kinds of scenarios on the fly around building heights and setbacks. It factors in existing regulations and market factors that may or may not make a project pencil in financially for developers. “It’s a complex problem because market forces, regulations and design all interact in very complicated ways with economic, environmental and social impacts,” said Jason Oliveira, a product manager who presented Synthicity. “We ask what the impacts are if height limits are changed, whether rents go up or down, whether construction or financing costs change, whether green space is needed or whether more affordable units are needed.” The company was founded by UC Berkeley’s current chair of the city and regional planning department Paul Waddell. is an app for city police officers, that lets them pull up interactive crime maps or field interviewing records on the fly. “Now officers walking around the streets of San Francisco carrying mini-police departments in their pocket,” said the startup’s vice president of business development Jamieson Johnson.” is an Internet-of-things detector that measures air quality and poisonous fumes like carbon monoxide. It tracks temperature, humidity along with pollen and particulate counts. Co-founder Mark Belinsky said that while people perceive outdoor air to be full of pollution like car exhaust, indoor air is usually less healthy. “Indoor air is often two to eight times more polluted. The question is what can we do about it?” he said. could be a NIMBYist’s dream (except that’s not the intent.) They’re a software startup that makes permit and noticing information about construction and development easier to discover through a mapping interface. worked with the San Francisco International Airport on enhanced navigation and location-based services. They are set to launch an app tomorrow that will help the blind and visually impaired passengers make their way through an airport terminal to their right gate. Indoo.rs’ technology can also be used to take in real-time sensor data about flows of people and congestion through an indoor space. Lastly, worked on emergency group messaging that could give people up to a minute’s notice about an impending earthquake based on sensor data. They worked with the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management to create something akin to those federal AMBER alerts that you see on your phone when a minor goes missing. In this case, you’d get a message about an earthquake that sensors have detected tens or hundreds of miles away before it reaches you, giving anywhere from a few seconds to two minutes to find shelter. |
Pronto.ly’s Contactless Ultrasound Transfer Tech Aims To Best NFC | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | Israeli startup is working on a universal alternative to NFC that relies on high pitched soundwaves to perform a contactless handshake. Now NFC has its fans (and fanboys) — but it also has major . Apple for one has so far continued to eschew adding the contactless transfer tech into its mobile devices. But the fact you need a dedicated chip at all to fire this contactless medium up is arguably the problem. NFC’s requirement of needing a large enough user-base to make the tech useful has generally hampered adoption of both chips and NFC-enabled services, such as contactless payments, since there’s no critical mass of users to generate significant momentum. Which is where Pronto.ly’s alternative aims to step in. The startup is building a technology based on using ultrasound as the contactless layer. It thus only requires devices to have a microphone and speakers to make use of the tech. In other words: no NFC chip required. The system does not send the actual data a user wants to transfer via this sonic medium, but uses ultrasound to identify and authenticate a transfer device (or devices) so that a verified exchange can then take place in the cloud. “The Prontoly solution leverages preexisting device hardware, namely standard microphone and speaker. With that we employ a timebase onetime password (TOTP) handshake between devices on the client level which is then correlated via our authentication server,” explains co-founder and CEO . “These TOTPs are the only thing exchanged over the ultrasonic sound wavelength (encrypted of course), no identifying or transaction data is ever transmitted via this medium. Once we have authenticated a transaction request between devices we push to clearance via the application selected processor.” Pronto.ly has filed patents around filtering its ultrasound signal pattern out of background noise so it can function in noisy environments. Having a unique ultrasound pattern as its signal also means it can avoid potential clashes with — or interference from — other radio technologies, says Pappo. And even other ultrasound techs (which are, in any case, not yet in common use in the consumer electronics tech space). That said, Pronto.ly is not the only company looking at this technology. At Mountain View revealed it’s working on an ultrasound ID tech for its device — which will allow multiple mobile users to sling stuff to the same TV screen via Chromecast without having to log onto a Wi-Fi network. Google nabbed the ultrasound password tech from a by that company earlier this year. That’s a neat looking use-case for sure, but Google is — currently at least — focused on one device and one use-case (logins). Whereas Pronto.ly’s system aims to be cross platform and device agnostic — so will be able to work with Android, iOS, Windows… whatever, assuming the device in question has a microphone and speaker. It’s also targeting multiple applications for the tech — aiming to support whatever implementations and use-cases its b2b customers want to use its contactless identification/authentication layer for. Pronto.ly offers access to its tech via an . “Comparing what we have and (what we know about) Google latest announcements regarding Ultrasonic, they are concentrating on Login. For us Login is just another use case of many: Payment, Point of Sale, Smart TV, Access points. In each one of those and others, we have on going activities,” says Pappo. Another advantage (vs NFC) is that ultrasound also doesn’t require proximity to function. The Pronto.ly tech can be tuned to work only in close proximity, but can also function over longer ranges. “One example of a technical challenge we overcame was the issue of proximity tuning,” adds Pappo. “We have some customers who require 20cm range and some with 5m range.” Plus, unlike NFC, it can be used to broadcast a signal to multiple devices — as in a Chromecast-esque smart TV scenario. Pappo says he has been working on developing the technology since 2012, founding the company itself back in April 2013 — helped by the proceeds from a prior startup exit. Pronto.ly itself has raised some $600,000 so far, in pre-seed and seed funding, with investment coming from angels including Jeff Pulver, and seed funding from the hiCenter incubator and the Chief Scientist of Israel. The startup in the process of raising a Series A, with the aim of closing the round by the end of the year, according to Pappo. At present, Pronto.ly has multiple customers trialling the technology for different use-cases. While it’s not naming these customers yet, it says they include an Israeli bank wanting to use it for a contactless ATM for cash withdrawals; an Israeli card issuer aiming to use it for SME P2P payments (similar to a mobile payment dongle but without any dongle being required); a European bank wanting to offer a contactless ecommerce checkout process; and a wireless charging company wanting to do subscriber authentication using ultrasound. Pappo adds that he expects the first in the wild deployment of the tech “within weeks”, via a device maker. Other deployments should surface in the wild in Q3 and Q4 this year, he adds. In terms of business model, Pronto.ly is targeting payment scenarios for b2b monetization — working with large banks and the like — and aiming to take a flat fee per payment transaction processed via its tech. “We will work with financial institutes and credit card issuers, working on really customized use-cases with them,” says Pappo. “We want to have at least ten big financial customers like that in one year.” It also intends to monetize its SDK via a freemium model, so that developers can integrate it for free but have to start paying per user, after a certain usage threshold is reached. [ by ] |
Geek Wars Loom As Geekatoo Raises $1.7 Million To Once Again Battle The Geek Squad | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | There’s a battle brewing again in the land of the geeks. Ever since 1994, when launched his service in Minneapolis with $200 and a bicycle, his on demand IT department for consumers bestrode the consumer tech services landscape like a colossus with a pocket protector and Scotch-Taped glasses. But like all wonders of the ancient world, the faces a modern threat. , is once again looking to emulate the work of tide and time and topple the colossal cohort Stephens assembled. This time it has raised $1.7 million in venture funding from investors including 500 Startups . Founded by Kevin Davis, Geekatoo’s story actually begins nine years earlier with a visit to the local Best Buy Geek Squad, when a repair that was supposed to take one or two weeks resulted in a nearly lost laptop and a six-week separation. Thinking there must be a more customer-friendly way to deal with computer issues, and his co-founder set about creating a service that would mimic TaskRabbit, Zaarly, or RedBeacon for computer problems exclusively (and considering Geek Squad pulled in upwards of $3.5 billion last year, it wasn’t a terrible idea). Initially, Geekatoo had a sort of bounty model, where panicked customers with broken computers would post their problem to the Geekatoo site, and a local geek(atoo?) would bid their services and the poor frantic soul with the busted gadget would select whichever bid looked the best. Unfortunately… the model proved untenable. Davis says the company had only 50 customers in its first three years. After put the company through its paces last summer, Davis switched the model to a fixed price for the service and the business began to take off, he says. Growth was impressive enough to catch the eye of not just 500 Startups, but a host of other institutions and individuals including 500 Startups, Eric Ries, DeNA, China Rock, Microventures, and Wefunder. “If you buy a service contract, that’s what we’re selling,” says Davis. From roughly 50 customers at the beginning of last summer, Geekatoo is now looking at a $2 million run rate and some bigger business partnerships. While they cradle their dying device in their arms, would-be customers can contact Geekatoo via a toll-free number or the company’s website. Once they relate the nature of their emergency, Geekatoo finds a geek and sends them out. Typically response rates for jobs mean that 60% of jobs are claimed within an hour, and over 90% are claimed within 24 hours, according to Davis. Geekatoo has grown quickly as an independent business, but now it’s time to start looking for partners, according to Davis. The synergy that Geek Squad has with Best Buy is exactly the kind of relationship that Geekatoo is looking to mirror with its own business — just online. “Tiger Direct, Amazon, Buy.com… We want to go to them and say ‘We’ll be your Geek Squad,'” says Davis. The company has a few partners already. Geekatoo is in a pilot program with a nationwide network of senior communities and is in talks with an undisclosed computer manufacturer to include its Windows 8 app directly into new devices. For each transaction Geekatoo has it typically gets about $140 with roughly 1.2 services ordered. The company spends about $20 to get a user and makes roughly $35 to $40 per transaction, with the rest going to the service provider, Davis says. Services range from PC and Mac repair to home theater setup to mounting televisions and setting up networks. “We do everything that Geek Squad does,” says Davis. “Just better, cheaper, and faster.” The company even has Geek Squad’s founder recommending it. apple store make appt online. Or try — Robert Stephens (@rstephens) |
Solving Optimal Health For Google[x] In North Carolina | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | a textile company that stood on the edge of the blue-collar town of Kannapolis, North Carolina for over 100 years. The company employed more than 16,000 town residents at its height, but in 2003 Cannon Mills was forced to shut its doors forever, laying off about a tenth of the town’s entire population, all in one day. What was once a tragedy for Kannapolis might just hold the key to one day solving diseases like cancer or fibromyalgia… And the town could soon be a big part of . Baseline, , intends to take a look at 175 healthy people’s molecular structure to determine just what it means to be in a state of perfect health. These volunteers will give up blood, urine and other materials as well as have their entire genome sequenced. For the past seven years, Duke University has been already gathering those same molecular materials from a quarter of the 44,000 residents in Kannapolis. Cannon Mills, Co. Plant 1 Kannapolis, NC, Flickr Known as the , the Duke University-led project is sponsored by a 91-year-old eccentric Los Angeles billionaire by the same name, . This nanogenarian pretty much has cornered the world’s fruit supply. Murdoch is the chairman of , the largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world. He also just happens to be obsessed with life extension research. Murdock came in and bought Cannon Mills at auction seven years ago, pulled in the Duke Translational Medicine Institute, and turned Kannapolis into a $1 billion mecca for biotech. Word is that Murdock’s a bit of a brash eccentric, eating mainly fruits and vegetables and racing 35 year olds up the stairs. He demolished the old mill and erected the 350 acre in its place. The mural of a giant fruit basket and an eagle adorn the front of campus in his honor. The eagle is said to be him, soaring free through the air. Fruit basket mural in the NCRC rotunda in honor of David H. Murdock, Flickr Murdock gave $35 million of his own money to kick off research efforts for this study back in 2007. Now a 40,000-square foot biobank hosts the genetic materials from nearly 11,000 of the town residents who’ve opted into the Murdock study so far. The new lab employs just 600 workers, though according to campus development over 5,000 townsfolk will eventually be employed there as well. Most of the workers currently at the facility hold doctorate degrees. Meanwhile, a majority of the residents who were laid off at the mill back in 2003 were in their late 40’s and had little more than a high school education. They ended up taking jobs at the town’s then newly built Wal-Mart. Regardless of Murdock’s quirks, the town seems pretty grateful for his contributions. Both the Kannapolis website and the mayor pay major homage to the research campus. And just ask those scientists on the research study and you get the sense Murdock’s money saved the town. Residents get paid $30 to $250 and up to participate in the study. It’s not enough to live on, but it’s something for a former textile town with a majority of workers now earning their living in and 10.5% of the per capita population living below the poverty line. While Baseline has just started its search for the perfect human subjects, the Murdock study has been gathering three tablespoons of blood and urine, family medical histories, and DNA from each participant for closer to a decade now. During this time, the cost of DNA sequencing has dramatically decreased — sequencing one person’s genome used to cost $100,000 but now it’s more like $1000. At the same time, labs now have access to software algorithms and more computational power, while molecular measurement tools now give deeper insight into what is going on internally. The majority of all its human samples still sit neatly side-by-side at the Kannapolis campus, waiting for a potential discovery into optimal human health. Meanwhile, back at Google, leads the Google[x] Life Sciences team. He actually helped set up the Murdock study in 2005 and is now heading up Baseline. He’s been consulting heavily with both Duke and Stanford Medical Schools during the initial pilot phase of the program. Grand biomarker studies have been done before, but Baseline’s focus is on detecting changes at the molecular level before there’s a full-blown disease. “It may sound counter-intuitive, but by studying health, we might someday be better able to understand disease,” says Conrad. “This research could give us clues about how the human body stays healthy or becomes sick, which could in turn unlock insights into how diseases could be better detected or treated.” The personalized medicine market is already at $232 billion and is expected to grow 11 percent annually, according to . That market includes a $42 billion chunk in gene-based therapies by 2015. Google[x]’s plans for Baseline to go a step further and carve out a spot in personalized medicine that predicts and corrects any unhealthy changes in the human body before it happens. Google says the information from Baseline will be completely anonymous. However, it will sequence each volunteer’s entire genome, which could theoretically be traced back to any subject even without matching the subject’s name and other information. Meanwhile, the Murdock study only sequences the genome of centenarians for now. The purpose is to discover why this small portion of the population tends to live so much longer than everyone else. Murdock, by the way, to 125 himself. North Carolina Research Campus on the site of the old Cannon Mills, Flickr The Baseline project came knocking at Duke University’s door at just the right moment, according to Dr. Rob Califf. He’s the head of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute and is heavily involved in the Murdock study. He’s also listed on Google[x]’s Baseline consulting team. “We were able to get the funds from Murdock to start us out right. Now this project with Google opens wide the doors of possibilities,” says Califf. It’s still early days for Baseline, but Califf confirmed the Murdock study and its participants will fold into the Google[x] research at some point. He says combining forces will speed the pace of clinical research and enable the development of new tests and techniques for detecting and preventing diseases like cancer. The 175 chosen members in the initial Baseline study are surely aware of how their data may be used, but the residents of Kannapolis were most likely unaware that those three tablespoons of blood and urine would be a part of this research. They definitely didn’t think it would ever reach the halls of Google. Califf is upfront about the potential for abuse of this info, particularly if it’s used for insurance or employment purposes. But he says it’s different when it’s for science and potentially eradicating diseases like cancer. He mentions campus researchers will be sure to do their part to inform the town of Kannapolis just what their information will be used for and get further permission for other tests in the coming months and years of the project. Though nothing is set in stone on when or how things will move forward, Califf marks November as the possible time frame for his team to roll up their sleeves and get to work with all those Kannapolis samples. They’ll then be able to determine which subjects fit whichever category they are looking for, get further consent, run some tests, and then send the data along to the folks at Google[x]. DNA Painting credit: Flickr/CC |
Incubated: How The 500 Startups Accelerator Helps Startups Get Noticed | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | It’s only been around a short three years, but the has already cemented its spot as one of the top programs for founders who are looking to improve their products and reach new users. Now graduating more than 100 new companies per year, the program has historically done a great job of including international startups. runs four accelerator classes each year, running a 12-week program of about 30 companies in each batch. The program operates as an incubator in which startups all work together within the same office space, with access to staff and mentors to help them grow their business. The accelerator is particularly strong in helping startups to understand their internal metrics and distribution, helping them to market their products and services more efficiently. And it’s got a strong background in helping companies about design and improving their product. It’s also been great for international companies, many of which get their first exposure to what it’s like to operate in Silicon Valley. The program helps them to understand their audience from a global perspective, and helps them to figure out the best way to reach users around the world. To find out more, check out the video above, where I talk to partners, mentors, and some founders who have been through the program. Check out all the episodes of Incubated here: |
PayPal Co-Founder Max Levchin To Speak At Disrupt SF 2014 About His Latest Startup, Affirm | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | We’re happy to announce that co-founder, board member and self-proclaimed crypto-nerd will be returning to the Disrupt stage in September. Last year, Levchin spoke with TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis , lessons he learned from PayPal and his fertility app, , which now is doing rather well. But Levchin just can’t sit still and he’s got a new venture. And, wouldn’t you know, it’s about commerce. His latest company, , is a financial company that uses data to solve hard problems in finance, and offers consumer credit at the point of sale. If there’s a service you’ve used on the internet, there’s a good chance has been involved in it. Levchin counts , , and among companies he’s helped bring to life either as founder or advisor. Affirm launched out of the Levchin’s own company building investment vehicle, HVF. has quietly in debt and equity financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nyca Partners, and Khosla Ventures. The company’s first product, Split Pay, gives consumers the ability to take out a short-term loan to finance transactions, structuring financing like home and car loans and avoiding the costly and consumer-unfriendly credit card APRs. Affirm wants to make it as easy to secure financing as it is to post a message on social media. It uses context-driven cues from social networks to determine whether you’d actually make good on a loan before it provides it to you. Affirm isn’t the only outlet trying to revolutionize the loan industry, though, and competition is particularly tough with the likes of and others. Can Affirm be successful in this crowded market? They’ve certainly got the right man at the top. Levchin was one of the original co-founders of PayPal, and served as the company’s CTO until it sold to eBay in 2002. In 2004, he helped start ratings and review service Yelp, where he currently serves as chairman of the board. Levchin also sits on Yahoo’s board. Levchin founded Slide in 2005, a service that enables users to create and personalize widgets and use them on social networks, blogs and desktops. Slide was in 2010 for $228 million. Levchin is also co-founder and Chairman of the Board of , an app that wants to help women get pregnant through managing their cycle. Glow will even pay for in vitro fertilization for couples for whom the cycle tracking doesn’t work. Tracking ovulation cycles is just one of the many ways Levchin believes we can use technology and data to better enhance our daily lives. We’re thrilled that Levchin will be joining us at Disrupt, and hope you’ll be there to hear his plans for Affirm and what might come out of HVF next. for Disrupt are available through September 1st, and if you’re interested in sponsoring the events, are still available too. |
Y Combinator-Backed Kash Lets Retailers Offer Starbucks-Like Mobile Payments While Cutting Out Credit Cards | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | If you’ve been to a Starbucks in the past year or so, it’s almost guaranteed you’ve seen someone in line pay with their smartphone by opening the and holding a bar code up to a scanner. is hoping to bring the same experience to other retailers and small businesses while cutting out one of their biggest costs: credit card fees. Users just have to install the Kash app for iOS or Android. Unlike the Starbucks app, which forces you to create an account and enter your credit card information the first time you use it, Kash’s app just shows a green debit card labeled “tap to pay,” and the first purchase is on them. It’s a smart way of jumping straight to the best part of the app experience, even if the card does seem weirdly in the otherwise flat iOS 7-style interface. gets around credit cards entirely, letting users pay straight from their checking accounts by entering their online banking log-in info, as you would with an app like Some people might not be comfortable with that, but Kash promises that it fully covers any fraud that could result from using its app. Since payments are being handled directly, retailers get paid for their sales in a day instead of potentially waiting days or weeks for things to go through traditional processors. Retailers that sign up for Kash get on-site setup and a free scanner. While Kash doesn’t currently integrate directly with existing point-of-sales systems or any of , Kash CEO told me in a phone call that retailers it has approached would rather have the separate installation now than wait a few months for those features to be rolled out. Customers seem to be jumping on it as well, as businesses that have signed up so far report that 15-20% of their customers have already tried using Kash to pay. Small businesses won’t pay anything for quite some time, as Kash doesn’t charge any fees on the first $100,000 of payments in processes. This means that bigger retailers using the service will effectively subsidize early usage by local businesses that sign up. Once you do pass that $100,000 figure, Kash charges a 1% fee on all transactions it processes. That’s both cheaper and less confusing than the per-month, per-swipe, percentage, and other fees that credit card companies can drop on their customers. With only 5 employees, Kash already has a backlog of retailers and small businesses that have signed up that it plans to get up-and-running over the next few weeks. Nejatian told me that at its current rate, businesses that signed up in the last few days will be set up in about three weeks. While Kash originally started in Canada, the company moved to San Francisco to join the current batch. In the last few weeks, it’s managed to sign up dozens of retailers for its beta in the city as well as in the East Bay and in the San Jose/Mountain View area. |
MobileIron Pops 7% After Reporting Bigger Than Expected Q2 Revenue Of $31.5M | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | Today marks first earnings report as a public company. In the second quarter, the mobile device management company had GAAP revenue of $31.5 million, a per-share loss of $0.66 on a GAAP basis, and $0.52 on a non-GAAP basis. The market had expected MobileIron to lose $0.70 on revenue of $26.84 million. MobileIron . After cracking the $11 mark, the company has traded under its offering price in recent days. In after-hours trading, following its earnings beat, the company’s shares are up more than 7 percent. MobileIron’s “Subscription” revenue, a marker that could be linked to the company’s annual recurring revenue, grew to $7.10 million in the period. The company’s full revenue tally was up a modest 25.09 percent from the year-ago quarter. For the current quarter, MobileIron expects between $31.2 and $33.2 million in GAAP revenue, and total calendar 2014 revenue on a GAAP basis of between $120 million to $130 million. The company ended the period with more than $155 million in cash, a large chunk of which came from its recent flotation. In sum, a decent quarter for the company, and one that came in ahead of expectations. Its net loss of $17.11 million in the quarter, up from a year-ago loss of $6.20 million a year ago, however, isn’t as rosy. |
Yelp Swings To Profitability In Strong Q2 With $88.8M In Revenue, EPS Of $0.04 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | Today after the bell Yelp its second-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $88.79 million, and a profit of $0.04 per share. The company had net income of $2.7 million in the period, up from a $878,000 loss in the year-ago quarter. Investors had expected to lose 3 cents per share on revenue of $86.32 million. The company’s revenue tally for its most recent quarter is up 61 percent on a year-over-year basis. In its , Yelp reported $76.4 million in revenue, and a 4 cent per-share loss. Yelp was up just under 9 percent in regular trading. Following its earnings beat, Yelp is up nearly 6 percent in after-hours trading. The company also reported strong guidance for its third quarter, with revenues forecasted to land in the $98 to $99 million range. Investors appear enthusiastic with the company’s results. For the first half of 2014, Yelp’s revenues rose 63 percent when compared to the same period of 2013. For a company of Yelp’s age, that’s quick revenue expansion. Want a vanity metric? Yelp now has 61 million reviews on its service, up 44% year-over-year. The company also reported that it saw its average monthly unique visitors grow 27% compared to the year-ago period. Mobile traffic grew even more. |
AgileBits Shows Off 1Password Login Extension For iOS 8 Apps | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | When Apple first showed off Touch ID on the iPhone 5s, everyone knew what it would eventually lead to: using your fingerprint to access anything secure on your iPhone, in any app. At WWDC last month, that it was opening up the feature to all app developers. Now, is showing how its app will combine Touch ID with to let you securely log in to any app without having to save your credentials everywhere. In a , the company demonstrates how users will be able to use 1Password to quickly sign in to an app protected by one of its long, hard-to-crack passwords. From the login screen, the 1Password Login extension can be reached with a quick swipe up to open Control Center. You press your thumb to Touch ID, and the extension automatically brings up the different accounts you’ve saved for that app. With another tap, the credentials are entered and you can sign in. That’s a lot safer than simply staying logged in to all your apps. For apps that you don’t obsessively check and want to keep secure or private, the Login extension will be a nice compromise between speed and ease of use. is hoping to get developers to integrate the extension in their apps by the time iOS 8 launches this fall, and has created a in order to make the process easier. Here’s the demo video AgileBits put on its blog: http://vimeo.com/102142106 |
This Little Box Turns Your Existing iPhone Charger Into A Portable Battery | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | Does the world need another portable battery meant to charge your devices in a pinch? Probably not. But I dig the minimalism of this one. Instead of requiring you to carry around yet another thing, it turns your iPhone wall charger into a backup battery. One less thing to forget when you’re packing up the hotel room! Just announced this morning by the same folks who built the , the is a 1,500mAh battery that slips right on top of your iPhone wall wart. (For the curious: once you account for output efficiency and whatnot, a 1,500mAh battery is big enough to charge a dead iPhone 5S up to about 70%. Also worth noting: the output is capped at 5V/1A — perfect for iPhone, but it’ll make charging an iPad super slow) The price is set at $40 — but according to from the company, the promo code “ ” will drop that down to $20. I just gave the code a shot and it worked, though there’s no word on how long that’ll be the case. |
Google Analytics Can Now Exclude Traffic From Known Bots And Spiders | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | Google made a small but important to today that finally makes it easy to exclude bots and spiders from your user stats. That kind of traffic from search engines and other web spiders can easily skew your data in . Unfortunately, while generating fake traffic from all kinds of bot networks is big business and accounts for almost a third of all traffic to many sites according to , Google is only filtering out traffic from known bots and spiders. It’s using the for this, which is updated monthly. If you want to know which bots are on it, though, you will have to pay somewhere between $4,000 and $14,000 for an annual subscription, depending on whether you are an IAB member. Once you have opted in to excluding this kind of traffic, Analytics will automatically start filtering your data by comparing hits to your site with that of known User Agents on the list. Until now, filtering this kind of traffic out was . All it takes now is a trip into Analytics’ reporting view settings to and you’re good to go. Depending on your site, you may see some of your traffic numbers drop a bit. That’s to be expected, though, and the new number should be somewhat closer to reality than your previous ones. Chances are good that it’ll still include fake traffic, but at least it won’t count hits to your site from friendly bots. |
Hilton Hotels Now Lets Your Choose Your Room With Your Phone | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | Hilton Hotels is taking a page out of the airline playbook, giving users more control over the experience through their smartphone. The hotel chain has a way for users to choose their room on their smartphone, and promises to roll out smartphone-powered door keys to the majority of their hotels by 2016. Using the new (yes, that name needs work) or the Hilton website, users will be able to choose their room the day before they check in. They’ll be able to see photos of the room, as well as floor plans from available inventory. “When we decided to invest in this mobile strategy, we didn’t want to do 100 different things in a few hotels here and there,” said Geraldine Calpin SVP and Global Head of Digital at Hilton Worldwide. “We wanted to tackle a few big things and make sure they were available everywhere. That starts with Choose Your Room.” Hilton will provide the new Choose Your Room feature, as well as mobile check-out, at almost all of its global properties. That’s over 4,000 hotels offering the ability to choose your room by the end of this year. “When we looked at the airline industry, we saw how much people love to choose their seats, so we applied that to the hotel,” said Calpin. “In our own internal research, 84 percent of people said they would choose their room if given the option.” Users will also be able to choose various upgrades for their room and request specific amenities to be ready when they arrive. Plus, use of the Hilton online platform allows for Uber-style checkout, sending your receipt direct to your email. The ability to choose your room and check out via mobile is nice, but it’s only a first step. The real shift begins when Hilton, and other major hotel chains, are able to offer an entirely mobile experience. After a long flight, waiting in line to check in to your hotel can be a real pain. Eventually, however, Hilton hopes that guests will be able to book their room, choose their room, check-in and check-out entirely from their device. “We’ve been working for years on the technology, and now we have a solution, but we have to work on the deployment of that technology which will take some time,” said Calpin. Still, Hilton is taking big steps towards integrating our digital lives into the travel experience the same way airlines have. The Hilton HHonors app is available across Android, iOS and Windows Phone. [gallery ids="1037354,1037355,1037356"] |
Why OKCupid’s Experiments Aren’t The Same As Facebook’s | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | on Monday where it admitted to experimenting on human beings, comparing tests it runs to improve its dating algorithms to that took over the news cycle early this month. Today that like Facebook’s experiment, these tests could violate Federal Trade Commission regulations. “But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site,” wrote in the tongue-in-cheek post. “That’s how websites work.” The blog post led to a series of articles from publications ranging from to comparing it to Facebook’s experiments and disparaging the company for lying to customers. This actually seems a lot worse than the Facebook experiment: — Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) OKCupid has been conducting experiments on you for funsies — Jezebel (@Jezebel) Some have tried to explain why this testing is . It’s not simply because a much smaller group of people use the dating website. tests were just different. , when we use Facebook, Google, Twitter, Google, Yahoo or Linkedin, we agree to be part of experiments that will alter our experiences in an attempt to make us visit a site longer or click more things. That’s what OKCupid was doing. In Monday’s post, Rudder described three “of the more interesting” experiments the company has run. In one experiment, OKCupid removed all the photos from its website as it was rolling out a blind dating app to see how it impacted use. In the second, OKCupid ran a test to see how much a user’s picture affects viewer’s perception of their personalities. In the third, OKCupid told users that they had a 90 percent compatibility rate with users who they actually shared a 30 percent rate with. By removing photos from its website, OKCupid learned information it could apply to its blind dating app. In its second test, it found that users saw personality and looks to be the same thing, and now instead of rating people on both personality and looks, users simply give one overall rating. Its third test seems to be the most controversial, but essentially it confirmed that OKCupid’s dating algorithm actually works — users don’t just work out because OKCupid suggests it. All of these tests or experiments were done to improve user’s experience on the OKCupid website. When people sign up for OKCupid, they’re signing up for a service that is going to connect them with strangers based on data they enter. Manipulating that data and finding best practices is just OKCupid doing its job. At the basic level, all social networks are altering what you see in your feed to make the time you spend on them better. But Facebook’s study went beyond that. Facebook manipulated content in users’ feeds to see if the emotional tone of their News Feeds impacted the tone of their own posts on the social network, deliberately making people sad. After conducting the test on almost 700,000 users, it published those results in an academic journal. Unlike OKCupid, Facebook didn’t alter the user’s experience simply to improve the algorithm for a business purpose. In this study, the company essentially conducted a psychological experiment that many consider . People sign up for Facebook to interact with their friends and read the content they share — both good and bad. As many before me have noted, Facebook shouldn’t mess with that for the sake of a study, especially one conducted without its users consent. Some of the OKCupid experiments were obvious to the users — for example, you can see when no one has a picture on the website. Rudder also the users were notified of the tests after the fact, and he also said users consent to such testing under the “diagnostic research” provision in the site’s Terms of Service agreement. OKCupid’s comparison of its own tests to the Facebook study blows a common practice employed by many web services out of proportion. The world of big data is new, and this is certainly not the last time we’re going to see concerns flare up about tech companies employing trial and error to improve their services. But OKCupid is just being transparent about something most companies are doing. Facebook took it a step too far, and OKCupid shouldn’t defend Facebook’s study by disclosing its own experiments. |
null | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 31 | null |
Credit Karma Rolls Out Free Weekly Credit Reports (Yes Really) | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | Online credit monitoring startup is rolling out free credit reports. And no, it’s not a scam. Over the years, consumers have been burned by websites offering “free” credit reports which had . After signing up for their free report, these misleading sites would then begin billing the unsuspecting users on a monthly basis after their trial periods ended. That’s why it’s been refreshing to use Credit Karma, a service which offers free credit monitoring and free credit scores that are actually , not . I’ve been a somewhat obsessed user of the in recent months, now that I have a near-term goal of applying for a new mortgage. I’ve been working to clean up the old, negative items on my credit report, and it’s a little thrill to log in to the app to see the score increase as these changes are made. , through a partnership with TransUnion and VantageScore (a scoring system for all three credit agencies) has been providing users like myself with updated credit scores on a weekly basis for some time. In addition, the service alerts users to changes on their credit reports, like balance decreases or increases, credit limit changes, hard credit inquires, new accounts, and other items. It also offers you a “credit report card” which grades you on each aspect of your credit history and behavior, including your open credit card utilization, percent of on-time payments, average age of open credit card lines, and more. More importantly, it explains how each item works and why it matters, which goes a long way toward demystifying consumer credit. Based on your own credit history and profile, Credit Karma generates revenue by referring you to related services like credit cards, loan products, or debt consolidation industries. I actually ended up contracting with a service called Lexington Law thanks to the app, which is doing the busy work of writing the letters to the various credit agencies on my behalf, asking them to remove the negative items that should have dropped off ages ago. (Yes, I know I could do this myself, but I don’t have time.) Credit Karma notes that 25% of consumers have errors on their report that might affect their score, and 33% of people have never checked their report. Meanwhile, the average consumer’s credit score is 633 but the threshold for having what’s considered “good” credit is 720. Unfortunately, one thing Credit Karma didn’t have until now was access to consumer’s full credit reports, instead presenting you with more of a summary of where you stand financially. So you would still have to go through the normal procedures to request your or pay a company to pull it for you. With today’s rollout, that changes, as consumers’ credit reports are being made available within Credit Karma for free at any time. They can also be refreshed on as often as a weekly basis, if you choose. As per usual, Credit Karma doesn’t just present the information, but explains what it means and recommends actions you should take. The deal for these new reports is with TransUnion again, so technically, it’s one of three credit reports available to consumers. When TransUnion retrieves your credit report they do so by requesting your credit information on your behalf, which is known as a “soft inquiry.” These types of inquires aren’t shown to creditors so they don’t affect your credit the way that “hard inquiries” can. The move should help Credit Karma better compete with traditional credit monitoring agencies as well as with more direct competitors like score provider and financial advisor as well as with , which also offers free credit scores and summaries, but today . Below, a dummy report so you can see what it looks like: |
Wikipedia Now Accepts Bitcoin Donations With Coinbase | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 7 | 30 | , the decentralized community-powered encyclopedia, is now donations in bitcoin, the decentralized community-powered cryptocurrency. The Wikimedia Foundation partnered with to process the donations. Also new today, will waive processing fees for all registered non-profits. Today’s news shouldn’t come as a surprise. Back in March, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales a bitcoin donation campaign. After opening a Coinbase wallet, he shared his wallet address on Twitter and said that he would give all the proceeds to the Wikimedia Foundation. “I’m planning to re-open the conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors at our next meeting (and before, by email) about whether Wikimedia should accept Bitcoin,” he wrote in a at the time. And here’s the result! Bitcoin will just be another payment option as the Foundation doesn’t plan to hold any bitcoin. Immediately after receiving a donation, Coinbase will convert the amount of bitcoins into USD. This way, donations aren’t impacted by bitcoin volatility. The Wikimedia Foundation raised $18.7 million during last year’s campaign. The Wikimedia Foundation is just a first partner for Coinbase. Non-profits will get a nice perk compared to other Coinbase merchants. Instead of paying a small transaction fee, non-profits won’t pay any fees, ever. Other merchants start paying fees after $1 million in transactions. Comparatively, competitor recently fees for all merchants as long as you don’t need better support and enterprise features. also recently bitcoin thanks to Coinbase. You can expect a big race between Coinbase and BitPay to snatch merchants before the other. |
Republicans Find Fun, New Way For You To Give Them Money.gop | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Are you a coolkid.gop? The Republican party thinks that it is, and wants you to jam along with their hip.gop message by buying a spiffy new domain name. For some reason eatshit.gop and basically every other profane.gop domain I tried is unavailable. But you could always buy gotohell.gop for the optimistic.gop price of $20.16. Or if you lean the other way, obamaisvoldemort.gop, stopthebeyoncevoters.gop, whereshouldthenextwarbe.gop and iheartromney.gop are all also available as of the time of this post. “The .gop domain gives Republicans a strategic advantage online and unites the Party through an online community spanning the full spectrum of influence and ideology,” said Will Martinez, VP Sales and Marketing for .gop in a news release. “This is an open space already full of new ideas and innovation, which we will be highlighting in the coming weeks. There is an incredible amount of energy focused on expanding digital tools within the Republican Party and .gop is a great snapshot of this momentum.” Billed as the “Republican neighborhood online,” it’s one of the party’s feeble.gop attempts to catch up with the Democrats online. In the 2012 election, a study found 57 percent of Democratic campaign donors contributed online, although only 34 percent of Republicans donors did. There have been more than 300 generic top level domains, from .sexy to .ninja, released by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the agency says we can expect more than 1,000 over the next few years. |
Microsoft To Abandon The Bastard Child Of Windows Phone In Two Months | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Remember ? Microsoft built it as a stop-gap measure to lessen the ire of Windows Phone 7.5 users, a group technologically precluded from making the leap to Windows Phone 8. If you had forgotten about it don’t worry, Microsoft is about to do the same. Mary Jo Foley the coming death-dates of a number of Microsoft products, including Windows Phone 7.8. As it turns out, 7.8’s moment of expiration has been known for some time: September 9th. Today Microsoft — and then retracted, it seems — a note to computing users concerning the end of support for a number of its products. The list included a note that Windows Phone 7.8 would lose “mainstream support” in September. It wasn’t clear what that meant. According to the company’s , consumer products generally receive a two year period of updates and support, after which they are no longer supported. There isn’t “extended support” for such products, as there is for versions of desktop Windows, for example. Windows Phone 7.8 is being axed after a mere 18 months. The : “Microsoft will make updates available for the Operating System on your phone, including security updates, for a period of 18 months after the lifecycle start date.” In short, if you are on Windows Phone 7.8 you have a few months left before your phone won’t update ever again. How many Windows Phone 7.8 users are left? About , so it’s no small tally. Windows Phone 7.8 was never more than a band-aid. Microsoft decided that Windows Phone needed to join the larger Windows family, and the original Windows Phone 7, 7.1 7.5, and 7.8 devices could never share in that future. Thus, to see Microsoft walk quickly away from the product is hardly surprising. What does it gain from its support? Aside from honoring the implicit promise to not leave users behind when providing them with a platform to by into, little. Strategically, that is, Windows Phone 7.8 is moot. |
You Say Potato Salad | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | as a news day, and meeting today with fresh eyes: You’d wonder why a lot of people were talking about potato salad. And, wow, . If this has seen far, it’s because it has stood on the shoulders of . Both Yo (an app that literally allows you to say “Yo” to your friends with one tap) and the crowdfunded tuberous treat are unnervingly simple products that leverage tech platforms in order to appeal to a broader audience. Though an actual potato salad is the extreme, clearly. They both prove that traction in and of itself is absurd. That potato salad is such a joke that , a college literary magazine for the middle-aged, has again If, according to Mark Twain, “comedy is tragedy plus time” then tech is a comedic goldmine at the moment … In , decades occur within a single news cycle, where the tragedies of being replaced by robots, being spied on and having our every move catalogued for some strange nerd panopticon, are relieved by a potato salad and a two-letter shout-out. So enter a populist potato salad that raises a gravy boat load of investor cash (almost two years’ tuition at a prestigious private university) within 24 hours of existence. Enter the millions of web pageviews this “story” creates, including this one, right here, right now, because you were seduced by an interesting title. I’m sorry. For every in which the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo and the WSJ’s Christopher Mims , on Medium, what this story means for humanity (spoiler alert: Nothing), there’s the unabashed sincerity of this: Potato salad, the Kickstarter, is the of the digital age; an organic reminder that we are fickle, desperate for a laugh or a party or a break from the stunning, forward march of progress. When faced with the , potato salad says, “Not today tech, not today.” And that perhaps you can fight the future. Or, at least, if you can’t beat it, join it. |
The Xbox One Just Learned A Few New Tricks | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Another month, another itty-bitty update to the Xbox One. The Xbox One’s July update doesn’t bring any earth shattering features (like, say, a version of Hulu that doesn’t break in the last two minutes of literally every show I try to watch), but it does pack a few new tricks you might not notice on your own. Here’s the new stuff, which should be rolling out right about now: Be on the lookout for news about the August update; if past traditions hold true, Microsoft should let loose a few details on that one in the next week or two. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHoDN9m3bks?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] |
TC Cribs: Pocket Gems, Where The Office Gets Snazzed Up $100 At A Time | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Today’s episode of Cribs brings us to , the San Francisco mobile entertainment startup. Pocket Gems just might have the most amount of personal “flair” items around the office of any company I’ve visited, and that’s saying something. That may be because each employee at Pocket Gems gets $100 to put toward new office decorations of their choosing. Some people pool their cash together to buy something like a pool table, and others use the money for one-off items like inflatable palm trees, or lounge chairs, or even fencing equipment. Being that Pocket Gems’ staff is an artistic bunch, the office keeps getting filled up with pretty unique stuff. See it all for yourself in the video embedded above. Below, check out some photos our team took of Pocket Gems HQ.
[gallery ids="1026822,1026823,1026821,1026824,1026825,1026826,1026827,1026828,1026829,1026831,1026832"] |
Amino Raises $1.65M To Replace Old-School Forums With Mobile Communities | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | , a TechStars-incubated startup that’s building mobile communities around topics like anime and , is announcing that it has raised $1.65 million in seed funding led by Union Square Ventures. Co-founder and CEO Ben Anderson told me that his engagement with “passionate niche interests” goes back to when he was a teenager and excited about robots, but not sure how to find others who were similarly excited. Certainly, there are plenty of online communities and forums, but Anderson said they remain “a little bit old fashioned” and not particularly well-suited for smartphones. In fact, when Amino is ready to launch a new community, not only does it ask existing users for input, Anderson said it also looks for areas where there’s already “an active forum ripe for disruption.” There are currently listed on the Amino website, including ones for K-pop, Minecraft, video games and art. Anderson suggested that the number could eventually reach the hundreds, creating an “app constellation” where users just register once and can then join a number of communities. Apparently 40 percent of existing users have already joined more than one community, though Anderson noted that their identities are separate on each one. “We found that humans in general are more complicated than just one identity,” he said. “It’s actually really freeing from a self-expression standpoint to have an account for just this one slice of your life.” And while it might be faster to turn Amino into a self-serve platform where anyone can create a community, Anderson said the plan is to continue building the apps with his team, leading to “a very curated selection of communities — we want to keep the quality of the communities really high for now.” I downloaded the Amino app today. It has an appealing simplicity — it’s easy to jump in and start browsing or commenting. There’s a newsfeed of popular content posted by other users, a forum for more in-depth discussions and, coolest of all, a map view that shows (in a general way) where other users are located. In Union Square’s Andy Weissman noted that Amino’s apps have been downloaded a total of 500,000 times. He wrote: Communities have an integral part of the Internet, online places where people can connect and share their passions and interests. And communities can have great network dynamics, where they increase in value as participants join and share more. Union Square Ventures has a long history of funding these types of businesses. Amino apps are only available on iOS right now, but Anderson said there are also plans for Android. Other investors in the seed round include Google Ventures, SV Angel, Box Group, Scott Belsky, Slow Ventures, Paul English (Co-founder of Kayak), Kal Vepuri, Launch Angels and David Chang. |
Senate Committee Advances Controversial Cybersecurity Bill | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | The Senate Intelligence Committee today that would encourage companies to share information about threats with each other and the federal government. The Senate group voted 12 to 3 to advance the bill. It should see a full vote this year. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) came under staunch criticism following its introduction in June. Complaint stemmed from the bill’s broad definitions that could be open to abuse, lack of Department of Homeland Security oversight and immature — at best — minimization techniques to protect the privacy of American citizens. They also question the sharing of information with not only the National Security Agency (NSA), but also layers of government that would have wide purview to use the shared information for non-cybersecurity purposes. The above fears are compounded in the light of former government contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations, which showed the executive branch’s to better collect the data and communications of U.S. citizens. “In the year since Edward Snowden revealed the existence of sweeping surveillance programs, authorized in secret and under classified and flawed legal reasoning, Americans have overwhelmingly asked for meaningful privacy reform and a roll back of the surveillance state created since passage of the Patriot Act,” the privacy groups . “The bill would do exactly the opposite.” The bill would take down existing legal barriers so the private sector would be free to hand over data relating to cyber threats to other companies and the government to improve security. The bill, however, as the ACLU and others have pointed out, would not do an even decent job at curtailing the collected information for that purpose. So the incentives in place could be used, under the broad definitions that it sets out with regards to cyber threats and response thereof, to garner data not specifically for cybersecurity purposes. The data could then be shared broadly within the government because the bill would provide few controls regarding its use. The bill would also give government agencies wide range for disclosure, retention and use of the cyber threat information they are provided by private companies. The bill would allow the data to then be used for prosecution of a wide range of crimes, including those under the Espionage Act. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, said the bill “provides important protections” to prevent privacy violations when she announced the legislation. The bill would require companies sharing information to remove personally identifying information of “known” United States persons. It isn’t hard to understand that private corporations are not choice arbiters of citizenship. Given the wide use of online pseudonyms and the like, it could become difficult to determine and decide who is in fact a citizen, and who is not. Under the current language, privacy advocates worry the government is not taking any steps to filter this information. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would act as a portal for information collected under the purview of the proposed law. DHS would then automatically share the information with other agencies, including the NSA. The Center for Democracy and Technology noted the bill “fails to address recently disclosed cybersecurity-related conduct of the NSA.” Thus, often, unminimized communications and other data of American citizens could be shared with the United States government by a corporation shielded by law from any legal response from the parties impacted. If this doesn’t sound brilliant to you, join the rising chorus. The bill would also exempt itself from its feeble protections for American information when the issue at hand relates “directly” to “a cybersecurity threat.” The irony sings. Privacy advocates worry the government could use cybersecurity information in pedestrian criminal proceedings because the bill does not expressly prevents the government from doing that. The language is almost humorous: So the government can use the provided information for cybersecurity, imminent death, or whatever the hell else it wants. Privacy groups are also worried that the definition of “cybersecurity threat” that the bill contains could be exploited to include whistleblowers. The broader the language, the more actions it can endorse and legally support. And when few protections are in place to guard against abuse, you have a toxic mix. IMAGE BY FLICKR USER UNDER LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED) |
With LocalMaven, Businesses Can Pay “Mavens” To Promote Their Deals | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Startup says it’s making things easier for businesses that want to use plain old cash to encourage word-of-mouth referrals. Founder and CEO Arnon Rosan , where he said he was frustrated that there was no good way to track or reward friendly referrals. For example, he said he might recommend a tent company to a friend, but he’d have no idea whether the recommendation went anywhere unless he asked about it later. And while the referral could lead to significant revenue for the service provider, the only reward he might get is being taken out to dinner. Not that LocalMaven is only trying to serve event businesses and, uh, tent companies. Rosan said he’s looking for a broader category of “mavens,” who are basically trusted experts. Mavens can include everyone from hotel concierges (he described a concierge as “the ultimate example of a maven”) to the friends you’re always bugging for recommendations. LocalMaven has created an online marketplace where businesses can connect with those experts, offering them a commission in exchange for promoting discounts and other deals. Every time a maven recommends a deal to a friend, colleague, or random person they met on the street, they use a unique promotional code, so it’s easy to track which recommendations actually lead to a sale — and then to pay the maven for each sale. Referral fees aren’t a new idea, Rosan acknowledged, but the goal is to make the process as convenient as possible. So if you’re having a serendipitous moment where you’re talking to a friend/colleague/random person, and they mention that they need a caterer/plumber/tent company, then you think, “Holy crap, I know the right company for you to call,” you can just bring up LocalMaven on your smartphone, look up current promotions, and give them a referral code on the spot. Rosan said businesses will have a lot of control over their promotions, for example by setting the commission rates that they’re willing to pay and determining how exclusive a deal can be. (And in the future, LocalMaven will allow businesses to offer discounts instead of cash commissions.) He also pointed out that people can sign up as more than one type of user — yes, they might join as a maven, but they might also have a business they want to promote, or they might want to redeem deals themselves. As for whether this could lead to spammy behavior where mavens just indiscriminately share deal after deal in the off chance that someone will bite, Rosan said that users will be able to rate both the business and the referrer, which discourage that kind of behavior. The company, which is officially launching today, says it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors. |
Is The Thiel Fellowship Program Really Just A Sabbatical From College? | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | under age 20, just started their venture this summer with the program. All of these bright young things were carefully selected from over 1,000 other hopefuls this year to receive $100k in funding so they could drop out of college and embark on a two-year mission to solve the future. But are they actually doing that or has the Thiel Fellowship Program turned into more of a prestigious two-year sabbatical?
A little over half of the kids (ages 16-19), 10 boys and a girl, live together in what appears to be a giant abandoned building in the sketchier part of San Francisco’s Mission. The difference between inside and out at their new abode is striking. On the outside, it’s all boarded up and slapped together with old wood panels, graffiti, staples and glue. It looks ready to fall apart at the slightest gust of wind. But step inside and it’s a completely different story. High beam ceilings let in natural light and modern art decorates the entry, hall and living space. There are two kitchens, a laundry, four full bathrooms and 10 bedrooms. The acrid smell of fresh paint lingers, hinting at the newness of this hidden mansion’s refurbished life. It’s sort of poetic that these kids live in such a place. It’s as if it serves as symbolism for a broken education system remade in Thiel’s visionary future. Here’s the problem with that vision – 8 of the 20 kids I spoke to in this year’s program said at one point or another in our conversation that they’d consider going back to college after they are done. Even the ones who said they would definitely not go back changed their mind at certain points and said they might also go back. On top of that, some of the kids I spoke to from the previous year also said they would go back or at least might consider it at the end of their two years. This makes a lot of strategic sense for them. According to the , college graduates earn nearly a million more dollars in their lifetime than their peers. Grad school students earn even more than that at $1.3 million above everyone else. The program gives these kids an opportunity to focus on something, right in the middle of school. It also opens them up to Peter Thiel’s very strong network of contacts that they can use in the future. A lot of the kids seemed to be using the program as more of a prestigious two year internship, kind of like a for tech, with scant regard for Thiel’s plan to disrupt higher education. According to Thiel Fellow spokesman Jeremiah Hall, only 6 of the Thiel Fellows have gone back to college so far. But then, it’s still pretty early to try and predict how many will go back. There are roughly 80 Fellows currently. 40 of them are still in the program. The other 40 are just barely out. Echoing their living space, on the outside the Fellows seem like regular teenagers but inside those normal facades are the minds of geniuses. Fouad Matin, 18, helps kids learn how to code. Lucy Guo, 19, interns at Facebook by day and builds educational software for third world countries in her spare time. 17-year-old Adithya Ganesh co-invented , an intelligent bionic glove for partial hand amputees. About two-thirds of this current crop of Thiel Fellows are first generation Americans. According to a involving nearly 11,000 kids, immigrant children who came to the U.S. before they were teens do better in school than native-born children. American-born children whose parents were immigrants followed closely in terms of achievement. Nineteen-year-old Alex Koren, a 6’2 red head, is the oldest and possibly the most outspoken kid in the house. His father is a former Israeli soldier. Matin’s parents immigrated from Morocco, Guo’s came from China. They had high hopes of their daughter earning a PhD. Instead she’s dropped out of school to join the program. While that is what Thiel himself is going for, it wasn’t what Guo’s parents imagined for their daughter. “Oh my parents were pissed,” admits Guo. That’s partly why she took the internship at Facebook on top of the Fellows program. “They said if I didn’t get my PhD and work for Facebook, they’d failed.” Thiel Fellow spokesman Ross Gillifillan helps pick those in the program. He pointed out that Thiel himself was born in Germany and came to the states as a toddler. According to Gillifillan, bringing in this many children of immigrants was not something the program did on purpose. “It just somehow turned out that way,” he injects. He’s sitting in the back room, observing, keeping the kids on the subject of their startup plans (and possibly away from too many things he doesn’t want the kids talking to a reporter about). Even with the prestige of the program, the money and the opportunities, many of the other kids with immigrant parents shared a similar story to Guo’s. These people had sacrificed for their children and given up their homeland, all so their kids could go to college. Dropping out and doing something else would be unthinkable to them. And yet, here these kids are dropping out…at least for two years, with a good lot of them admitting they plan to go back at a later date. What was more unthinkable to the teens was not taking this opportunity. “I felt like I was on autopilot,” 19 year old Kaushik Tiwari told me about his experience with college. He hailed from New Dehli and happened to be the only Fellow not born in the US in the house. Koren said something similar about his higher ed experience at Johns Hopkins, “I had three majors, I was class president, working for admissions, blogging for the school…and finishing up my freshmen year. I wanted to be around people actually doing things not around people talking about the theory around doing things.” Koren was sure he did not want to go back to finish school, but then thought about it mid-conversation and said he wasn’t sure, “I mean, I could change my mind. I just don’t know right now.” It may be too early to tell, with just a month into their endeavors. While there’s really no structure set for the teens in the program, their work ethic is remarkable. “We all get up around 8,” says Koren. Matin corrects him, “some of us earlier like 6 or 7.” They work from sun up to sun down on their projects, sometimes collaborating or helping each other out when they are stuck. “We owe it to the good of the people of the world to do something with our time here,” says Fellow Shantanu Bala, 19. Housemate Jared Sumner mentioned his self-imposed discipline came early, “I pretended to be a student at MIT and went to lectures.” Sumner also built a company called , an open-source DIY crowdfunding site competitor to that startups have used to raise $10 million. This was all previous to his time in the Fellows house. He views the Fellows program as a two year education of sorts. “If and when I return to college I can have a new perspective.” Despite these very big projects, the Fellows still act like typical teens. They watch movies on the house big screen and enjoy eating from the hot dog stand that is open till 3 am just down the street. Guo squeals after she admits she prefers McDonalds. “I can’t help it. One dollar fries!,” she says, laughing and hiding her face. Guo, at least, seems to have a solid plan in place for her future. Part dutiful daughter, part strategic planner, the only girl in the group already has a marketable startup idea, a Facebook internship under her belt and just one more year of school. Yes, she is one of the kids that plans on going back to finish her degree after she’s done. “The fellowship is not something you win, it’s a chance to focus,” says Guo. And that is exactly what she’s doing with her two gap years. |
Facebook Tests Android L-Style Lock Screen Notifications | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | A new update for the test group of Facebook for Android users briefly enabled lockscreen notifications, at least for new message activity, before a later update today seems to have disabled the feature. The notifications looked very similar to the , one of the new upcoming features of Android L, the next major update for Google’s mobile OS. Facebook has confirmed to TechCrunch the update went out to a “small group of beta testers.” The update doesn’t require Android L to be installed to work, however, as I encountered the new feature using an HTC One M8 running Android 4.4.2 with Sense 6. It features a Settings expander with viewing options, and tapping on the notification itself will take you to the Facebook app directly, after you unlock your device. As indicated on the notification itself, swiping will dismiss the notification and keep the device locked. Multiple notifications from multiple message senders stack visually one on top of the other. I was only able to see message notifications because of the type of activity on my FB account during the test, but other FB activity was also included in the new test feature. Facebook often tests new features on Android, but they don’t always necessarily make it to a shipping release. Presumably once Android L becomes production software, it won’t be required, but Facebook could still gain a user attention advantage by delivering lock screen notifications regardless of what version of Android handset owners have installed on their devices. |
Pinterest Steps Outside Its Walled Garden With New Animated Follow Button For Brands | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Pinterest, the image-based social network now riding on a and 60 million monthly active users (per comScore), has been making a lot of moves to improve how people content on its own site. Today it that it hopes will be used to snag more users when they are somewhere else on the net. Designed for businesses and brands, Pinterest’s new Follow button is actually more than a simple button that will take you to the brand’s Pinterest page; instead, it prompts a pop-up preview, which will feature Pins from the account in question that float up, one by one, from the bottom of the window. There are a couple of things going on here. By offering users a preview pane with Pins, it will potentially entice more people to follow the brand, given that they will have a better idea of what kind of content they will be seeing as a result. By not navigating users away from a brand’s main website, Pinterest is offering a message to brands that it’s not looking to compete directly with them by luring users away from their primary pages. “Your visitors won’t ever have to leave your website to follow you,” Pinterest product manager Jason Costa writes: He adds that once someone follows an account, they’ll start seeing those Pins in their home feed. Costa writes that those who are already using a Pinterest Follow button on their sites will automatically be upgraded to the new experience. Otherwise, any site can implement it using the on Pinterest’s developer site. Examples of the new button in action can be found on , , , , , and . |
Amazon Sends Letter To Try To Take Authors “Out Of The Middle” Of The Hachette Dispute | John Biggs | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Amazon is flexing another muscle in the ongoing Hachette dispute. In a letter obtained by the New York Times, David Naggar, VP of Kindle content, is offering 100 percent of all profits for some Hachette authors and has forwarded the offer to the Authors Guild, a long-time opponent of all things Amazon. “We agree that authors are caught in the middle while these negotiations drag on, and we’re particularly sensitive to the effect on debut and midlist authors. But Hachette’s unresponsiveness and unwillingness to talk until we took action put us in this position, and unless Hachette dramatically changes their negotiating tempo, this is going to take a really long time,” . “If Hachette agrees, for as long as this dispute lasts, Hachette authors would get 100% of the sales price of every Hachette e-book we sell. Both Amazon and Hachette would forego all revenue and profit from the sale of every e-book until an agreement is reached. “Amazon would also return to normal levels of on-hand print inventory, return to normal pricing in all formats, and for books that haven’t gone on sale yet, reinstate pre-orders.” The letter, which has resulted in raspberries from the Authors Guild, is a direct attempt by Amazon to “help” the authors which, in the end, will hamstring Hachette. The message is clear: Amazon will turn on the money firehose if the publisher plays ball. And, to Amazon’s credit, I suspect it will work. Publishers need Amazon more than Amazon needs publishers. Indie publishing, driven mostly by Amazon, is rising in quality and quantity every quarter and soon the successes by indies – the , etc. – will overwhelm the successes of the established authors. If this is a frightening prospect, you probably shouldn’t be reading blogs. Furthermore, the sense of publisher entitlement is fierce. As mystery writer wrote last week on the intransigence of the Authors Guild to consider Amazon’s terms, “calling Amazon a monopoly when they are merely winning at competition, for instance, is pretty weird.” Amazon is the bookstore. They don’t have to carry anything they don’t want to carry. While once the publishers were the bullies, now the bookstore is. And it seems like fair play. Is Amazon doing the right thing in giving writers their source of revenue back? Absolutely. Is this the best way they can do it? Absolutely not. But both sides won’t budge. Doctorowian economics are at work here: the publishers feared piracy so much that they gave away rights to their product to the biggest, most swashbuckling pirate of all, Jeff Bezos. By forcing DRM on us in the early 2000s, publishers effectively locked us all into Amazon’s grasp, and even mighty Apple can’t twist us out of it. In the end, Hachette will concede, Amazon will gain a modicum of power, and the Authors Guild will wait to wring its hands at another . And, again, the . |
And The First Game To Find Its Way To Android Wear Is… Yep, You Guessed It. | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Quick! Take a guess: which endlessly ported/cloned game is the first to have made its way to Android Wear watches? Doom? Tetris? Far Cry 3? Nope! It’s Flappy Bird. This is where I’d normally place a few dozen words explaining the game, but you already know pretty much everything there is to know: is Flappy Bird. On your wrist. Instead of a bird, it’s a Droid. Pipes are bad. Is it perfect? Nah. Even the game’s creator, Sebastian Mauer, calls it completely experimental. The physics are a bit wonky, and even getting the game to start is kind of weird — you either need to say “Okay Google — start Flopsy Droid” (which we actually couldn’t get to work) or press a button on your phone (which sort of defeats the point of having a game on your wrist). But it’s a start! If Android Wear watches manage to find a large user base, it’s a whole new platform/form factor for game developers to explore and battle over. Android Wear game developers just have to answer the same question that developers are still working out: what can I do on a watch that my phone can’t do just as well or better? |
Curse, An Under-The-Radar Community For Hard-Core Gamers, Raises $16M | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Not to glorify another high school dropout, but Hubert Thieblot had one of those unusual, circuitous paths toward building a profitable gaming startup. An avid World of Warcraft player, he started about a decade ago. “I wanted to have something I could do anywhere in the world,” he said nonchalantly. “A website seemed like a good idea.” Fast forward nearly a decade and the company just picked up $16 million in fresh funding through a Series B round led by GGV Capital and a separate venture debt round intended for acquisitions. What is Curse today? It’s a network of services for hard-core gamers, covering everything from online forums to guides to statistics. They focus on dedicated gamers that play very involved games like League of Legends. “When we see a new game that we think is going to be big, we ask ourselves what kinds of services we’d want to see and then we build them,” he said. That business has grown quietly and handsomely. It now sees 1 billion monthly page views, 28 million monthly unique visitors and is profitable primarily through advertising. It employs about 110 people, primarily in Huntsville, Ala. But Thieblot wants to take a page from the biggest gaming successes out of mainland China. He wants to pursue more of a premium services and virtual goods model, akin to what Chinese video social network YY has done. Last month, they launched Curse Voice, which lets gamers talk to each other while they’re playing. It’s kind of like a hyper-specialized version of Skype for hard-core gamers. The new round brings Curse’s total funding to $22 million. GGV Capital, which has a portfolio that criss-crosses between the U.S. and China, seemed like a good fit. Hans Tung, GGV’s managing partner, is joining the board. Curse also raised a $6 million venture debt round from Multiplier Capital for acquisitions. Venture debt is pretty unusual, but Thieblot said he didn’t want to dilute existing shareholders, including himself, and that the business throws off enough cash to pay back the loan within two years. |
Apple Brings Better Discussion, iPad Course Creation To iTunes U | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Apple has with a bunch of new features, cranking the version number up to 2 and introducing improved discussion features and the ability to create and update courses directly from the iPad app, which previously has been mostly a user-facing client for consuming content. The update, live now in the App Store, gives the universal app new powers for students, letting them ask questions about the course, posts and assignments more easily in private courses, and allows other students to participate in discussions directly by asking follow-on or supplemental questions, or by answering questions posed by other students. Push notifications also now alert users about new questions and responses to discussions in process. For teachers in particular, it’s a big update, since it now allows them to set up their iPads from their devices. They can provide course outlines, create assignments, put out class materials and track student progress right from the app, snap photos with the iPad’s camera, build materials in the iWork suite for iPad and then use the “Open in…” dialog to bring them into iTunes U. All of the material created for courses can be published to iTunes U right from the app, where they’ll be freely available to enrolled students. Previously this was a desktop-only workflow, so this makes it easier for users to work on the go and get their classes up and running, or update them as the course progresses with new material. It’s a big step to making the iPad even more of an educational resource, not just as a content-consumption tool, but as something educators can turn to in order to run their courses, without the need for a traditional computer as a primary hub. |
Hillary Clinton Denounces NSA Surveillance On German Chancellor | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Hillary Clinton criticized the National Security Agency (NSA) for spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone, calling it “absolutely wrong” Former government contractor Edward Snowden’s that Merkel’s phone calls were intercepted by the NSA, damaging diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Germany. Tensions have only escalated in the wake of a new spying scandal this week. over reports a German intelligence service accused of spying was working for the United States. Merkel it will be a “serious case” if the recent spying allegations were true. Clinton did not comment on the current controversy, saying an investigation was underway and she only knew what she read. “But clearly, we have to do a much better job in working together between Germany and the United States to sort out what the appropriate lines of cooperation are on intelligence and security,” Clinton told Spiegel. “I think the cooperation is necessary for our security, but we don’t want to undermine it by raising doubts again and again.” Clinton declined to comment on whether or not she thought it was “taboo” for the U.S. to acquire a source within the German intelligence service. She emphasized the U.S. could not enter a no-spy agreement with any country, including Germany. The Obama administration dismissed requests for such an agreement after the revelation last fall about the NSA’s surveillance practices. Clinton was also asked if Merkel deserved an apology, and sidestepped the question, saying Merkel and President Barack Obama have “had numerous talks.” When pressed, she said she was sorry, but noted she was no longer in government. Clinton was traveling in Germany on her “Hard Choices” book tour, which many view as an opportunity for the former secretary of state to test the waters for a presidential bid in 2016. |
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Apple’s “Secret” eBay Store Returns [Updated] | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | In fall 2012, that only sold Apple products at prices that undercut Apple’s own online refurbished store. The store was to have been run by Apple, despite the company never confirming its involvement. , but now has returned, and this time around, it’s selling “Apple Certified” iPhone 5 devices. Does that mean new iPhones are just around the corner? Probably! First by AppleInsider, the new eBay store lists a number of iPhone 5 models, ranging from $449 to $499 in price. The devices are available in black and white, in 16 GB, 32 GB, or 64 GB capacities, and are sold factory-unlocked for GSM networks. They also include a one-year Apple Warranty, and are said to be “returned to like-new condition,” “repackaged with manual and charger,” and have received a “final quality inspection by Apple,” according to the website’s text. You’ll note that doesn’t currently list iPhone 5 models for sale – or any iPhone for that matter. The recently launched store, which goes by the name “ ,” could hint at a forthcoming release of new iOS devices, which are typically announced at Apple’s September product launch events. If you recall, when the first Apple eBay store launched, it was selling refurbished iPads at $100 less than Apple’s store, AppleInsider . Today, the new store is selling off old iPhone models – and could certainly point to updated iPhone models on the near horizon. We’ve reached out to both Apple and eBay about this news. eBay declined to comment. Apple has not yet commented, but we’ll update if it does. At this time, it’s not 100 percent certain that this is a Apple-run store, though eBay’s refusal to comment could be interpreted as a confirmation of sorts. After all, if this were some random third-party seller or “just a big misunderstanding,” eBay would likely help to correct the earlier reporting, which is like wildfire. That being said, the store could also be run by an authorized Apple reseller. , in fact. 9to5Mac claimed at the time that eBay had confirmed the original store run by Apple. eBay reportedly told them the store was “a low-profile test site that could open to much bigger things.” But the store’s product pages referred to the seller as being “authorized by Apple Inc. to sell Apple Certified Refurbished products on eBay.” This led others to believe 9to5Mac’s reporting was just inaccurate. However, AppleInsider says they later confirmed the original store was a pilot program run by Apple. That bodes well for this new store being the real deal, too. : We had reached out to the seller directly before publication, and asked directly if the store was run by Apple, as per reports. This is the response: “No, this listing is not ran by Apple. We are a private re-seller.” Apple has not commented. |
With NYC Launch, Lyft Looks To Take On Uber And Local Regulators | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | has been aggressively expanding its service across the U.S. over the last year, but this week could mark its biggest launch and biggest challenge yet. That’s because, for the first time ever, the company is preparing to launch in New York, a region known for its regulatory morass. On Friday July 11 at 7:00 p.m. ET, Lyft will make its service available to New Yorkers looking to get around in Brooklyn and Queens where taxi service and other forms of transportation are scarce. Lyft president John Zimmer said the focus on the boroughs is meant to help serve an underserved market. According to the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, happen either in Manhattan or at the local airports. There’s only one subway line that runs between the boroughs, and that subway line — the G — is . Grabbing a foothold in the place with the least number of transit alternatives makes sense, but that doesn’t mean that Lyft won’t expand to serve Manhattan at some point in the future. It also doesn’t mean that passengers in the boroughs can’t take a Lyft to Manhattan. To prepare for launch, the company has been working over the last month or so to recruit drivers for the launch, and will have more than 500 ready at the time the service goes live. In terms of wheels on the road, that’s the largest launch in a single market that it’s had, according to Zimmer. The new service will have to compete with numerous other options that New Yorkers are used to, but its biggest competition will likely come from Uber, which has been operating in New York for . Perhaps anticipating the launch of Lyft in the boroughs, the on-demand ride company announced yesterday that it was . To date, Uber’s messaging has always been around how much cheaper its fares are than taxis in various local markets, but it’s clear that it is also trying to squash competition in the ride-sharing space. It also recently cut prices in the and by 25 percent each. With more than , Uber is clearly using its war chest to . At launch, Lyft rides will have a base fare of $3 per ride with a cost of $2.15 per mile traveled or $0.40 per minute traveled in traffic. That matches , but is cheaper than grabbing a taxi, which typically charges $2.50 upon entry and $2.50 per mile or $0.50 for each minute traveling slower than 6 mph.
Even if Lyft survives the price war, it will also have to in a market that has not taken kindly to peer-to-peer services that take on incumbent players. More than any other city, New York time and again has proven to be a tough nut for startups to crack. We’ve seen that with Airbnb, which recently battled the over releasing user data that could show hosts who were running illegal hotel operations. After receiving a subpoena and battling the AG in court, Airbnb succumbed to the request and . It also who were renting out dozens of units in the city. New York has been unkind to transportation companies, as well. Lyft and Uber competitor Sidecar early last year, but and retreated from the market after an administrative court judge ruled against one of the company’s drivers. Car-sharing service RelayRides also after notice from New York State’s Department of Financial Services (DFS). Even Uber, which has a longstanding service in the city, ran into problems when it sought to skirt the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission’s regulations and launch its own UberTAXI service without their blessing. Uber soon after launch, and it took several months for Uber to get back in the regulator’s good graces and there. (It’s probably worth noting that Uber recently — the guy it worked with to get its NY taxi service approved — as its new .) A safety comparison of Lyft vs. taxis and for-hire vehicles in NYC Uber faced resistance in New York City even though it was working with commercially licensed taxi and black car drivers. Lyft, meanwhile, operates a peer-to-peer model with drivers who haven’t gone through the same process. And that could cause some concern at the NY TLC or the NY AG’s office. Zimmer says the company has proactively reached out to a number of agencies in New York, touting its work with regulators in other markets. It also has been trying to make the case that its safety standards are well over and above what the TLC requests for taxi and for-hire (black car) drivers. “We’re now live in 67 cities, and we have worked through every regulatory hurdle that has been thrown at us,” Zimmer said. The insurance coverage Lyft offers is $1 million, compared to a minimum of $300,000 for a taxi. Its minimum driver age is 21, compared to 19 for a taxi. The company also screens for drunk driving and reckless driving, nixing anyone who had violations over the last seven years — something taxis don’t do. The hope is that Lyft can get regulators in New York to craft a new framework for peer-to-peer rides in the same way that other jurisdictions have. Most notably, Lyft and other ride-sharing startups convinced the California Public Utilities Commission for “Transportation Network Companies,” which they have been trying to convince other state and local governments and regulators to adopt. It’s unclear whether the folks in New York will be open to new competition from new ride-sharing services. After all, the local taxi lobby is clearly powerful there. What is clear is that Lyft will have a lot of work ahead if it’s going to be successful in one of the largest transportation markets in the country. |
Uber Caps Surge Pricing During Emergencies Nationwide | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | Uber is doing away with its practice of charging exorbitant rates for transportation during emergencies in the U.S., the company confirmed today. While its new caps on surge pricing during those times were first announced through a partnership with the state of New York, the company will . NY Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced via Twitter (and email) that the state had reached an agreement with the on-demand ride-sharing company to limit prices during “abnormal disruptions in the market.” The deal essentially marks the end to Uber’s practice of instituting “surge pricing” during events like emergencies and national disasters. : My office has reached an agreement with to cap pricing during emergencies, a thoughtful application of NY law to new . — Eric Schneiderman (@AGSchneiderman) For years, Uber has been knocked for its dynamic pricing model, which increases the fares passengers pay in periods of high demand. Typically, that will include major holidays and events like New Year’s Eve, when large numbers of people are trying to travel all at once. But it also frequently extends to regular commute times. The problem is when Uber has instituted , which limits access to only those who can pay for exorbitant rates to get around. During those times, its practice of “surge pricing” constitutes “price gouging” according to New York law (see below). New York’s law against price gouging (General Business Law §396-r), was passed in the winter of 1978-79 in response to escalating heating oil prices. It defines an “abnormal disruption of the market” as “any change in the market, whether actual or imminently threatened, resulting from stress of weather, convulsion of nature, failure or shortage of electric power or other source of energy, strike, civil disorder, war, military action, national or local emergency, or other cause of an abnormal disruption of the market which results in the declaration of a state of emergency by the governor.” During an abnormal disruption of the market, all parties within the chain of distribution of any essential consumer goods or services are prohibited from charging “unconscionably excessive prices.” Uber that also highlighted the company’s partnership with the American Red Cross. During emergencies, the company will donate all commissions on surge trips, or 20 percent of the total fare, will be donated to the charity’s disaster relief efforts. |
BlaBlaCar Raises A Massive $100 Million Round To Create A Global Long Distance Ride-Sharing Network | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | In what is the largest VC round in a French startup of all time, just raised a $100 million round led by , with existing investors , and also participating in the round. Previously, Deezer raised a from Warner Music Group’s owner Access Industries, but it wasn’t VC money . “Our ambition is to go further than what we have today, even though we still need to consolidate what we began,” co-founder and CEO Frédéric Mazzella told me in a phone interview. “At this point, we could either try to optimize our business to become profitable, or we could invest with this proof of concept to expand now and become profitable later.” I’ll let you guess what the team chose. BlaBlaCar is a marketplace where you can find a driver who is driving from one city to another and book a seat in advance. Drivers can make a bit of money while riders can travel for cheap. It has the same business model as Airbnb — you pay or get money every time you ride or drive, and the company takes a 10 percent cut on average. But the true beauty in BlaBlaCar’s business is that its marketplace is getting much better all the time — the more people use it, the more rides you will find close to your home, even if you’re going from a tiny city to another small city. Today’s news is also a great signal for the French tech ecosystem for two reasons. First, BlaBlaCar managed to find VC money to fuel its incredible growth — this is relevant as French VC firms don’t have big enough funds to lead these kind of massive rounds. But bigger VC firms operating outside of France are often looking for interesting deals in the French tech scene. Second, while the terms of the deal are undisclosed, BlaBlaCar is probably the next French billion-dollar tech company after ‘s IPO on the NASDAQ. At heart, BlaBlaCar is a community-powered collaborative consumption startup. In other words, it is something completely different from Criteo’s advertising technology platform. It proves that France is not a one-horse town. There are very talented people creating diametrically opposed startups, and they are willing to become global leaders. BlaBlaCar now operates in 12 countries and has 8 million members (after announcing 7 million members in May 2014), with a million monthly active users — a BlaBlaCar active user is someone who has shared a ride in the last month. At the same time last year, only 330,000 people used the service every month. So far, the company doesn’t face any legal issue as it promotes a revenue sharing model, and not a profit-seeking model like Uber — it’s like asking for your friends to pay for the gas. The key competitive advantage of the company is that it’s much cheaper to share a ride than to take a train or a plane. The average 200 miles ride costs $25 on average. While companies like Uber are going to own the urban transportation startup, BlaBlaCar could become the global leader of longer rides. It is one of Index’s largest deals to date. BlaBlaCar’s previous round was only $10 million in January 2012. So this round seems like a big step forward — even BlaBlaCar itself didn’t think it would be able to raise $100 million this time. “I handled the fundraising process as I used to work as a VC,” co-founder and COO Nicolas Brusson told me in a phone interview. “The first VC firms I saw were in New York and the Silicon Valley, and I was pitching a $27 million round. We realized that people really understood what we were doing now.” “Every car can potentially become a BlaBlaCar. I wanted to avoid Europe’s boy scout model — many companies don’t raise enough money because they don’t want to give away too much equity and then face American competitors who raised much more,” he continued. “BlaBlaCar has a huge potential market,” Martin Mignot from Index Ventures told me in an interview. “Everybody needs to travel long distance, that’s why ride sharing makes sense. Comparatively, Uber or even cabs are all about convenience. BlaBlaCar is both convenience and necessity.” Both Dominique Vidal and Mignot from Index Ventures are joining the board. “BlaBlaCar is like a Rocket Internet company, with a teddy bear at the top of the company,” someone recently told me. And it’s true that BlaBlaCar has the same focus as a Rocket Internet entrepreneur who wants to take over the world. But the culture is different. When I first went to BlaBlaCar’s office in Paris, Mazzella took a lot of time talking about the company’s values. They were smart, witty and polite. Team members told me that the entire company recently went skiing together — Mazzella wants BlaBlaCar to be in the top rankings of best companies to work for. Yet, there is something truly Rocket Internet-like going on at BlaBlaCar — in a good way. Everybody seems to speak at least three different languages, they all seem to have graduated from top business schools or engineering schools, and they are hungry. It’s a team of young and fearless employees who believe in the company’s mission and probably don’t realize how important BlaBlaCar is becoming. This way, the company can achieve a lot of things with very few people. “We always have 5 to 10 countries on our radar,” Mazzella said. “And when the stars align, meaning we have the right local team, the right market and the bandwidth, we shoot.” Right now, the company is looking at countries all over the world, such as Turkey, India, Brazil or Eastern Europe countries. For multiple reasons, the U.S. is not on the radar yet — gas is cheap, and cities are too big and too far away from each other. As Mignot told me, it’s a land-grabbing industry. You need to use your brand, product and money to take over entire countries before local competitors become too big — and it’s working. Even in Germany where is quite effective, BlaBlaCar now has more than a million members after a year. “The way we build our international expansion is with local offices,” Brusson told me. “We have an office in London, Madrid, Milan, Moscow, Warsaw… We made a lot of small acquisitions because that’s the best way to find talented entrepreneurs who are passionate about this industry. That’s how we launched in Italy, Germany, Poland and Russia.” Someone recently told me that people were leaving the room when Mazzella pitched his idea in front of an audience in the early days. Founded in 2004 as Covoiturage.fr, Mazzella had a tough time convincing French customers. “From 2004 to 2009, I can tell you that I tried everything,” Mazzella told me. That’s also how the three co-founders Mazzella, Brusson and CTO Francis Nappez could experiment with different things before settling for a traditional transactional model with a frictionless marketplace. That’s probably why the company is moving so quickly now — it’s like the team already failed and now has the opportunity to make it right. BlaBlaCar will certainly face other challenges, but it is well-positioned to expand to many new markets, especially now with the new influx of cash. |
Play With Google’s Psychedelic New Interactive Music Video Cube | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | It’s called , and it’s a trip. Built by Google Creative Labs as “an experimental platform for interactive storytelling”, The Cube is an in-browser manipulateable 3-D box with a different video and audio track on each face. It with indie dance band The Presets’ new single “No Fun”. You decide what to watch and hear by clicking and dragging The Cube to show a single side or a combination. And no, Google didn’t take some bad acid. The whole thing is a multi-pronged promo. The Cube only runs in Google Chrome and Android, it links to buy the song on Google Play where it’s exclusively available for the next 48 hours, and it’s sure to help Google recruit designers by showing it can do art, not just algorithms. And since The Cube is embeddable, you can play with it below. There’s a story about a girl in a bathtub and a dude dancing himself silly laced in with technicolor heads and pulsing geometric shapes.
This isn’t Google’s first foray into weird, interactive music videos. The Chrome Experiments has done two with Arcade Fire. ” used your address and Google Maps to customize the video with aerial shots of your home. employed your phone and webcam to let your movements control the action. But rather than a one-off experiment, Google is calling The Cube a “platform”, indicating more art could be built on it eventually. It was conceived by the Google Sydney Creative Lab team and demoed last month in person at the local Semi Permanent creative conference. Google hooked up with The Presets to show what The Cube can do, but the possibilities go far beyond music. Imagine a short film told from six different perspectives simultaneously, or using The Cube for interactive data visualizations. Groovy. For more on the making of The Cube, check out the behind the scenes video below (you’re probably gonna want to pause The Cube itself first) |
Tinder CEO’s Internal Memo Says Harassment Complaint Is Inaccurate | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | TechCrunch has obtained an internal memo sent from CEO Sean Rad to employees in the wake of a new lawsuit waged against the company. The lawsuit focuses on the relationship between Whitney Wolfe and Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, . Former VP of Marketing Whitney Wolfe has alleged that Justin Mateen, her ex boyfriend, threatened and sexually harassed her after they broke up. She also claims that his behavior resulted in her being pushed out of the company, for which she also blames CEO Sean Rad, though the details of that have yet to be confirmed. Mateen has since been . Here’s Rad’s official email: Hey team, I know it’s been a difficult 24 hours for all of us… I’ve learned a lot through this process and I wish I had done more in terms of managing what was clearly a complex situation. The communications between Justin and Whitney that have come to my attention through this process are just unacceptable. However, as many of you know, Whitney’s legal complaint is full of factual inaccuracies and omissions. We did not discriminate against Whitney because of her age or gender, and her complaint paints an inaccurate picture of my actions and what went on here. We take gender equality very seriously and none of this reflects the Tinder and culture that we have worked so hard to create. I truly appreciate your dedication. Sean Rad
Founder & CEO, Tinder Within the , Wolfe claims that Rad not only witnessed Mateen’s inappropriate behavior with Wolfe, but that he neglected her requests for help. She also claims that once she had chosen to leave the company, Rad rejected her request to be paid generous severance and to let her keep her unvested stock. The text messages sent from Mateen and cited as evidence in the case are pretty incriminating. It’s entirely possible that Justin’s behavior was a series of badly thought-out, emotional responses, but when you irresponsibly date a subordinate, there is no excuse for letting your own drama spill into a work environment. Where accusations against Rad are concerned, things are less clear. It seems that the facts surrounding Wolfe’s position as a co-founder and her exit from the company are still being investigated here at TechCrunch. We’re still digging further into this to get clarity on Wolfe’s position as a co-founder, as well as the details of how she left the company. In the meantime, please bear this in mind: where lawsuits are concerned, both sides of the story are rarely told at once. We’ve heard quite a bit from Wolfe, but Tinder and IAC haven’t had a chance to formally respond in court with their side of the story. |
Senators Call On Obama For More Transparency In The Intelligence Community | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | Two senators for failing to provide a sufficient transparency report are taking their complaints to the White House. Senators Al Franken and Dean Heller asked President Barack Obama “to support stronger transparency provisions” in a letter Tuesday. The bipartisan pair urged Obama to endorse their proposed additions to the USA FREEDOM Act that would require the intelligence community to disclose estimates of how many people had their information collected, and how many of those people were Americans. Currently the FREEDOM Act, which has passed through the House but not the Senate, only requires the government to disclose the number of “targets” implicated in surveillance orders. The government’s definition of target is very vague, of the Director of National Intelligence’s first transparency report. In short, a “target” can be anything from an individual person to an organization composed of millions of individuals. Therefore we have no idea how many people that actually is. Franken said yesterday the report is a “far cry from the kind of transparency that the American people demand and deserve.” The letter calls the president to commit to more aggressive reforms to the intelligence community’s programs. The Obama administration in the past has vocally supported t, but has been less specific about its transparency goals. Obama called on the intelligence community to be more transparent in his , but he hasn’t come close to support for disclosing transparency reports that would provide specific information about the numbers of individuals affected by intelligence agency sweeps. If Franken and Heller manage to include stronger surveillance transparency requirements in the FREEDOM Act, companies required to provide information to government intelligence agencies would also be allowed to release reports of how many accounts were affected by government agency searches in a more timely manner and granular fashion. Currently companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are subjected to gag orders that limit this right. Although they are , the reports are not specific, only identifying the numbers of accounts affected by searches in bands of 1,000. The senators are on the right track with this push to disclose more information about government surveillance practices. However, this isn’t the first time they’ve tried to pass these reforms. Franken and Heller introduced these reforms as the Surveillance Transparency Act last summer and in the fall, but Franken conditionally the FREEDOM act Monday, saying he would vote against any bill that “undercuts transparency.” |
With 45,000 Pre-Orders, The New Oculus Rift Will Start Arriving Around July 14th | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | Back in March, the second generation of Oculus’ work-in-progress virtual reality headset went up for pre-order for $350. No one knew exactly when the new headset would actually , outside of a target window of “sometime in July”. Word on the Oculus fan forums was that the company would announce more details today, and sure enough: the company has just that the first DK2 (Developer Kit #2) headsets should start arriving by the week of July 14th. The bad news: even with that sweet, sweet Facebook cash behind them, they can’t keep up with pre-orders — so if you didn’t get your order in early, you might be waiting a while. Oculus has received just over 45,000+ pre-orders for the DK2, but just 10,000 headsets are expected to ship this month. Company founder Palmer Luckey that roughly 12.5 thousand pre-orders came in the first 36 hours alone; in other words, even some people who got their orders in by won’t be getting their headsets for a few weeks. For reference: by the time Oculus “ran out of materials” to build their first generation Rifts, they’d sold around 50,000 units. With 45,000 units pre-ordered, the second-gen dev kit is already set to surpass the original. |
Vevo Product Head Michael Cerda Is Leaving The Streaming Music Company | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | Vevo SVP resigned this week following three years as the company’s head of product and technology. The streaming music video company confirmed the departure after Cerda revealed earlier today that he was leaving. Cerda later confirmed his departure to TechCrunch. “Leaving Vevo was a very difficult decision to make. I love my team, the work we’ve done, and the KPIs we’ve achieved. But every good movie (and video) has an ending, and now feels like the right time to roll the credits.” Cerda joined Vevo about three years ago and quickly led the company to develop a number of new apps across multiple platforms. Under his leadership, the company built new experiences for mobile phones and tablets on iOS and Android, as well as connected living room products, including the Xbox, Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV. During his tenure, Vevo opened a San Francisco product office and launched a series of , built an , and expanded its digital footprint to 14 territories. He also tweeted this: Product is like sex. Everyone thinks they are good at it. — Michael Cerda (@imcerdafied) Prior to his stint at Vevo, Cerda served as VP of technology at Myspace, and before that had founded companies including and . He also worked for a number of other startups, such as Trapeze Networks, Procket Networks and Redback Networks. A source tells us that Cerda was in the midst of negotiating a new contract when he decided to resign. While it’s not clear where he will land, we’ve heard that he is in talks with various media and technology companies. Cerda declined to comment for this story. Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff tweeted this morning that the company was to drive the company’s future product road map. When asked for comment, the company issued the following statement: “With Vevo’s continued focus on expanding to more screens, launching in more countries and building great music products, coupled with a 45% growth in streams year on year, the time is right for us to bring on a Chief Product Officer. This new role, a first for our company, will help us expand Vevo even more broadly as we approach our five year anniversary later this year. In line with this expansion, Michael Cerda, currently Vevo’s SVP of Product, will depart the company in August. I want to thank Michael for his leadership of our product team. I am very excited about the future and look forward to sharing more details on our expansion and growth soon.” |
Bring On The Blogging Robots | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | Earlier today that the Associated Press (AP) will to produce some of its earnings coverage. Given how much I enjoy covering every semi-semi annual earnings season, I’m downright excited about the development. Not that I write for the AP — or want to. (I hear they frown on making up words and idioms and generally saying things like damn and so forth, how restricting!). But I can now see a future in which my scribbling is aided by fast and smart tools that, when it comes down to the most rote moments of my job, lighten the load. Earnings season makes most reporters want to poke their eyes out with sharp objects. But that, I think, is mostly due to the massive amount of stress that comes with frantically covering numbers that drop all at once, . You have mere moments to not only get the brand-spanking-new figures into your post, quickly craft a headline, figure out what the larger story is (falling net profit? expanding operating margin? massive increase in sales costs? lost an executive?) while also doing raw numerical comparison, pitting the street’s estimates, both GAAP and not, against what the company reports. Or in the , while also trying again to figure out what its non-GAAP revenue really means. It’s quite a lot to do in, say, negative two minutes. And then there’s the best caveat: Investors are in the same boat. Sometimes a company will report earnings that look shiny in the Firefly sense, but after 10 minutes, any after-hours gains have been utterly torched by investors and the company is underwater. This is : And of course at the same time you’re trying to frame the earnings in a broader context: If I could offload the most quotidian of the above, say, crafting a standard paragraph that compares results with forecasts, and save myself a few seconds, I’d be all for it. No one reads TechCrunch, or me I suppose, because our prose when comparing fiscal third quarter diluted earnings per share on a non-GAAP basis to market expectations is especially riveting. But I think that people do seek out reporting and analysis that helps make those numbers mean something. And show me the robot that can do that. Hell, I can’t most of the time, and I’m human. And I really try. So bring on the goddamn robots, I say. AP, I have about $18. Can you email me one? |
MakersKit Raises $1.5 Million In Seed Funding To Launch A DIY Empire | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | Looking to build a 21st century DIY media empire? The rags-to-not-yet-riches story of Jawn McQuade and Mike Stone, the co-founders of may have written the instruction manual. Launched in February last year, the company has already raised $1.5 million in seed financing, inked distribution agreements with and , and through Amazon. “I sold my stores and we put 100 percent of our efforts into MakersKit,” wrote Stone in an email. “That date is also when Jawn stopped being my employee at the stores and we became co-founders of MakersKit.” The two entrepreneurs met when Stone, a 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology alum, hired 24-year-old McQuade to be the general manager for Stone’s now shuttered San Francisco chain of clothing stores, indieindustries. The pair began giving in-store tutorials on how to make different craft projects as a way to drum up business for the fledgling company, but soon found that the tutorials were selling better than the clothes. Popular with the San Francisco startup set, McQuade and Stone soon found themselves doing tutorials for companies like Google and Yelp. “That was when we got the taste of becoming a tech company,” says Stone. The company decided it would package the most popular tutorials and sell them as kits. Instead of including instructions in the kit, the two co-founders decided to link to online videos that walked customers through the projects. It’s a market that’s been mined by other crafting companies including , and , but Stone isn’t worried about the other companies in the market. “It’s helpful that we have competitors. They expose people to being creative,” he says. Stone’s MakersKit also focuses on a different segment of the market. “All of our competitors are trying to take over this market of young, female makers, but we’re trying to take our product to the mainstream,” he says. That mainstream approach was enough to attract investors led by Tribeca Venture Partners, with additional commitments from Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Mesa+, Greycroft Partners and Gary Vaynerchuk through his Vayner RSE investment vehicle. The capital gives MakersKit a $6.5 million post-money valuation. From mason jar herb gardens to soap-making, lip-balm making and candle-making kits, MakersKit products appeal to a broader audience, says Stone. “About 40 percent of our customer base is male.” Given the company’s emphasis on video content, it’s also no surprise that television networks like A&E also have put in calls to meet with the two founders. So far, MakersKit has sold 45,000 kits in a little over a year at around $25 per-kit. Stone expects the company to more than double that figure in 2014. In addition to the online and retail presence the company has through its own site and its brick-and-mortar retail partners, MakersKit also has collaborations with other web-based vendors like Birchbox and Zulily. With the new capital, the company is pushing ahead with plans to open a public workshop space from its Los Angeles headquarters and build out a community space on its website, where customers can share their projects. It’s all part of a business plan to fulfill some lofty goals. “We want to be the next Martha Stewart, but the cool version, with cool guys doing it,” says Stone. For the recent Techstars graduate, everything seems to be falling into place, and Stone credits his time at the accelerator for much of the company’s broader ambitions and greater focus. “[Techstars] shifted our thinking and our business overall,” says Stone. “Once we got into Techstars, it gave us a chance to come up with a plan and figure out what separated us from all of these competitors.” With the Martha Stewart mantle up for grabs, Stone feels there’s space for a new player in the multi-billion-dollar hole she’ll leave in the marketplace. “People don’t really have another brand that comes to mind after her. All of our competitors are also trying to be the next brand. We wanted to accelerate so we don’t miss our opportunity. |
With Political Failures Left And Right, Tech Needs To Rethink Its Strategy | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | Politics is the bête noire of hackers and entrepreneurs. It lacks the precision and logic of a function in a computer program while being incredibly inefficient to boot. Taxi services have been bad for decades in cities like San Francisco thanks to local politics, but a dedicated technology startup managed to ameliorate the situation in just a handful of years. This aversion to the democratic process is not just an unspoken taboo though, but rather openly flaunted. HackerNews, the news hub for hackers, that “most stories about politics” are off-topic for its discussions. , it should be obvious that our general lack of interest of the political realm is becoming a burden. As the size of the technology industry has grown, fully grown startups are increasingly centers of power in our economy, touching on areas well outside their traditional ken of science and technology to issues like health care, employment, and education. These are socially contested policies in which many citizens hold passionate positions, and the technology industry’s agenda often becomes subsumed by larger objectives. We can see this in a matter like immigration, which is perhaps the most important subject facing Silicon Valley’s economy today. Due to our current immigration system, founders coming to America to start a business are mostly out of luck, even if they receive investment funding or hire American employees (a small handful may get through in extraordinary visa cases, but this is exceedingly rare). Congress failed to pass a comprehensive bill on immigration the past two years despite bipartisan interest, and , further attempts at reform have been canceled for the foreseeable future. It’s easy to blast Congress for failing to move forward on immigration (or on anything, for that matter) instead of blaming ourselves. But our interests in immigration have also failed within the Obama Administration as well, despite the heavy tech influence on the president’s campaign. In 2010, the US Citizen and Immigration Services agency , outlawing the practice where a founder sponsors their own visa through their startup. Thus, one of the key pathways for immigrant entrepreneurs to legally build their companies in the United States was closed. The technology industry’s tribulations with immigration is a vivid vignette of our challenges in many other policy areas. If politics is a form of narrative, the tech industry is in desperate need of a new one. For years, we benefitted from a deep well of support among the general public and in Washington for progress in the technological arts, using a set of platitudes we all know well. America is a quintessentially entrepreneurial nation, a startup which saw its founders traveling across an ocean to start their new lives. Entrepreneurs create jobs, while keeping the country competitive. Technology is a force for good, creating incredible products that have truly made the world a better place. However, , Silicon Valley is increasingly a political target, partly due to its size, but also because of our callous approach to so many of the salient issues of our time. Employment remains the most important problem to people around the world, yet disruption is increasingly replacing jobs with automation. At a time when there is more concern than ever over manipulation and privacy, tech companies conspired with the U.S. government to allow all sorts of spying on citizens. Thus, when we engage on an issue like immigration, our progressive notions of science and technology suddenly seem deeply incompatible with the exigencies of politics. Part of the challenge is that there remains a latent and at times boisterous nativism concerning American jobs, despite widespread evidence that high-tech visa holders are some of the most important stakeholders in building startup companies. But we have yet to develop the means to overcome such views and educate the American electorate on why a more open immigration policy is fundamentally good and also urgently needed for the US economic recovery. But it is not just our interface with the world outside of the startup bubble that is problematic — even our internal narrative has become less cohesive. Take the issue surrounding Netflix, Verizon, and network neutrality. The interests of Netflix fundamentally diverge from those of startups in the video space, since Netflix has the budget to pay for net neutrality while startups don’t. The company additional fees for peering, then . While the company has since on the issue at the FCC, the point remains the same: our largest companies and earliest startups don’t often share the same political goals. Net neutrality can evoke quite passionate viewpoints, but to see a more intellectual example, , a major new policy development that affects startups and large companies alike. While there has been a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the European Court of Justice’s decision, there is a truly interesting question for engineers and founders to think about in their own products. What kind of control should a user have over their information? How discoverable should it be? If information has been previously made public, how should a startup handle a request to restrict access to that data? Our angle on issues like this is discordant, and that makes it difficult to speak to policymakers with a collective voice. I don’t want to turn the clock back on progress. Startups have done incredible things for humanity over the past decades, and I expect we will see even more incredible advances in the future. But we have to engage more with the issues of today if we desire to have any influence on these debates. The challenge is that the tech world has not always been accommodating to alternative points of view on many technology issues. While the San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most diverse places in the world culturally and economically, it is simultaneously one of the most homogenous places on its political views, . On technology in particular, there is a very limited range of debate in places like San Francisco or Palo Alto. There is no solution for guaranteeing that our voice is heard, but we can take some of the lessons from our startups and apply them to Washington. Building a startup means understanding our users and encouraging them to join our products, and that same empathy can be used in the political process. We also need to think in a more lean mindset, working on issues more locally first where change can happen faster. In short, we have the tools, and we certainly have the need to engage in politics. Now, we just need the effort. |
Clever Oculus Project Lets You Live Your Life In Third Person | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | Ever wished you could tap the “Change Camera View” button in real life to switch to a third-person view? These guys made it happen. Sure, it requires the user to wear an Oculus Rift and a big ol’ dual camera rig built into a backpack — and sure, it’s probably only fun (and not nauseating) for about a minute. But it works! Built by a Polish team of tinkerers called , the rig uses a custom-built, 3D-printed mount to hold two GoPros just above and behind the wearer’s head. With a joystick wired up to an Arduino and a few servos, the wearer is able to control where the camera is looking. If we may suggest a next version of the project: have a drone follow you automatically, blasting its camera feed to the Rift wirelessly. For maximum effect, dress as a mustachioed plumber: [Via: ] |
Dropbox Buys E-Commerce A/B Testing Service Predictive Edge, Shuts It Down | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | has made another acquisition: , a startup that had built a way to personalise e-commerce offerings, along with dynamic pricing, for marketers to send out to users and run A/B tests around them. The service will be shut down, and the founders will be working on something different, as they note in an announcement on the site: Predictive Edge is joining forces with Dropbox!,” the company writes. “Going forward we’ll be focused on solving problems outside the world of A/B testing. As of today, you can no longer sign-up for our service, and we’ve informed current customers that our product will no longer be supported. Many thanks to you all for your feedback & support, and here’s to a new chapter! A new — and intriguing — chapter. The founders note that they’re not continuing to develop this product, and it’s tempting to wonder how and if any of that technology will be applied in whatever they tackle next. Hu’s LinkedIn profile notes that he is now “ .” Predictive Edge was working in what is an emerging and growing area of e-commerce: dynamic pricing, used by the likes of Uber for surge pricing, but also e-commerce sites to present different prices depending on who is doing the looking. This is Dropbox’s 17th acquisition, with five of the last six of companies focused on services for enterprises — if you were in doubt about how Dropbox is laying the groundwork for a more concerted push to drive more sales from business users. Predictive Edge was started in 2010 by two graduates from Stanford and one from the University of Pennsylvania: Kevin Liu (from U Penn), Steven Wu and Marty Hu (both from Stanford), and it was part of the university’s StartX accelerator. It’s not clear how much money Predictive Edge had raised, or the financial terms of this deal, but Great Oaks was the startup’s lead investor, with another backer being Zach Weinberg, a co-founder at , among other things. |
Google’s Smarty Pins Lets You Test Your Geography Knowledge | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | Here is a random little thing from Google: a Maps-based quiz game. The company today , which allows you to test your geography knowledge through questions in six categories — arts and culture, science and geography, sports, etc. And it’s actually kind of fun. You get hints like “the wienerschnitzel and the wiener sausage are both named for this city, the capital of Austria” and then you have to drop a marker as close to the location of the answer as possible. Sometimes that’s a country, a city or a specific landmark. Google tells me that in celebration of the World Cup, the team also added a bit of football-related trivia in the “Featured” category, too. Players start with 1,000 points and lose points for every mile off the mark their answers are. If they answer fast, they can also score some bonus points, and once they run out of points, the game is over. As far as I can see, Google isn’t doing anything all that special with this site. It looks like Smarty Pins uses and the Maps API, but otherwise, it seems to be mostly based on pretty straightforward HTML5 techniques. The design is heavy on animations and shadows, but it isn’t quite . If you want to give it a try, you can now test your own knowledge . |
iCloak Stik Aims To Put Robust Online Privacy In The Hands Of The Many, Not The Few | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | Meet : a plug and play device that’s being designed to make robust online privacy accessible to the many not the few — by enabling an average computer user to route their browsing via the or I2P anonymizing networks so it can’t be tracked. The device will also let users select a particular country where they want to appear to be coming from, which can defeat regional content locks. Every time you connect to the Internet with iCloak it will also generate a new random MAC address — meaning the hardware itself can’t be traced either. All your browsing activity disappears without a trace once you shut an iCloak session down. This is because it’s effectively a clean instal every time you use it, which thwarts tracking techs like cookies and adware, along with more pernicious malware that might lurk on a computer that’s been around the cyber block a few times. Sound interesting? Of course it does. Online security and privacy are continuing to rise up the digital agenda thanks to disaster vulnerabilities like coupled with the slow drip of intelligence agency surveillance leaks from the files, and a growing realization among Internet users about the sheer volume of data mainstream digital services are amassing on their users — and using to . The mainline Internet has become both an experimental corporate playground and an enabling Panopticon for omnipresent state surveillance. Little wonder there appears to be a . So how does iCloak work? It’s a USB stick with a security hardened OS pre-loaded that’s designed to boot into RAM when a computer is rebooted, meaning online activity becomes sandboxed away from your standard OS and hard disk. The device works with Mac, Windows PC or Linux computers, and will be able to handle both 64-bit and 32-bit machines when it launches, according to CEO Eric Delisle. The iCloak OS is based on Ubuntu, with some admin tools removed to make it even harder for hackers to meddle with. It’s also read-only, so again the idea is to lock it down as much as possible to provide a robust and secure environment for accessing the Internet. The iCloak OS itself lives on a hidden partition on the USB drive so it’s not visible if the stick is plugged in and accessed on a live computer. iCloak is similar to the but it wants to be a whole lot more accessible — aka: usable by the average computer user, not level 10 security geeks. So while Delisle says his startup is a big fan of Tails, and plans to contribute source code to that project, it also reckons there is room for improvement on the mainstream accessibility front. “We’ve built a very basic, simple clean interface that provides several tabs — one of those tabs is your connection tab, and that just allows you to, whether you have an Ethernet card or a wireless card, to get connected to the Internet. The tools for doing that are in there, then the other main parts — there’s things like support and information — but the other main part is just an apps tab,” he says, describing the iCloak interface. “We’ve kind of taken that modality of apps because it’s become so prevalent in people’s lives with tablets and phones and iPads and the like. That’s where we’re putting all of the things that you can do when you’re in iCloak.” Unlike Tails, Delisle says the iCloak user won’t need to burn their own disc to use the system, or jump through complex set up hoops. The concept is reboot and get cloaked. “iCloak Stik was heavily informed by a lot of open source projects that I’ve used for years,” Delisle tells TechCrunch. “Things like the Tor network, I2P, different kinds of encryption. Projects like live CDs or live OSes. And these are things that as a technologist it’s been fairly comfortable for me to use. But there’s just no consumer level way of people using this stuff. So that’s what we have done. We have taken the complexity out of it and we built a tool… that when you reboot the computer it basically renders that computer untraceable.” “We’ve automated a lot of the things that we would do, as security guys, to keep ourselves safe and now, obviously, we’re passing that on in a consumer product so that grandma or my brother or my friend can take one of these things. And at least when they decide that they want to be private they can be,” he adds. Delisle, a self-described serial entrepreneur, has been funding iCloak himself so far, but the last push to get the project to market — and do some market research to test the appetite for more mainstream privacy tools in the process — is taking place on . They’re aiming to raise $75,000 and are already almost half way there with 24 days left to run so things are looking good for iCloak. If they hit the funding goal they’re aiming to ship to backers in September. Retail price for the device will be $50 for the standard iCloak Stik or $100 for a pro version that bundles additional software with it, such as a word processor, so users can do more than just private browsing when in a cloaked session. Any third party software that DigiThinkIT, the company behind iCloak, is bundling with the device is open source and is also being modified to simplify the experience to make it as accessible to a mainstream user as possible. In terms of specific features, the basic iCloak Stik offers anonymous browsing ( is the default browser); a secure password storage and manager called iCloak Ring (which will also be able to function as a standard app on live computers, not just when cloaking your digital activity via iCloak); and a separate visible partition that your regular computer can access for storage uses. The iCloak Stik Pro adds in GNU Calc for editing Excel spreadsheets; the AbiWord word processor; a messaging app for sending anonymous messaging; and a Bitcoin wallet to facilitate anonymous payments. “We have a roadmap of some really interesting things,” adds Delisle. “For example we’re working on a concept that we came up with called identity sets [to allow people to appear to have a different identity than their own]. “Some of the tools that we’re making, like iCloak Ring, we’re going to be providing as apps that people can actually download to their iPhone or Android or whatever. So there will be components of the system that people will find useful outside of an iCloak session itself.” “I think we have a real opportunity to help a lot of people, and in helping a lot of people create a good business out of it too,” he adds. “I think we’re hitting a nerve. And probably one of the greatest things is it’s hitting a nerve worldwide; this is not an American thing. This is a human thing.” Delisle confirms the startup will be open sourcing all the iCloak software so third parties can verify the code. It’s also working directly with Tor with the aim of becoming the first officially “Tor certified” product. “The idea here is we want to build our tools in a way that when a consumer gets them they don’t necessarily have to just trust us. They don’t have to trust that we did the right things. We want them to be able to trust themselves and give them the tools to verify what we’ve said and what this thing is supposed to do. One of the ways of doing that is using trusted third parties to take your stuff, tear it apart, audit it and on their own behalf say yes this does what they said it was going to do. And we’ll get Tor to do that,” he says. He’s also hoping to play a part in expanding the Tor network — by putting Tor relay installers on all the iCloak sticks. “Because the larger the network grows, the safer we all are,” he adds.
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Lawrence Lessig’s Campaign Reform Push Comes To A Head This Friday | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | , an American intellectual and activist, recently launched a political action committee (PAC) , with the goal of electing members to Congress who are in favor of campaign finance reform. The group is , with a fundraising deadline of July 4 rapidly approaching. Raising money to combat money? Metallica’s comes to mind. But all the same, Lessig is determined to raise large sums of money — with matching donations on tap if he meets his goals. The group , and now has bigger aspirations. I caught up with Lessig via email to ask him a few questions about the effort, especially in regards to how lowering the influence and heft of money in our politics would impact the technology industry. Big tech companies are incredibly wealthy, after all. If you want to ask the man a question yourself, Lessig will be taking questions on Reddit later today. Your self-imposed funding goal of $5 million in a month is an audacious effort. Why use an aggressive money-raising timeframe, when you could have afforded yourself, and your cause, more time? The urgency is to be able to pick the districts and begin the campaign. (Plus I am a bit of a drama queen). The Mayday PAC website states that “In our money-driven system, the Internet will always belong to the highest bidder.” Ironically, it seems at the moment that the FCC itself is wielding much authority over the future of the Internet’s makeup. How can raising money to pare back the impact of money influence things like the FCC’s proposed and flawed net neutrality rules? We have no protection for network neutrality because of the enormous influence of cable company’s money in the political system. Cable’s lead lobbyist is the most powerful lobbyist in DC. The Dems are not going to get out in front on this because of the punishment they would face in the fall from cable money. And the Republicans are enjoying the great benefit from being NN’s clearest opponent. If NN is your issue, then this is why you should see that politic$ is your issue too. It seems that wealth technology companies and their workers, instead of donating money to try and curtail the impact of money, could instead — and I’m not advocating for this — deploy capital directly to the capitol, collecting an essentially guaranteed return for a modest cost? They could, and if we don’t change the system, eventually they will. But I think what many in the tech community want is to change the rules of the system, so this isn’t how the game gets played. They (and we all) should see that the nation need innovators innovating in the market, not innovating on K St (the home of lobbying). They should be focused on finding new and better iWidgets, not new loopholes to add to scam the tax code. In cases of things like the coming 2015 spectrum auction, what impact would having less money in politics have? It’s easy to see a potential impact of political finance reform in other areas, but some parts of technology regulation and the like are often esoteric, and ruled over by independent agencies. I think you mean “independent” agencies. The idea the FCC is “independent” is a joke. It may well be independent of the president — how else could a presidential appointee announce a policy inconsistent with the president’s own policy — but it is completely DEPENDENT on the communications industry. Someone needs to do a chart of the path of FCC commissioners, because this is its business model — spend a couple years regulating, and then cash out with lucrative lobbying jobs for the industry you’ve just regulated. That’s not to say that politic$ pervades every level of the agencies. I think the FCC has a huge staff of smart technical sorts. But we have allowed the influence of money to dominate here like everywhere in DC. We’re seeing a spate of mega-mergers among large cable companies that are, in some cases, also ISPs. Would gutting some money from our political system allow for a more active federal government when it comes to heeding anti-trust concerns? Antitrust is hobbled for more reasons than money, but that’s part of it. The cable mergers are terrifying — we’re going to have one or two companies covering 70+% of households, claiming the First Amendment forbids their regulation (when they edit bits (by blocking or speeding up certain traffic) they say that’s the same thing as the NYTimes editing content, so the First Amendment should protect them against anti-bit-editing regulation (aka, network neutrality regulation), AND the First Amendment gives them the freedom to use their resources to promote or oppose political candidates. The platform through which we access everything controlled by a single (or two) corporate entities with the constitutional right to engage in politics and the constitutional freedom from any effort to assure neutral access. Have you seen strong donations from the technology sector so far? If so, why do you think technology specifically is interested in your project? Yes. Because geeks have a sensitive bullshit meter and [ “ways of DC” == “bullshit” ]. Are you going to make the funding goal? $12 million is a quite a lot of money, but without the $5 million in matching funds, your war chest is sizably diminished. Also, what has been the average donation size to Maday so far? If we meet the goal Friday, I’m pretty confident about the match. The challenge is Friday’s goal. If we can get the net to go crazy between now and then, then we can make it easily. If we can get the net to go crazy while on YouTube, then with some other things we’re working on, yes, easily. But the key is to unleash the dogs seeking sanity in DC. They should scare up the million or so we’ll need. I don’t have stats for this round. For the last round, average was $87, median was $50. I’d be surprised if it was much different this time. We’re about to post a cool iterative graphic of the contributions. And finally: How big can this get? If you raise the $12 million, how big do you go in 2016? If we raise the $12M AND WIN, then we go up by an order of magnitude * 5, at least. But let’s take first steps first. |
Google Buys Songza | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | music streaming service Songza after weeks of speculation around a potential buyout. Songza uses information about the user and context to determine the best playlists for you at any given time, all of which are curated by music experts (DJs, Rolling Stone writers, etc.). Very few services look to — Pandora, Spotify, and other big players rely heavily on algorithms — making this one of the key selling points of the service. Plus, Songza has tons of data around what people like to listen to based on the time of day, the weather, location, and activity, which can be immensely valuable to a company like Google who is looking to seamlessly integrate technology into every corner of your life. Originally, Google was reported to be targeting the for this acquisition, though the company has not officially disclosed the terms of the deal. However, we’ve heard that there was also a possibility that Songza was being approached by other suitors, raising the price tag considerably. According to Google, Songza will remain intact for users and nothing will change about the service for now, though Songza’s expertise will be applied to other products like Google Play Music and YouTube. However, Google is not commenting on the employment situation with regards to all current Songza employees. Songza will stay in its office in Long Island City for the next few weeks, and eventually move into Google’s NYC HQ. Songza has been around since 2007, and originally launched as a streaming service for expertly curated playlists. Eventually, the company launched its Concierge feature, which uses date and time and activity to serve up the right playlist at the right time. Since, the company has raised a total of $6.7 million in funding, with participation from investors like Amazon, Gary Vaynerchuk, Scooter Braun, Deep Fork Capital, Lerer Ventures, and David Hirsch from Metamorphic Ventures ( ). Songza currently has around 5.5 million active users, though it doesn’t disclose how many of them opt to pay for the that does away with ads. in its official announcement: [Songza has] built a great service which uses contextual expert-curated playlists to give you the right music at the right time. We aren’t planning any immediate changes to Songza, so it will continue to work like usual for existing users. Over the coming months, we’ll explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music. We’ll also look for opportunities to bring their great work to the music experience on YouTube and other Google products. In the meantime, check out their service to find a playlist for any mood you’re in — whether you’re feeling a little mellow or a lot funky. And here’s Songza’s statement: We can’t think of a more inspiring company to join in our quest to provide the perfect soundtrack for everything you do. No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use. In the meantime, we’ll be walking on sunshine. Apple recently for many of the same reasons. Unlike Pandora and others, Beats takes a Songza-like approach to music curation, using humans to put together the perfect playlists, and then using technology to match people with the right playlists for them. And we can’t forget that Amazon recently launched its own , which of people are using. As is expected in , Google needed something more sophisticated than its own Google Play Music All Access on-demand streaming service, and is clearly using Songza to help keep pace. |
FTC Accuses T-Mobile Of Allowing Shady Scams To Sneak Onto Your Phone Bill (Update: T-Mobile Responds!) | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | The FTC is taking T-Mobile to court. Their claim? T-Mobile is allowing shady text messaging services to sneak onto your bill, and making “hundreds of millions of dollars” by not doing enough to stop it. Let’s say you’re sitting at home, bored. Your phone blinks as a text rolls in. “Welcome to Celebrity Gossip King! Text STOP to cancel,” it reads. “Weird,” you think. “Must be spam or something. If I reply, I’ll probably make it worse. Plus, I kind of like celebrity gossip anyway.” Six months later, you’re looking at your mobile phone bill closely for the first time in ages. Wait, what’s that $9.99 charge lurking on page 20? “Celebrity Gossip King”? That garbage is costing you 10 bucks a month? You check your last few bills. Sure enough, $10 a month, every month. You didn’t sign up for this. Welcome to the world of premium SMS — sketchy, for-pay text message services that many a mobile phone owner has found themselves unwittingly subscribed to. How? It varies. Maybe you punched in your phone number on some ringtone download site. Maybe someone else signed you up. Maybe the service is just spamming numbers en masse in hopes that most people will just ignore it. The FTC has been battling this many-headed scam (known as “mobile cramming”) for the past few years, primarily by going after the folks operating the lines and pushing carriers to automatically block charges from premium numbers . Today they’ve filed a complaint against T-Mobile for failing to stop the charges — and, claims the FTC, profiting from it. With its complaint, the FTC wants the courts to order two things: for T-Mobile to permanently and proactively block these “cramming” scams, and to refund consumers for what they call “ill-gotten gains.” We’ve reached out to T-mobile for comment, and will update this story if we hear back. We have seen the complaint filed today by the FTC and find it to be unfounded and without merit. In fact T-Mobile stopped billing for these Premium SMS services last year and launched a proactive program to provide full refunds for any customer that feels that they were charged for something they did not want. T-Mobile is fighting harder than any of the carriers to change the way the wireless industry operates and we are disappointed that the FTC has chosen to file this action against the most pro-consumer company in the industry rather than the real bad actors. As the Un-carrier, we believe that customers should only pay for what they want and what they sign up for.” said John Legere, CEO T Mobile USA. “We exited this business late last year, and announced an aggressive program to take care of customers and we are disappointed that the FTC has instead chosen to file this sensationalized legal action. We are the first to take action for the consumer, I am calling for the entire industry to do the same. This is about doing what is right for consumers and we put in place procedures to protect our customers from unauthorized charges. Unfortunately, not all of these third party providers acted responsibly—an issue the entire industry faced. We believe those providers should be held accountable, and the FTC’s lawsuit seeking to hold T-Mobile responsible for their acts is not only factually and legally unfounded, but also misdirected. — John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile USA |
MapR Gains $110 Million In Funding Led By Google Capital | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | led the latest round of $110 million in financing for San Jose based . MapR, which helps companies around the world deploy Hadoop, raised $80 million in private equity from Google Capital, Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, and existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA and Redpoint Ventures. The company raised another $30 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank, bringing the total up to $110 million. This is more than double the amount raised in past rounds and makes for a total of $174 million in funding since 2009 for the company. MapR says it will use the new funds to continue its growth in the big data and analytics segment. MapR has significant production in Hadoop environments in financial services, healthcare, media, retail, telecommunications, and Web 2.0 companies. According to company leadership, this round will also fund additional hiring of engineers and support open-source projects, such as Apache Drill, Hadoop 2.2 with YARN, and Apache Spark. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 8 | null |
Facebook Starts Using App Links To Get You Back Into Apps | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | , Facebook’s initiative to within an app, is about to become a lot more useful for developers who rely on Facebook to direct users to their apps. In a , Facebook announced today that developers will now be able to utilize App Links to send people straight from ads in the Facebook mobile app to specific points within their apps. There’s a catch though: for now, they’ll only be able to deploy these ads if they’re working with one of Facebook’s As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine wrote in , it’s pretty clear that Facebook launched App Links as a way to sell more re-engagement ads. Developers have already found that can drive a massive number of installs — — so the company is looking to take advantage of their newfound mindshare to become a major source of user engagement as well. While many dislike targeted advertisements, the advantage for users in this case is that ads will now be able to point to something specific that you might be interested in rather than sending you to an app that you then have to search through to find something appealing. A lot of users try out apps once and then never go back because they didn’t find something that hooked them. With re-engagement ads, you might install an app from an ad, check Facebook later that day, and instead of seeing “install now” as an option, see an option for a particular piece of content you might be into. Of course, App Links works for more than just Facebook’s mobile app install ads. Developers who have enabled App Links will also send users who click links shared by other users, Pages on Facebook, or even other apps to specific points within their apps. Now that it sells in-app ads via the announced at F8, Facebook will benefit from more app engagement in general, not just that generated from its ads. Notably, Facebook isn’t the only one stepping up its mobile app install and re-engagement ad business. Yesterday, Twitter began its global rollout of out both kinds of ads . In addition, it , who specializes in getting users to get back into the apps they’ve already downloaded. |
Online Education Startups Codecademy, General Assembly, Others Band Together Against FCC Proposed Net Neutrality Rules | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) got an earful from concerned online education startups today. , , and cautioned the FCC in their filings today that an Internet fast lane would, “…impede [American’s] access to an affordable education and to job skills for the 21st century economy.” All four companies argue that the for Net Neutrality creates an uneven playing field in favor of large universities with bigger purse strings. CEO of General Assembly, Jake Schwartz cautioned the FCC that his company would not have had a chance to even exist under the new proposal: When my co-founders and I started General Assembly in 2011, we quickly found ourselves competing with a host of online and offline incumbents, many with ample funds and an incentive to keep companies like General Assembly out of education. Had the FCC’s rules been in place at our founding, it would have been much more difficult for Brad, Matt, Adam and me to found and grow General Assembly. It’s hard enough to start a business and find resources for the important things – in our case building new and better courses for our students and supporting our graduates – without diverting funds to Internet service providers to enjoy service on par with well-funded competitors. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed earlier this year that would allow for costlier Internet fast lanes, essentially creating a two-tiered Internet – one where we still pay our ISP but the Internet is slow and one where we pay a lot more and the Internet is much faster. However, these new proposals, which seem to favor content provider giants such as over the American public, met with . Over 100 internet companies, including Google and Facebook, jumped in to try and stop the proposed rules with , fearing the new proposal would create a precedent for content discrimination. All four online education startups have highlighted four ways in which a lack of strong open Internet rules might strangle innovation and growth in their own industry: The also to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan this morning, encouraging him to review these letters and to lead a discussion about the importance of a free and open Internet for education. Click on the links below to read the full text of each filing: |
Facebook Accidentally Sent Advertisers Receipts And Data For Other People’s Ads | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | Last night a sizable number of Facebook advertisers received , including company names, campaign names, and amount spent. tipped us off to the bug, and Facebook confirms to me it occurred and was fixed in about two hours. The company also confirms that no one was charged for other people’s ads, despite one , and ad delivery wasn’t affected. The gaffe could shake confidence in Facebook’s advertising system. Essentially what happened was that a portion of Facebook’s advertisers who were sent their regularly scheduled ad receipts while the bug was active last night got an email containing other people’s company names, campaign names, and the spend from their last billing period, as seen above. If they clicked through the links, they’d be denied by the Facebook Ads Manager and not allowed to see or change the other people’s ad campaigns they were emailed. Facebook says it’s about to send a note explaining the situation to those impacted, but hadn’t publicly admitted the issue as of press time. Update: Here is what Facebook is about to tell victims of the bug: You may have received email receipts for advertising charges unrelated to your account. This was the result of a system issue that lasted a couple of hours yesterday. We want to assure you that you’ve only been charged for ads that ran on your own account and that this issue did not affect your ad delivery. As always, you can find more information about your recent charges by visiting your Advertising Account Billing Manager at and clicking on the individual transactions listed. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused. One customer who was hit with the bug and called Facebook’s ad support hotline was told that , but Facebook couldn’t confirm that number to me just yet. While the data the bug exposed wasn’t highly confidential, it’s still a breach of privacy. Knowing a company is running ads for something and how much they’re spending could help competitors and cause other problems. Facebook will need to lock up its systems and respond more quickly to issues like this to keep the faith of advertisers that pour into the social network each quarter. |
Cleantech’s Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 7 | 6 | The rumors of the death of cleantech investment have been greatly exaggerated. Clean tech’s big dream of a more energy efficient future fueled by renewable power sources (Fleets of electric cars! A chicken in every pot and a solar panel on every home!) didn’t die with the high profile bankruptcies of companies like , , and . As the first decade of cleantech investment draws to a close, when venture capitalists spent — and lost — billions of dollars backing companies; a new investment paradigm seems to be emerging, with cleantech companies that are doing more with less capital commitments. A recent study of cleantech investments from shows that while investors remain active, they’re not committing nearly as much money as they did in the heyday of clean technology investments.
Much of the new, more restrained approach can be laid at the feet of big cleantech bankruptcies that have hit the market over the last several years. Coupled with the underperformance of several companies in once-hot markets like biofuels, , cleantech investment went through a bit of a retrenchment. However, for all of the failures there have also been a string of successes in the industry. Companies like Elon Musk’s and ; or , the venture-backed company providing information on energy use to utility customers; or Climate Corp., the weather tracking, big data company all point to the value that can be created through clean technology investments. Indeed, those bright lights seem to have fed a resurgence of interest in the sector, with investors again opening their wallets for new companies. The first quarter of 2014 was among the most active periods for clean technology investments in the past five years, according to CrunchBase data. In June, companies like the , and the recycling company raised significant capital from corporate partners and project financiers along with venture investors to continue building their businesses. This new environment is actually better for cleantech companies, says Ryan Popple, a partner in the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Green Growth Fund who now serves as the Chief Executive at Proterra. “I got into green in 2006,” says Popple, who previously worked at the biofuel company Cilion, which had raised $160 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and Richard Branson in 2006. “Cilion, between its Series A and Series B raised more money than Proterra would ever raise — including its IPO.” According to Popple, the lessons learned from the ebullience of the cleantech bubble of nearly a decade ago have been taken to heart by the investors that remain active in the market. “The most important thing is that we have the right amount of venture capital,” he says. “The problem set that we’re going after is still enormous and it still may be one of the biggest economic opportunities over the next millennia or two.” Given the opportunity, venture investors will still cut the big check for a company that seems particularly promising. Like which closed on $100 million in new funding earlier in the year. However, investments like that are proving to be the exception in the current cleantech market, not the rule. Capital intensity remains an issue for large, industrial companies developing new processes for energy manufacturing, or making new kinds of vehicles, or building new recycling plants. Now though, these companies are able to develop their technologies with equity commitments from venture capital firms working alongside corporate partners and other providers of capital.
Proterra’s investment syndicate included GM Ventures and Mitsui. Cool Planet raised capital from investors including the energy giant BP, and Energy Technology Ventures — a joint venture between corporate investors General Electric, NRG Energy, and ConocoPhillips. These corporate investors and a cadre of family offices have stepped in to fill the void in funding that was created when venture firms abandoned the cleantech market. “There’s a resurgence,” said Andrew Chung, an investment partner with Khosla Ventures — one of the most active firms investing in clean technology. “But it’s from newer pockets of capital that have taken an interest in the area.” For investors like Rob Day, at Black Coral Capital, startups in cleantech look better than they have in a long time. In a recent blog post, Day wrote that the cleantech market was poised for growth and a return of investors who had previously shied away from the sector. : Many startups that survived through lean times are now poised for growth. And startups that were better positioned because of lower capital burn, or launched after the lean times with smarter business models, are doing quite well indeed. Cleantech startups are healthier than ever. The future of cleantech investment is still unwritten, and with a new generation of startups still waiting in the wings, the bells that investors hear may be for public offerings instead of at the industry’s funeral. Photo via Flickr user . |
Gartner: Device Shipments Break 2.4B Units In 2014, Tablets To Overtake PC Sales In 2015 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 7 | 6 | The gradual decline of the PC industry, spurred on by the rapid rise of mobile computing, continues apace. Today the analysts at Gartner have their latest forecasts for global PC, tablet, “ultramobile” and mobile phone shipments: they are set to break 2.4 billion units, and nearly 88 percent of that number will be attributable to mobile phones and tablets — specifically devices built on Google’s Android operating system, which on their own will account for nearly 1.2 billion devices. But while many argue that tablets will become “the new PC,” we’re not yet at the point where tablets are outnumbering PC sales on their own. There will be 256 million units of devices like Apple’s iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and the Kindle Fire to be shipped this year versus 308 million PCs (these include “traditional” models, defined as netbooks and desktop devices, and “premium” ultramobiles, which are laptop/tablet hybrids like the Lenovo Yoga). Gartner predicts the tipping point in favor of tablets will happen in 2015, when there will be nearly 321 million tablets shipped, versus close to 317 million PCs. Source: Gartner (June 2014) (Note on terminology: “shipments” is Gartner’s classification for how many devices are sent retailers, carriers and others for sale to end users. You can think of them as closely correlated (but not exactly the same as) sales. A shipment is a guess on how many will be sold based on previous performance, which means that sometimes if sales are disappointing/surprisingly good there will be a correction, with lower/higher shipments in subsequent periods.) Interestingly, while sales of PCs are inevitably declining, as they have been for years, 2014 is seeing something of a slowdown in that trend. As Microsoft forced the hand of many people to move off Windows XP by dropping support as it pushes hard on new versions of its operating system (and new devices to run it), that’s apparently had an effect. After declining 9.5 percent in 2013, the global PC market (desk-based, notebook and premium ultramobile) is on pace to contract only 2.9 percent in 2014, something that Gartner research analyst Ranjit Atwal refers to as a “relative revival.” (You can almost imagine the weak smile he might make when he says it, too.) “Business upgrades from Windows XP and the general business replacement cycle will lessen the downward trend, especially in Western Europe,” he writes. “This year, we anticipate nearly 60 million professional PC replacements in mature markets.” But that won’t be a lasting trend: As you can see in the table above, every other category of device will grow in the next year, while PCs by 2015 will be back below 2013 levels. But while tablets, with screens larger than your average smartphone, appear on one hand to be the more natural heir to PCs, they, too, are seeing some maturation. Gartner says that these devices have already moved on from “early adopter” to “late adopter” in more developed markets, and that will have a knock-on effect both in terms of the rate of sales, and in terms of what models will be in demand. While Apple’s iPad, at the premium end of the tablet spectrum in terms of features and pricing, has long dominated the tablet market — indeed, you could say that the tablet market didn’t even really exist before Apple made its move into it — that has been shifting and will continue to do so. “The next wave of adoption will be driven by lower price points rather than superior functionality,” writes Atwal. Gartner also predicts diverging interests in tablets, depending on who is doing the buying: developed, mature markets will look for larger screens. Emerging markets will be more keen for “phablets,” the hybrid devices that look either like strangely large phones, or small tablets. Overall, the tablet market, Gartner says, “will see a relative slowdown in 2014,” although the 256 million units that it predicts will be shipped in 2014 is still up 23.9 percent from 2013. But as with many things, one segment’s slowdown is another’s distant dream. Remember that PCs are seeing constant declines, and even mobile phones are growing significantly slower than this: the 1.9 billion units that will be shipped in 2014 is up only 3.1 percent on the year before. Within mobile phones, smartphones are very much becoming the norm rather than the rising trend. They will account for 66 percent of all mobile sales in 2014, and Gartner projects that number to be 88 percent in 2018. It’s a mark of how far along some developed markets have come, and how far down in price smartphones have gotten. The fact that there will still be a market for feature phones in 2018 is the remarkable stat here. While Android’s continuing dominance in the mobile segment should not be a surprise to anyone, what may be more interesting is insight into how it will continue to be the leader for some time to come, with a heavy dose of fragmentation behind it (“others” are the second-largest category, with 660 million devices in 2014, more than iOS/Mac and Windows combined). Gartner says the world will see shipments of Android rise by 30 percent in 2014, compared to 15 percent for iOS devices. The wider trends for bigger screens, and smaller tablets, has largely been resisted by Apple up to now (exceptions: a slightly longer screen in the iPhone 5 generation; and the iPad mini). But Gartner predicts it will finally make their way to Cupertino: “We expect the announcement of the new Apple iPhone 6 will attract pent-up demand for users who want a larger screen,” writes Annette Zimmermann, another research director at Gartner. Apple, of course, has not officially said a thing about what this alleged iPhone 6. And what of Microsoft, once-mighty Nokia and the Windows Phone operating system? They remain at a “low base” in 2014, with only a 4% market share. This will increase modestly by 2018 to 10 percent — that is, if you don’t think we may see some other radical change upset even that trajectory in the next three years. Gartner’s overall 2.4 billion figure (2.433 billion to be more precise) is up 4.2 percent on 2013 shipments. And as a point of comparison, it’s a slight decline on the that Gartner put out for 2014 (2.474 billion), but an increase in proportion for the performance of Android-based devices, revised up by around 100 million. Shipments include mobile phones, ultramobiles (including tablets) and PCs Source: Gartner (June 2014) Image: |
How Real Will Wearable Games Be? | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 7 | 6 | I keep flip-flopping on smartwatches. Some days I think they’re the coming thing, the next big platform and so on. I imagine the use cases of constantly-on (especially for games) and it seems exciting. However on other days I remember that I have a Pebble, and while it’s neat in its way it does have some heavy limitations. After a brief flirtation I realized that I was barely wearing it or caring about its apps. I find myself wondering whether all smartwatches will be similarly faddy, and yet find the root idea compelling. I’m not the only one. Game designer Will Luton thinks smartwatches , for example. As he sees it they’re ideally placed for ambient and pervasive games, with the most obvious designs for them behaving similarly to the lite games of the early days of Facebook. Is it a real space though, or is it just a passing thing? Is gameplay really coming to a wrist near you soon? Mobile, tablets and phablets have all brought us closer to the screen than PCs ever could, and the number of applications that this has already enabled is insane. It’s almost impossible to imagine a time when we didn’t have communications, maps, email, trackers so on all in our pockets. The biggest plus-point for wearables over and above those devices is essentially even more pervasiveness. A mobile you still have to fish out of your pocket to check in, but a wearable is essentially always in view. The push for more pervasiveness led to the eyeball and the wrist. The first is Google Glass, but it’s increasingly looking like a broken idea. This nails why: Glass is simply too invasive. The wrist looks to be the better bet, and on it the smartwatch. It’s still in view, can ping you with vibrations or run apps like maps, yet doesn’t scare other people. From a gaming standpoint this intuitively leads to -style games. The general idea is that you’re notified of a game event and engage with it in a single tap, which in turns updates a global game for everyone. Maybe you check into a mobile or Web app later for a richer experience, but the smartwatch provides the in-the-moment play. So for example the smartwatch explorer earns points for traveling to certain places, tagging or leaving comments, or going on puzzle hunts. Another gaming use is in fitness and activity-tracking. These are already very popular in the mobile space but they tend to rely on custom hardware (like the ) or manual input. A smartwatch, on the other hand, potentially takes much of the input factor away and replaces it with passive sensors. It may sound a little corny, but a global diabetes game using a passive blood-sugar tracking built into a smartwatch might be just the thing to help save some lives. The third use is in ambient communication. Say, for example, that your smartwatch encounters another in its locale. They could engage in a gamelike communication with each other (similar to Nintendo’s ), perhaps combating, trading or simply flirting/pinging one another. The Pebble isn’t touch-enabled, but it seems fair to assume that most next-generation smartwatches will be. The screens should be big enough to interpret taps, swipes, pinches and maybe even drags. It seems unlikely that they’ll be able to display soft keyboards, but likely that they’ll handle voice at least passably well (for example most people expect Apple’s iWatch to connect to Siri). And again it’s fair to assume that they’ll support compass, tilt and other sensors. At a basic level this offers a fair range of interaction. Such interactions really would have to be built with one hand in mind (because of course the user is wearing the watch on their other hand) but they wouldn’t be showstoppers. Another is that the smartwatch game would have even more thumb or finger-occluding issues than smartphones (where using your digit covers over a part of the screen) but again, that could be smartly handled. The smartwatch will likely be poor as a platform for action gaming, even , but you might see great versions of games like working on it for instance, or other games that involve simple tapping or dragging. Roleplaying or caring games would work very well. Smartwatches are ideal for -style interactions, for games that involve time elements and similar. One example idea (combining this and pervasiveness) is the evolving-egg style of game. You have a small creature on your watch that you feed and grow, perhaps solving puzzles as a part of that experience, and as it comes into contact with other creatures perhaps they swap some DNA and evolve. While the screen size likely prevents smartwatch games from ever being immersive, ultra-casual, connected, lighthearted gaming fare could definitely find a new home on it. That’s where smartwatch’s strength likely lies. Yet there are problems. A big one, for example, is that notifications are actually pretty annoying. While the mobile phone has brought notifications into our lives in a big way, they are a constant source of grump for many of us, and smartwatches threaten to make that grump even worse. I can only speak for myself but when I used my Pebble a lot I thought it was very cool to be pinged like this for about a day. Then less so, then annoying, then irritating as hell. Then I gave up trying to tailor them and turned them off wholesale. And that means I essentially turned off its pervasiveness and reduced it to a much dumber watch, which I then tired of. It’s a vicious circle to be sure, but the problem is that developers often abuse notifications, sending them out with very little personal or relevant pretext and essentially turning them into advertisements. Even relatively innocent uses of that kind of technology start to become a drag, especially for power users. It’s bad enough for many users that their phone buzzes and pings when notifications come in, but on the wrist? Then there’s the straightforward concerns with power. Size imposes a large technical constraint on what can be packed into smartwatches, but at the same time nobody wants a watch that covers their forearm like a . They want small, sleek and stylish – that is if they want watches at all. So with only so much room to play with, it’s impractical to create a smartwatch too capable. Most of the watch’s innards will be battery. Communications will likely be restricted to Bluetooth, WiFi and NFC. Sensors will have to be extremely miniaturized, and then there’s the electronics to support the screen. That leads to my biggest concern: the dependency on mobile. Currently smartwatches do not really seem to be being thought of as stand-alone platforms, but rather as adjuncts to phones. They are essentially a secondary display to a primary core, not so much a platform in their own right as a peripheral to another. There are good reasons why, yet the fact that smartwatches are peripheral devices massively cuts down the likely size of their market as they grow to be regarded as peripheral accessories. Nice-to-have for the pres-existing device, a luxury’s luxury, but not serious. That in turn means that smartwatches face critical mass issues. Without it pervasiveness is seriously cut down. StreetPass is an example of a pervasive technology that works but doesn’t. It detects when another 3DS is in the same vicinity and conducts a minor gaming interaction between them, but the problem is that the frequency of that meeting happening is low. It needs scale and without it is nothing. The exact same problem applied to location-based gaming, which is why FourSquare ground to a halt, and also to smartwatches. I’m fearful that even if smartwatches do get their start that they will already be balkanized. Imagine, if you will, a scenario where many people have smartwatches from mobile manufacturers, but they’re not interoperable. Even with Android Wear powering them, imagine you still need to get the Samsung watch to work with the Samsung phone, the Amazon watch to work with Amazon phone, the Windows watch to work with the Windows phone. Smartwatch then becomes a recipe for a set of sub-platforms, in effect feature watches rather than smartwatches. Developers then see no reason to offer them major support, resulting in lowest-common-denominator apps. So you see why I’m flip flopping. It feels, to me at least, like there is a space there and some kinds of game that would well fill that space. Not everything would work on a two-inch screen, but then again not everything has to. The strength of any successful platform is rarely about being all things to all people, but rather leveraging its uniqueness in ways that make peoples’ lives better. Yet at the same time the smartwatch as we understand it today seems too tied down, too belittled, for it to truly flourish. It feels much like the palmtop sector of yore, where lots of mini-solutions tried to find their way but couldn’t, and ultimately the idea took a decade longer to bear fruit than it should have. So far all the versions of the smartwatch that I’ve seen have that feel, and it’s not strong enough to be considered “next” yet. All eyes are no doubt turning to Apple to see what the company will do. Will it define smartwatch for real much as it did smartphone, or will it go the accessory road? As goes Apple, so go the rest of us. |
Why Section 702 Reform Matters | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 6 | A in the Washington Post delved into the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Section 702 surveillance activities, and although it found that the program returns useful information to the agency, it also revealed broad use of the legal authority to collect data and communications from non-target parties. It also indicated that “unmasked identities remain in the NSA’s files, and the agency’s policy is to hold on to ‘incidentally’ collected U.S. content, even if it does not appear to contain foreign intelligence.” In short under the legal purview of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the NSA regularly collects — albeit in a roundabout fashion, and likely not one as robust and complete as it would like — data and communications of United States citizens that it hangs onto even if it has no immediate merit relating to national security. The Post did not go into too much detail on the “valuable” information the sweeps returned for national security reasons, but noted the searches provided the government with information about a secret overseas nuclear project and the identities of cyber hackers attacking U.S. networks. But the sweeps also provided the government agency with detailed information about the lives of more than 10,000 people who were not necessarily being targeted by the NSA. The Post report described the files, “determined as useless but nonetheless retained” as running the gamut from illicit sexual liaisons to financial anxieties. Pictures, including mothers kissing their infants and women modeling lingerie, were picked up in the broad searches. As we have recently seen, the NSA is unafraid to use its authority to search its pooled data — that it collects directly from technology companies and by tapping the core fiber cables of the Internet — with “selectors” that relate to United States persons. The Post report is damning in detailing the painful laxity that appears to pervade our national intelligence apparatus. In one example, it cites an analyst who inferred that every member of the chat friend list of a known foreigner to be foreign as well, a view so broad as to be almost ridiculous. The report also indicates that Section 702 authority is often used when traditional warrants expire: In an ordinary FISA surveillance application, the judge grants a warrant and requires a fresh review of probable cause — and the content of collected surveillance — every 90 days. When renewal fails, NSA and allied analysts sometimes switch to the more lenient standards of PRISM and Upstream. “These selectors were previously under FISA warrant but the warrants have expired,” one analyst writes, requesting that surveillance resume under the looser standards of Section 702. The request was granted. This matters as there has been in the United States Congress to ban using so-called “backdoor” searches on United States persons. A backdoor search under Section 702 is when stored data is queried using search terms to find the communications of Americans. The NSA, under Section 702, cannot go out and try to collect the communications of a known United States person, but it can search what it picks up “incidentally.” Given the NSA’s own , and that the FBI and CIA also use similar methods, and that the NSA’s incredibly broad interpretation of what it can collect under the rule, the amount of data and communications in its databases stemming from United States persons must be massive. And it has the authority to query that information without securing a warrant. The NSA and the executive branch do not view backdoor searches as outside the letter, or spirit, of the law, according to their recent comments appended to the data released concerning the use of such authority. Before the Post’s report this weekend, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) that generally upheld the 702 program. However no government oversight body, not even PCLOB, had delved into as large of a sample as the one the Post dissected. Even before these privacy violations were revealed, privacy advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation were denouncing the report. One quick way to kill something is to cut off its oxygen. And if you want to kill a part of government, stifle its cash flow. If the Senate can follow the House into removing funding for Section 702 searches for United States persons, it would be meaningful reform. |
Charge Your Phone Before Flying! TSA Will Now Block Dead Devices At Some Airports | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 6 | We’ve all been there: You’re standing in the security line at the airport. The TSA agent is mad at you about a water bottle, or a pair of scissors, or some other thing you forgot was even in your bag. Get rid of it, or you’re not flying. What if that thing keeping you off your flight was your dead iPhone? This afternoon, the TSA published stating that passengers boarding flights to the U.S. from “certain overseas airports” (the specific airports go unnamed) will first need to prove that “all electronic devices” they’ve packed can be powered up. No power? No flight. At least not while you’re carrying that dead device. Last week, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson directed TSA to implement enhanced security measures at certain overseas airports with direct flights to the United States. As the traveling public knows, all electronic devices are screened by security officers. During the security examination, officers may also ask that owners power up some devices, including cell phones. Powerless devices will not be permitted onboard the aircraft. The traveler may also undergo additional screening. TSA will continue to adjust security measures to ensure that travelers are guaranteed the highest levels of aviation security conducted as conveniently as possible. The TSA is being deliberately light on details, but that the new rules are in response to a specific threat which has the TSA worried about “a cellphone, tablet, or other electronic device” being used to hide an explosive device. Questions left unanswered: Will the TSA have back-up chargers to test the most popular devices? How dead is dead? Does getting it to flash the “Your phone is too damned dead to turn on” icon count? Forgetting your charger at home just became a more annoying. |
Crowdfunding Platform Seedrs Begins Offering ‘Convertible’ Equity Option | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 7 | 6 | Proof there’s still room for innovation in the equity crowdfunding space yet, if ‘ claims of a first hold true. The “pan-European” equity crowdfunding platform is adding ‘convertible’ equity as an option for startups wanting to raise funding via the site, with the UK’s being the first to use the new investment mechanism. Convertibles, commonly used in Silicon Valley and increasingly in Europe, offer the advantage of simplicity and speed, since the company’s valuation is deferred to a future date, typically when a larger VC round takes place and determined by the VCs leading the subsequent round. Meanwhile, investors in a convertible equity (note, I’m referring to not debt) are offered a discount in relation to that future valuation. In the case of Future Ad Labs, it’s offering a 15 per cent discount to ‘armchair’ investors via Seedrs. The London-based startup, which offers a revenue-generating and more human-friendly to the CAPTCHA, is aiming to raise a further £400,000 through a Seedrs convertible round, adding to the $1 million in funding previously raised from a list of backers that includes Passion Capital, Balderton Capital, Ballpark Ventures, and accelerator Ignite100. Part of that previous round also included £60,000 from 70 investors via Seedrs. In other words, Future Ad Labs has chosen to return to equity-crowdunding to raise what it sees as a bridge round before it goes out and raises a more substantial series A round; hence the choice to do it via a convertible. Asked about the thinking behind choosing to do a convertible note through equity crowdfunding and not simply by going back to current investors, Future Ad Labs co-founder Jacques Kotze tells me the startup had a “good experience” with Seedrs before, despite being one of the first to use the platform (when I understand it had a few teething problems) and that it was “natural to return as they pioneer the use of convertibles in crowd finance.” Kotze also says many of Future Ad Labs’ current VCs and angels will be participating in this round. “We’re not turning away from them, but we’re combining their value with the value of the crowds,” he adds. “We think it’s a wonderful opportunity for ordinary investors to invest alongside top VCs, such as Passion Capital and Ballpark Ventures, on exactly the same terms.” Calling itself an ad tech company, Future Ad Labs’ “PlayCaptcha” ad unit lets users verify they are human, to the same end as a traditional CAPTCHA. But instead of asking users to enter a sequence of letters and numbers from a blurry image, they complete a game-like mini challenge (though, intentionally, they aren’t challenging at all), such as moving an on-screen slider in a straight-ish line to unwrap a virtual chocolate bar. These challenges are fully branded, meaning that users are engaging with well-known brands at the same time. That chocolate bar, for , could be a KitKat. The startup says it plans to take the same idea and use it to offer more engaging alternatives to paywalls and video loading pre-rolls which, similar to PlayCaptcha, will deliver brand engagement and an incremental revenue stream for publishers. Future Ad Labs’ competitors include NYC-based , and . |
null | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 1 | null |
Wearable Solar’s Prototype Dress Combines Fashion With Phone-Charging Capabilities | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 6 | Here’s an unusual way to keep your smartphone charged — with a solar-powered dress. That’s what fashion designer is developing with her startup . She brought a prototype dress to Brooklyn’s last month, where I had a chance to see the dress in action. Van Dongen told me that she had two main inspirations: One of them is the fact that we highly depend on connectivity. We’re all addicted to our smartphones and we want them constantly powered, and the better our batteries get, the more we’ll use them. And at the same time, working as a werable tech designer, I know the difficulties when integrating these kind of bulky batteries that don’t allow for any comfort or wearability. So that’s why I thought, why not power your phone through your clothes? And eventually power other interactive qualities that our garments are becoming a platform for. In the video interview above, van Dongen discusses how the dress is affected by the weather, as well as the next steps in moving from prototype to commercial product. She was actually part of a larger group of startups attending the festival from the Netherlands, so I also talked to both her and Rob de Vos, consul general for the Netherlands in New York, about their visit to Brooklyn. |
Google Co-Founders Talk Regulation, Innovation, And More In Fireside Chat With Vinod Khosla | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 7 | 6 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdnp_7atZ0M]
Google co-founders and sat down for a rare long-form interview with technology venture capitalist at Khosla Ventures’ latest annual summit, and the video from the event was posted on YouTube this past week. It was a relaxed and wide-ranging discussion touching on everything from machine learning, to the shifting job landscape, to new horizons for health tech, to their 16 year relationship as co-founders, and much more. You can watch the whole 42 minute chat in the video embedded above. It’s a good Sunday afternoon watch. Especially interesting were their remarks on the future of health, given Google’s in the space. At about 29 minutes in the video above, Khosla asked, “Can you imagine Google becoming a health company? It may be a larger business than the search business or the media business.” It’s clear that both Brin and Page are keenly interested in medicine and health, but feel a bit put off by the current hurdles presented by the regulatory environment in the United States. Brin answered:
“I think it ‘s for sure a larger business, and we do have [products like] the glucose monitoring contact lenses… but generally, health is just so heavily regulated, it’s just a painful business to be in. It’s not necessarily how I want to spend my time. Even though we have some health projects, we’ll be doing it to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high, I think it would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs.” Page continued:
“…I’m really excited about the possibility of data also to improve health, but that’s, I think like what Sergey’s saying, it’s so heavily regulated, it’s a difficult area. I can give you an example: Imagine if you had the ability to search people’s medical records in the U.S., and any medical researcher could do it. Maybe they’d have the names removed. And maybe when the medical researcher searches your data, you get to see which researcher searched, and why. I imagine that would save 10,000 lives in the first year, just that. That’s almost impossible to do, because of HIPAA. So, I do worry that we kind of regulate ourselves out of some really great possibilities that are on the data mining side [in medicine.]” Later on at minute 37, Page shared similar sentiments about how complicated regulatory structures impact the efficiency of both governments and corporations:
“I do worry that when I look at governments, our interaction with governments… it becomes pretty illogical.
… The complexity of government increases over time. If you just look at all our democracies over the world, the amount of regulation and law we have increases without bound… One thing I propose, I was talking to some government leaders, actually the president of South Korea, and I said, ‘Hey, why don’t you just limit your laws and regulations to some set of pages. And when you add a page, you have to take one away.’ And she actually wrote this down, which was great. I do think that otherwise, the government is likely to kind of collapse under its own weight, despite the people being good and well meaning. Just because of that one issue of complexity increasing. I just don’t think it’s reasonable. When [Google] went public, the laws were from 60 years ago. If you took a random law professor and locked them in a room, and told them to rewrite those, you’d have something much better come out. But we’re not doing that.” Given the obvious amount of time they’ve spent thinking about such topics, it will be interesting to see if Brin and Page concentrate more on changing the way that things work at the regulatory level in the years to come. |
StepUp Lets You Easily Chop YouTube Videos Into Bite-Size Chunks | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 7 | 6 | Online video is limbering up. The volume of video content already being watched online is massive. Here’s just one stat to boggle the mind: reported close to 50 billion online videos watched by Americans alone in just the month of January this year. But really you ain’t seen nothing yet. As cameras find their way into more connected devices, and more people around the world adopt smartphones with a lens and a data connection as their personal mobile device then orders of magnitude video content is going to be produced, uploaded and consumed. There’s no doubt the digital future will be filmed and streamed from myriad mobile devices. So there’s a growing problem. Namely: discoverability. With so much video content fighting for eyeballs, finding the best stuff is only going to get trickier. And that’s likely to drive demand for tools that help condense videos into highlights packages to make content quicker and easier to consume. Digital video is both increasingly plentiful and ripe for remixing. So step forward UK-based startup which has built a platform for turning existing digital video content into shorter snippets that can be looped for repeat viewing, or watched in sequence — one segment after another. Founder Makoto Inoue dubs his creation a ‘Vine for YouTube’. The basic idea is to give the average online consumer the ability to chain together and tag/annotate video snippets — cutting a single longer original video down to size as a highlight snippet. Or combining multiple highlights into a sequence of easily digestible chunks that can be used to structure and navigate the video content to aid learning. “Online video itself is a huge market but many people are focusing on how to let people create more video contents, but there are not many companies focusing on how to help people consume. So the more videos get generated there’s more [scope] for us to help people consume videos much easier,” says Inoue. Pro video editing tools already offer the ability to edit video content, of course, but Inoue wants to democratize the process to make it easy enough for the mainstream online consumer to do, not just video editing professionals. The resulting edit may be less polished but it’s more accessible. He describes StepUp as a “video bite-sized service”. While that might immediately make you think of Vine, Twitter’s looping micro video snippet format, it’s not a like-for-like rival because Vine is focused on helping people film new video, while StepUp wants to let people remix existing content in new ways. “Vine is all about video creation,” says Inoue. “[StepUp is] more about curation. Vine actually made my life a lot easier because when I say ‘Vine for YouTube video’ more people understand why a small size make sense.” Animated GIF tools are perhaps a better comparison but StepUp aims to be a much broader platform than the GIF’s one trick pony. It’s about remixing longer video content into useful — or entertaining — highlights packages that can be used as a learning aid (by letting people re-watch individual segments until a tidbit of knowledge sticks, for instance), not just a medium for condensed video buffoonery. As well as giving people basic and accessible video editing tools, StepUp is obviously also aiming to become a video content platform in its own right — where people can seek, find and consume videos on particular topics that others have curated into its segmented montage format. (Another startup with some crossover is , which is using short videos as a format to support mobile e-learning.) Inoue argues that identifying a good bit in a video doesn’t require a video editor or any specialist training. “You don’t really need a specific skill or design skill to augment video [in that way]. All you need to know is from where to where is important. So I focus on that specific bit,” he tells TechCrunch. “And, the biggest win for us is, assuming [the video] on YouTube you don’t have to download and upload which takes lots of time,” he adds. There’s no limit on the length a StepUp video segment can be (although it defaults to a Vine-esque six seconds). Once a source video has been added to StepUp, the user can press a clip button to grab a particular segment, changing the time stamp after the fact if needed and then, once happy with their clip, they add a category, tags or other notes and upload their remix to StepUp’s platform. Currently source video for splicing and dicing can be grabbed from YouTube, or users can search for existing content uploaded to StepUp to use. On the viewer side, those watching StepUp videos can like individual segments, and comment on the whole video. StepUp videos can also be embedded on other sites as well as watched on its own platform.
In terms of direct competitors Inoue names Russian startup as the closest, but points out that unlike Coub there’s no time limit on video segments on StepUp — meaning it can be used to create remixes that offer the viewer something more substantial than can be conveyed in just 10 seconds. StepUp sidesteps rights issues about using others’ content by proving a link back to the original video/s — much like Pinterest turning existing online photos into pins. Inoue believes this could be a selling point for StepUp, pointing to online news’ and community sites’ penchant for using embedded animated GIFs as a bit of a grey area when it comes to rights issues. “For these purposes it’s much easier if they embed my tool. It’s almost like animated GIF but with sounds and also with one click you can go back to the original video. That’s one area I wish people would use [StepUp for],” he adds. In terms of particular video content he sees as a good fit for StepUp he suggests longer talks and music videos offer especially ripe raw material for stepping up. For instance he says panel discussions at conferences might lend themselves to a best bits cut, while music videos tend to be about three to four minutes long on average — so he argues there’s scope to offer a condensed, bite-size teaser version. Or for fans to splice together their favourite moments. The wider point again is that StepUp can accommodate both e-learning and entertainment use-cases. And if it can build a big enough user-base it could become a video discovery platform in its own right. A sort of YouTube digest, if you will. Or that’s the grand vision. Inoue’s original idea for StepUp was called Benkyo Player, which still exists as a separate video learning toolset offering things like subtitle search for the video libraries of massively open online courses (MOOCs). That e-learning angle got Innoe and Benkyo Player backing from the social good focused Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV). The accelerator then remained on board, despite the pivot from dedicated e-learning video player to more expansive StepUp video platform. Content categories on the site currently include various topics that lend themselves to step-by-step learning and instruction, such as cooking, fitness, martial arts, musical instruments and languages. So, although StepUp is a pivot it’s not moved a million miles away from Innoe’s original e-learning focus. The name StepUp actually comes from a about a hip hop dancer and a classical ballet dancer trying to teach each other their respective dance moves — and that step by step learning process is what StepUp aims to facilitate, says Inoue. StepUp as it is now launched around April this year and is getting monthly page views that average between 10,000 and 30,000 at this early stage. As well as the original £15,000 backing from BGV Inoue also pulled in a grant and mentoring from Nominet so has raised £65,000 in pre-seed funding so far for StepUp. He’s now looking for seed funding of between £100,000 and £500,000 to expand on what he’s built so far. If he’s able to pull in the larger amount — either in Europe or over the pond where the money generally flows freer for these type of big platform UGC content startups — Inoue says the priority would be building StepUp for mobile. Currently the product doesn’t work properly on mobile devices because of browser restrictions. Fixing that would be a key priority, he says. In terms of business model, he sees the platform supporting a Pinterest-style model once it has enough users — offering native ads in a spliced snippets format, giving brands a way to tease ad content and potentially spice it up or make it less annoying to view (by turning a three minute pre-roll advert into a more condensed and consumable snippet, for example). Other monetization ideas include a freemium model for using StepUp’s tools — e.g. charging for things like adding non-public video content for editing, or offering more control over the tagging process. Doing a degree of automation for the step/clip or caption process for a fee is another idea. Inoue also sees potential offering video analytics for brands — since the platform can be used to identify the particular segments of video content that viewers really like (based on things like how many times they loop a segment or which snippets of a video they actively like). All those ideas are just snippets of potential right now, though. Inoue is a sole founder driving StepUp, and needs funding to step the current desktop-only product to a more accessible and mobile friendly next level. But the core idea at least stands on a solid foundation — so he’ll be hoping the money follows.
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Plug Your Phone Into This Solar Powered Donkey | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 6 | Turkish herdsmen are keeping up with the latest news and entertainment via donkey power these days. They strap solar panels to the backs of their donkeys and use them as mobile charging stations wherever they go. According to a earlier this week, the sheepherders can read email, look up the weather and search websites. They could even keep up with the World Cup, all while roaming the countryside. Each panel generates about 5-7 kilowatts of energy. That’s enough to power laptops and cell phones or even to power lights for a donkey night ride. Turkish solar panel company Ser-Gün provides the solar panel devices to the herdsman for the “plug-and-play donkey” project. It just proves even remote sheep herders can stay globally connected these days. |
Women Use Pinterest, But They Don’t Run It | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | Only 40 percent of employees are women, even though the majority of the company’s users are female, . ratio appears better than other tech companies that have released similar reports — only . But considering Pinterest’s users are overwhelmingly female — — it’s somewhat shocking that they make up such a low percentage of the company’s total employees. (Source: ) Even though studies show to use Pinterest and , only 19 percent of leadership at Pinterest is female. It seems to me by failing to recruit and hire more women, the company likely is failing to gain female perspectives that could improve their user’s experiences. When it comes to diversity, it seems Pinterest’s numbers are worse than the abysmal stats we’ve seen at other large tech companies. Only 2 percent of employees are Hispanic and 1 percent are black, compared to 3 and 2 percent, respectively, . In 2013 AdWeek “the whitest social platform,” reporting that 18 percent of white Internet users had Pinterest accounts while only 8 percent of black and 10 percent of Hispanic Internet users went on the site. Given these numbers, that’s not a surprise. With its post, Pinterest released the same trite statement we keep hearing from these tech companies. “We’re not close to where we want to be, but we’re working on it,” wrote , a software engineer and tech lead at Pinterest. I’m getting sick of that response. When you look at tech positions alone, 21 percent of employees are female, which is better than numbers we’ve seen that hover around 10 percent at Twitter and 17 percent at Google. Although it seems Pinterest is trying to do better in its recruiting (32 percent of tech interns are female), it’s clear that significant change will take a long time. But even more unsettling, although Pinterest outlines steps it’s taking to improve its gender gap, is that it appears the company hasn’t acted to rectify its poor diversity numbers. “While we’ve made some progress in diversifying gender at the company, we haven’t done as well in representing different ethnicities, and we’re focused on getting better,” Chou wrote. But why not? With these numbers, it should be clear simply looking around Pinterest’s offices that diversity is a problem, and it’s already affecting who is using its products. These tech company diversity reports keep coming, and that transparency is important because it sparks a conversation about these issues. But that doesn’t matter if nothing is done to rectify it. Hopefully efforts to make these companies’ environments more inclusive will keep coming, too. |
Baidu Shoots Up Google Play Download Rankings With Apps That Boost Android Performance | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | Chinese search engine giant had a good month on the Google Play Store in June, shooting up seven ranks to crack the top 10 publishers by downloads, according to ‘s growth wasn’t on the back of its search capabilities. ‘s data shows that two apps, and , accounted for most of the jump. As with other recent explosions in app popularity, the company was assisted by a featured spot on Google’s storefront, with a prominent placement in Indonesia — its largest country by share of total downloads — giving Baidu’s Battery Saver app a big boost. According to Baidu, the app has been downloaded more than in September 2012. DU Speed Booster, an application that claims to boost device speed by as much as 60 percent, had a huge month in several important markets. were in the United States, Brazil, Thailand and Brazil: Both of Baidu’s apps for boosting performance are available in free and paid versions. It isn’t entirely surprising to see apps that let you get more out of your hardware take off in the markets where Baidu is succeeding, as those are the countries where low- to mid-range devices are most likely to be adopted en masse. |
YC-Backed Kamcord Launches An App For Watching Mobile Game Replays | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | As , it’s clear there’s an enormous market for video of gameplay. A few players stepped up a couple years ago to tackle the same concept for mobile gaming. Y Combinator-backed was one of them. They built a layer that developers could integrate, letting gamers easily record and share their gameplay. at the beginning of May, they’ve grown their share rate by four times. Co-founder says that the company is seeing one hour of gameplay video uploaded every minute, or about 1 percent of YouTube’s total volume. There are about 14 million videos in total recorded so far. Rathnam points out that is still just a 17-person startup despite these figures. “We’re now in a really good place and we’re seeing a really tremendous amount of growth,” he said. It was a couple key partnerships with well-known games like Outfit7’s Talking Tom series and Stickman Soccer that drove up their volumes. Now the next step is not to be just a layer, but a destination. That’s why where you can watch gameplay videos from friends or competing players. There are your standard social features, like the ability to follow top players, learn tips from other gamers and chat about trending videos. Kamcord competes with a number of other products, including Applifier, which just merged with gaming engine Unity. Rathnam says the two companies have slightly different product philosophies. For one, Kamcord doesn’t require you to register as a user and it also is not as heavily focused on being a cross-promotional ad network where you might be prompted to watch replay videos from many other games. Kamcord’s investors include , , Japan’s and China’s . |
Yammer’s David Sacks Departs Microsoft After Two-Year Tenure | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | Today Yammer’s founder and former CEO that he will depart , the software company that his social enterprise startup for $1.2 billion. His exit, which comes two years after the June 2012 acquisition of Yammer, follows standard timing. When companies are purchased, existing employees are often given two-year contracts, sometimes with earnouts attached. Sacks did his time, in other words. One year after it purchased , Microsoft that the service had seen 55% account growth following the deal’s closing, to more than 8 million. Paid networks were up 100%. Yammer a mention in Microsoft’s most recent earnings report. Microsoft has worked to move Yammer into its Office 365 lineup. If you visit the Yammer , you can purchase the service for $3 per user per month, but Microsoft lists two separate Office 365 options that both include Yammer. In a statement concerning Sacks’ departure, Microsoft commented that Yammer is now used by “more than 500,000 organizations.” Yammer was recently , making it available for no extra charge to new groups of people. As such, it seems that Microsoft is content to make Yammer component to Office 365, and use it as a lever to ratchet up subscribers of the latter service. As a fun aside, if you haven’t seen the clip of Sacks trying to explain why to at Disrupt SF 2012, you haven’t lived: |
Yeti Is Like Tinder For Places | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | Sometimes searching for the perfect bar or a challenging hiking trail can be like searching for a mythological creature. Unless you’ve already found . The new app from the makers of aims to help you discover new things and converse with people of similar interests nearby. Yeti looks a lot like the dating app with the topics organized into photo cards — except that on Yeti, you run into a lot fewer Myspace-style mirror selfies. Users are presented with related topics based on their location, and just like Tinder, they can swipe left to pass on a topic or swipe right to join in a conversation. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq-9heRPJ6M&w=560&h=315] Co-founder tells me the app has been particularly popular among travelers, and I can see why. In the last six months, I’ve lived in three cities. Through all of those moves, I’ve time and again drained my phone battery searching for nearby coffee shops open at 10 p.m. on Yelp or trying to find a nearby convenience store on Google maps. Although those apps help and are a modern day essential to exploring any new city, I rarely would specifically search for an eclectic bookstore or a cafe with a stand-up comedy show during happy hour online. I would come across them while walking around and exploring. But it seems Yeti could aid that. While playing around with the app, I found conversations about where to find the coolest view of the new Bay Bridge and where you can find a cafe with great tea, all within a few miles of my apartment. These are things I might check out now, but I never would have thought to seek out before using this app. Beyond just discovering new places, Yeti gives you a chance to just talk with others around you. Some other topics I swiped right for were a thread about Uber vs. Lyft and the best TV shows on Netflix. Even when not traveling, I could see myself swiping through Yeti when I’m bored. My only complaint about Yeti is that sometimes the pictures take a bit long to load, even when I’m connected to a pretty strong WiFi signal. That said it’s not a surprise the app today is featured as number one new app in blogs and forums. Capecelatro tells me he and his team arrived at the idea for Yeti with a lot of trial and error in their last venture, . Capecelatro has been interested in how he can connect people with technology, especially in light of reports that show increased use of technology leads to people . At the Pool and meet people with similar interests using information from Facebook. At the time, Capecelatro called it a “sort of a mashup between Meetup and Match.com.” But the company began to pivot away from that in November when it . “At the Pool just had too many features,” Capecelatro said. “What we found what really worked the best was content-based […] when users were talking about things like their favorite restaurants. With Yeti, we said let’s really double down on that one feature.” The Yeti team got the idea to use the Tinder-like interface from himself. He suggested it to the team, and they ran with it. “It really forces the user to focus on what they’re doing,” said Yeti’s designer Jason Hsin. “It’s all about the content.” Capecelatro said by using the swiping system, the forums can organically monitor themselves. If users repeatedly swipe left on a card, that card will stop coming up. If your swipes are similar to another user’s, Yeti will make more of the topics that user joins come up for you. Yeti is available in the app store now. It’s funded at just under $1 million, including investments from Clearstone Venture Partners, Canyon Creek Capital, David Carter of Amplify and Dennis Phelps of IVP. |
TechCrunch TV’s New Show Incubated Is All About What It’s Like To Be In A Tech Accelerator | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | Let’s say you’re a founder and want to join an accelerator, but you’re not sure which one. Nowadays there are dozens of different tech accelerator or incubator programs out there to choose from, and each offers something different. With our latest series, Incubated, we’re hoping to provide startup founders with all the info they might need before they make the decision to apply to an accelerator. For the last several months, we’ve been conducting interviews with the managing directors, mentors, and founders who have participated in a variety of different incubators to find out what each of them is all about. Now we’re ready to share those insights with you. Every Wednesday afternoon over the next 10 weeks, we’ll be releasing a new episode of Incubated, each of which will be focused on one of the top accelerators in the U.S. We’ll talk to the folks running the programs as well as founders who have lived through them for more insight into what startups can expect, and what they’ll get out of, each accelerator. So whether you’re looking at a media-focused accelerator like Turner Media Camp or Matter.VC, or you’re trying to choose between different programs in the Los Angeles area, or maybe you’re just weighing the pros and cons of vs. , Incubated will help you understand what you can expect when you apply and if you’re accepted into all of these accelerators. |
Samsung’s VR Software Leak Shows Initial Apps, Ability To Switch Between Virtual And Real Reality | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | ‘s VR efforts are one leaky ship lately, with a report today echoing earlier rumors that the company would be partnering with . Now, a leaked pre-release version of the Samsung VR software has made its way into the hands of , apparently revealing some of the early functionality the head-mounted display will have, and detailing some of its workings. Based on the leaked app screens, the Samsung Gear VR device will indeed mount a Galaxy smartphone in front of your face, likely similar to the way that Google Cardboard works with Android devices. But Samsung’s device will predictably be limited to its own smartphones, at lest according to rumors. It’ll also plug into VR via USB 3.0, which is only supported on current Galaxy devices including the S5 and Note 3, likely because of the increased bandwidth for data made available through use of that connector. The app leak also reveals that upon installation, Samsung’s VR software will begin downloading apps called “VR Panorama” and “VR Cinema,” which means that out of the box it should at least support viewing panoramic photos captured with the devices it pair with, and the Cinema app implies an immersive movie-viewing mode. There are already third-party apps that offer this, complete with 3D effects, on Google Cardboard. Device management software illustrates that Gear VR will have a touchpad and a back button on its surface, in order to compensate for these being inaccessible on a docked smartphone, and the back button can also act as a pass-through switch, allowing a user to switch from immersive VR to a view of the world around them as seen through their docked device’s camera. Users can also issue voice commands to their device using “Hi Galaxy” to begin operation, per this leak. It also optionally reminds a user every hour that they’re in a virtual realm, so they don’t get lost in the Matrix. All of this adds up to a device that still sounds like it will have fairly niche appeal out of the gate, and that will likely look to developers to build strong apps that can drive more consumer interest. The modularity could help hook users who might not otherwise look twice at a VR device, however, especially if Samsung can also price this thing fairly low, given the phone will be handling the bulk of the work. |
Amazon Remains Great For Customers, Not For Shareholders – Stock Drops 6% As Losses Widen | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | ‘s announced today made it more apparent than ever that Amazon remains a great business for its customers, but not so much for its shareholders. The stock, after the earnings were reported, was already down by 6% and falling in after-hours trading following Amazon reporting net losses that widened to $126 million in the quarter. Amazon has been stretching itself even thinner this year, easily living up to its name “the Everything Store.” In 2014, Amazon launched its first smartphone, a set-top box to rival and , a and competitor, an all-you-can-eat e-book subscription service, a -like streaming music competitor, an expanded grocery shopping service complete with its own magic wand/barcode scanner for instant access, and more. And it invested heavily in its content businesses including developing its first two children’s series for Amazon Prime Video, as well as its own games made exclusively for Fire Phone. As CEO said in the company announcement out today, Amazon is “working hard on making the Amazon customer experience better and better,” or, if you’re reading between the lines – yes, Amazon is still growing revenues, if not yet its profits. As per usual, Amazon didn’t reveal too much about how well its various businesses are doing, and it certainly didn’t offer insight into the pre-orders of its newly launched Fire Phone which has been panned by tech pundits and other critics as being “good” but not great. However, there is some small window into how Amazon’s mobile hardware business does with news that its mobile app marketplace has tripled over the past year, and app submissions have “more than doubled” since the Fire Phone’s launch. Amazon’s Fire TV is reportedly doing better than expected, too, with sales that “significantly exceeded” Amazon’s forecast and a mention that Amazon is working to increase its manufacturing output. Here, Amazon reports that Fire TV app submissions are up, also more than doubling since the device’s launch. AWS was also called out as being an expanding business with thousands of new employees, 250 significant service and feature releases year-to-date, price reductions for customers starting in the second quarter (28% to 51% depending on the service). Amazon says AWS continues to “grow strongly,” with usage growth close to 90% year-over-year in the second quarter. This heavy growth could have also contributed to this quarter’s losses. |
Amazon Misses In Q2 With In-Line Sales Of $19.34B, Larger Than Expected Per-Share Loss Of $0.27 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | Following the bell today, its second quarter financial performance including a $0.27 per share loss on revenue of $19.34 billion. Analysts had expected Amazon to lose $0.15 on revenue of $19.34 billion. For the quarter, Amazon’s revenue grew 23% when compared to the year-ago quarter. It had operating income of -$17 million, down from its year-ago tally of $79 million. The company had a net loss of $126 million in the quarter, up many-fold from its $7 million net loss in the year-ago period. Following its earnings miss, Amazon is down sharply, shedding 5% of its value. In regular trading, Amazon picked up a fraction in a mixed market. Amazon is famously valued for its revenue growth, and not its profits. And its business is cyclical, with stronger fourth quarter revenue than other periods. Amazon ended the period with cash and equivalents of just over $5 billion. The company not reveal much regarding its new , but did note that since its launch, “the rate of app submissions to the Amazon Appstore has more than doubled.” Amazon is spending heavily. According to the company, its web-services group, AWS, has hired “thousands of employees in the last year.” That could be a partial explanation for its margin pressure. Amazon now employs 132,000 employees, more than even Microsoft after its purchase of Nokia’s hardware assets. The company expects revenue of $19.7 billion and $21.5 billion in its third quarter, along with a loss of between $810 million and $410 million, up sharply from its year-ago third quarter loss of $25 million. The company blames “approximately $410 million for stock-based compensation and amortization of intangible assets” for the massive coming deficit. Amazon’s “services” line item expanded year-over-year from $2.952 billion, to $4.089 billion, a change of 38.52%. AWS, listed as part of the “Other” category in North America, saw its revenue bucket rise to $1.186 billion. AWS’s revenue, of course, is a fraction of that total tally. Investors appear bearish on both its past-quarter performance and its guidance. Had Amazon managed to beat on revenue in the period, its surprisingly large per-share loss would have been more palatable. |
Your Smartphone Will Soon Know If You Have Bipolar Disorder | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | In the United States, people over the age of 25 have some form of bipolar disorder. In fact, the United States than any other nation in the world. Researchers at the University of Michigan are now testing a new smartphone app for , code-named PRIORI, that can help detect if someone is having a bipolar episode. While the app still requires more testing before launch, a group of 60 volunteer American patients are already starting to show promising results, according to a study funded by the and facilitated by the at the . PRIORI is designed to learn over time to monitor a person’s voice and detect subtle changes in mood. A change is a signal that the user might be having either a manic or depressive episode. Privacy in conversations may be of concern to patients wanting to use this app, but, according to the research team, only the patient’s side of the conversation is recorded. The app will simply alert the person’s health care team of the possible early signs of a mood swing. Here’s how the app works to illustrate: “These pilot study results give us preliminary proof of the concept that we can detect mood states in regular phone calls by analyzing broad features and properties of speech, without violating the privacy of those conversations,” said Zahi Karam, a member of the Michigan team, at the in Italy. According to the team, which is led by computer scientists Karam and Emily Mower Provost, and psychiatrist Melvin McInnis, this technology could also help people with other conditions, such as schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder. Seed funding for the app and research study came from the . |
Chrome Android Beta Gets Single Sign-In For Google Sites And New Material Design Looks | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | has a hit on its hands with in my opinion, which is why it’s great to see it already making its way into some products ahead of Android L’s general consumer launch. Today, Google updated the with some new features, including single sign-in for Gmail, Maps and Search so long as you’re signed into Chrome, but also introducing some Material Design looks to the mobile browser. The simplified sign-in is a great feature on its own, since it means that so long as you’re signed into Chrome on your Android device with your Google account, navigating to Gmail, Maps or Search will show you logged-in versions of each site, instead of asking you to log in again each time. If you have multiple Google Accounts on your device, you’ll have access to any other of those accounts in Chrome for Android, too. These new features are definitely going to save users some frustration in terms of removing some friction from the process of using Google properties online. Of course, it also means that if you lose your device and you’re signed in on Chrome, anyone who finds your device and gets through any security you have set up in terms of a lockscreen will have an easier time getting access to your various accounts. On balance, however, Google has introduced a lot of tools that should help with securing your information, including the Android Device Manager, and I’d be willing to trade some increased risk for not having to fuss with passwords repeatedly, especially with the added hump of two-factor authentication. The new looks aren’t too shabby either. The home page now drops most of the chrome from Chrome, and the Incognito mode looks like the one that recently changed its looks on the desktop. Search also has a more pared down look with bold contrast and edge-to-edge elements other Material Design hallmarks. Anyone can (a separate app from the stable build) if they’re interested in taking this new version for a spin. |
Pandora Q2 Tops Estimates Slightly With $218.9M In Revenue, But Its Stock Is Falling | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | came in barely ahead of analyst estimates in its just-released . The streaming music company reported revenue of $218.9 million (up 38 percent on a non-GAAP basis) and non-GAAP earnings per share of 4 cents. Analysts had that the company would report revenue of $218.6 million and EPS of 3 cents. On a GAAP basis, however, the company continues to see losses — it reported a loss of $11.7 million, or 6 cents per share, compared to $6.8 million last year. Perhaps as a result, as of 4:30pm Eastern, the company’s stock had fallen nearly 10 percent in after hours trading. ( after earnings reports, despite beating estimates.) The company said that ad revenue was up 39 percent to $177.3 million (the company recently ), while subscription revenue was up 35 percent to $41.6 million. It also said that total listener hours grew 29 percent year-over-year, to 5.04 billion, while the number of active listeners grew 7.5 percent, to 76.4 million. “Our better than expected second quarter results demonstrate success and continued business acceleration as a result of our investments in mobile and local advertising,” said CEO in the earnings release, later adding, “As a company, we are united by Pandora’s clear sense of purpose to unleash the infinite power of music, and we’re attracting the brightest stars in the advertising, technology and music industries to help drive our business forward.” One of the first analyst questions focused on user growth, specifically whether that growth is slowing. McAndrews said the user numbers are seasonal, with a slowdown over the summer — although that could change as Pandora becomes “more prominent” in Internet-connected cars. “Clearly, there’s a cap on number of people who can listen to us in certain geographies,” he said. “We feel we’re not there yet … but we’re also investing in features and in the playlist, etc., to try to get people to listen more.” |
Y Combinator-Backed Checkr Automates Background Checks For The New, On-Demand Economy | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | The nature of employment is changing. Thanks to a growing number of platforms offering on-demand services in more places around the world, there’s now massive demand for workers to perform services and deliver goods to users. As those businesses have scaled up, that’s created a need for better processes around vetting and bringing on new workers quickly. The best example of this is probably Uber, which reported recently that it will in 2014. But the process of getting background checks completed hasn’t changed much, even if companies are requesting a whole lot more of them. Y Combinator-backed wants to change that. was founded by Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon, who are two software engineers that used to work for an on-demand delivery startup that ran into the problem of running background checks for drivers it wanted to recruit. They decided that if they added a little bit of technology, they would be able to automate the process and enable companies to fit into their existing workflows. The result is a system that enables clients to easily sign up and screen candidates either via an online form, or by using its REST API to connect with their own hiring systems. Standard reports include one county criminal background checks for $25, while a premium report costs $35 and include county searches for every place that a candidate has lived in the past seven years. Background checks include social security number validation, address history, sex offender searches, and checks against terrorist watch lists and national crime databases. For companies hiring drivers, Checkr can run a driving record check for an additional $5 plus DMV fee. (Bulk discounts, of course, are also available.) Checkr uses the same data sources as traditional background check companies, but can usually turn them around a lot more quickly than the incumbents. Reports generally come back anytime between an hour and a couple of days, depending on how complex they are, but most are ready within 24 hours. Clients are limited to those who are doing background checks for commercial purposes only — that is, for employment or tenant screening, car sharing, or something similar. The system cannot be used for random consumer checks. Its clients ability to scale up depends a lot on the speed with which they can sign on new contractors, so Checkr could help improve what is today a pretty clunky process. Perhaps more importantly, the automated nature of the service enables clients to simplify input of names to search and the data that is returned. Since launching in April, the company has been focused on serving the on-demand space and has signed on around 40 clients, including companies like , , and . With them on board, it is processing about 1,500 background checks a month, and growing that number by about 25 percent a week. But of course, it’s always looking for more clients, and hopes to help solve one of the biggest problems that companies in the on-demand space currently gave. |
Lawn Love Wants To Bring The Whole “Software Eating The World” Thing To Your Own Backyard | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | Lawncare and landscaping are areas that have remained largely un-“disrupted” in the whole trend that’s been going on in recent years. If you’re in one of the 80 percent of American households that have a lawn, chances are that you either take care of mowing and upkeep yourself, or you have hired a local lawncare provider you’ve found the old fashioned way, through a recommendation of someone you know — research shows that fully of the landscape industry business marketing is done through customer referrals. Getting a quote on lawncare is usually an in-person affair, and booking and payments are not often conducted through the web or a mobile phone. is a new startup launching out of the Summer 2014 batch of Y Combinator that aims to add a layer of tech-enabled ease to the process of finding, booking, and paying a landscaping or lawncare provider. Essentially positioned as a for lawncare, Lawn Love has built a web platform that works as a two-way marketplace with the aim of bringing more efficiency and protection to both sides of the business transaction. From the consumer side, the platform works like this: A user selects the kind of service they need among a few options, and provides some basic information about the property’s size and location. Lawn Love provides an automated quote within minutes, and from there, the user can select their preferred provider from a short list of available people, and schedule the service. Lawn Love provides full insurance protection and payment processing services to both sides, and takes a flexible commission on each job, which is paid by the hour. The average Lawn Love job runs at about $40 per hour, though it all depends on what services are being rendered and the size and location of the area. founder Jeremy Yamaguchi says that the proprietary “secret sauce” of the platform is in how quickly finds available providers and ranks them by customer ratings and their own specialties, as well as its automated price quoting technology. “We’ve built some pretty sophisticated backend software that does smart routing and intelligent batching,” Yamaguchi said. “And many lawncare professionals will tell you that there’s no possible way they can create an estimate without seeing a lawn. Us being able to intelligently provide a quote, sight unseen, is a nontrivial advancement.” According to Yamaguchi, the lawncare industry today looks a lot like the taxicab and town car transportation industry did in the pre-Uber days: comprised of many long-tail independent service providers without a clearly dominant player that ties them together. “90 percent of companies that operate in the space have fewer than 20 employees, many of whom are individual contractors. A lot of the business process is unnecessarily painful on both sides,” he said. Lawn Love launched its pilot market in San Diego, and is currently active there and in three other California metro areas: Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Jose. The company has just two full-time staff right now, but founder Jeremy Yamaguchi says that since the platform is easily scalable, further geographic expansion will be on deck in the weeks ahead. So far, Yamaguchi says that lawncare professionals have responded very positively to the Lawn Love platform. “Some of the providers we work with have part time roles with other companies, and they use Lawn Love to fill in their downtime,” he said. “The majority, though, are essentially small one-man businesses. We’re bringing them a bunch of new business and handling the billing and scheduling, so they’re able to divorce themselves from the unpleasant parts of the job, like chasing down non-paying customers.” The real challenge, of course, will be in getting people on both sides of this industry to change their habits. The way that people have done business in the lawncare space has been unchanged for a long time, and shaking up the status quo is never easy. Customers might be happy enough with the way they do things now, and lawncare professionals might not be too keen to give up a percentage of their fees to a third party. Also adding to the competition is the other tech platforms that deal in this space at least partially, from TaskRabbit to Thumbtack. Lawn Love will certainly have a lot of work ahead if it wants to become a big player in this very fragmented and localized industry. But it seems that if it takes off, Lawn Love could both satisfy an existing market that wants an easier way of doing things, and help create more demand from people who currently do their own lawncare because they find it too much of a hassle to find and book a professional. |
Jimmy Kimmel Convinces People That An Old Casio Is Apple’s iWatch | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | Want to convince people that you’ve smuggled ’s top secret smartwatch out of the labs and onto your wrist? You burn hundreds of man hours rigging up a semi-believable fake… or you could stick an Apple sticker on the back of an old Casio and call it a day. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9JQsXPd41U&w=640&h=390] It’s not Kimmel’s finest prank (that goes to his video, as that one managed to trick pretty much ), as he’s clearly cherry picking the best responses and even those picked are kind of meh. But it gets the point across: at this point, Apple could slap their logo on literally anything, give it a commercial with a catchy indie track, and the lines would still wrap around the block. |
Fixed Raises $1.2 Million For A Mobile App That Fights Your Parking Tickets For You | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | , the clever just by snapping a photo of the ticket with your mobile phone, has now closed on $1.2 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include , , , John Cobbs, Mark Randolph, Matt Humphries, Eric Wu and David King. Headquartered in San Francisco, which also serves as its debut market, this January, allowing residents to snap photos of their tickets using an iOS device. Afterwards, Fixed checks for common errors before proceeding to write a customized contest letter on your behalf, which is sent to the city. The company recently opened up its waitlist to the entire San Francisco metro area and has since seen 35,000 users sign up for its service. So what does the city think of Fixed? Apparently, not much. While the app hasn’t seen explicit pushback from the city the way that some other transportation or “sharing economy” startups have, San Francisco hasn’t been entirely cooperative, either, Fixed’s co-founder claims. “San Francisco doesn’t have a way to submit a contest electronically, they insist that you mail it in,” explains co-founder David Hegarty, who created the company after receiving what he felt were several erroneously issued tickets. “After one or two contests got ‘lost in the mail’ we started faxing our submissions so we’d have an electronic record of delivery,” he says of Fixed’s early days. “This week, they emailed us a pretty curt email to tell us ‘Stop using the fax machine’. No reason given” he continues. “After we politely pointed out that the Californian Vehicle Code allowed for the submission of Contests via Fax, they shut off the fax machine.” Um, yikes. But Fixed believes it’s operating within the law, and is now seeing around 1 percent of the city’s some 28,000 weekly parking tickets filtered through its app – or, around 300+ tickets per week. The company was in private beta since March, and has been growing its volume at 25 percent to 35 percent week-over-week, and more so since removing the waitlist function last month. As for the tickets themselves, win rates are at 20 percent to 30 percent, depending on the violation type. Some violations are prone to errors, and with those Fixed has a higher win rate, Hegarty explains, while others are more difficult to contest. But he also believes that Fixed’s win rate would be higher if the followed the rules of the San Francisco Transportation Code and Californian Vehicle Code. “They are absolute sticklers for the law when issuing the ticket – no mercy or sense of fairness – but when it comes to the rules on how a citation must be properly written and contested, they take a very ‘lax’ interpretation of the rules to suit them,” he proclaims. As for how his company plans to keep the city honest, so to speak, Hegarty couldn’t yet say, noting that Fixed would be weighing its options there. Despite these challenges, Fixed’s seed round was oversubscribed, forcing the startup to turn money away. With the additional funds, the company plans to now expand in San Francisco, increase its marketing efforts, and hire advocates to meet the increasing ticket volumes. Today, the company has six employees in its office and 10 to 12 — dubbed Fixed’s “Ticket Heroes” — on the street. These are the first responders for the incoming tickets and are responsible for checking them for errors. Longer term, if Fixed is able to scale its business to critical mass in San Francisco, the larger goal is to then take that blueprint to expand the service to other cities around the U.S., including New York, L.A. and Chicago for starters. The hope is to establish Fixed as a viable service in the U.S.’s top 100 cities within just two years – which seems fairly ambitious given the local pushback the startup has already received. |
Instagram’s “Bolt” Leak Could Be A New Facebook App Or An App Install Ad Test | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | Some Instagram users are reporting having briefly seen a banner advertisement within the Instagram application which pointed to a new app called “Bolt,” described as a “one tap photo messaging” app. Next to the app’s name and description, a download button linked out to a non-functional URL on the Google Play store. The current speculation being shared around the web is that Bolt is a new application soon to be released by Instagram. However, it also seems likely that the Bolt leak was a test involving an expansion of Facebook’s app install ads to the company-owned Instagram platform. The existence of Bolt was first brought to our attention by tipsters, who sent in screenshots to our tips line late last night. One tipster even proclaimed: “They’re coming at Snapchat again. Guaranteed.” News of Bolt’s odd debut has also been picked up by a number of sites, including , , and others. The company has yet to officially comment on the matter. There is already a mobile application on the Google Play store called “Bolt” but it’s . Despite having a similar, pink-hued lightning bolt icon, we’ve confirmed that Bolt is not the Bolt in question. The current assumption that Bolt is an Instagram creation makes sense, given that taking on Snapchat has clearly been a big focus for Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, which also recently launched a picture messaging client called . And Slingshot, too, . One could joke that someone at Facebook has “slippery fingers.” In addition, Facebook Messenger product manager Peter Deng , which could have influenced the service’s newer emphasis on . And finally, TechCrunch has been hearing that Facebook has some “big stuff” planned for next week, and the launch of Bolt could be part of it. That being said, it’s worth pointing out that there’s nothing in this leak that specifically that Bolt is a forthcoming Instagram-owned property. The placement of the banner ad at the top of the user’s stream could also very well be a test of app install advertisements. Mobile app install ads have proved to be an extremely profitable business for parent Facebook, though the company in order to make its mobile ad offerings seem more diverse. However, the company made $1.66 billion in the quarter from mobile ads, which now account for 62% of Facebook’s ad revenue. Bringing those same advertisements to the Instagram platform seems like an obvious next step for Facebook, especially given the wide network of third-party mobile applications that offer up some sort of Instagram integration. These app businesses would likely love to be able to target the Instagram crowd specifically, especially since they are often trying to reach a younger demographic like those that favor Instagram. Instagram might have been trying out the app install format with a fictional app to see if it was something users would click on. Or, even if Bolt is the next app from Facebook, it’s interesting to see how well Instagram could serve as a promotion tool for linking users to that application – and, maybe one day, to others. |
Microsoft Brings OneNote To Amazon’s Android App Store | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | When said that it wanted to take its products and services to other platforms, it appears that the company meant it: Today the software firm , its competitor, . So, if you have a Kindle Fire or a Fire phone, you can now take OneNote on the road with you. Microsoft recently . Before, it had a mixed bag of free and paid offerings. (TechCrunch , but didn’t find it too compelling.) While Microsoft has done a good job in recent months making its various web services available everywhere, there is a part of its platform play that is still missing. While , Office for Android tablets , and now even OneNote for Amazon’s niche Android app store, a touch-build of Office for Windows itself remains elusive. When that software finally splashes down, expect a few waves. |
The Smart Key Chain Will Store Your Files, Check Your Email, And Find Your Keys | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 24 | Because is getting smarter, it would be silly to think that keychains would be exempt. has four uses in one small package: USB file storage, upcoming calendar alerts, incoming email notifications, and a key locator. The file storage bit, to me at least, is kind of a joke considering the powers of cloud storage. Still, an extra reminder for calendar alerts and incoming email on your keychain isn’t a bad idea, especially for those of us who have no plans to jump on the smartwatch bandwagon. Where email is concerned, the Smart Keychain app lets you designate five people or organizations as very important, and you’ll receive any new emails from the important folks on the Smart Keychain. It pings your email every fifteen minutes, so breaking news in emails or time-sensitive stuff should still be handled on the phone. The most attractive part of the whole product, in my opinion, is the key locator, with the extra features standing in as an added benefit. Users can find their keys by pressing a button on the phone, which will sound an alarm on the keychain. The Smart Keychain can be pre-ordered on starting at $59, with options for 8GB, 16GB or 32GB options. For now, it’s only compatible with iOS, but Android is in the works. Plus, the team is trying to add support for Rewards card integration, as well as a health/fitness tracking option. Learn more on the . [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXrriPRlb1k&w=640&h=360] |
Vingle Lets You Mingle With People Who Share Your Interests | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 7 | 23 | is a fun, community-oriented site from two of the three founders of , the crowdsourced subtitling platform that was last year. and saw how devoted fans on Viki were to translating and subtitling the dialogue in their favorite movies and TV series, and wanted to create a network were people could participate in interest-based groups about things they are equally passionate about. is based on Korea, but with the launch of its , it hopes to find more users in different countries (the site already has a large cohort of English-language participants). It’s also available on . On Vingle, fans can join groups focused on things ranging from men’s and women’s fashion to trending topics like the Tour de France. The site currently has 2.3 million visitors and in June it saw 100 million page views. “If you look at the history of our founders and Viki, they were really fascinated even before Viki to find communities of subtitlers. The question raised was why are these people doing this subtitling and translation for free? They are driven by being in a community they love. The founding vision of Vingle is to share with likeminded people about everything, not just videos,” says Mark Tetto, Vingle’s chief strategy officer. In Korea, Vingle competes with , which is a community platform by the maker of messaging app Line. Vingle is also similar to , but it takes a much more visually-oriented approach. There are also commonalities between Vingle and , because both are heavy on content such as fashion, DIY, and entertainment and have a similar mosaic-style layout. To set itself apart from , Vingle is redesigning its website. “We are in a stage right now where we’re defining who we are as a community platform,” says Tetto. “People see the UI and it feels to them like Pinterest, but that will change very much.” “More generally, it’s about what is a community versus just interests,” he adds. “We provide spaces people can join. There are over 3,000 communities and they are very tailored to your particular interests. One of the hardest things to do is to create a massive audience, whether you are on Pinterest, a blogger, or on Facebook.” Part of Vingle’s appeal to users is an instant audience for their contributions in groups with memberships of thousands of other people. Though Vingle is still hashing out a monetization strategy, the same thing may also appeal to potential advertisers because they can quickly see what other interests specific groups tend to gravitate toward. “The structure of the service is really different than other social networks because if someone likes a product, like Chanel, you can find what else they love, what they like to eat, or what kind of cars they like. So right now our content system has that potential,” says Sanghoon Kim, the site’s director of marketing and communications, adding that Vingle may eventually monetize by showing sponsored content relevant to each group. |
Easy Location-Sharing App Jink Is Kind To Your Smartphone’s Battery | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 7 | 23 | is an and with one goal: to answer the question “where the heck are you?” The location sharing app, developed by Taipei and San Francisco-based , is the latest entrant in a very busy space and is up against some formidable competition, including (which , bringing its total to $20 million), Facebook’s , Apple’s , and Foursquare’s . But Jink’s simplicity and some ingenious features help it stand out. One of ‘s goals was to make using Jink as easy as texting or calling someone. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHnhfO8S4sA] Like a messaging app, the only thing you need to do to sign up for Jink is to give it your mobile number so it can text you a code to start a private profile. You can then choose to give it access to your phone’s contacts, or just enter people’s numbers each time you use it. On Jink’s map, you and the person you are sharing your location with show up as geotags (you don’t need to enter an address) as you move toward one another. You can send messages back-and-forth, which are overlaid on the maps as bubbles so you don’t have to switch windows. Once the two of you meet up, Jink automatically switches off to save your phone’s battery power. This feature is one of Jink’s key differentiators from other location sharing apps. For example, Glympse and Facebook’s Nearby Friends share your location for a pre-determined amount of time (or until you turn location sharing off). When Greenhouse’s team, which includes co-founders , , and , started working on the app last year, they “looked at the competitive landscape and saw that other apps were a little too complicated for what we wanted to do,” says Lin. “Our grand vision is to create a location sharing app that is going to be ubiquitous and super-easy, as easy as texting or calling.” In addition to turning off as soon as you meet, Jink also has other privacy-saving features, like the automatic pausing and expiration of location sharing if a meetup doesn’t occur. For groups, the person who started the Jink can see everyone, but each member of the group can’t see each other. The challenge is getting friends to sign up for it, since Jink’s competitors are well-known. The app has already gained traction by being featured in Apple’s App Store. Its developers also made it easy for users to get their friends to sign up for it by sending them a text to a download link for the app. Lin says Greenhouse is looking at ways to make the onboarding process even faster: “Within 10 seconds you can get a Jink going. We’ve done a decent job but we can still do better.” Future plans for the app include improving Jink’s backend so it works faster and focusing on Jink’s messaging feature. Greenhouse is prioritizing product and user growth at this stage but cited selling stickers for Jink profiles or integrating location-based advertising or logistics as potential ideas for monetization. The startup has raised $300,000 in seed funding and is currently looking for its Series A. |
Life On Kim Kardashian’s D-List | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 23 | Kim Kardashian can’t sell? The Kim Kardashian: Hollywood game is now with a 5-star rating and more than 140,000 reviews. It’s slated to gross in annual revenue and the stock price for the company that created it, , has nearly doubled in the last month! I’d been hearing about this game for a couple weeks. People were apparently on virtual dollars to buy fashion accessories and go on pretend dates. So I finally decided to download the thing for operation “Shut Up, You Can’t Take My Money.” The object was simple: Work my way up the celebrity ranks without spending a dime. This is the “E True Hollywood Story” of how I made it off the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood D-List. The beginning of my story is pretty typical for most players. I was a poor shop clerk named Riley whom no one had ever heard of. I wasn’t on any list at all. Even sleazy street photographers shoved me out of the way to get their celeb shot. A whole week into the game and I was still stuck on the E-List… That is, I spent an entire week checking in obsessively to a virtual game to validate my virtual stardom in this pretend Kardashian Hollywood world. Early on, I had a few fans on what appeared to be something like Twitter and some people occasionally recognized me on the street. Then one day Kim showed up to my store in downtown L.A., asking to be let in after hours and for me to hook her up with a free dress. I obliged, of course. We became “friends” and my star was on the rise. Soon after, I was asked if I wanted to hook up my social profiles in order to earn more stars and energy for free. Of course I did! What the game neglected to tell me is that it would tweet out to all my followers in real life that I, a grown woman, was playing Kim Kardashian Hollywood. I'm now an E-List celebrity in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Come join me and become famous too, by playing on iPhone! — Sarah Buhr (@sarahbuhr) Sidenote: I’m not the only one who’s had this happen. The EPA — as in the Environmental Protection Agency — accidentally let out a tweet about its own Kardashian obsession this past week: Whoops! Someone managing the account was clearly playing this game. The now-deleted tweet was followed with this official apology: Whoops…our bad. Sorry about tweet. Upside – more attention for the Office of Water ( ), thanks — U.S. EPA Water (@EPAwater) Kim eventually hooked me up with my first modeling gig and suggested I “go out on dates, get famous” to help my career. My first date was with fast food restaurant manager, Ryan Kennedy. He hated my outfit and broke up with me. Not sure what else to do, I took the modeling gig Kim suggested. Sure it was weird to do odd jobs while the photographer threw money on the floor, but who was I to complain? I was on my way to becoming a celebrity, right? Then it happened. I had finally done enough gigs, checked in obsessively, met the right people, and had enough good dates with the rich and famous to move up to the D-List! You’ll notice I had to drastically change my look throughout the game. I got a nose job and changed my hair color. I got points for buying more clothes and accessories. The more gigs I did, the more money I made, and the more I “Kustomized” my look, the more I fulfilled achievements in the game. Kim also hooked me up with an agent and I was encouraged to go to social gigs where I got paid to do things like mingle and have drinks. I soon went out with even more guys and showed up to more networking gigs. I dated an architect, an American entrepreneur, another model. Some of the guys I dated were jerks but the more famous the dude, the better my chances were of rising up the list. The downside is that I ran out of energy pretty frequently on these gigs. The game gives you little lightning bolts to indicate how much energy you have, and you use them up completing tasks for each new gig you take on. This is how the game turns a profit: You need the energy to keep completing tasks and get a good rating on your gigs. However, if you run out of those little bolts of energy you either have to wait for more, which means you don’t do as well on the gig, or you can buy them using “KStars.” These “KStars” can be earned each time you level up (which can take quite a while), or you can purchase them in the App Store for real money. That was not part of the plan so I tried to get smart about the game. Were there hacks? Online tips? What else could I find? I’d already hooked up my Twitter account so that was out. I also had the option of watching video ads for other games to earn more, but the game only lets you do that a couple times. You get one “K Star” and $10 each time you do that. Other hacks I found online included going to the trouble of setting your phone clock forward so the game would think it’s time to give you more energy. Another one suggested clicking on random objects for cash and energy. That last process proved to be pretty slow. Each object only gave out maybe a dollar or the occasional bolt of energy if I was lucky. You can also sign up for promotions and offers, but to me it’s the same as buying virtual currency — you’re just agreeing to certain offers. Either way, you gotta pay if you want to get ahead. That became painfully apparent soon enough. There I was on a date with the Dirk Diamonds, a star on the B-List, and clearly someone a couple of rungs above me. I was running out of both energy and money to pay for the expensive wine Dirk wanted… and none of the producers or actors in my network seemed to be offering anything up. My agent wouldn’t even call me back. What was a girl on the D-List to do? Sadly, my plan to raise my status without spending any money had to be scrapped in order to buy “K Stars” before I lost Dirk forever. $59.99 bought 725 virtual “K Stars,” which was enough money and energy to save my date. With that virtual currency, I was also able to buy three apartments, a dog, a trip to Punta Mita, my own car (no more D-List bus rides around town for this girl), and to land a couple more dates. Kim even threw me a pretty sweet birthday party at the club. The best part of all, however, was just how quickly I rose from the D-List to C-List status. With my upgraded status, my agent called me with better gigs, I got a much more tech-savvy photographer (one that actually uses digital prints and a laptop), and even my dates complimented my outfits more. The game seems to be hitting a popularity threshold lately. It stalled on me briefly a few times in the past couple of days, and a ton of people lost it on Twitter when the game crashed over the weekend. Do you know how embarrassing it is to admit to yourself that you actually want this game to load so you can just play already? That you actually like escaping to this virtual reality to shop and get paid just for showing up at a club? https://twitter.com/BroImABelieber/status/490316268269228032 Glu Mobile gave out extra “K Stars” and money to those affected in the crash five days ago, it was the virtual Kim Kardashian who got all the credit. https://twitter.com/seazzzzzia/status/491324910086537216 , Kim holds a 45 percent stake in the game and stands to make about $85 million from it. Kardashian made about last year in all her other endeavors. I’m still currently stuck on the C-List with about $559 in virtual currency. But I do have a gig coming up for a “Smart Ad” campaign with a famous photographer… and another date with both Dirk and Charles soon. Virtual Kim tells me my latest ad campaign is trending, too. B-List here I come. |
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