title stringlengths 2 283 ⌀ | author stringlengths 4 41 ⌀ | year int64 2.01k 2.02k | month int64 1 12 | day int64 1 31 | content stringlengths 1 111k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A Most Dangerous Machine | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | News Feed has decided that I like gruesome murders. Actually, senseless deaths and gruesome murders. I’m not exactly sure when the problem started, but I imagine it was around the time of one of the now too-common stories of mass shootings like Sandy Hook. Or at least, that’s what I like to tell myself – that surely, I was following a nationwide news story of importance rather than clicking sensational headlines that trade human tragedy in exchange for pageviews. I’m not really sure. But what I do know is that now any extensive visit to my Facebook News Feed has grown really depressing. Amid tech news and baby photos, I’m now bound to come across some shared headline of something so horrific, so odd and unbelievable, that I actively have to stand up and walk away from my computer or put down my phone to keep myself from clicking. After commenting on a friend’s mobile photo upload, I scroll down to find the worst of humanity only a few items below. I don’t want to know why , but I’m going to click. I’m sorry, I just am. (Did you?) And in clicking, I feed the machine. The emotionless algorithm that simply matches my interests to the stories that display. The algorithm that feels no remorse in abusing my sometimes precarious psychological state in exchange for increased time-on-site or pageviews. Okay, I admit it. I’m human. And human curiosity can be a damning thing. I’m weak, and I’m ashamed. I am the person who is going to slow down and look at the wreck on the side of the road. And sometimes, I’m going to click the linkbait. It’s not always of the variety. What is Facebook’s responsibility to stop reinforcing the worst of my online behavior? Really, how many times should the most tabloid-esque murder-du-jour story rise up to the top of my News Feed? Today alone, I’ve seen stories of a boy who choked his cheerleader girlfriend, of dismembered body parts strewn around Long Island, of a man who killed a teenaged neighbor over a lawnmower. I don’t need to know these things. They don’t improve my life or my understanding of the world in any way. They only reinforce my belief that people are horrible, and that evil is real. Today, I unfollowed as one of my “news” sources on Facebook, which should go a long way to fixing this problem, as (You can do this from the drop-down box on the post – just click the “Unfollow” option.) I hope it’s a permanent solution, but I’m still wary of loading my News Feed. What terrible thing awaits me below? After the deed is done, Facebook asks me why did I unfollow this source? I click the link to tell it why I did such a thing, but the only options are “annoying or not interesting,” “shouldn’t be on Facebook,” or “spam.” Where is the option for “it’s just too much?” Where is the option for “psychological abuse?” Where is the option for “because I can’t trust myself around linkbait?” Oh, it’s on the next screen: Let’s be fair: Facebook is not the only site that takes the personalization element to its worst possible extreme. I read a story about a Taiwanese plane crash on , and my “Recommended for you” section is immediately filled with other tales of death and horror. I scroll down and see these suggestions: a man who killed a neighbor over a tree-trimming feud; a mother and daughter who die from a food truck blast; an inmate’s botched execution; a Nigerian man with Ebola; the man who shot a pregnant intruder; the father whose toddlers died when a dresser fell on them; the teen who murdered an 11-year old at a slumber party – and all that’s after just a scroll or two. Thanks, Yahoo. I’m now hiding under my bed afraid of the world. I don’t want to be uniformed. I want to read the news. There are wars going on. There is political upheaval. What are we doing about the ? These are things I need to know more about. These are things I should have spent my random few minutes of news browsing on, but yet I’m instead fed the “stories I like” via algorithms that have taken the place of human editors – . This is not just a minor annoyance. It’s a very real concern – not only about the narrowing window I have on the news of the world, but a concern about the impacts of emotionally damaging content on unsuspecting victims. This is especially worrisome since Facebook, it seems, has no problem . A test, which no Facebook user knew about until it wrapped and was discovered by the media, was a study that was meant to discover whether Facebook’s News Feed content could impact a user’s emotional makeup. Consider me just another data point. I read Facebook; I feel sad. More seriously, consider the impacts of unfeeling technology and impersonal algorithms on the vast numbers of those suffering from mental illnesses. Whether they’re browsing , or vlogging their most heinous thoughts – as did the Santa Barbara shooter who to “punish” “you girls” in his YouTube videos before his terrible spree. While our legislators argue over gun control, the U.S. – a direct result of mental health reforms that were originally meant to stop the abuses of human rights that took place in the psych wards of the past. But now we have a system that actively prevents people from getting help. People who suffer from distorted – and dangerous – mental states, or even with more treatable conditions like depression, are also using computers, browsing the web, and reading sites like Yahoo News and Facebook. And we don’t know the long-term impacts of them being subjected to the outright manipulations that take place when a site like Facebook decides to study them like lab rats. Nor do we fully understand the impacts to the rest of us when Facebook or some other news portal simply rolls out a new “recommendation algorithm” as part of its everyday experimentations. When the machines over-feed someone stories about death and violence, do they get partial credit later for their psychological break – or do they only get lauded for helping through digital debris or uniting the victims via online ? This is one of the many fallouts from our linkbait addiction – the result of a culture too overwhelmed with content to read anything at length. But to the humans building these systems, I ask you to remember this: We are an easily tricked and manipulated species. When all you count is what gets clicked, the algorithm fails. At best, . At worst…well, look around. |
Wearable Fashion Toy Linkitz Teaches Girls How To Program | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | MIT PhD is using socializing and accessorizing to get get girls interested in programming. Neel’s invention, , is a wearable electronic toy that allows kids to rearrange, take apart and snap together electronic blocks that blink and buzz to change their behavior. This teaches them programming in a fun way, says Neel. Both boys and girls can play with , but Neel, who was the 10th woman to earn a PhD in computer science at MIT and fell in love with computer programming in the sixth grade, says she was inspired by her own three daughters to design the product. “I bought them ‘engineering toys’ when they were in elementary school, but many of them devolve into solitary building activities, which is not the way my girls wanted to play. They were very social and very interested in friendship and doing things with friends. So I decided to try to start with things that my girls liked to do, and add technology into those games,” Neel told me in an email. “I’m hoping to hold [young girls’] interest as they move to middle school, when lots of girls start to say they think math and science are boring.” The Linkitz team, which, in addition to Neel, includes co-founders Drew Macrae and Chris Wallace, recently won the in Coburg, Ontario, Canada. The winnings included a trip to Shenzen, China, for a program where the Linkitz team is currently learning about product manufacturing in order to make the toys ready for mass production. Linkits also received a $100,000 early-stage investment funding from Northumberland CFDC to finalize, test and market their product. Linkitz plans to set up headquarters in Coburg and is already working with a team of local engineers there to create the toy prototype. Neel says she hopes to put the first prototypes in little hands for testing soon.
“Wearables are the new black, and kids want their own. Linkitz makes smart and modular wearable toys that blink and buzz and will help kids learn programming too,” explains Macrae. The N100 is an annual startup competition led by Northumberland CFDC. Startups compete for $100,000 in early-stage investment capital. Last year’s winner, , the “Ubiquitous Computer” went on to secure $635,000 in angel funding. |
Your Long Wait For TechCrunch-Branded Paper Cups Is Over | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | A parent company isn’t all that different from a real parent. They feed you, and give you money. They give you advice (sometimes more strictly than others). And, yes, they embarrass you. Speaking of, today our proud parent company , with vast experience in the online business, has launched an online storefront for its brands, including TechCrunch. Welcome, dear readers, to the , where you can “Fly Your Aol Flag.” (Seriously, that’s the subject of the internal email we were sent about this. No joke!). The store’s is a gem, too: The AOL Shop offers the most sought after, in-demand and useful products for you, your family your friends, your clients, those difficult people on your holiday shopping list and practically anyone else you can imagine. We choose products based on quality, brand, environmental impact and, of course, our completely scientific Hipness Factor™. These items are not only rare, they’re coveted by folks that don’t have the kind of access to our private stock that you do. So go on. Fly your AOL flag. You may turn a few heads. Hipness Factor™? Some highlights from the store: I can’t decide what is less relevant: the journal or ? is huge with babies. So this makes sense. Until you scroll down and realize you need to buy of the onsie to check out. Polygamist cult leaders will swoon! , Disrupting Rain Since 2014 Talk about going green, AMIRITE? Aol is offering so much value to its customers that it can’t even fit all of that value into the packaging. Because this brightened our Friday in an unexpected way, we’re sharing the conversation directly from the TechCrunch internal message boards. Enjoy! Who wants TechCrunch Whisky Glasses and Baby Onesies? Oooh can we get them in NYC? ‘The AOL Shop offers the most sought after, in-demand and useful products for you, your family your friends, your clients, those difficult people on your holiday shopping list and practically anyone else you can imagine. We choose products based on quality, brand, environmental impact and, of course, our completely scientific Hipness Factor™. These items are not only rare, they’re coveted by folks that don’t have the kind of access to our private stock that you do. So go on. Fly your AOL flag. You may turn a few heads.’
Please someone BLAWG this our entire store should just be that whiskey glass. http://store.aol.com/collections/techcrunch/products/techcrunch-eos-smooth-sphere-lip-balm < my daughter would be happy to eat this http://store.aol.com/collections/techcrunch/products/techcrunch-paper-cups-1 FINALLY @Greg, $.93 each Actually I like these green hoodies, these should be our team hoodie. http://store.aol.com/collections/techcrunch/products/techcrunch-zip-hoodie The way this stuff is photoshopped on, so good. http://store.aol.com/collections/techcrunch/products/techcrunch-titleist-dt-solo-golf-golf-balls I would like one, please.
do we get a discount on this stuff? Just expense it DONE Breaking: Your Long Wait For TechCrunch Branded Paper Cups Is Over: The Store: The Movie cc @Alexia It’ll be like when Jay-Z orders his own vodka at the club minimum order on all this stuff is like 36 pieces. who is ordering 36 techcrunch jackets this is the best http://store.aol.com/collections/techcrunch/products/techcrunch-applique-hoodie how long have we had a store? i’ll sign these for a kickback of $5 per
personalized greeting of “nice baby” for this one, extra $10
http://store.aol.com/collections/techcrunch/products/tech-crunch-onesie Our hoodies will give you scoliosis http://store.aol.com/collections/techcrunch/products/techcrunch-zip-hoodie please buy 72 water bottles http://store.aol.com/collections/techcrunch/products/copy-of-stylelist-75l-camelbak-eddy-water-bottle at full retail Ok so who’s writing this? ‘Breaking: Your Long Wait For TechCrunch Branded Paper Cups Is Over:’ @Greg The fact that they’re minimum order of 36 tells me these are supposed to be for sale TO AOL’s internal brands, not outside. Still waiting for the XS TC jacket Barto promised me last year. Starting to think its vapourwear http://store.aol.com/pages/about-this-store ‘We have chosen to stock a variety of AOL branded products that can be ordered in any quantity in a short time frame. For all other brands, the orders are custom and have a minimum quantity tied to them. We have done our best to select items that have a low minimum order and short lead times.’ 2013: Project Devil. 2014: Project Drinkstirrer this convo thread could be the whole post. GUYS: ‘our completely scientific Hipness Factor™ So….this store is open to all AOL employees. That means MapQuest and Cambio can get TechCrunch swag. No revenue, actually: “AOL does not make a profit from the items sold on the store.” then they are doing it very wrong
My father in law does screen printing and embroidery (essentially all of this stuff) and these prices are insane. this is the best discovery of the century cost on a hoodie like this is about 6 bucks http://store.aol.com/collections/techcrunch/products/techcrunch-applique-hoodie @Matthew how fired is the person who blogs this? serious question. i will do this… it just feels right for me
i won’t get fired tho right? @Sarah none fired So, if you and 35 of your closest friends want to get together and purchase a host of hoodies, go for the TC one. Represent. |
Unlocking Your Cell Phone Is Still Illegal, But Probably Not For Long | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | Unlocking your smart phone to run on a different carrier, without your carrier’s permission. It seems completely innocuous, right? Something you’d do with a spare bit of time on your weekend just to see if you could. Surprise! It’s illegal. And we’re not talking jay-walking-when-no-one-is-looking illegal, either —thanks to some crazy ass interpretations of the DMCA, it’s a quote-unquote crime punishable by up to 5 years in jail. Thankfully, that’s changing. The legality of unlocking has flip-flopped many a time over the past 15 years, but it’s likely about to go back to being legal. A few weeks ago, the passed the “Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition” act that moved to make unlocking legal again. This morning, Congress unanimously approved it. Now the only thing left is for the President to put his stamp of approval on it — and given that the administration , that’ll hopefully happen pretty quickly. Once this bill is signed, it’ll once again go back to being legal… for now. Congress is scheduled to re-evaluate the bill every 3 years, so it could flip right back to illegal before too long. Someone needs to set up a account for whether or not you can currently go to jail for unlocking a friggin’ cell phone. |
Homejoy Expands Beyond Cleaning With Beta Test Of Home Services | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | When raised its last December, the company did so with a plan to to its customers. It’s starting to make good on that plan, with the launch of a beta test for other home services. In an email sent out to some Homejoy users (text below), the company invites customers to book and try out some of the new home services available in beta. When you click through, it takes you to a that lists a wide variety of services you can book. Those include plumbing, handyman, landscaping services, pest control, furniture assembly & installation, painting services, moving and storage, electrical services, and carpet cleaning. For , the test could enable the company to move upstream into higher-margin businesses. Plumbers, painters, movers, and electricians all tend to demand a premium above the cost of having your apartment cleaned. And that could be good for Homejoy’s bottom line, as it seems to be struggling to keep pricing for its cleaners low. Last week, the company emailed customers to say that it was raising the price of its cleanings to $25 per hour for recurring weekly or bi-weekly appointments, or $35 per hour for single or recurring appointments every three or four weeks. That was up from the $20 an hour it was charging for regular cleanings previously. Of course, Homejoy isn’t the only company to offer more than just cleaning on its platform. , which it competes against directly in many markets, has long offered a series of services that include light plumbing and electrical work. Now the two will go head-to-head not just for customers, but also for service providers to complete the jobs. It’s not clear how extensive the test is, or in how many markets that Homejoy is offering home services today. But it’s clear that home services are something the company is very interested in, and if the test works, they could expand very quickly. We’ve reached out to Homejoy for more info, and will follow up with any update we receive. Hi, My name is [XXXX], your Client Account Specialist at Homejoy! We haven’t seen you in a while, so we wanted to reach out and invite you to be among the first to experience new services at Homejoy. Your Clean Kitchen
Homejoy is now your all-in-one home services solution!
That’s right [XXXX] – Homejoy is beta testing new home services, and we’re excited to welcome you to be among the first to join! Among the many services we’re launching are handyman, plumbing, electrical, moving services and more. Click the link below in the next 3 days to claim 50% off any handyman or home improvement service. There’s no better time to make your home happier. |
Google Docs Makes Collaborative Editing Easier For Word Users | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | At its I/O developer conference earlier this month, announced a major update to its suite of productivity apps, including Docs, Sheets and Slides. The main feature there was the integration of , which now makes editing native documents online easier. Today, Google recapped some of those updates , but it also threw in a new feature that will make life quite a bit easier for many writers who want to make the switch from Word to Docs. If you regularly use files with a number of people, you’ve probably come across its ability to track changes. Until now, those didn’t transfer all that well into . To bring some of this functionality to Docs, previously announced the ability to suggest edits and starting today, Google will convert any tracked changes from Microsoft Word into these suggested edits. This may seem like a minor update at first, but tracked changes are a tool that many businesses rely on for their day-to-day document editing workflow. Google may have had its own version of this, but if it wants companies to switch to Docs, not being able to take this kind of editing history with them was likely a deal breaker for some. Now, it’s not just converting these, but because it is integrated with the new suggested edits, it’s now also easy to discuss these changes with your colleagues right in the document. If you haven’t seen the suggested edit feature in action yet, just pull up a document in Docs, look for “View” in the menu bar and select “Suggesting” in the “Mode” menu. From there on out, all your edits will be suggestions. Everybody with “can comment” access to a document can suggest these edits and everybody with “can edit” access will be able to accept or reject them. You can find our more in-depth look at the changes in Google announced earlier this year . |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Apple’s iWatch Patent, The MBA Sticker Ad, And The Defender | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | As the summer presses onward, so do we. A massive Apple patent surfaced this week, giving us our most at the company’s focus for the much-rumored iWatch. And speaking of Apple, the company recently released an showing off MacBook Air notebooks covered in stickers. Plus, we discovered a fun , a portable, all-in-one defense system. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by . |
Greats Brand Sneakers Are Off To The Races Following $1.5M Funding Round | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | , aspiring to be the Warby Parker of mens’ footwear, has revealed that the company broke $100,000 in sales in June, with a projected $1.6 million run rate for the year. Following a , the shoe brand will, for the first time, have three different models of their shoes available at once. Historically, the brand has sold only one or two versions of a shoe at a time. by and , both of whom combined have 20 years of experience in the footwear industry. In August 2013, the duo decided to apply that experience in an effort to save money for the end consumer. The end-result is Greats, which Babenzien describes more as a brand than a business. The team has spent $0 in marketing and still continues to show strong growth both in sales and in a following. On Instagram, for example, where the company actively posts man-centric imagery (maybe 20 percent are shoes), Greats Brand has more than 32,000 followers. And of all the people who purchase shoes, 40 percent of them share that purchase decision on a social network. Luckily, it’s not just everyday Joe’s sharing Greats Brand style on their social feeds — even . Yet even with a focus on brand over business, the company seems to be doing well in terms of sales. The $100k revenue in June came from a single shoe, The Bab. Since launch 11 months ago, sneaker sales are up 250 percent, with revenue up 134 percent. This is thanks in large part to the fact that Greats Brand doesn’t involve any other retailers. They handle design, buy the product wholesale, and market it through social channels for online sale. On the weekends, the team runs a 100 square-foot pop-up out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn but there are plans to get a legitimate retail space up and running. The company also plans to get 10 models available on the site at any given time. Currently, they’re transitioning from one to three, but they’ll reach their 10-model goal by first quarter of next year. Babenzien says this has nothing to do with capital, but rather a more cautious (and still user friendly) way to test what works as they grow. If you want to check out Greats Brand, you’ll find the . |
Bose Picks A Patent Fight With Beats Over Noise-Cancelling Headphones | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | has sued soon-to-be- -owned over patents it holds related to noise-cancelling headphones, according to a new . The new suit means that Apple has a brand new patent battleground, should the Beats acquisition go through as planned, in addition to its ongoing litigation with and others. The full complaint is listed on , and lists Beat Electronics and Beats Electronics International as defendants. Bose alleges that Beats has infringed on 50 years’ worth of research, development and engineering of noise cancelling tech, and that its current lineup of these devices incorporates “at least 36 U.S. patents and applications,” broken down into 22 granted patents and 14 applications currently undergoing review. Beats products named as having infringed upon Bose’s IP include the Beats Studio line, which include the new Studio Wireless Bluetooth headphones. In the filing, Bose also includes a brief history of the development of its tech, which began in 1978 when company founder and engineer was dissatisfied with his airline headphones and decided to develop better ones that would cut out cabin noise. Bose cites the QuietComfort line of consumer headphones, as well as a product history that includes the development of military specific headphones as part of the grounds for its complaint. The specific patents Bose lists in the complaint include United States Patent No. 6,717,537, called “Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Latency in Digital Signal Processing Systems,” United States Patent No. 6,717,537, or “Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Latency in Digital Signal Processing Systems,” and United States Patent No. 8,073,151: “Dynamically Configurable ANR Filter Block Technology,” to name just a few. In total, there are five counts of infringement against five Bose patents named in the suit, which are supposedly violated by Beats’ Studio line. Bose is seeking from the court an injunction against continued infringement, a full account of sales of infringing devices, damages including court costs, determination that the infringement is willful and upwards adjustment of damages accordingly, and “other relief” to be determined by the court. We’ve reached out to both Apple and Bose and will update this story as more information becomes available. The full complaint from PACER can be found below:
Here’s the official statement from Bose provided to TechCrunch on the filing – The filing is comprehensive and explains our position, and as a matter of practice, we don’t comment on on-going litigation. We can share that for over 30 years, Bose has made significant investments in the research, development, engineering and design of the proprietary technologies found in our headphones. Bose’s patented technologies enable the exclusive performance found in our QuietComfort® Acoustic Noise Cancelling® headphones. We are committed to protecting our investment, protecting our customers, and defending the patents we own. |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 7 | 22 | null |
JustReachOut Helps Startups Write Better Email Pitches | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | If there’s one thing we know about at TechCrunch, it’s that doing PR is hard for startups. We get our fair share of bad pitches to our general tips line every day, and we get lots of pitches sent to us individually that just aren’t a good fit. We always tell startups to figure out who the best writer for a given topic is, but if you have to do that across multiple publications (assuming you don’t want to give us the exclusive), it quickly becomes a chore. , a new startup out of growth hacking consultancy firm , recently launched a service that makes PR easier and more affordable for startups by combining its web services with some basic consultancy services. Last week, made a bit of a splash when it launched a service that offers PR firms access to the emails of writers at major tech publications for $9 a month. If you just want to get in touch with us, you can just as well use our list and save yourself a few bucks. Having an email is just one part of the process, though. How do you know what somebody covers? That’s where comes in. It takes this idea, but refines it and adds some basic consulting services on top. The idea behind the service is that most startups can probably in their early days by simply building relationships with the reporters that cover their fields. So the first thing you do on JustReachOut — after you watch a mandatory video on — is look for reporters who have written articles about topics related to your startup (think AWS, Drones, , mobile games, etc.). The service will then look for those and come back with a list of recent articles about the topic and the names of their writers. From there, you click on the writer’s name and you are taken to an email form that’s already pre-filled with a standard pitch. You could run with that, but the company really discourages you from it because you can also ping JustReachOut and they will work with you to craft a much better pitch (and I recommend you do that, because you really want to personalize these kinds of emails as much as you can). , who heads , has done PR for a good seven years now — and has regularly pitched us successfully during those years. (He got us to write about this, after all, so he must know something about how this process works.) As he stressed when I talked to him earlier this week, the focus of the product really isn’t so much on just getting email addresses, but on getting on the phone with him to learn more about how to do startup PR right. “While the tool shows you an email draft and email address right after you click ‘reach out,’ I can guide you through writing up your email pitch,” Dragilev noted. “I’m doing this to help startups think about how to build relationships with press over something they really care about.” The last thing he wants is for people to use the tool and then spam writers (which is much appreciated). Dragilev tells me that the tool enforces some limits on how many emails you can send to ensure that startups aren’t pushing stories too hard and to too many writers. The service uses in the backend to find its email addresses. That fails every now and then, but the tool will always let you know when it can’t verify an addresses. JustReachOut is currently available for $25/month, but after the summer that price will go up to $99 per month (if you sign up before that, you will stay at $25/month). Given that this comes with some hands-on consulting, that feels like a very fair price — especially compared to what a full-service PR firm would charge. |
How Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 Stacks Up A Month Later | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | tablet/PC hybrid, and it’s a departure from their first- and second-generation versions of the Surface line, with an all-new design and a bigger, better display. The device is basically the perfect partner for Windows 8 and the Modern Windows UI, but your appreciation of this device (or lack thereof) will depend heavily on what you want to do with your computer. We , but how does it stand up to extended use? has consistently done at least one thing right with the Surface line of devices, regardless of whatever else people think about the machines – they deliver great examples of modern industrial design, from the magnesium alloy used in the case construction to the engineering feats required to fit a full computer’s internals inside the slim devices. The Surface Pro 3 continues this tradition of great design, with a new lighter look that works well, a slimmer case, and a bigger, more usable 3:2 ratio display that captures a user’s full attention when it’s active. [gallery ids="1035054,1035052,1035053,1035055,1035056,1035057,1035051"] The new kickstand on the Surface Pro 3 is also a big improvement, and even though I admittedly poked fun at a built-in kickstand on the original Surface, it has indeed proven useful in every generation of the machine. This time, the full range of motion is available instead of just a few select lock positions, and that’s a big advantage for using this thing around the house, and for digital art, which is one of my primary use cases in a Surface. There are still some quirks in the design – despite losing weight, it’s still heavy if your expectations are set based on coming from an iPad, and the screen size, despite offering a better movie watching and graphics work experience, means that using it handheld is a little bit more awkward than before. Overall, though, it’s definitely an improvement on previous generations when it comes to design. Microsoft has learned from its past releases and created features for the Surface Pro 3 that greatly benefit the overall experience. The kickstand mentioned above offers a big advantage in terms of how usable the Surface Pro 3 is in various situations, including while used on your lap. The new click shortcuts for the pen are also great, including using a long press to automatically open OneNote and begin a new blank document, even when the computer is asleep with the screen turned off. They may not be new, but some existing features of Windows 8 also come in handy, and shine especially bright on the Surface Pro 3. Chief among these is the ability to run apps side-by-side in a windowed mode that splits the screen among them. This makes multitasking while keeping an eye on Twitter easy, and the additional screen real estate afforded by the new Surface Pro 3 display makes using the feature feel a lot less cramped. Based on my usage of the device, it’s hard to understate the value of the new OneNote auto-launch functionality using the pen. The Surface Pro is basically the perfect digital handwritten notetaking tablet, and this really ups its value in that regard. But the pen also loses some tricks in the switch from Wacom to N-Trig as a provider, including automatic flip-to-erase functionality in drawing programs, and that’s less than ideal. The big value proposition behind the Surface Pro 3 has always been its ability to run full-powered Windows applications despite having a portable, tablet-style form factor. The Surface Pro 3 isn’t a huge advancement in terms of performance over the Surface Pro 2 in this regard, but it does push the needle a bit. During some activities, however, including unlocking the device and rotating the screen, I actually felt that the Surface Pro 3 was a bit more prone to lag and delays than the Surface Pro 2. Once active, apps and games performed well, and despite having read elsewhere that drawing responsiveness was less than stellar compared to the Surface Pro 2, I found in my use that it was still more than acceptable when working with the new, Surface Pro 3 high-density display optimized version of Photoshop CC, and with Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro. The new digitizer doesn’t have anywhere near the levels of sensitivity of the one provided by Wacom on the Surface Pro 2, but for light digital painting, photo editing and cartooning (my uses), it works well enough that many probably won’t notice a difference. The display on the Surface Pro 3 is one of its standout features – the high density resolution makes it great for watching movies or Netflix, and for using the Windows Modern UI. The classic desktop will be harder to navigate for those with old eyes or vision problems, because it renders individual elements so small, and that’s true of apps not built for HiDPI screens, too. Overall, though, Microsoft has really outdone themselves with this screen, and that’s just another part of what makes this machine so useful for those working in digital artistic fields. Battery life on the Surface Pro 3 is rated at 9 hours of web browsing usage, and it definitely feels more long-lasting than the one found in the Surface Pro 2. If you’re coming from a notebook you’ll be pleasantly surprised, but for video streaming and intense graphic application usage, you’ll likely find it doesn’t reach near that nine-hour mark. Again, this is a situation where your origin point will determine your reaction: coming from a tablet could make battery feel inadequate, but transitioning from the PC world, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Microsoft is touting the Surface Pro 3 as a device that eliminates the consumer question of “tablet, laptop or both?” and to some extent, it can do that. But answering that question with the Surface Pro 3 means making other concessions, too – despite the marketing push, it’s not a perfect ‘have your cake and eat it, too’ scenario. Windows 8 is not everyone’s cup of tea, for instance, despite improvements made with Windows 8.1. And the software library for Modern Windows is still such that you may not be able to find everything you’re looking for. The fact is that despite its merits, the Surface Pro 3 is still a niche device – but for a couple of very different niches. It could work great for someone looking for a single computer solution that’s closer to an iPad but with a larger display and a little more range in terms of approximating a desktop; and it could be great for a digital artist looking for something to use away from their home setup. It’s a solid machine and an example of well-executed hardware engineering, but at $799 plus the cost of a $130 Type Cover, it might still have a few too many quirks and peculiarities for the average user. For those who fit the profile, however, there’s nothing else quite like it. |
Lyft Strikes A Deal To Launch Service In New York City, But Pauses Operations In Buffalo And Rochester | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | On-demand ride startup has come to a bit of a resolution in the city and state of New York that will allow it to begin offering service in the city after two weeks of discussions with regulators there. But in striking a deal that will make it available in all five boroughs of the Big Apple, Lyft has agreed to pause its operations in two other cities in New York State. Two weeks ago, announced that it in Brooklyn and Queens, but ended up after receiving pushback from the New York Attorney General and the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Ever since, it’s been in talks to reach a compromise with those bodies that would allow it to operate in the city. That compromise has apparently been reached, with Lyft announcing today that it will finally launch operations tonight — but not just in a couple of boroughs. Lyft will offer service in all five boroughs, including the Bronx and Staten Island, as part of the agreement. That service starts at 7:00 PM Eastern Time tonight. That’s not the only concession that Lyft has agreed to, however. As part of its launch, its entire fleet of drivers will be licensed by the local Taxi and Limousine Commission, meaning that it’s taking a step back from the pure ride-sharing model that it’s been operating under in other markets around the country. For the most part, Lyft’s driver base has historically been made up by folks who aren’t commercially licensed by local authorities. That’s given it access to a nearly unlimited number of drivers who have a car and some spare time, as well as an inclination to drive around with a big furry pink mustache on the front of their vehicle while making extra cash. As such, Lyft has been working hard with regulators to build a framework that is friendly to its service without requiring it to play by all the same rules as taxis and other for-hire vehicles. Because Lyft (and for that matter, and ) held its drivers to higher standards than those required by most local transportation bodies, it believed that adherence to those rules and need for individually issued commercial licenses for were largely moot, anyway. That approach has worked in places like California and Seattle, where Lyft and the other ride-sharing startups have gotten new rules adopted to fit the way that they do business. But for New York City, the company will be conforming to local regulations while it tries to work out more of a compromise. At least that’s true in the short term. In the longer term, Lyft is hoping to continue discussions with the New York TLC about possibly creating a framework that is similar to what has been adopted in California, and creates a separate class of services from the existing taxi and black car market. The need to onboard only licensed drivers, and the need to cover a larger geographical area means that new Lyft users will probably see longer wait times than they might have in other markets. When Lyft announced its launch plans a few weeks ago, it was opening up with 500 drivers at launch. It wouldn’t disclose numbers, but the company has acknowledged that — for what it’s now calling a beta launch in New York City — that number will be significantly smaller. While the good news is that potential passengers in the Big Apple will now have another choice for transportation, the company is pausing operations in two other markets in New York: Buffalo and Rochester. That’s because, while it has struck a deal with the local regulator in New York City, the TLC, different rules apply in other parts of the state. In particular, there’s an insurance requirement for for-hire vehicles that Lyft needs to comply with under state rules, which it is trying to work out before resuming rides there. Even so, it seems like Lyft is one step closer to figuring out some of the regulatory issues that it faces in New York State. |
Wacom’s New Stylus Series Offers A Digital Pen For Every Scribbler, Sketcher And Note-Taker | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Wacom has a series of new stylus devices for tablets and smartphones that it’s launching today, including three new Bamboo devices and a new Intuos version, with two aimed specifically at the iPad with special Bluetooth-powered pressure sensitivity abilities. Two offer a better nib, with one adding an ink pen on the opposite end, and the Bamboo Stylus fineline has a special thin tip with 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity, and the doubling that with 2048 levels of pressure, on par with some of Wacom’s top-end artistic tablets. The new Bamboo Solo and Bamboo Duo won’t break the budget, at $19.95 and $29.95 respectively, and even the Bamboo Stylus fineline is only $59.95 despite its Bluetooth connectivity and pressure sensitivity. All three are going on sale September 4, via Wacom’s online store and select retail partners. The more expensive Intuos Creative Stylus 2 is just $79.95 (you couldn’t get a pressure sensitive stylus for less than that when they first started becoming available) and should offer the most sensitivity on the market. It’s aimed at digital artists, and could provide a better mobile workflow for users of Wacom’s Intuos and Cintiq line that’s suitable for when they’re on the road. It ships in October, however, so for the time being I was only able to try out the new Bamboo line. Let’s start with the best: The Bamboo Stylus fineline is indeed a significant improvement on the Bamboo line, with a thin tip that works better in terms of mimicking a natural drawing and writing experience. Its pressure sensitivity also works well in Bamboo Paper at least, and it supports other apps as well via Bamboo’s developer partnerships. The palm rejection is intelligent and faultless in my experience, and it has a standard microUSB charging port in the base that juices a battery good for up to 26 hours of continuous use. Wacom is also planning to roll out cloud services that will let the pen automatically share files and settings across different devices through the pen’s Bluetooth connection. The fineline unlocks special tools in the free Paper app with purchase, too, and these provided more than my required share of options for light sketching, jotting down ideas and taking handwritten notes in the app. While there’s still a little lag, especially with some tools like the variable width inking marker, it’s come a long way from early days. Both the Bamboo Solo and the Bamboo Duo also offer nice improvements over the originals, including more ergonomic design and new tips that seem more durable, as well as providing a better feel when used with touchscreen devices. These are designed for use with any tablet, iPad or otherwise, as well as smartphones. The small but significant changes have solidified these as the best affordable styluses currently on the market if you’re looking for a basic tablet pen, and the Duo’s actual ballpoint nib on the end make it a great option for those who also still carry a real notebook and value the indelibility of real ink. Wacom’s stylus options are worthy inheritors of its reputation as a maker of drawing and sketching accessories for the discerning computer user, and a sign that this category, while seemingly straightforward, still has room for some innovation. |
Amazon Rolls Out A YouTube-Like “Video Shorts” Section On Instant Video | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | ‘s has traditionally been thought of as both a rival to and , in terms of offering movies and TV shows for rent, purchase or for free streaming via the company’s Amazon Prime membership program. But you might want to add to that list of would-be competitors, as Amazon has now introduced a new section to Instant Video focused on short-form, YouTube-like content called “ .” The company says that the Video Shorts section was added to Instant Video within the last couple of weeks, though the content it contains has actually been building up on the site for much longer than that. Amazon started adding short-form video content to its video service last year, and has been slowly growing the catalog, which now contains a mix of movie and game trailers, music videos and concert clips, how-to videos, and more. The how-to’s on Instant Video focus largely on beauty and makeup tips – a genre which is exploding on YouTube, where tune in to vloggers’ channels, and which produces breakout stars like , who today has over 6.7 million subscribers, for example. Amazon’s offering, however, pales in comparison with YouTube’s user-generated content: its beauty videos seem to be aggregated from content farms like Howcast or Howdini. Meanwhile, the Video Shorts video game section largely features game trailers and clips, and very few walkthroughs or tips, like YouTube offers. Meanwhile, Amazon has no rival to game livestreaming, a more recently popular category for online video which has since resulted in a billion dollar exit for Twitch to YouTube parent company, Google, . Other sections in Amazon’s short form video section include “Food & Drink,” “Technology” and “Literature & Books” – categories which conveniently also relate to content Amazon.com sells in its online store. Though these days, what Amazon selling? The company’s , with investments in everything from cloud infrastructure and services to mobile devices and consumer hardware. The company wants to deliver groceries to your door, ship its products via drone, stream media to all your screens, and even produce its own TV shows and games. It shouldn’t then come as any surprise that Amazon would also see its Instant Video Service as something that could not only take on iTunes and Netflix, but potentially YouTube as well…at least, one day. At present, though, the Video Shorts section only has “hundreds of thousands” of videos to choose from – a figure which seems like a lot, but is only a drop in the bucket compared with YouTube, which today hosts over a billion visitors monthly who watch over 6 billion hours of video. Amazon may have added a Video Shorts section, but it still has a long, way to go to produce a business that would actually compete with YouTube. |
With Intercom’s New In-App Messenger, Businesses Can Get Smarter About Talking To Customers | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | When to join customer communication startup , he told me the goal was to help businesses becoeme more personable and intimate when communicating with customers. With the recent launch of the new version of Intercom’s in-app messenger, it sounds like the company has taken a big step in that direction. The launch comes after at the beginning of this year. To be honest, when I first got the details about the new product, none of the individual features struck me as all that unusual. However, Intercom team members argued (first via email and then in a remote demo) that it’s the complete product that’s unique. Specifically, Adams (who’s now Intercom’s vice president of product) said the team focused on five key areas — the impersonal nature of customer messages, the poor targeting and timing of those messages, the lack of context, the fact that those messages aren’t very conversational, and the fact that many of those tools in this market treat the web and mobile as two separate things. So for example, if a startup adds a new feature to their website, the main way they’d ask customers for feedback is by sending them a generic email asking them what they think — and most of those emails will be ignored. “We don’t think these five things are well-served in the market at all by anybody,” Adams said. He added that the consumer apps that you probably use to message your friends are “so fast, so simple, and so natural,” while that’s not true on the business side. To show off the new messenger, Adams demonstrated it on the Intercom site itself. Again, if Intercom added a new feature, it would want to ask users what they think. In this case, however, those users get the message within the application itself, right after they used the feature. The message would be formatted to look like a natural part of the app, and it wouldn’t appear as if came from the company, but from a specific team member. The person sending the message would have data about the person they’re messaging (whether they’re a long-time user, for example), and they could choose the format of the message, as well as add photos, videos, and emoticons (because “(grin)” just doesn’t have the same effect). Behind the scenes, Intercom customers will be able to see aggregated data about the kinds of responses they’re getting. Over time, Adams said the messenger will start supporting more sophisticated workflows. And yes, businesses will be able to deliver these messages on both web and mobile. After testing the messenger with a limited number of businesses, Intercom made it available to all customers last week.
|
Microsoft Will Mass-Produce Its Big-Ass Touchscreens | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Remember the ? Microsoft isn’t done making huge slabs of touch-capable screen, it turns out. The company’s announced this week that Microsoft intends to “mass-produce” its Perceptive Pixel (PPI) displays, which are touch-enabled and can stretch to up to 82 inches in size. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley , which Microsoft confirmed to TechCrunch. Microsoft . The purchase brought the software company the ability to build large — very large — touchscreens that suited its Windows 8 push well. However, the screens saw limited commercial uptake, so far as I have been able to tell (they did become what I can only call internal status symbols at Microsoft — if you could get one for your office on campus, it meant something). Microsoft’s intention to mass-produce the hardware means that it will sell touch-based screens of all sizes. With its Nokia hardware purchase, Microsoft sells touchscreens that are best suited for your pocket. With Surface, touch screens that fit best inside your backpack. And with PPI displays, touch screens that can only fit on a huge slab of open wall. Elop didn’t elaborate on price, but we do have some data to go on. As I from Microsoft’s campus: And the prices [of PPI displays] are coming down. The 55 inch PPI display, according to Microsoft’s Eric Rudder, the Chief Technical Strategy Officer at the firm, will run you around $7,000 at present. In conversation on Microsoft’s Redmond campus, Eric indicated that he was working to quickly lower the price of the displays. They will ride the lessening cost curve of the television set world, it would seem. This puts the 55 inch PPI but a few generations from being affordable enough for the average enthusiast. The 82 inch behemoth will likely take longer, but the question of its affordability is a when, not question. So what price can we expect? Make your own guess, but we could be just a few generational cycles away from being able to afford putting a frakkin massive touchscreen display in our homes. I always found Windows 8 to be a far more enjoyable experience on a PPI than any other display size — almost as if the operating system were designed for more screen real estate. Windows 9, it seems, . |
A Letter To Jennifer Lawrence | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Dear Jennifer Lawrence, You and I don’t know each other, but I work in tech news and, as such, have read and of what happened to you and a group of other women who work in Hollywood over the long weekend. While it is not exactly clear how your privacy was violated and your property was stolen, there is apparently an who spend their precious lives perpetuating these kinds of actions — “collecting” stolen, private images of both famous and non-famous women to gawk at in online backchannels. Though I was aware through my job that this subsection of the Internet existed, I had no idea it was this orchestrated, at this scale. Quite frankly, this fact is terrifying. It sucks to be a woman on the Internet when there some sort of bounty program for your private information. All day you are sized up and objectified and abstracted. Just read . We are quite literally made inhuman online. And we are dehumanized even further by whatever the hell is going on in and beyond. At its essence, this is a crime against all women, which is a crime against humanity, and can ever make amends for it. If someone gives you generalized “advice” on what you could have done to avoid this, give them the bird. I’m sure you know by now how to pick a more difficult password and random answers to your security questions. If are accurate, what went down is a bit more complicated than that, involving many different individuals and points of failure. When the , I was angry that Apple makes people wait three days to enable two-factor authentication on their iCloud accounts. It turns out in this case. The criminals apparently , “My iCloud keeps telling me to back it up and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how to back you up. Do it yourself,” you once. I have had the exact same thought at that exact same notification, because iCloud can be quite complicated: If you have Photo Stream toggled on (the default), it automatically sends your photos to iCloud, where they exist even if you delete them from your phone. There’s a reason that a ( was made about this process. The concept of automatic photo and video uploads is more fraught with issues than it seems at first, and there’s no automatic way to see what’s up there when it’s up there. If I and other industry reporters don’t know how exactly to absolutely protect ourselves, because the targets and tools are always changing, how will people who don’t have our exposure to tech? The onus is on Apple and other tech platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft to keep their customers — us — safe. Though stolen photos are being shared that have been extracted from Android and Windows Phone backups, too, I’m singling out Apple here because Apple, beyond any other tech company, prides itself on a seamless consumer experience. It’s done a very good job of hiding the technical aspects of its products : “ ” Well, not in this case. Finally, I’m so sorry — I only hope that the people behind this , and that the mass awareness of that fact prevents anyone else from attempting something this vile. They’re to blame foremost. Best, Alexia Tsotsis Co-Editor, TechCrunch |
Jared Leto Dishes On His Favorite Tech Investment | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | TechCrunch caught up with actor and singer today backstage at BoxWorks, the annual confab focused on Box’s enterprise file storage service. Leto had just taken part in the event’s keynote, which stretched north of two hours. Why would Leto, who won an academy award in 2013 for his performance in “Dallas Buyers Club,” take part in a technology conference? Simply put, it’s somewhat . Leto claims dozens of investments in young companies and is the founder of several firms himself. While Leto is mostly known for his work in entertainment, he has also put money into Surf Air, Zenefits and Wish. His best investment? According to Leto, Nest, a company that . I hadn’t been aware that Leto was involved with Nest in any capacity. In fact, lists only four investments to his name. The musician is therefore one of the quieter celebrity investors out there. There is no shortage of famous money in tech at the moment, or star hype, but it tends to be noisy. In Leto’s case, somewhat to the contrary, I doubt that many in tech know that he is so active. That might be because Leto has also founded three companies, which, along with his film and touring schedule, could restrict his ability to chat too much about where he shunts his dollars. The three firms are The Hive, which focuses on social media management for brands; The One and Only Golden Tickets, which is now operates under the Adventures in Wonderland moniker; and VyRT, which deals with the live-streaming of concerts, but remains in beta. All told, Leto is perhaps the only celebrity technology investor that I don’t actively dislike. That and he’s a decent human in person. Watch the clip; it was a fun shoot. |
Yes, Google Will Now (Probably) Replace Your Nexus 5 If You Bust The Screen | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Did you drop your shiny new(ish) Nexus 5 and wreck the screen? Don’t panic! Google has tweaked its stance on accidental damage a bit, and will now (probably) replace the handset for free — but there are a few catches. Word going around the rumor mill was that Google had suddenly instated a new policy regarding replacements for Nexus handsets that had been accidentally damaged. The weird part? No one seemed to have confirmation from Google on the matter. So we, you know, called Google and asked. Here’s what we learned: It’s not so much a “policy” as it is an “exception” that Google’s customer service reps are allowed to make — so you probably don’t want to be a jerk about it when you call. Also, it doesn’t seem like every rep necessarily knows about this yet. Until now, accidental damage — be it water damage or a shattered display — generally meant you’d foot the bill. A replacement screen, for example, would cost about $150 (or about 42 percent of the cost of buying a new Nexus 5 outright). A Google spokesperson confirmed the new “exception,” but was quick to reaffirm that, “this special exception is available in the U.S. only at this time.” [via on Google+] |
An Inside Look At The Development Of Samsung’s Gear VR At Oculus With CEO Brendan Iribe | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | key platform partner behind , having co-developed the hardware and having built the and first party demonstration apps entirely in-house. The company’s foray into mobile may be newly revealed, but it began not long after the original Oculus Rift hardware was introduced to the world at CES in 2013. “We generated all of this excitement, and people just really got enthusiastic,” Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe explained in an interview with TechCrunch. “We showed up with still just a prototype at the time, and got numerous awards and then met with Samsung not too long after that.” Oculus had been seeking to meet with Samsung for a while, because it rightly figured the company’s AMOLED screen technology would be a key piece of its tech picture for the Oculus Rift headset. Samsung, while interested in that supply relationship, also had designs on mobile VR and its future, it turned out. “When we met with [Samsung,] they said ‘Actually, we’re happy to support VR in your products with screen technology, but we also think there’s an opportunity on mobile,’ and they brought the first prototype [of Gear VR] to the table,” Iribe recounted. “They said they’d been working on it a while, and we asked how long, and they said ‘Oh a few months,’ so it was when we made all this noise worldwide at CES that they decided to get involved.” Initially, Iribe and Oculus were skeptical of what could be accomplished in terms of virtual reality on the mobile side of things – the team had been working on devices powered by impressive desktop hardware, after all. But they were still open to the possibility, and decided to take Samsung’s first and see what they could develop on top of it. “We took it back to the lab, their prototype, and played with it a little bit, and an idea came to us,” he said. “The sensor inside of a phone is just not good enough to deliver great VR; it’s not fast enough, it’s not accurate enough, etc. But what if we glued the sensor from the DK1 [initial developer prototype of Oculus Rift] on the side of this thing and jacked it into the USB port? Lo and behold, we started to see really promising results.” The mobile possibilities are what helped convince ID founder , and while Iribe says it wasn’t the sole cause for him coming on board, the smartphone-powered VR prototype did pique his interest in a considerable way. “We showed it to John Carmack, and he got super excited and said basically ‘I think there’s real potential here and I’d like to dedicate my next few years to making this a reality because I really believe in the whole mobile VR untethered world,'” Iribe added. Once that enthusiasm was established, Oculus brought in Max Cohen, the company’s VP of Mobile. Carmack ran the mobile effort for the first few months, through his trademark practice of what Iribe describes as “locking himself in a room” and working away on a problem with single-minded determination. But while Carmack provided the initial zeal, he isn’t the only one at Oculus focusing on mobile platform development efforts. “What’s great about John on this project is that he has amazing ideas, and a lot of them he’ll take all the way to completion because he’s just very productive,” Cohen explained to TechCrunch. “But other times there will be other very capable developers on the team who can take that and make the magic happen themselves, freeing up John to come up with the next crazy idea.” Carmack and the mobile team iterating on the hardware and software experience have resulted in a final product that, while still not “immersive” in the way that the Oculus Rift prototype is, by Oculus’ own admission, is still heads and tails beyond the competition, according to Iribe. “When we saw the first Samsung demo, it looked like what most of the other mobile VR demos have looked like, whether it was Google Cardboard or FOV2GO,” he said. “There’s a sea of these kind of crappy mobile VR headsets where they just don’t deliver a great experience. You certainly wouldn’t want to strap any one of them to your head for more than a few seconds.” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n5ov-DKBMA&w=640&h=480]
Oculus’ efforts with its own sensor, and with supplementing other aspects of Samsung’s design, as well as with working on the software development tools and first-party apps are what set this apart from experiments like Google Cardboard. This remains an experimental project itself, however, intended for early adopters and developers, and even Iribe admits that wide consumer availability is probably still a ways away. “This is something that is not ready for mass market consumers, but it will be soon, and as it is, and as it rolls out, you’ll start to see more devices powered by Oculus over the next few years,” he said. “A decade from now, or even less than a decade – five, seven or eight years from now, I think you’ll see a lot of devices powered by Oculus available across both mobile and PC.” Neither Iribe nor Cohen would comment on any discussions with smartphone OEMs beyond Samsung, saying they’re currently “laser-focused on Samsung,” but Iribe did concede that he believes mobile manufactures competing with the Korean company will at least want what Gear VR offers once they see how well it performs. Iribe and Cohen say that the Samsung partnership and Gear VR project were in place long before Facebook came along, and that the social network company’s acquisition of Oculus VR had virtually no effect on their project roadmap with the mobile maker. The Oculus parent company was nothing but supportive, and offered resources at every step, according to the two, but Iribe says ultimately this was still entirely an Oculus project, managed and run by the Oculus team with its own goals in mind. Still, Facebook is obviously interested in the future of mobile, so the partners’ interests clearly align in this case. Ultimately, mobility may be what helps popularize Oculus to a degree greater than any technical wizardry behind the goggles could accomplish – Iribe says that already, he’s been able to demo Gear VR more easily to a wider number of people in a shorter amount of time than he ever could with Oculus Rift, given its relative portability and the simplicity of the setup. VR is one of those technical achievements that’s hard for people to wrap their heads around without experiencing first-hand, and Gear VR could do more for Oculus in that regard in a short period of time than the scant number of Rift developer units has since they became available. Whatever its ultimate fate, the Gear VR is a proof-of-concept for a mobile incarnation of immersive computing, and Iribe, Carmack, Cohen and their team have used it to prove that while Google might poke fun with cardboard larks, Oculus isn’t playing around when it comes to smartphones and virtual reality. |
Fox Sports Go To Stream 101 NFL Games Online And On Tablets This Season | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Once upon a time, it was rare to see sports streamed online, but that’s no longer true. As more and more audiences are turning to their laptops, mobile phones and tablets to watch streams of their favorite sports teams, broadcasters are increasingly making those matches available on those devices. The latest is Fox Sports, which will it has rights to this season. Streaming is nothing entirely new: After all, DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket service has provided streaming access to all out-of-market games over the last several years. Part of the reason for that is that it had exclusive rights to those streams, and well, they provided a reason for NFL fans to sign up — whether or not they had a satellite dish. Over time, the appetite for streaming has expanded to other networks when available. ESPN has made its Monday Night Football games available online and through its WatchESPN app for tablets. And the last three Super Bowls have all been streamed — first by , then by , and last season by . Apparently that last live broadcast was successful enough for Fox Sports to decide to do it some more. This year, the network will be streaming 101 NFL Games on its website and tablet app. Those scheduled streams include 97 regular-season games and four playoff games that will take place over the course of the 2014 season. There are a few caveats to this announcement. The first is that viewers will have to authenticate — that is, sign in with their cable or satellite provider to prove that they pay for television access. The second caveat is that while Fox Sports will live stream more than 100 games altogether over the NFL season, only in-market games will be available to viewers. That is, if you’re a Philadelphia Eagles fan in San Francisco like I am, you’re out of luck — you’ll be stuck watching 49ers streams through the app. For the majority of NFL fans rooting for the local sportsball team, however, the new streaming option will be a welcome way to catch the game, even when they can’t be in front of the big screen on Sunday afternoon. |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 7 | 25 | null |
Amazon Invites Children’s Book Authors To Kindle Direct Publishing, Rolls Out Kids’ Book Creator Software | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Amazon announced this afternoon that it will be expanding its Kindle Direct Publishing business to support the needs of children’s books authors through a new program it’s calling “ .” Along with the program, which is aimed at helping authors prepare, publish and distribute books in the Kindle Store, Amazon is also releasing a new tool, the Kindle Kids’ Book Creator. This tool will allow budding children’s book authors to create chapter books and illustrated children’s books that are able to take advantage of Kindle features like text pop-ups, explains Amazon in an about the new services. After the book is finalized, authors can also use the tool to upload the book to KDP while also stipulating the category, age and grade range filters needed to get the book listed correctly. Optionally, KDP Kids authors can also enroll in KDP Select which allows them to earn royalties through Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. They would then also have the ability use other marketing tools available to Select authors, like the Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions. The doesn’t just have to be for new authors looking for a way onto Amazon’s Kindle platform, however, but could also support established authors looking to convert their books into a Kindle format in order to expand their reader base. The software is available as both a Mac and PC download, and lets chapter book authors import manuscripts in Word (doc/docx), as well as HTML, Mobi, ePub and other formats, so there isn’t much need for additional conversion tools. Meanwhile, illustrated book authors can import files in PDF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, and PPM formats. “Kids” is now one of many genres KDP supports today, which also includes categories like Literature, Business, Mystery/Thriller, Non-Fiction, Romance, Sci-Fi, Teens/Young Adult and more. But children’s books are a potentially growing category for Amazon, as the youngest generation of readers today will be using tablet devices even before their first birthday in many cases, and will be comfortable moving to a digital reading format having never remembered the era where hardbound and paperback books were your only choices for reading. The announcement comes at a time when Amazon is embroiled in a which has put authors – and their readers – in the middle. But it also comes at a time when indie publishing is on the rise, having produced break-out hits (of questionable literary quality) like It makes sense that Amazon would want to tap into this growing trend for other genres, too – especially as it markets its own Kindle Fire tablets to families with small children, where features like Kindle Free Time enable safe use of the device among ever-younger users, while other parental controls . |
Attend TechCrunch Disrupt For Free #TCDisrupt | Travis Bernard | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Haven’t been picked for our giveaway contest yet? Don’t fret, dear reader. We’re giving away yet another ticket to Disrupt. This contest starts now and ends in one hour at 4 PM Pacific. All you have to do is enter to win. You can earn extra entries to the contest by sharing the giveaway link with friends and following our social accounts. Details about Disrupt San Francisco and the giveaway: To enter, click the “enter to win” image at the bottom of this post. . Enter to Win Disrupt SF Tickets |
Incubated: Media Camp Helps Startups Get Connected With Hollywood Decision-Makers | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | A few years ago, a couple of execs at Turner Broadcasting decided they wanted to find a way to better help startups looking to create media-focused products. And so, they created an incubator called to guide those companies to success. Launched at SXSW 2012, Media Camp was founded to identify interesting startups and help them build products that big media conglomerates would actually want and use. Up until that point, most startups entering the space had good ideas, but didn’t know how large media companies worked, or who they should contact to even get their foot in the door. Today, the program is a joint initiative led by Turner Broadcasting in San Francisco and Warner Bros. Entertainment in Los Angeles. Media Camp is a 12-week program designed to connect founders with high-level mentors who know the business and can point them in the right direction when it comes to building products that work with media companies’ existing workflows. And while it provides all the same mentorship that one might expect from a typical accelerator, it has one distinct advantage for startups looking to build tools around the media business. As part of Time Warner, the program can help make introductions to the decision makers within that company. Since it’s focused on media specifically, startups that go through the program can find early customers and get the market validation they need. Either that, or they can get feedback from media companies about what they can do to improve their products and get them adopted in the market. On the flip side, Time Warner gets an early look into upcoming startups and technologies that its units can use to improve their businesses. And in some cases, they are exposed to startups solving problems they didn’t even know they had. Media Camp typically chooses 5-10 companies per class, and looks for those which already have product in the market, or one that is close to launch. To find out more about the incubator, check out the video above. And be sure to watch some of our other incubated videos while you’re at it. Check out all the episodes of Incubated here: |
Facebook Is Down On Web And Mobile [Update: It’s Coming Back After 20 Minutes] | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Is Facebook Down? Why yes it is. [Update: Err, was. As of 1pm PST, service has returned to the US, Germany, and other places after a roughly 20 outage, though some users are still having trouble accessing the service.] Users reported the social network went down on web and mobile in the US as well as the UK, Germany, Thailand, Portugal, and other parts of the world at around 12:40pm PST. With earnings of , Facebook theoretically loses about $22,453 for every minute it’s down around the globe. However, since this was pretty prime browsing time for Facebook’s key markets in the West, it was likely losing a lot more. The 20 minute outage could have cost it around a half million dollars. showed the outages too. We’ve contacted Facebook for info about how widespread the problem was, and the cause, and when all users worldwide can expect it to work again. Facebook has had an uncharacteristically problematic summer with major outages in , , and . We’ll have more info when we hear back from Facebook. Update: Facebook provided this statement. “Earlier today we encountered an error while making an infrastructure configuration change that briefly made it difficult for people to access Facebook. We immediately discovered the issue and fixed it, and everyone should now be able to connect. We apologize for the inconvenience and will thoroughly investigate this issue so we can learn from it and ensure that Facebook is there when people need it.” For now, here’s some of the best Internet art criticizing Facebook for sucking away our time (all rights and accolades go to the original artists). Feel free to take this moment to go outside or have a quiet moment of reflection before the feed starts gushing again. |
Raspberry Pi Gets A Better Browser | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | [vimeo 104919646 w=500 h=375] For most of the English-speaking world, Raspberry Pi getting a new, improved web browser is a blip at best. But for a few elite hackers and educators, it’s a blessing. For years, RaspPi users have suffered from a fairly janky browser that is built into the stock version of Raspbian Linux. While you could roll your own browser, it wasn’t high on anyone’s list. Now, however, there’s Epiphany. This new browser is rewritten by the folks at for the latest Raspberry Pis and offers solid improvements over the original version. These : Future versions of the RaspPi OS will include the new browser but you can install it by typing: Get thee to the repository! |
Haven Keeps Your Doors Locked Without Keys | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Here’s a clever solution to keeping your door locked: It’s called and it attaches to the floor and the doorframe. To open your door, you simply disengage the floor attachment and open it normally. There are no locks to pick or deadbolts to crack, simply because you don’t need to use those to keep the door closed. Created by Alex Bertelli, former Army man turned business development expert in Tennessee, and serial entrepreneur Clay Banks, the product uses your phone or a specially keyed fob to open and close the door at will. “We built this because we knew there had to be a better way to use technology to protect our families and we didn’t want to be a victim of the next break-in,” said Banks. The Haven will be made in the U.S. and will be constructed of sturdy glass-filled nylon polymer, steel, and aluminum. They plan to assemble the parts in Tennessee and will be holding a Kickstarter this month. “Our competitors are focused on converting traditional deadbolts into smart locks, but with the rise of break-ins that doesn’t make the lock any safer. We are setting ourselves apart by creating a stronger smarter solution. Placing the lock at the bottom of the door will prevent, protect and delay entry into someone’s home by using the strength of the foundation,” said Banks. The company is headquartered in Nashville. You can sign up for more information on their site, , and expect more details as they finalize the design. For now, however, it looks like a solid way to keep out intruders, zombies, dragons, and even wizards. |
Intel Debuts The MICA, A Fashionable Smart Bracelet Designed By Opening Ceremonies | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Intel is about the idea of making computers that don’t look like computers, namely in the wearables space. Instead of latching a mini smartphone screen onto a wrist band, the technology company wants to be the brains behind the operation, not the looks. That said, Intel has partnered with Opening Ceremonies to bring a new female-oriented wearable to the market. They haven’t been super forth coming about the software or its capabilities/features, but we do know a bit about the hardware. For one, it will be called MICA (my intelligent communications accessory) and it will debut at the Opening Ceremonies runway show at New York Fashion Week. Unlike most of the wearables on the market, it looks more like a bracelet than a smart watch, built with premium materials like semi-precious gems, snakeskin, pearls, tiger’s eye and obsidian. The Mica will feature a 1.6-inch curved Sapphire touchscreen OLED display. It has a 256 x 160 resolution. That said, the touchscreen will be worn on the inside of the wrist as opposed to on the outside like a smart watch, letting the fashion-centric part of the design shine. The company is calling it a notifications device, hinting that it will probably keep users in the know with their social media updates, calendar reminders, text messages, and other inbound content. We’ve also learned that it will have its own 3G radio, offering connectivity without having to pair the bracelet to a smartphone. The bracelet has a clasp near the touchscreen to get it on and off, an dcomes with wireless charging or the option to charge via USB. Intel worked with both Opening Ceremonies and the CFDA to ensure that this wearable focuses on fashion and not necessarily tech specs. We’ve seen this approach before from smaller startups, like , but this is the first time that a major tech player has genuinely approached design this way. That said, the MICA will probably cost $300 at the very least, as Intel and Opening Ceremonies expect it to retail at around the same price as other jewelry in Opening Ceremonies portofolio. It will be available before the holidays at both Opening Ceremonies and Barney’s. [gallery ids="1051283,1051282,1051281"] |
Twitter Taps HackerOne To Launch Its Bug Bounty Program | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Following that have shook confidence in many online services, Twitter today the that will pay security researchers for responsibly reporting threats through , a bug bounty program provider. will pay a minimum of $140 per threat reported on Twitter.com, ads.twitter, mobile Twitter, TweetDeck, apps.twitter, and its iOS and Android apps. Twitter actually began working with HackerOne three months ago according to its , but it seems the Apple celebrity photo hack has catapulted cybersecurity to a new level of mainstream interest, and Twitter wanted to show that it takes keeping its users safe quite seriously. Twitter writes “To recognize their efforts and the important role they play in keeping Twitter safe for everyone we offer a bounty for reporting certain qualifying security vulnerabilities.” Already the program has recognized 44 hackers for helping Twitter close 46 bugs. Some large companies like run their own bug bounty programs, but offers a plug-and-play solution for companies that want the benefits of crowdsourced bug hunting without having to fiddle with administering the program themselves. Others that employ HackerOne include Yahoo, Square, MailChimp, Slack and Coinbase. to expand and market its programs. HackerOne was co-founder by Alex Rice, a former Facebook security team member who saw the social network’s self-run bug bounty program save the company from tons of threats. , Twitter offers a higher minimum reward than the $50 Yahoo provides or the $100 from Slack, but significantly less than the $1,000 bounty from Coinbase, $250 from Square, or the with its in-house program. Some are to work more closely with outside security research following the celebrity photo iCloud hacks this week. Instead, yesterday it for not choosing more secure passwords or enabling additional protections. While it does cooperate with independent experts via , some believe a more open program could have identified some of the tactics used to steal access to iCloud accounts of stars like Jennifer Lawrence. Perhaps Twitter’s move will encourage Apple to rethink how it includes the community in boosting security. |
La Revedere: Groupon Shuts Down Service In Romania | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | international business today got a little bit smaller — , to be exact. The company has decided to wind down its operation in Romania, effective today, after it failed to find enough traction in the market. The news was sent out in an email to its merchant partners in the country signed by EMEA VP Luke Massery, which we are copying below, and we have confirmed the details with Groupon directly. “After a thorough analysis of the Romanian market and taking into account all relevant factors, we have decided to close our business in Romania,” a spokesperson noted in an emailed statement. “A combination of the macroeconomic situation and the low internet penetration in the country made it difficult for Groupon to gain desired critical mass. Shutdown of our operations in Romania is in effect from 03.09.2014.” For those who have already bought Groupons, or for businesses that have offered them on the platform, they will have them honored until the date originally agreed. Alternatively, customers will be able to get refunds for any unused Groupon deals that they have purchased. The spokesperson confirmed that there would not be further closures in other countries, calling Romania a “special case” in the region. “Our EMEA business is doing well,” she noted. “[The] Romanian business hardly shows up in total sales, due to its small size.” You might be thinking, “Why should I care that Groupon is shutting down its operations in this little, beautiful (see above) country of 20 million people known best for things like the Dracula legend?” In a way, you are right. But on the other hand, Groupon in Romania underscores the opportunities and challenges for Groupon and other e-commerce hopefuls. The Romanian operation first opened for business around four years ago, when the Samwer brothers, who , were still running things. It had around 40 employees. Romania is on the “still developing” side of the digital divide in Europe, and as with many other countries in that category, e-commerce sits as a gateway service to other tech developments. Over the next two years, a number of other local deals sites emerged in the country, peaking to , local publication Wall Street notes. But perhaps due to the lack of quality, mixed with a lack of interest and infrastructure, that number declined steeply in more recent times. Groupon was among those who may have been one of the bigger deal companies in the Romanian market, but that didn’t always translate into profit. In 2013, the company reported a loss in the country of €540,000 ($709,000). That was down from a loss of €773,000 ($1 million) in 2012, but apparently with declining customers. The wider context for Groupon in Europe is that the company has had some in the region after its CityDeal acquisition, with a lack of operational, technical (and maybe cultural) integration between what was happening in the U.S. and in Europe. That is one of the reasons why Groupon so often launches new services in the U.S. that cannot be rolled out concurrently elsewhere (one example: the that Groupon launched today). This is now changing, though. Although Groupon reported flat gross billings in the EMEA region compared to a year ago, revenues have been a more encouraging story, with EMEA seeing the highest revenue growth of the three regions: Still, the company’s last earnings report investors with the company failing to meet analyst estimates. With North America continuing to be Groupon’s growth engine, it’s not a surprise to see the company cleaning house and looking to firm up underperforming operations elsewhere. Whether that strategy will manifest in other ways is still to be seen. The letter in Romanian is below, followed by an English version via Google Translate: Image: |
Biographer Walter Isaacson And Medium CEO Ev Williams To Speak At Disrupt SF | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | We’re excited to announce that author Walter Isaacson and entrepreneur Ev Williams will be joining us onstage at Disrupt SF next week. Well technically, anyone who paid attention to knew they were going to be taking the stage, but now we can tell you a little more about what they’ll discuss. Isaacson is probably best-known to TechCrunch readers as the author of the bestselling biography , but he also wrote acclaimed volumes on Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. And he serves as president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. Isaacson has a new book coming out in October, titled . The book covers innovators from Ada Lovelace to Larry Page, and in the words of its publisher, “is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens.” Prior to publication, Isaacson took an interesting approach to getting crowdsourced feedback and fact-checking — he posted excerpts online, asking for comments and corrections. ( .) Specifically, he published those excerpts on blogging platform Medium, where Williams is CEO. Williams is a pretty notable innovator himself. He co-founded Blogger and Twitter, and at , he’s building that combines a publishing platform with high-quality, journalistic content. TechCrunch Co-Editor Matthew Panzarino will be interviewing Isaacson and Williams about , Medium, and more. [original photos via and ] |
Box Pushes Its Office 365 Integration Into Beta | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | This morning at its BoxWorks event, cloud storage and file management company Box announced that its integration into Office 365 in beta. The company also indicated that it is working to extend its integration into Office 365’s online tools, and, if possible, to Office for iPad. On stage at the conference, Box CEO Aaron Levie asked the audience to tweet at current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Twitter — it’s , if you were curious — for his assistance in allowing Box to integrate with Office for the iPad. Microsoft, which has a customer base that reaches into the enterprise market, may not be too receptive to the pitch. Microsoft sells OneDrive for Business, Sharepoint, and other storage and collaboration tools that Box competes with. That fact may make its willingness to help Box somewhat limited. Levie directly cited customer demand as the reason for his proposed integration into Office for iPad. That’s notable as it indicates that there is large enterprise uptake of the Microsoft productivity suite inside of corporations. Box’s CEO that Office 365 has done “incredibly well,” so to see the smaller company integrate with the service is not surprising. Box’s customers, which skew heavily towards the business space, are likely Office users, and thus are potential Office 365 users. The overlap is considerable. Following its Office 365 integration beta kickoff announcement, Box pivoted to discussing its BoxNotes product, which competes with Office. The company shared a few vanity metrics about the service, but no hard user figures. BoxNotes competes with Office in that it allows for the creation, and editing of text files. Integration, and competition, are therefore the tones of the day. |
Jared Leto Is Surprise Guest At BoxWorks, Talks Digital Transformation | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | Musician and actor Jared Leto stopped by BoxWorks today and talked digital transformation in the entertainment industry, and in the ultimate act of sharing, he passed around his Oscar so people could take pictures with it. Leto has been in the music and movie industry for a long time and as he pointed out, back in the day, he couldn’t communicate directly with his audience. There was no Twitter. He needed to get a record company to pay attention to him, to sign him, record him and distribute the product. Today, he pointed out he doesn’t really sell music directly. People generally just take it and he encourages that. He joked he says at concerts, “I don’t mind if you steal my music but go to a store and do it. Be brave.” He said he makes his money through relentless touring and his band, 30 Seconds to Mars has been on the road for so long, it actually earned in a single album cycle. He says you can sit and cry about the changing world, but you have to recognize it and take advantage of it, and he and his band have found a way to do that. His point though wasn’t that people were stealing per se, but they were interacting with his music and that’s all any artist can ask. As he said, the internet opens up a conversation with the audience and it gives artists the opportunity to find an audience. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it’s an opportunity that just didn’t exist before the internet and social media. “Technology is the great equalizer,” he said. “It’s shifted balance of power from gatekeepers, not just to artists, but to audiences too,” Leto explained. And Leto isn’t just a musician, he has several digital businesses he’s launched as separate projects. He joked his first business was selling pot as a kid, but his businesses today take advantage of the internet (and they’re legal). One is called , which hosts VIP packages and offers another way for artists and fans to interact. Artists can do meet and greets after the show and fans can get good seats or can stand by the side of the stage and watch the band. He said what was the core value of a musician has changed. It used to be the album or CD, but as it moves to touring, having that relationship with fans becomes ever more crucial. |
The All New Moto X Arrives Later This Month For $499.99 Unlocked | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | Motorola is updating its flagship Moto X, and it’s an improvement that makes one of the best deals in mobile even better, even if it doesn’t completely revolutionize what came before. The original Moto X was one of the best phones last year, and despite a change in the company’s ownership from Google to Lenovo, this new Moto X looks to be a worthy successor. Google’s new Moto X has a metal frame, a 5.2-inch display with full HD resolution and 423 ppi pixel density, Android 4.4.4 KitKat, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 2.5GHz processor and an Adreno GPU. The camera on the rear is a 13 megapixel affair, which can capture 4K video and has 4x zoom, plus a ring flash surrounding the lens for neat effects and even lighting. It has four mics vs. three on the original Moto X for better sound capture and background noise isolation, and it has a 2300 mAh battery with a new turbo charging feature that delivers 8 hours of use in just 15 minutes of charging. Back options include the original wood backs from the Moto X customizer options, and now a new leather choice for more premium fun, from U.S.-based luxury leather provider Horween (which you may recognize from watch bands, if you’re into that sort of thing). Moto’s new X offers a “pure Android” experience, cleaning up bloatware even further and letting Motorola deliver updates within days of their release on Google Nexus devices, according to the company. It promises some additional features, however, including some introduced in the previous generation like Touchless Control and Active Display. You can now do more with voice commands via Moto Voice, including operating apps like Facebook and YouTube, as well as setting a custom phrase to trigger voice operation, including whatever colloquial you may choose. Might we suggest “Yo, Moto X”? [gallery ids="1052542,1052543,1052544,1052545,1052546"] Moto Assist can read text messages out loud or turn off notifications during a meeting or at night, and intelligently reactivate them when you need to. Moto Display will put up to three recent notifications on the screen even when it’s mostly asleep, with the company’s trademark “slide to preview” action. This is one of the Moto’s best Android innovations, in my opinion, so it’s great to see it reappear here. With Moto Actions, the phone knows your hand is coming close and will display those notices, plus you can wave in the air above the device to silence your ringer or prolong your sleep by delaying your alarm. Moto Maker is back with Horween leather options, as mentioned, and there’s even a carrier free version that offers speedier updates and no contracts to deal with. The new 13 megapixel camera is tied to a gesture activation that lets you pick up the phone and twist your wrist twice to jump right to the capture app, and a motion detection engine will suggest trying a new frame if it perceives you moving around too much when you snap your original. Tech tricks on the phone include three IR emitters and one receiver that work together for improved gesture recognition, from either above or below the phone, and at a greater distance than most. A nano coating will offer some degree of water resistance, both outside and in, and without requiring any flaps or covers for outlets. The screen uses the industry standard Gorilla Glass to protect against bumps and scratches. 16GB and 32GB versions will be available, and the front camera captures images at 2MP, while recording video at 1080p. It ships beginning later this month in the U.S., and will retail for $99.99 on a two-year agreement at most carriers, while an unlocked version will be available carrier-free for $499.99 at Motorola.com. |
The New Moto G Offers A Bigger Screen And Removable Storage At $179.99 Unlocked | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | Along with a new , Motorola is taking the wraps off its new Moto G today, and the new version of its affordable smartphone continues to be one of the best values in modern mobile devices. Motorola’s new mid-range phone offers a larger 5-inch display with 1280×720 resolution for 294 ppi pixel density, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz, Corning Gorilla Glass, with Android 4.4 and a guaranteed update to Android L when that becomes available. It has both single SIM and dual SIM variants, with 8GB and 16GB storage options, and a brand new removable microSD slot which supports cards of up to 32GB. A new 8 megapixel camera also boasts a faster f2.0 aperture, and the front camera is improved to 2 megapixels from one on the original Moto G. The volume button can now trip the camera’s shutter when the app’s open, another new trick, and it has a double stereo speaker, vs. the single mono version on the first-generation device. 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, 720HD video capture and special digital TV tuners for Brazil only round out the hardware package. Motorola achieved something truly impressive with the hardware package it put together for the original Moto G, and this one still boasts long-lasting battery life to its 2070mAh powerhouse (good for up to 24 hours of continuous mixed usage, per Motorola), plus a pared down version of Android that closely mimics stock Android for easier updates. The interchangeable Moto G Shells are back again, letting users swap out plastic rear cases depending on their preferences. Software features include the best from the previous model, like the Motorola’s Voice Actions, and Motorola Alert, which lets you share locations with specific contacts so they can make sure you’re safe. Motorola Assist is also present here, with quiet hours for when you sleep, auto meeting detection based on your calendar, automatic replies via text to missed calls from your favorite contacts and more. Motorola isn’t wasting any time bringing its new model to market, either – the new Moto G is available immediately from Motorola.com for $179.99, unlocked and off contract. It’s also on sale as of today in India, France, the UK, Brazil, Spain and Germany. That’s still a good deal for the original; with the improved screen on this year’s Moto G, and that better camera, it’s an even better bargain. |
The Moto Hint Aims To Make You Feel Like You’re Living The Future From The Movie ‘Her’ | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | Motorola has taken it upon itself to give us the future the movie promised us – or at least one key ingredient in the future. The new Moto Hint is a single wireless earbud that comes in a variety of designs, and while it isn’t quite as invisible as the headset showcased in , it is designed to give its wearer the ability to quickly and easily ask their phones questions. The Moto Hint is an accessory for the specifically, and so won’t bring its magic to the downmarket Moto G, but it will let you instantly query the new flagship with requests like “What’s the weather like?” to instantly get a spoken forecast. You can also ask for directions, and receive turn-by-turn voice navigation, or dictate and send messages, plus of course make and receive calls. Finishes include fabric, leather and wood to match your Moto X, along with both black and white body accents and silver or black metallic finishes. Does having just a single earbud make you look more or less crazy when you’re talking to yourself? It’s a question we’ll have to wait a while to find out, as this ships in the U.S. later this fall. It also has a retail price of $149.99, which is kind of steep for mono sound, but then again, what price can you put on getting an early taste of our virtual assistant-heavy future? |
Apple Will Add Extra Security Measures To iCloud, Says Tim Cook | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | Apple has added extra security measures to iCloud, including alerts if someone tries to change your account password, download iCloud files to a new device, or a log a new device onto an account. Users can then change their passwords immediately or notify Apple security. The alerts will start in two weeks, CEO Tim Cook . In addition, Apple will also increase its use of two-factor authentication, expanding it to cover access to iCloud accounts from a mobile device when it releases its iOS update later this month. The changes come in the wake of the , allegedly from hacked iCloud accounts. Apple previously denying any breach within its systems, but admitting that celebrity accounts were compromised by attackers using standard phishing techniques. In his interview with the WSJ, Cook reiterated that point and said that Apple could have done more to make people aware of hackers potentially targeting their accounts or how to create more secure passwords. “When I step back from this terrible scenario that happened and say what more could we have done, I think about the awareness piece. I think we have a responsibility to ratchet that up. That’s not really an engineering thing,” he said. Apple also said it will take more steps to make people aware of two-factor authentication, since most users currently don’t use it. Apple told WSJ that if the celebrities whose accounts here hacked had used two-factor authentication, then hackers would not have been able to guess the currect answers to their security questions. |
You Can Stand Under My Umbrella Here | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | As a staunch introvert who prefers wide swaths of personal space, I find the idea behind frightening, yet strangely compelling. The creators of the project, which is , want to “bring strangers together on rainy days” with a Bluetooth light that attaches to the top of your umbrella and an app alerting people that you are willing to share it. You can change the color of the light to reflect your mood: green if you are wiling to share it, for example, or red if you aren’t.
Patience Lee, Umbrella Here’s user interface designer, tells TechCrunch that the project originally started for a competition called the , a design competition that seeks to “facilitate communication between people and communities.” All four members of Umbrella Here’s Hong Kong-based team are recent graduates from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where they majored in interaction design. “We remembered that during rainy days, people without umbrellas would just stand outside the Hong Kong subway station waiting for the rain to stop. The four of us have experienced times when we had an umbrella with us and felt very embarrassed to ask the person next to us to share our umbrella,” Lee says. “This is the reason why we came up with Umbrella Here. A signal that helps you tell people that you are willing to share your umbrella, instead of needing to ask a stranger directly.” Of course, Umbrella Here’s concept will only come to fruition if there are enough people using the light and app to create a network. In order to get more users, Lee says that Umbrella Here is currently in discussions with a large corporation to buy the light as a gift for clients, as well as several social networks to integrate Umbrella Here with their platforms. Even if you aren’t keen on the idea of sharing your umbrella with a stranger, Umbrella Here still has several functions that might be helpful. The app, which lets you keep a record of the people you have connected with through Umbrella Here and add them as friends through different social networks, also tracks weather reports and will send you an alert reminding you to take your umbrella along with you if it looks like it’s going to rain. The Umbrella Here light will also turn different colors depending on the temperature and blink when it is about to rain. To be sure, you can also depend on weather forecasts and looking out the window to remember if you need to bring your umbrella, but then you won’t be part of Umbrella Here’s network. The project ends on September 17 and has already raised more than two-thirds of its $15,000 goal, so there are clearly plenty of backers who are intrigued by the idea (and even willing to put it into practice). If Umbrella Here catches your fancy and you order one, the team promises that you will receive it by January 2015. Umbrella Here already has a manufacturing-ready prototype and is ready for production if its succeeds. |
The Road To Disrupt: The Final Steps | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | In the final videos of the Road To Disrupt series, all of the Startup Battlefield teams from Disrupt SF 2013 find out the results of the competition. This is it for the 30 startups involved with Startup Battlefield. It’s all on the line and the companies are about to see who will take home $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup. But first, has to pitch to the Disrupt judges. Practicing the presentation up to the final moments before the stage, founder Natalie Bryla delivers a near-perfect onstage pitch for her company that makes a messaging app that lets the sender control who sees messages and when. We’d like to give a big thank you to our Road To Disrupt companies for sharing their experiences with our community and dealt with a near constant film presence in the days leading up to and at Disrupt SF 2013. Join us next week at as our next batch of companies battle for the top prize. |
The Moto 360 Smartwatch Is Finally Here, Available Today For $249.99 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | The Moto 360 has been unveiled previously, and is arguably the most anticipated smartwatch, owing partly to its attractive round face. The wearable is finally landing, complete with heart rate monitor, in both black and gray metal finishes, with retail availability kicking off today at noon EST from Motorola.com, Best Buy and Google Play for $249.99. Two new metal band options will be available beginning “later this fall,” with the price rising to $299.99, and aftermarket metal band options will be on sale for $79.99 when that launches. At the same time, leather bands will also go on sale as official Motorola accessories for $29.99 apiece. [gallery ids="1052589,1052590,1052591,1052592,1052593,1052594,1052595,1052596,1052597,1052598,1052599"] We already knew a lot about the Moto 360, besides firm pricing and availability, but to recap the Android Wear watch has an edge-to-edge round display (with an occlusion at the bottom for radios and sensors) and is made from stainless steel. It includes a pedometer, and weighs 1.72 ounces, which is less than either the LG G Watch or the Samsung Gear Live. It also boasts wireless charging, another unique function (although we hear the ). The premium materials and wireless charging, in addition to the design, are what Motorola is hoping will prompt buyers to spend an extra $20 – $50 above what the competition is charging. Like all Android Wear devices, it offers wake-on-wrist-flick, automatic voice response via the “Ok Google” trigger, and activity tracking. It’s compatible with any Android phone or tablet running Android 4.3 or higher, and it has IP67 dust and water resistance for splash and rain protection, and submersion of up to 1 meter for 30 minutes. It has a Gorilla Glass screen case, and Horween is producing the leather straps. Motorola is offering Motorola Connect to personalize the experience and differentiate its device software-wise form the rest of the Android Wear crop. This companion app for your smartphone lets you specify height, weight and age for more accurate activity tracking, allows for watch face customization (change colors and font choices), as well as provides limited location tracking for lost devices (it’ll show you your smartwatch’s last recorded location, rather than live updates, as it doesn’t have its own internal GPS). Tech specs for the Moto 360 include a 1.56-inch 320×290 display, good for 205ppi, and it has a 46mm diameter watchface. The 320mAh battery will get you about a day of mixed usage, and the TI OMAP 3 processor should give you all the oomph you need. 4GB of internal storage and 512MB of RAM is pretty standard, as is the vibration motor included for notifications. Personally, I’ve found that Android Wear doesn’t yet have what I need to make it a daily necessity, but perhaps Motorola’s careful attention to design will convince this traditional watch fan. |
Disrupt SF Hackathon – More Prizes Than You Can Hack A Stick At | Jeffery Bennett | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | We’re fewer than 48 hours away from the start of the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon. To make your experience even better, we’ve partnered with some wonderful companies that have agreed to pony up some great prizes for best use of their systems. Clover, one of the fastest growing point of sale systems in the World has a robust collection of APIs, both Android and RESTful here: The developer who builds the most interesting integration according to our panel of judges gets $5,000 and the opportunity to launch on the Clover Platform. Connect your apps to the merchant counter top in ways not possible before. Extra credit if you use more than one API set from this conference. Clover has their engineering team on the floor and are available to answer questions at Best Use of Concur API — Up to $2,500 in Amazon Gift Cards – For an app that demonstrates the best use of Concur APIs; prize distribution is $200 to each winning team member. API Details at Best Use of Concur API + Co-Sponsor API On-stage – Free passes to The Perfect Trip DevCon 2014 ($99 per ticket) – For teams (2 tickets per team) that demonstrate the best of the Concur API + co-sponsor API onstage. For example, best use of Concur + Yodlee, Best use of Concur + Pebble, and so on. Applies to all Disrupt co-sponsors in the mashup ideas list at . All contestants can also apply to pitch their app for a shot at $100K in prizes. For best use of the CrunchBase API, PlayStation 4 for each member of the team for up to four (4) team members. Participants must successfully use the DigitalOcean API in their hack: Win an all expenses paid 2 day trip to NYC. Hang out with DigitalOcean Team, meet with the founders and our team leads, ask questions and get coaching. Win $2500 prize for best use of Esri’s ArcGIS software plus free year one year subscription to ArcGIS Online. Here are a few examples of what one year ArcGIS Online subscription delivers: Check out & Hack and Win! EVO Snap* is giving away a brand new 2014 Honda Metropolitan to the developer who demonstrates the most creative and/or innovate use of the Snap* APIs in their Hackathon creation. Saving gas is a Snap* with this stylish 49cc Honda scooter that delivers up to 100 MPG! Capture the attention of the EVO Snap* team and you could ride off in the comfy saddle of a beautiful Candy Orange/Pearl Black Metropolitan featuring an ergonomic design, modern instrument panel and 22 liters of lockable beneath-the-seat storage. Visit the EVO Snap* booth on-site for details and eligibility requirements. Technology leader Frequentz, is offering up $5000 in prize money for the most innovative app, utilizing Bluemix, to enhance its global tracking and tracing capabilities. Frequentz’s software solutions provide valuable end-to-end data insights across the Life Sciences, Food, CPG, and Industrial marketplace to assure Brand Integrity & Customer Safety. API Documentation can be found . Best Idea Market Project: Projects that are built using Idea Market ideas have a chance to win $3000. All entries are eligible to win funding from investors. Project list can be found at: For the best use of Intel Mashery APIs and/or Intel Galileo hardware, each team member (up to 5) will each receive: (1) super hero wearable blanket and (1) Basis Health Tracker smart watch. Developer Engagement Incentives MasterCard is challenging developers to use its APIs during the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. The prizes below will be awarded independently from the TechCrunch judging and decided by MasterCard employees present during the event. Access our APIs through the . +$100 per team member if the Simplify Commerce API is used +$300 per team member if two MasterCard API services are used MasterCard will also be providing promotional items for developers throughout the event. Register here: Best Use of Azure: Microsoft will award to the best use of Microsoft technology including the Express framework, Node.js and Azure, one Surface 3 per team member up to 4. Three winners for best use of Moxtra SDK/APIs All three winning teams get Mentorship via Moxtra with Subrah Iyer, co-founder of Moxtra and WebEx All three winning teams get 1 year free unlimited use of Moxtra SDK in their app, if they decide to commercialize the Hackathon app All three winning teams get cash reward; $1000 for first place and $500 for second and third place Old Navy believes that technology innovation can continue to enhance the consumer shopping experience and we are looking for creative, technology based approaches to help us in this effort. Old Navy will be giving its branded mobile app a complete overhaul which should be completed by the end of 2014 or early 2015, which will be promoted heavily once live. Details of the new app features cannot be disclosed at this point, however, we are looking for potential solutions that can integrate into the app that would be able to create a more seamless, user-friendly shopping experience. A problem that we are specifically trying to solve for is: How can we use technology to create something that better bridges the experience between pre-shopping, shopping, and post shopping. Old Navy stores are currently equipped with iBeacons, and we are looking for great, creative, and useful solutions that can leverage iBeacon technology in a way that will make the shopping experience for our customers more unique, personalized, fun, and exciting. Pending final submissions, the winning idea/solution could be integrated into the new brand app launching soon. This provides general background and guidance, but we are also open to other ideas/solutions outside of the direction given above. For the most innovative use of Braintree / Venmo / PayPal, each member of the winning team will come home with a XYZprinting Da Vinci 1.0 3D Printer and accessories. The $500 amazon gift card will be awarded to the team with the best implementation of one or more of Pearson’s APIs. These include Acclaim (an open badging platform, ), LearningStudio (a Learning Management System platform, ), as well as the Pearson content APIs (Dictionaries, Financial Times, ) Best implementation of our APIs wins $2,000. Runner-up $1,000. Everyone using gets Peel T-shirt and hacky sack for each team member. Best use of Sabre APIs wins $2,500 Sinch is offering a $5,000 prize for the most creative use of its calling and messaging SDK at the TechCrunch Hackathon. For a tutorial on how to implement JavaScript messaging, please visit: . For a tutorial on how developers can implement its new JavaScript calling, please visit here: . Developers can also tweet Sinch @SinchDev or email with any questions. We’ll have two winners! First place gets choice of prize: Plus the Spark team will be around and willing to do mini-Kickstarter consultations with any Internet of Things projects. For the best use of the Twilio API, Three Apple Smart Watches (to be announced) Twitter’s prizes will go to the team with the most interesting use of Twitter’s API. Awards include: UX Award for the Best UX at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, September 7, 2014 Create a Versal gadget and help bring interactivity to online learning. Versal is opening up our developer platform, enabling JavaScript developers to build interactive learning apps called “gadgets”. Gadgets are embeddable apps that teachers around the world use to create cool courses within the Versal platform. From interactive diagrams and timelines to games and simulations, developers are limited only by their imagination. Gadgets can be developed in our Web-based IDE, or the SDK can be downloaded to your own environment. At the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon, we’ll award the following to the best gadget submitted by the end of the event: a Chromebook (up to two if you have multiple teammates), plus a $2500 contract to complete the gadget. It will also be featured in the Versal course creator for teachers to use in their courses. Win with weather! We’re awarding $1,000 cash to the most interesting and best use of weather data in a hack. The Weather Underground weather API is easy to implement and scalable across any platform. Sign up for your free developer key here: We’re giving away the prizes (XBox One, Windows Phones) to the best hack submission that incorporates Yammer data via the Yammer Platform API at The grand prize winner will also receive Beats by Dre speakers courtesy of Yodlee Interactive. |
Firefox Beta Gets Built-In WebRTC Video Calls On Desktop, Chromecast And Roku Video Casting On Android | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | is launching the latest batch of updates to the channels for desktop and Android today. While there weren’t all that many exciting changes in the last few releases, today’s updates include a couple of interesting new user-facing tools. : , you can now test the browser’s new “send to device” video casting feature that supports both Roku and Google’s Chromecast, for example. And on the desktop, you can test drive Firefox’s built-in WebRTC-based video chat — a feature the organization started in its more experimental channels earlier this year. Getting started with — a standard for making plugin-free audio and video calls — on Firefox is now as easy as it is going to get, but it’s not exposed by default. You have to go into the “customize” window first and look for the speech bubble. Drag that into your main toolbar and you are good to go. Clicking on the bubble gives you a link that you can share with somebody else and once they click on it, the call (which is always free) starts. In the backend, Mozilla is partnering with the WebRTC specialists at . The video chat should work just fine between Chrome and Firefox users, too, though in my own experiments with it, calls sometimes dropped randomly. Mozilla acknowledges that the features aren’t quite ready for prime time just yet and the organization still calls it an “experiment” for the time being. Still, it’s definitely worth a try. On Android, the main addition is Chromecast and Roku video casting support. When you play a video on a site like CNN that serves up (mobile) videos through an HTML5 player and doesn’t use Flash (and your Roku or Chromecast are up and running), you can now stream your mobile video right to your TV in the living room. For Chromecast users, that should work without any major setup. Roku users will have to install the Firefox channel on their device, though. Mozilla notes that some sites customize their HTML5 video player so the “Send to” icon that would usually appear in the player to make this work won’t show. To get those working, you have to start playing the video and the “Send to Device” icon will then appear in the URL bar. All of this, as usual, is still very much in beta and prone to bugs. But that’s what the beta channel is all about, after all, and if you find any issues, you can . |
Nasty Gal Lays Off Up To 10 Percent Of Its Workforce | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | Several sources confirm has laid off up to 27 employees in the last week. “Business is down dramatically and leadership has been in panic mode for months,” according to one source. #GIRLBOSS author and CEO Sophia Amoruso that the company is making some “strategic changes.” The L.A. shopping startup let go over 20 employees last week, . Another source says this number is actually 27, including several execs, PR and tech staff. Nasty Gal laid off another four employees in its Kentucky-based fulfillment center last week, as well, according to an anonymous tip. Nasty Gal employed about 280 people at the end of 2013 so these layoffs account for over 10 percent of staff cuts. As one source tells it, “Nasty Gal is in the middle of a massive reorganization and has hired several high level employees but has decided to let go of 27 employees today.” We reached out to Amoruso as well as her PR team for a response. Neither have responded but a spokesperson outside of the company confirmed in a phone conversation that the company was low on PR staff at the moment and she was helping out in the interim. In addition to the layoffs, there are indications that the company has other issues. Just 38 percent of employees approve of the CEO on its page and only 30 percent of employees would recommend a friend work for the company. One former employee’s review of the company includes pros like snacks and lots of parties. The cons seem to paint the company as not rewarding talent: I have never been around so many talented, inspiring people who are held back and disrespected. Success is measured by not only the amount of money a company makes, but the type of culture it maintains and reputation it creates. To hear from people who still work there, that they hate going to work, they are undermined constantly and as a result are disconnected from the brand is truly sad. Nasty Gal had so much potential to be a great brand, but kinda blew it. Not only losing great employees who built the brand, but lots of customers along the way. Another former employee gave the company just two stars on Glassdoor and said the company had spent too much money on things like decor instead of salaries. The reviews have other uncomplimentary things to say about a lack of company vision, poor follow through and leadership. We made some changes yesterday in order to strategically re-organize
the business to fit our vision of the future. We are building a
powerful brand that leads the market and are committed to creating
something that has never been created before. We are excited to open
our first two stores in the near future and continue to build the team
to support that growth. Part of these changes were to work exclusively with agencies on the PR
side, which we have done in the past and we know performs for the
business. Our Technology team was affected as well. I’m hell-bent on
Nasty Gal continuing to be great at what we always have and raising
the bar for what an American fashion brand can achieve. Best,
Sophia |
Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis Will Move To Create Innovation Lab Using Stratasys Tools | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | Bre Pettis, CEO of , is stepping down to create a co-branded /Makerbot “innovation lab” where he will use 3D printers to work with artists, designers, and makers. Makerbot President Jenny Lawton will move into the CEO position and Pettis will be on the Makerbot board of directors. Wrote Stratasys CEO David Reis: The news, originally broken after received a leaked internal email, comes as a bit of a surprise. Pettis has long been the visible face of Makerbot worldwide and was instrumental in its move from little startup to 3D printing behemoth. Now, however, he is returning to his roots. The planned workshop will allow him to control a small skunkworks where future Stratasys and Makerbot products will be built. The team will also work with designers to build and give away or sell 3D printed models. The most recent example of this, their , is just the first of their upcoming projects. |
KnCMiner Raises $14 Million To Take Bitcoin Mining To The Moon | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | Swedish maker of miners, , has announced a $14 million Series A to help build out new mining chips along with hosted mining services. Founded by Sam Cole and Andreas Kenner, the company raised with GP Bullhound advising. led the round. “The funding will enable KnCMiner to expand its mining operations and ability to offer services to consumers in relation to the Bitcoin environment,” said the company in a release. KnCMiner has been making heavy-duty a few seconds after they are deployed. The company is working on new chips now. “We are improving our 20nm ASIC capability, and for R&D on the next generation ASIC chip which will come on-stream next year and will represent a step-change in processing capacity,” said Cole. The company hasn’t been actively looking for funding. Most of their miners sell out immediately during pre-order periods and they’ve been able to fund the entire venture on their own. Now, however, they’re looking to expand operations in hosted mining as well as create new chips faster. The company is definitely still bullish on bitcoin and will be looking for about $70 million in Series B funding in the next year. “KnC believe that Bitcoin’s price will appreciate steadily and significantly over time due to the interaction of a fixed rate of ‘money supply’ growth and significantly faster growth in transaction volumes and therefore rising ‘money demand.’ Excess demand for Bitcoins will lead to currency appreciation, i.e. a rising U.S. dollar-value of Bitcoins, over time,” said Cole. “We believe bitcoin will have a tremendous impact on a global scale,” he said. |
FCC Chairman Calls For Stronger Broadband Competition, Especially For High-Speed Connections | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | In a speech this morning, discussed the state of American broadband, arguing that there is a lack of competition in the market, especially in terms of truly fast connections. Broadband, as it is currently defined by the FCC, is a connection of at least 4 Mbps. That’s too slow, according to Wheeler, who noted that his agency is looking to increase that metric to a minimum of 10 Mpbs. Even so, Wheeler stated that 10 Mbps “doesn’t fully capture the increasing demand for better wired broadband,” given that consumers increasingly use a number of devices at home that can “overwhelm” a connection of that speed. Americans need access to faster Internet. Wheeler calls 25 Mbps connections “table stakes” in the current day. While more than 90 percent of Americans have access to at least one 4 Mbps provider, the percentage slips as the speeds in question rise: at the 25 Mbps speed, around one in five Americans lack a single provider. Less than a fourth have access to more than one provider at that speed. The implication of the above is that if the average American wants to purchase a quick connection to the Internet, they have limited options. Limited options implies limited competition, and thus, most often, lesser service at greater prices. Internet access is not a luxury service, but a requirement to take part in the modern economy. The FCC’s work to expand access to broadband is therefore a project that can look nearly complete in the vein of 4 Mbps connections, but also quite incomplete when you take into view properly quick connections. Wheeler made the competition argument explicitly, which is notable. From his prepared remarks: The simple lesson of history is that competition drives deployment and network innovation. That was true yesterday and it will be true tomorrow. Our challenge is to keep that competition alive and growing. […] In fact, AT&T has announced plans to deploy gigabit fiber to 21 major metropolitan markets. Many of these are in same markets where Google has announced plans to lay fiber. A year ago, Cox Cable said it wouldn’t be upgrading to gigabit networks because it would cost billions. Now it says it will, starting with communities where Google and CenturyLink are deploying fiber. It’s as simple as that. How does Wheeler intend to encourage not only broadband penetration as previously defined, but also connections that are up to par in terms of speed? Opening up more spectrum was cited, via both the coming Incentive Auction, and by boosting the amount of spectrum that is unlicensed more generally. Wheeler also cited community broadband as a potential catalyst for increased competition. That proposal has run into , and . Wheeler, who is currently struggling to land on his feet in the net neutrality debate, is setting a somewhat combative tone when it comes to broadband penetration and speed. He even wrote out what he calls his “mantra:” “ .” Not a bad choice of words. Netflix penned a detailing its support for what Wheeler said, calling it a “hard truth” that there is “not enough [broadband] competition to protect consumers and businesses who rely on the Internet.” Which is to say, everyone. |
New Box Security Features Give Companies Far Greater Control Over Documents | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | made its name being a user-focused company. Ease of use took priority over everything else, and while they’ve achieved a huge user base in this fashion, a big criticism of the company has been on the security side. It was never secure enough for some IT pros. A series of announcements today at the should go a long way towards alleviating those concerns. First of all, they announced a new Information Rights Management feature that allows users to control what recipients can do with a file. You can mix and match controls allowing editing or view only and restricting or allowing printing, sharing or copy/paste. If you get a document that’s View Only with all restrictions on, the only thing you can do is read it -and all assigned rights travel with the document. Users can also simply send a secure link to the document and any rights you have attached to the file travel with the link. The link can be password protected or not. What’s more, Box also lets you set an expiration date on the document level, so any document or link you share can expire at a certain time. This is a huge leap for Box, although it’s worth noting Huddle introduced a similar set of security features last week and this is something Syncplicity could do for some time. The IRM product is available immediately for customers on the business and enterprise plans. A panel of CIOs speaking today after the announcement made it clear they were thrilled with having this level of control over documents. They crave greater security, even while they clearly liked using Box inside their organizations. But that wasn’t all. Box also announced a partnership with AT&T that uses AT&T’s NetBond service to connect to the Box cloud via a virtual private network, increasing the level of security associated with using Box. Abhi Ingle, svp for advanced solutions at says this effectively makes Box just a node on your private network giving you all the security of the AT&T network without having a significant impact on end user experience. He added, “Nobody is going to take you down with a Denial of Service attack.” What’s more, Box now works with third-party security partners, Splunk and HP Arcsite. As Box senior vice president of global marketing at Box Whitney Bouck put it, many companies are using these products to monitor security across enterprise and they will now include support to monitor Box. within that existing security frameworks Other new features include the ability to set retention policies on documents and expire them if need be, new reports that let administrators see what happens when internal users share internal documents with third party partners and customers who are also using Box and new eDiscovery partners, Exterro and Guidance that let companies that use those services treat Box as another document source in the eDiscovery process. In a week when cloud security was top of mind after the release of the celebrity nude photos through a cloud service, there had to be tons of questions given the timing of Box’s event even if it wasn’t warranted. These tools help answer the concerns of those companies who are still worried about putting their content in the cloud by giving them a range of capabilities to control access, track documents, protect the network and tie into the existing security and eDiscovery tools inside the organization. |
NVIDIA Sues Samsung and Qualcomm, Tries To Get Samsung Galaxy Devices Blocked From The U.S. | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | Ready for another big patent battle? NVIDIA has just filed patent lawsuits against both Samsung and Qualcomm, claiming the companies are infringing upon its graphics chip patents. The end goal? To block the shipment of Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets until Samsung coughs up patent licensing fees. In a on the matter, NVIDIA notes that it tried to negotiate with Samsung directly but was unable to reach a deal. According to NVIDIA’s Chief Administrative Officer David Shannon, “Samsung repeatedly said that this was mostly their suppliers’ problem.” So far, NVIDIA has named 12 Samsung devices they want blocked: the Galaxy Note, Note Pro, Note 3, Tab S, Tab Pro, Tab 2, Galaxy S III, S4, S5, Infuse 4G, and, randomly, the super ancient Android clunker from 2011, the Samsung Illusion. NVIDIA claims at least seven of its patents are being stepped on, covering such concepts as: The biggest thing to consider here: Qualcomm’s chips, including its GPUs, are in many, devices beyond just Samsung’s. Depending on how this one goes, Qualcomm might be in for quite a long battle. You can find NVIDIA’s complaint to the U.S. International Trade Commission (requesting the blockage of all Samsung Galaxy devices) , and the lawsuit it |
Facebook Slingshots Itself In The Face By Making Reply-To-Unlock Optional | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | Many thought Facebook’s ephemeral app was pointless, but now it’s not even special. It’s just another pokey Snapchat clone. As of , Slingshot’s core mechanic, the requirement that friends first reply with a photo or video to unlock what you sent them, can now be turned off by the sender. That means people can just blast you their photos without forcing you to do any work, which surely reduces the friction of the app and could open it to a more mainstream audience. But the curiosity that friction created was part of what made Slingshot fun (I actually used it for a few weeks, and *gasp*, enjoyed it). “Sling a shot to see a shot? Not necessarily! After shooting a photo or video, now you can choose whether to sling it as a locked or unlocked shot” the update trumpets with little apparent awareness of the gravity of the move. Perhaps this will open up Slingshot to a more mainstream Now it’s just a Snapchat clone with a nicer drawing interface, reactions, and your Facebook friends. Considering Snapchat’s cool factor and strong community, competing directly with it seems like a fool’s game. Perhaps Facebook thinks its polished ephemeral sharing app can succeed in parts of the world where it already has a strong presence and Snapchat is still small. But the change just feels cowardly. Facebook’s Creative Labs . They’re experiments to investigate what users want. That’s good, because ditching reply-to-unlock is akin to an admission of failure of the app’s premise. I would have rather seen Facebook ride out its risky mechanic, and let users decide if it belonged in the deadpool. Instead it’s betting a watered-down version will be more popular, but it’s still years too late. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 3 | null |
DataStax Lands $106M In Series E Funding | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | , the commercial face of the open source Apache Cassandra database, announced $106M in Series E Funding, bringing their total to date to over $190M in funding. Today’s round was led by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers with additional investors including ClearBridge, Cross Creek and Wasatch, PremjiInvest and Comcast Ventures. Existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners also participated in the funding round. The company was started in Austin, TX in 2010 by Matt Pfeil, the chief customer officer and Jonathan Ellis, the company CTO when the founders recognized a market need for an enterprise-grade company on top of the Cassandra project. While early need involved the old “throat to throttle” technical support, over time they have added to the Cassandra product to help companies build applications on top of Cassandra. They also have a commercial customer support product. Ellis says we are in the age of data and Cassandra can help process it. “We are in data age. Data is good for end user, because the more data they have, the richer the experience .” One customer, Comcast wanted to change set top boxes, so they designed new ones with few moving parts, making it less prone to breaking and combined it with software to enhance the end user experience using Cassandra and DataStax to provide information you care about, such as sports scores from your favorite teams scrolling across the top of the screen, regardless of what you’re watching. Ellis says the company remains a big contributor to the open source project, but they are offering a better experience for a fee. While there is a free version available, they have customers willing to pay. Ellis says DataStax enterprise delivers security, search, repair expert, best practices tools, applications and monitoring tools, all of which aren’t available in the free project. One thing venture capitalists look for aside from founders with a good idea is a customer base waiting for a product and Ellis says they were fortunate enough to have customers lined up for the product the week they opened. There was pent-up demand for a commercial product and Ellis and Pfeil took advantage by building a product that people needed. |
Bridj Raises $4M, Hires Former Chicago & DC Transport Head Gabe Klein To Reinvent Your Commute | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | There are a number of startups trying to change the way passengers get around urban environments. Most notably, companies like Uber and Lyft have drastically increased the ease of hiring a car to take them where they need to go, while also lowering the cost. But there’s only so much those companies can do in reducing costs due to the limited number of seats in each car. Boston-based Bridj thinks it can do better, by implementing a low-cost alternative to those options. Rather than launching another single ride-hailing service, the company is building a series of dynamically generated bus routes. To aid in that quest, Bridj has raised $4 million in funding and made a big new hire: former Chicago and DC transit head Gabe Klein. Bridj hopes to build a dynamic urban transportation system, designed to more efficiently shuttle people from their homes to work and back again. The company takes into account multiple data points related to when and where people travel to and from, creating a living, breathing logistics map for the city. With all that information, Bridj believes it can reduce the time, cost, and hassle of commuting. For the past several months, the company has been testing out that theory in Boston, where it has built up a series of pop-up minibus routes. Some routes run several times a day, while others only appear twice a day. But for the most part, routes are determined based on customer demand, daily changes in traffic, and several other factors. From a user point of view, customers sign up, identify their origin and destination points, and then Bridj tells them where to go to meet one of its minibuses. Rather than use the same static routes as your usual city bus routes, Bridj dynamically designs routes that aggregate commuter pickups where demand is highest. That leads to sub-10 minute wait times, as well as much faster commutes than its passengers are used to. According to founder and CEO Matthew George, Bridj routes can cut commute times in half, with 20-minute rides compared to city transit routes that would typically take 45 minutes. It also generally picks up customers closer to their homes or businesses. As a result, Bridj is seeing huge demand, even while in beta. George tells me that typically, 70 percent of seats on its 15-passenger specialty vehicles and many routes are typically sold out. It’s looking to expand the number of vehicles it deploys and turn up more routes over time. To do that, it’s raised $4 million from a number of Boston-based investors who hope to help it get off the ground in that launch market. That includes Atlas Ventures, ZipCar investor Jill Preotle, NextView Ventures, Suffolk Equity, Freshtracks Capital. It’s also made a huge hire in Gabe Klein, who is joining the company as COO. Klein had previously served as the head of transportation departments in both Chicago and Washington, D.C., and as such is well-versed in the issues facing commuters in urban environments. He had been recruited by former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, where he instituted bike sharing and introduced a new circular bus system. Later Rahm Emanuel brought him to Chicago to implement other transportation changes in that city. Now he’s attempting to change urban transportation as part of an early-stage startup. With Klein on board, Bridj will have some major operational smarts behind it. Perhaps more importantly, he can help the company when it inevitably faces pushback from local government and regulators in markets that it enters or expands in. Since he’s aware of the issues facing city transit departments and speaks their language, he can speak their language and show how a system like Bridj’s can benefit the market. |
Snapchat Pushes You To Watch Friends’ Stories | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | are a huge hit, with the photos and videos you post to your profile now more popular than Snap messages. But they’re still easy to forget about since they’re pull and not push — they aren’t sent to friends directly and don’t generate alerts. You had to seek them out. Until now. Snapchat confirms to me it’s started “sometimes” sending push notifications that remind you that several friends have stories for you to watch. This way you don’t have to nag your friends to peer into the quirky moments of your life because Snapchat will quietly do that for you. Story notifications fundamentally change the unobtrusive pull nature of Stories, which made them a refreshing alternative to its traditional direct messaging feature or injecting your posts into friends’ Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds. You could share a selfie or glamorous moment without having to feel like a jerk since friends had to go looking for them. The question is whether Snapchat can sustain that casual attitude while playing the secret postman, pinging your friends to drive you, and it, more Story views. Previously, Snapchat had been one of the most conservative and respectful social apps when it came to interrupting you. No shallow alerts that someone Liked your photo, viewed your profile, or retweeted your quip. It only tugged your pant leg when someone sent something straight to you. But social is a battle for eyeballs, and no one else showed such restraint. Twitter and Facebook will use any excuse to send you a push or email, with Twitter getting more brazen as of late, telling you when friends all followed someone or a few people were discussing a TV show or current event. Snapchat is well within its bounds to get a bit more aggressive. Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence I’ve collected suggests early core Snapchat users might be sending fewer direct snaps lately. I’m getting far fewer per day than I did a year ago, my friends report the same, and several have told me their younger family members who were formerly addicted are becoming less keen to blast out funny faces, drawings, and random windows into their life. Snapchat Stories is thriving, with over 1 billion views per day as of June in part thanks to a who’ve become Snapchat celebrities ( ). It’s also a potential via , which just got their own in the app. Yet they’re often viewed after someone returns to the app from a direct snap notification. If those pushes dry up, Stories could get fewer incidental views. And so, Story pushes. A sign Snapchat may be shifting its priority to making Stories a strong, independent product that don’t need no direct snaps to get by. Most people think of Snapchat as photos that last 10-seconds or less. But the rise of Stories could make their 24-hour self-destruct timer the new standard. |
Apple’s NFC Payments Play Could Make Its Wearable A Computing Friction Killer | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | Apple could be gearing up to make its so-called ‘iWatch’ a payment device powered by NFC, according to a new report from the . But including near-field communications tech in the iWatch (and the iPhone 6, too, if the report is correct) will open the door for much more than just payments, and could make the wearable an authentication device that finally convinces the consumer market wrist-based computing is something to get excited about. WSJ says that the watch using NFC is a signal that it will factor significantly into its mobile payments play, which is rumored to be introduced at next week’s event. Watchers have long pegged Apple as readying a mobile payments program, that would let them pay for goods and other things using their existing iTunes Store accounts, and now that functionality is also apparently going to come to their wearable alongside its introduction with the new iPhone next week. Other details revealed in the new report reflect earlier suggestions that the watch will have two different screen-sizes, and a curved LED display, along with a bevy of sensors to track a user’s health and activity. In a separate report, the that the new iWatch will be able to track footsteps and heartrate, with much higher accuracy than the current crop of devices. It will have a flexible display panel, they say, and use wireless charging. It’ll work with HealthKit and use Handoff to let it resume activities begun on iOS and OS X devices, and vice versa, and both phones and iWatch will use NFC. With multiple sources agreeing on these basic facts, the potential for Apple’s wearable starts to take shape. Earlier, I’d struggled with finding a good reason to justify their entrance to this market. A payments component goes some way to help it make sense, and Apple has reportedly worked with credit card companies to ensure low fees for its use, but just the inclusion of NFC and the potential for a wearable as a convenience device that offers true cross-platform communication is a bigger selling point. Imagine an iWatch that is a true companion, speaking to Mac and iOS devices as an assurance that a user is who they say it is – without the need for arduous processes like manual entry of passwords. That’s a big step up in terms of providing genuine convenience. Other gadgets like the Bionym Nymi authenticator band look to provide this kind of persistent identification, but Apple could achieve much of the same thing with its own wearable, removing steps and reducing friction from processes ranging from payments, to controlling a smart home (via its new HomeKit features for iOS 8), to surfacing loyalty cards and tickets via PassBook. An iWatch with the same basic feature set as Android Wear isn’t exciting, even if it does share ties with iOS devices like the iPhone. What is exciting, in terms of the potential of a wearable to finally achieve mass market adoption, is companion hardware that makes the experience of using all other computing devices, including emerging categories like connected home gadgets, easier. As it stands, most wearables introduce a degree of complication; if Apple can simplify, as it has a habit of doing, instead of asking users to learn and make a habit out of something new, it should have a winner on its hands. |
Apple Dominating Shipping Capacity Out Of China With New iPhones | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | According to several sources, Apple has already begun flexing its supply chain muscles by shipping so many units of upcoming devices from its manufacturing facilities to sales outlets that it is causing delays for other manufacturers. Apple shipments via major concerns like FedEx and UPS are said to be ‘incredibly high’ for the holiday quarter, pointing to a massive number of iPhones and whatever other units Apple announces for the fall season incoming. The company is apparently flooding its channels with devices, causing shipments for other ‘top tier’ device makers to be delayed to make way for Apple products. One other manufacturer was reportedly told by shippers that they couldn’t meet some deadlines because they were booked up servicing a ‘very important customer’. If Apple is displacing shipments from other manufacturers with its volume then it wouldn’t be the first time. An account given by logistics exec a couple of years ago gives a few examples: “Apple began innovating on the nitty-gritty details of supply-chain management almost immediately upon Steve Jobs’s return in 1997. At the time, most computer manufacturers transported products by sea, a far cheaper option than air freight. To ensure that the company’s new, translucent blue iMacs would be widely available at Christmas the following year, Jobs paid $50 million to buy up all the available holiday air freight space, says John Martin, a logistics executive who worked with Jobs to arrange the flights. The move handicapped rivals such as Compaq that later wanted to book air transport. Similarly, when iPod sales took off in 2001, Apple realized it could pack so many of the diminutive music players on planes that it became economical to ship them directly from Chinese factories to consumers’ doors. When an HP staffer bought one and received it a few days later, tracking its progress around the world through Apple’s website, “It was an ‘Oh s—’ moment,” recalls [former HP supply chain chief Mike] Fawkes.” It also points to Apple’s hopes to sell an enormous number of devices in the holiday quarter. Reportedly, those include — a rumored wearable device is reported to be announced but . Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin (subscription required) that — provided it can make enough of them — Apple could sell in the mid-60 million iPhones in the holiday quarter. “The other thing that will be interesting to watch is what happens with Samsung’s sales. Last quarter, Samsung shipped 78m smartphones and they stuffed the channel prematurely to mask some of their challenges,” says Bajarin. “I think it is extremely possible, given the sense I get on both Apple and Samsung trend lines, that Apple and Samsung sales in the holiday quarter could be closer than people think.” Samsung having pushed a lot of phones last quarter to cover up could bite it in the butt if Apple eats up shipping capacity in a way that makes it tough for the company to get the new Galaxy models into the country. |
Catering Startup Cater2.me Says It Has Served 5M Meals | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | It’s been more than two years since about , a service that connects local food vendors with companies in need of catering. Sounds like the startup has been busy since then — co-founder Zach Yungst told me that it has now served 5 million meals total, and that it’s launching in four new cities, bringing the total to 10. Cater2.me’s goal is to deliver a more varied, tasty catering experience by tapping into the varied culinary world you find in many cities. The company customers just enter the basics of how many people they’re feeding, dietary restrictions, and when they need food — Cater2.me handles the rest of the logistics, making sure customers get deliveries from a rotating list of providers. In San Francisco, at least, that approach . (The TechCrunch HQ in San Francisco, however, has been fed by some competing services, including and .) Five million meals is a big number, if a bit hard to wrap your head around. For a point of comparison, back in summer 2012, . Yungst also told me the company is now serving “in the five figure range daily” (so, tens of thousands of meals a day). It employs more than 65 people, which is particularly impressive for a company that hasn’t raised any outside funding. Oh, and the new markets are Seattle, LA, Houston, and Denver/Boulder. (In addition to SF, Cater2.me was already available in New York, Chicago, DC, Boston, and Austin.) The company is currently looking for beta customers who can offer feedback as the network of food vendors gets built out in each city, with plans to launch fully in those four locations before the end of the year. |
EyeEm Challenges Flickr For Providing New Media With Relevant Images | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Unless you don’t mind stealing other people’s work, using Flickr to find images available via the Creative Commons license is the easiest way to source pictures for blogging. While services like are available, I’ve personally never spent a dime for an image in an article I’ve written — it’s always been easier to do a quick search on Flickr or to shoot my own photos. Photo-sharing service wants to offer publishers an option somewhere in between Flickr and paid photo services, and it’s This week, EyeEm expanded its partnership with HuffPo, which In addition to those time-based challenges, EyeEm users and submit their work if they think it fits the bill. For those who think their own stories might interesting to the site, EyeEm has launched a that anyone can submit photos to with descriptions of the broader story they’d like to tell. The startup says it’ll monitor that album for cool tidbits and connect photographers with the publication when it finds something worth expanding into a longer blog post. While EyeEm’s partnership with the Huffington Post is a great opportunity for the photographers who do end up getting their photos credited on the site, I think it’s more interesting as an indicator for the direction the startup would like to go over the coming months. All signs seem to indicate that EyeEm to be the next generation of stock photography. Since March of this year, the company has offered a collection of images shared on the service That always felt like an in-between step, a way for the service to provide the top-notch photographers in its community a wider reach as it builds out the . The current method of rounding up content for the Huffington Post also gives off that awkward vibe of being a solution bridging what its users are comfortable with and that end goal. I could very well be wrong on this, but it seems to me that the ideal solution for EyeEm is to have even closer integration with its media partners — instead of putting up a blog post or a new challenge every few weeks, HuffPo reporters and editors could somehow generate their own challenges (or even send notifications to EyeEm power users) asking for the kind of photographs they’re looking for and immediately sift through photos on the service. EyeEm could further differentiate such a service by making the process of choosing the right picture simpler for journalists. I’ve chatted with several of my colleagues about this topic, and anecdotally, most agree that the tagging and search functions in content management systems and stock photo services are generally horrendous. Even on Flickr, where millions of photos are available for free, you basically have to offer the search gods a sacrificial lamb if you want to get anything decent in a few minutes of browsing. Just last month, , a computer vision startup, in order to improve photo search and discovery using machine learning. If I’m right about the direction the startup is moving in, taking the effort out of finding the right photos might be the factor that really puts EyeEm ahead of its old-school competition. ( ) |
Hands On With The Moto 360, The First Round Smart Watch | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | As we approach Peak Smartwatch at the Apple event next week, manufacturers are racing to offer product to those who might not want to bow down to Cupertino in the coming months. The latest contender is the Moto 360, a steel and leather beauty that launched today alongside the new Motorola X. Although I’ve been duly impressed by the Samsung Gear series, you will immediately notice that the design language of the 360 is far more chic. Made of a round piece of coated steel and featuring a nice leather band and Gorilla Glass crystal, the watch looks more like a than a nerd accoutrement. How does it work? Well, if you’re not familiar with the vagaries of Android Wear, not very well at first. The interface consists of notifications that appear over the various watch faces available as well as a voice activated screen that allows you to ask for various pieces of information. You can ask Google for directions (delivered indirectly by your phone). You can ask it to take a note or send a text. You can look things up. You can also tell the time just by lifting your wrist. Unfortunately, the interface tends to dump back to the default time screen if something isn’t understood, which is quite frustrating. Voice recognition has been consistently good, but sometimes it will activate too soon, resulting in something like “OK Google Text OK Google” appearing on the screen. I’ll have a full review of the new gear next week but we recorded a quick hands-on with the watch today in anticipation of many long hours spent talking to my wrist. [gallery ids="1053220,1053219,1053218,1053217,1053216,1053215,1053214,1053213,1053212,1053211,1053210"] |
TC Cribs: Lending Club’s Hole-In-One San Francisco HQ | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Welcome to another episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that gets nosy and tours the inside of tech companies’ offices. This time, we headed over to , the startup that’s built an online marketplace for financial lending. Lending Club is a company that straddles the worlds of tech and banking, and that duality is pretty apparent when you go inside their San Francisco HQ, which is fittingly located right in between the city’s Financial District and the startup-heavy SOMA neighborhood. [gallery ids="1053278,1053263,1053276,1053272,1053265,1053275,1053273,1053274,1053267,1053280,1053279"]
Watch the video embedded above to see our stroll around Lending Club HQ — complete with a round of indoor golf to cap it all off. |
Yahoo Acquires, Shuts Down Luminate, An Interactive Image Platform | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Another acquisition today from Yahoo to beef up its advertising and media business. It is buying , a startup founded by LiveOps, Netscape and Yahoo alums that has created a platform for interactive, tagged images — or, as we have called it in the past, an . Terms of the deal, which was announced on , have not been disclosed. Luminate, founded in 2008 as Pixazza, had raised just under in funding, from investors that included August Capital, Google Ventures, Nokia and Ron Conway among others. Founders who are no longer with the company include Lloyd Tabb, now leading Looker. It’s not clear yet how Yahoo may use the tech it is acquiring — it included crowdsourcing and image-detection technology — but one thing is more clear: Luminate is no more. James Everingham, the company’s CEO, writes that the service stopped working this week. If you are a Luminate publisher — there are 10,000 of them, he notes — the JavaScript snippet will no longer run anything on your site. “If your site(s) have individually earned over $10, you will be receiving a final payment for each site by September 30, 2014. If you are a Luminate Direct advertiser, you will be refunded the remainder of your balance by September 30, 2014.” All Luminate publishers, advertisers and experts will be able to login and access account information until October 1, 2014. This is Yahoo’s 33rd acquisition, and one in a string focused on building out its media business. Other recent purchases in the same vein have included and . |
11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Travis Bernard | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | On the eve of Disrupt, we reflect on the top stories from 8/30-9/5. Here are the 11 best stories from the past week. |
CrunchWeek: Samsung’s Gadgets, iCloud Hacks, And Sarah Goes To Burning Man | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Happy pre-Disrupt Friday, everyone, I hope you are well rested for next week’s fun. Today on CrunchWeek , , and sat around the white table to dig into the biggest stories of the week: , the , and, of course, . As a small note, I was wrong at the end of the show, as there will be no CrunchWeek next week. We’ll see you all on the other side. |
The One Where Grover Norquist And I Decompress From Burning Man | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | The Libertarian-leaning Republican leader of Americans for Tax Reform, went back to Washington, D.C. this week after his first visit to Burning Man. The two of us were able to catch up this week and – a word burners use to describe how they adjust back into life after experiencing Black Rock City. This was both our first time at Burning Man. This is our decompression conversation: Me: Hi Grover, may I call you Grover or would you prefer your playa name? Grover: I did not have a playa name but I’ve never had a nickname. Nobody’s ever given me a nickname. Grover is unique enough. Me: Grover it is. So what’s different now, after you’ve been to Burning Man? GN: I’d been talking for several years with before I went. I had kind of an intellectual understanding of what it was. I read up and watched videos. But there were two things I got wrong – I went and saw something that was more impressive than what I had ever imagined. I intellectually knew, but the amount of work and the art and the amount of stuff was bigger and more impressive than I realized. I have been to the Louvre. This was more impressive. Not that the Louvre or those places aren’t impressive, but I didn’t expect it. Me: How did you feel leaving Burning Man, leaving the place? Was it hard to do? GN: Well I hitched a ride with a guy with an RV and the battery died on our car. I was going to shave and shower but there’ were no hotels anywhere. So it’s 5 am and we get dropped off at one of the casinos in Reno but there was no room. So we’re in the Starbucks, my wife and I, and we get a shuttle ride to the airport and we see a guy covered in dust, no shoes. And we’re covered in dust, too. All of us burners. This other guy comes over to the guy with no shoes and gives him his other shoes. Then they parted ways. They didn’t know each other. I’m thinking both of those guys and me are for decades going to remember this moment. Me: Did you feel like you’d left home? GN: Oh, I don’t know I could call it that…I didn’t feel like I’d gone somewhere and come back. I didn’t know what to call it. It’s not quite that you are back to reality. It was a more confusing homecoming because I’m already thinking about next time. That’s different. I started noticing when I went back to shaking hands instead of hugging them. I’m not really a hugger. I don’t approve of promiscuous hugging. I shake hands with my dad, even. I got so used to hugging that shaking hands felt odd for a bit after. Me: And now? GN: I’m back to shaking hands now. Me: How did you decompress or come down from the whole experience? GN: I wrote three articles about it. Me: I read the one you wrote for . In it you said: Some self-professed “progressives” whined at the thought of my attending what they believed was a ghetto for liberal hippies. Yes, there was a gentleman who skateboarded without elbow or kneepads – or any knickers whatsover. Yes, I rode in cars dressed-up as cats, bees and spiders; I watched trucks carrying pirate ships and 30 dancers. I drank absinthe. But anyone complaining about a Washington wonk like me at Burning Man is not a Burner himself: The first principle of Burning Man is “radical inclusiveness”, which pretty much rules out the nobody-here-but-us liberals “gated community” nonsense. GN: Ya, I’d wanted to go for awhile, though . Me: Did you have any revelations while you were there? GN: How few rules it took. By having a sketched out city, if you live on this grid, everyone can find you. The number of rules are almost all state laws. The rules were way down. There are 4000 federal laws. They put together a city of strangers. They found fewer rules works, not more rules and even the rules they have come with a reason. Even the power of social sanctions…you have social shaming for throwing wrappers on the ground. If you are walking a mile down the road and you throw a wrapper on the ground there’s nobody there but you don’t do it because that is what everyone does. Also, wear lighting at night. People do it because they’ve been told to and so you don’t get run over. It makes sense. People lived with the loud music. Nobody said I’m calling the cops. There were camps on the edge and people who liked the loud music and wanted that could just go there. Me: So now that you are back and in the “real” world, will you go to a decompression party? GN: Oh ya, I’ve been invited to one in Anacostia. This guy invited me. It’s a community. I talked to my wife and I think we’ll bring the kids to that one. They say it’s kid friendly. |
Alibaba Proposes To Go Public For As Much as $66 Per Share, Valuing The Firm At More Than $160B | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | , the Chinese e-commerce giant run by Jack Ma, has submitted F-1 paperwork to the SEC with the expectation that it will go public on September 8 under the NYSE symbol BABA. The today. 20.1 million shares will be on offer. Japanese investor Softbank currently owns 34 percent of the company while Yahoo owns 22 percent. The initial price is expected to hit at $60-66 per share with an initial valuation of up to $162 billion. At that valuation, Softbank’s share of the firm is worth around $55 billion, and Yahoo’s stake is worth more than $36 billion. In after-hours trading, Yahoo is up more than 1 percent, implying that investors in the American Internet giant are content with the Alibaba offering price range, but not surprised on the positive side. Yahoo ended the day worth just over $39 billion. Investors are therefore valuing Yahoo somewhat slimly when compared to the expected market value of its Alibaba shares. The proposed valuation alone would make Alibaba and its subsidiary Taobao the second most valuable Internet company after Google. The , however, is expecting a valuation of $155 billion, still far from shabby. You may now commence the pricing guessing game. Earlier , a slip of about a week from market expectations. Alibaba is a strange beast, an amalgam of Amazon and eBay. It does not actively hold inventory and instead connects buyers and sellers who complete the transaction. The IPO, if all else holds, could be the largest in history. Current investors are maintaining their stake in the company, although Yahoo will reduce its percentage slightly. The company is massive, and massively profitable — its revenue in its most recent quarter totaled $2.54 billion, with profits tipping the scale at just over $2 billion. The company’s margins are therefore more than impressive. Investors have a keen eye on that metric. Yahoo’s after Alibaba once reported a decrease in its operating margin. Alibaba’s massive IPO will set records, and even dwarf the company’s already large cash position of $16.97 billion, measured on June 30 of this year. Investors are likely betting that Alibaba will continue not only its impressive profit margins, but also its quick topline growth. One metric to keep the pulse on when it comes to Alibaba is its number of active buyers on its platform: The company picked up 24 million between the March 31 of this year, and June 30, ending at a total of 279 million. As a final caveat, the Alibaba IPO can be viewed as a slight proxy on the Chinese economy. Something to keep in mind. |
Google Starts Selling Glass ‘Explorer Edition’ On The Play Devices Store | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Google is selling the , still for $1,500, with your choice of a free frame or sunglass shade in the mix. The Glass model listed is still very much Google’s experimental product, but the descriptions in the listing make it sound more like falling into the category of an “Explorer” is now more about how many extreme sports you’re involved in than how comfortable you are with alpha software builds. Putting Glass up on its devices storefront signals yet another widening of the availability of the wearable computer, after Google first opened up the program to everyone (instead of just those invited to participate) temporarily, and . By making it easier to find and acquire, Google is slowly broadening its potential user base for the devices, even if it isn’t making any claims about a consumer launch or taking the hardware out of beta. I remain skeptical about the future of Glass, and whether we’ll see it evolve into something beyond the marginal curiosity it is today, but Google putting it up on its main devices store should at least remind people that it’s still around, and that developers are still building software for the face-based computer. It’s also interesting that it’s for sale just under Android Wear, which is the platform I see Google betting on for wearables in the foreseeable future. For those wondering if this Play launch means it’s making its way to other countries finally, the answer, sadly, is no. |
Shutterfly Brings Its Online Boutique Tiny Prints To The iPad | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Shutterfly is expanding its lineup of native iOS applications today with the launch of , a mobile version of the online stationary boutique the company for $333 million. Like its web-based counterpart, the app allows customers to create and customize stationary, cards and other gifts via a variety of personalization options, including by occasion, paper type, trim, envelope color, and more. The app also allows you to build your products using photos from your iPad’s gallery or Photo Stream, Facebook, Instagram, and, of course ,Shutterfly, as well as apply photo filters. Though the name “prints” brings to mind photo printouts or other paper products, Tiny Prints actually includes more categories beyond stationary or cards, like its competitors Sincerely or Red Stamp currently offer. It also lets you use your photos to decorate other gifts, like coffee mugs, iPhone, iPad and Samsung cases, notebooks, photo frames, ornaments, photo blocks, glass prints, and more. You can even buy photo-printed pillows, if you’d like, as well as those that are patterned and have a monogram initial, or other text. These are not cheap, however – the pillows are around $45-50 each. Other products range from just under $20 to the $40’s as well, from a quick glance around, which makes it competitive with, or pricier than, some of the other options out there for photo gifts, like apps HelloPics, CafePress’s MagicMoments, Print Studio, Madesquare and others. But Tiny Prints prides itself on , which is why it may charge more. Plus, Shutterfly is one of the top photo print destinations today, so it can help drive its current customers to this newest app thanks to its trusted name (and its sizable marketing budget). You can use the new Tiny Prints app to get started with your project, then pick up where you left off via the Tiny Prints website, which is another differentiator between this and its mobile-only competition. There are some other nice touches as well, such as the ability to “preview” the project before buying via mock-ups that show the product from different angles. Tiny Prints is a free download, . |
It’s Time For VCs To Run To Their Bubble Bunkers | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | world of Silicon Valley and startups has reached crazy times. , one of the most prominent accelerators in the world, announced yesterday that The idea is that founders who join the program can ask for their equity to be returned (or a percentage of it) shortly after their Techstars batch ends if they feel that the accelerator didn’t provide them with sufficient value. David Cohen, one of the founders of Techstars, believes that founders nearly always see the value of Techstars in hindsight, but often have concerns about its impact before the program. A return policy is designed to ameliorate those early concerns and ensure that founders never have to worry about wasting their time and losing equity in the process. It’s an awesome and smart move for Techstars in what is becoming a very competitive accelerator market. But it’s also crazy. Think about it: a living, warm-bodied venture capitalist has just offered his equity stake back to any founder who dislikes his investment. That violates pretty much every sacrosanct principle that the VC industry has, and I can almost imagine the amount of coffee spit out on Sand Hill Road by VCs first reading about the concept. It’s as if your friends Peter and Tom are getting married and the Pope suddenly shows up to officiate. You almost have to do a double-take just to be sure you really are seeing properly and your Burning Man brownie has stopped coursing through your brain. If this were a one-off deal, we could simply chalk it up to the eccentricities and benevolence of a single investor and continue our belief in the grand normality of everything going on in the startup world these days. But David Cohen isn’t the only investor crazy enough to give back equity to his founders. Kent Goldman, , is offering a chunk of the carry (or upside — get it?!) of the fund to the founders he invests in. Carry is the profit made on the investments of a deal, and is usually distributed to the partners of the fund as a performance incentive. Goldman wants to encourage more community among his founders, and thus, he believes that providing a bit of carry to his founders will foster a culture of collaboration across Upside’s portfolio. And that’s not all, folks! Upside isn’t the only new fund giving up carry, as Binary Capital, , intends to donate a portion of its carry to charitable organizations, to donate half of A16Z’s partner income to charity. Binary argues that it focuses on the missions of founders rather than purely metrics, and thus, their carry donation aligns their incentives with this commitment. Look, innovation here is good, and venture capitalists can and should always be working to improve their relationships with founders. An equity return policy is a nice way to ensure that there is accountability from investors, since they can’t just disappear after the term sheet is signed. Giving founders a chunk of carry provides a monetary incentive for founders to cooperate with each other and develop community within a portfolio. And no one can argue against charitable giving and connecting venture gains with those much less well-off. But together, these programs are starting to make me a little concerned about the health of the venture industry. If capital has become so plentiful that the only way to distinguish a fund in a competitive market is through these sorts of programs, are we reaching a point of oversaturation? In short, aren’t we looking at something of a bubble here? I continue to have mixed opinions. Private valuations of startups have run ahead of the public markets in many cases, . But I have also argued that we should be cautious about running to our bubble bunkers, since , and startups can thus grow exponentially in heretofore impossible periods of time. While these new programs would definitely seem to indicate that the market has become frothy, what I haven’t seen is venture capitalists giving up as much on the of their equity chunk, . Series A investors are still largely determined to net a large slice of equity, often approaching 20 percent or even 33 percent of a business, and that focus on the percentage ownership has driven up the size of rounds. If a startup only needs $2 million, but is valued at $50 million, the vast majority of VCs are going to argue for a larger capital infusion in order to get their equity stake more in line with their investment strategy. This sort of dynamic is also evident at many top accelerators, which continue to take a mid-single-digits percentage of equity (usually around 7 percent). Greater competition from corporate accelerators and nonprofits that take no equity would seem to be putting pricing pressure on the market. If these are the signs of the apocalypse, the good news for founders is that the only people truly being harmed here are the VCs themselves. Founders are huge beneficiaries, and most of these new practices don’t affect the limited partners of venture funds, since these programs are coming out of management fees, carry, or both. Even an equity return policy isn’t likely to skew results much, since the assumption is that the worst companies are probably the ones most likely to return their equity since they didn’t grow and thus don’t see the value of the investment. This is why competition in the capital markets is good. VCs have traditionally been able to work with poor performance for years while getting paid millions of dollars in management fees, a view . With greater competition in the capital markets for startups, being a VC is no longer the cushy and instantly-profitable job it once was. The bar has been raised through these new founder-friendly programs, and the worst VCs are facing a tougher battle everyday not just for returns, but for their paychecks as well. |
The ATLAS Bipedal Robot Is Ready To Build Your Warehouse/Battle Station | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYSitvLW0r0] We’ve been following MIT’s , the bipedal robot, for a while now. We’ve seen the cute little guy walk, toddle, and climb over obstacles but now he can reach down, grab a heavy metal girder, and drag it around like a beast. Our little robo-monster is growing up! The demo, which was presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Hong Kong, shows ATLAS “trucking with a truss,” namely dragging a huge piece of metal around an open space. The project is part of work and was produced by Scott Kuindersma, Frank Permenter, and Russ Tedrake. Why is this important? Because ATLAS can now walk while off-balance (albeit not very quickly.) This means the robot could carry differently weighted objects in each arm (a gun and a battle-ax or a baby and an adult) and can also assist in warehouses and deep inside an underground lair. It is, in short, now a humanoid robot that can do useful work. Keep an eye on ATLAS because some day you’ll be cowering in a corner while a dozen of them search your house. Excelsior! |
Farming Startup FarmLogs Triples Market Share In Last Six Months | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Michigan-based FarmLogs is announcing today a significant milestone in the young company’s history. In just two years since its founding, the company has seen incredible growth and now counts customers in all 50 states and over $11 billion worth of crops under its management, a number that has tripled in the last six months. FarmLogs estimates 15% of the farms within the United States are using its services. The company was in Silicon Valley and later moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Earlier this year, Jesse Vollmar, CEO and co-founder explained the company’s focus is building out its product to intelligently predict and optimize crop rotations as well as automate activity data collection. “We are excited to have earned the trust of farmers around the country,” said Vollmar in a statement. “Reaching this major growth milestone means our product is now able to make a substantial positive impact on US agriculture. The pace at which we are growing is a testament to the tremendous quality of people working at FarmLogs and our ability to build a valuable product that puts the farmer first.” FarmLogs’ data-driven approach to farming leans on the mobile web to help crop farmers quickly and efficiently forecast profits, track expenses and more efficiently schedule operations. Best yet, the software utilizes GPS for additional data about any given location’s historical weather data. Farms can quickly jot down notes and input data using the software’s mobile app. It’s a radical revolution for the age-old industry. “FarmLogs makes it incredibly easy for farmers to know what is happening in their fields. Rain, nutrients, crop health, soil conditions, and machine data all analyzed and delivered through intuitive web/mobile UI,” Vollmar said. “We’re taking the most advanced precision ag research from the academic world and bringing it to every farm in the US.” FarmLogs graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 class and went on to raise a $4 million Series A round in early 2014. The cash influx lead to the growth by allowing the company to increase its headcount from 8 to 18 full-time employees. |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 09.05.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today. |
Millennials Are The Largest Group Of Smartphone Owners, And Adoption Is Still Growing | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Millennials, one of the largest generational groups in the U.S., on par with the Baby Boomers, are also the largest group of smartphone owners, says Nielsen in out today. And their adoption of the devices is still growing: by the second quarter of this year, 85% of those aged 18 to 24 owned a smartphone, and 86% of those aged 25 to 34 did. That’s up from 77% and 80%, respectively, over the same time last year. It’s worth also pointing out, on the eve of Apple’s big iPhone 6 reveal next week, that the smartphone in question is more likely to be an Android phone. Nielsen notes that over half (52%) of U.S. smartphones run Android, with Apple iOS accounting for a 42.7% share, and “other” OS’s (Windows Phone, Blackberry, etc.) making up the rest. But while it didn’t break out the number of Millennials specifically who chose Android over iPhone, from comScore this year did. And it, too, that Android dominated, with half of Millennials using Android, and 44% on the iPhone. Though neither report speculated as to why that’s the case, the choice to use Android is often more about the cost of the phone itself versus a decision to align oneself with a particular hardware manufacturer or software system. Android phones extend further down into the low-end of the market in terms of price, and that makes them more broadly adopted – not just in the U.S., but . But whether Millennials are choosing one mobile platform or the other, we’ve long heard reports of how addicted they are to their devices. Remember the stories from earlier this year that said Millennials believed ? ? The millennials are very heavy mobile users, spending 14.5 hours per week on their phones, talking, texting or using social media, . For those designing the next mobile generation of mobile apps, or even just trying to adapt their current online offering to this mobile-first crowd, these metrics matter. In fact, in Nielsen’s smartphone app from this July, the firm found that those aged 25 to 44 (a group which includes Millennials up to Gen X’ers) use the most apps per month, at 29 on average. But it was those in the 18 to 24 bracket which spent the most on their phones. This group was on their phone for 37 hours, 6 minutes, on average, per month – again, largely engaged with social networking apps, entertainment, and communication utilities. It’s no wonder then, that I have an iPhone folder of messaging apps that’s now 10 pages deep on my phone. (It’s for research!) But now the question is whether or not the mobile platform itself will ever be able to grow a service as large as what incumbent Facebook was able to do on the web, before it successfully made the mobile leap. After all, those that do manage to establish a solid mobile footprint are often snapped up by Facebook anyway (e.g. Instagram, Whatsapp), it seems. Snapchat (which is probably delighted by this whole iCloud hack thing – shoulda used Snapchat!), is one notable exception. |
Attend TechCrunch Disrupt For Free #TCDisrupt | Anna Escher | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Good news! You still have a chance to win a ticket to Disrupt San Francisco with our next giveaway. You can earn extra entries to the contest by sharing the giveaway link with friends and following our social accounts. This weekend’s contest ends on 9/7 at 11 AM PST – so you have a few more days to enter and share with friends to increase your chances of winning a ticket to see discuss today’s tech landscape, and more. Details about Disrupt San Francisco and the giveaway: To enter, click the “enter to win” image at the bottom of this post. . Enter to Win Disrupt SF Tickets |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 4 | null |
GoPro Fetch Review: You Will Envy Your Dog’s Work/Life Balance | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7koVxnJW0OM&w=854&h=510] For you today, we have a video a little over six minutes long of a dog experiencing a happiness more pure than you or I will ever know. Please enjoy. Seriously, though, this footage caught using the new GoPro Fetch mount for canines during a holiday weekend cottage trip was only one small part of a much longer series that kept me and my family entertained for far, far too long. I’ve generally never considered myself ‘extreme’ enough to own a GoPro of my own (and I don’t ), but this new Fetch mount has me reconsidering a personal purchase. The dog in the video is my Quincy, a yellow lab belonging to my brother who clearly loves the water. My own pooch Chelsea basically froze when I put it on, which was hilarious but didn’t produce enthralling footage. She later warmed up to it, same as most dogs would a sweater or coat, but she’s not a water dog and the swimming is particularly enjoyable to watch – damn near therapeutic, in fact. A very flattering still image of me and my brother captured via the Fetch-mounted GoPro. The Fetch’s adjustability means that it worked with a range of different dogs I know, from very small to very large, and the two mount locations provided an interesting shift in perspective (although the back mount in general produced much better footage). No dog managed to destroy the Fetch, though none actually tried that hard, and as you can see, it stood up well to prolonged use in the water. GoPro’s growing range of mounts offers a lot of options for the action cam, which once favored the snowboarders of this world but can now entertain even the most risk averse, like myself. It’s $60, and is available now from GoPro.com. |
A User’s Guide To Disrupt SF 2014 | Leslie Hitchcock | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | Hard to believe that Disrupt SF is just around the corner! As always, TechCrunch has partnered with an amazing array of folks who promise to make your experience at the conference better than ever. Join us on Monday for the Official After Party at , sponsored by our friends at . , yes plural: This year, five sponsors are awarding prizes to startups of their choosing from the Battlefield and Startup Alley. For the first time, is hosting a happy hour reception in Startup Alley on Monday and Tuesday afternoon. Enjoy a drink on them and peruse the amazing startups there to exhibit. TechCrunch wants Startup Alley to get the best support possible while at Disrupt, so we’re continuing to offer free What does that mean? It means that Startup Alley and Battlefield companies at Disrupt are entitled to schedule 1:1 meetings with attorneys from Perkins Coie to get courtesy legal advice and investment feedback from Norwest Ventures. Also, is taking SUA participants on a tour of startup spaces in San Francisco during Disrupt. Don’t forget to sign up! : is pleased to sponsor our fun-filled Hardware Alley day again on Wednesday, September 10. We know you love your coffee so head over to the booth to find your caffeine fix during the conference session breaks. Have we got a treat for you! Our friends at will be pouring from their booth at the conference and serving cocktails at our receptions in their capacity as Official Spirits Sponsor. Cheers! : Atlassian is offering 6 months of unlimited group chat, video chat and screen sharing for free to Startup Alley! They are also giving each attendee 6 months of free HipChat Plus. Register using code TCDisrupt14. is reprising its role at the Hackathon, providing the platform for our . Thanks, y’all! For the second Hackathon in a row, the folks over at have generously offered free hosting credits for our intrepid hackers. Can’t wait to see what gets built using them! If you’re an arm-chair Disruptor, thanks to you can watch the conference action from the TechCrunch homepage or the Disrupt SF event page. has long been a TechCrunch partner. If you purchased a ticket, you used Eventbrite. We love them and we think you will, too. If you haven’t purchased a ticket, please go do that |
Mozbii Is A Color-Picking Stylus Just For Kids | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | Now on Kickstarter, is a wonderful stylus that lets kids turn the world into their crayon box. It has already surpassed its $30,000 funding goal, with the campaign ending on Sept. 27. To be sure, there are other color-picking styluses out there, but Mozbii has several features that makes it suitable for children as young as two. The stylus is shaped like a lollipop with a flexible neck. Its RGB color sensor is embedded on one side of the head, with a tiny color-picking button next to it. To use it, kids just need to press Mozbii’s head against an object, and that puts enough pressure on the button to activate it, which means that even toddlers, who have limited motor control, can use the stylus. An LED light on the other side of the “lollipop” head lights up when the stylus successfully picks up a color. Once they pick a color with their Mozbii, it is saved automatically in Mozbii’s app, and they can use it to doodle or fill in coloring pages. Mozbii’s magnetic charging head is also easy for children to use. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRUdVtCJaY&w=640&h=360] Both the Mozbii stylus and app were created by Taiwanese startup , which was founded by Jeremy Shu. Shu, a former operations director at Apple, was inspired to create learning products for kids by his own children. When his son and daughter switched from a bilingual Mandarin-English school to a school that taught exclusively in English, they had a hard time adjusting and their grades began to slip. Instead of pressuring them to study harder, Shu encouraged his children to take up hobbies, including sports, music, and art. He realized that having a creative outlet helped his kids relax and, in turn, their report cards began to improve.
Mozbii is supposed to help nurture children’s creativity while motivating them to interact with the world around them, Shu says. I got to try out Mozbii in Ufro’s office and was impressed with its ease of use and accuracy. It works best when used with vivid colors, like the purple of an orchid flower. More subtle colors, like skin, are harder to duplicate exactly, but Mozbii still captures variations in the tones. In the app, kids can save palettes of up to twelve colors each for use in future drawings. One of the main things that I like about Mozbii is that it encourages children, who spend an increasing amount of time on tablets, to explore their environment and the objects around them. For example, the sensitivity of Mozbii’s RGB color sensor lets them capture several different shades of pink and yellow from the skin of a peach, or they can make a palette by gathering up their favorite toys and using it with the stylus. In addition to the coloring app, Ufro plans to develop other educational apps that work with Mozbii, including apps for reading, numbers, and music. Mozbii already has a finalized prototype, so Shu is confident that the campaign will be able to deliver to the first 100 super early bird backers by next month, while other backers will receive their styluses in November. Pledges that include a Mozbii start at $64. For more information, see its . |
Mobile Authentication Tech Startup AirSig Gets $2M From Foxconn | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | , a Taiwanese startup that makes authentication products for mobile devices, has received $2 million in investment from Foxconn Technology Group. In return, Foxconn will hold a 10 percent stake in the company, which puts AirSig’s valuation at $20 million, the company said. Air Signature, AirSig’s main product, uses the g-sensors in gyroscopes in smartphones to let users unlock their devices by “writing” their signature in the air. The tech is available through AirSig’s app AirSign Unlock, . In addition to mobile devices, Air Signature technology can also be used for e-payment and e-commerce apps, as well as smart devices. For a demo, see the below video. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3siRiXC2R0M] In a statement, AirSig’s CEO Pokai Michael Chen said that the investment from Foxconn will be used to accelerate development of the company’s tech and its expansion into global markets. |
Baidu Invests $10M In Mapping Software Maker IndoorAtlas | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | Finnish startup , which develops indoor mapping technology that uses magnetic positioning, has received a $10 million investment from , China’s top search company. The two companies also announced that they have signed an agreement which will make Baidu the only user of IndoorAtlas’ technology in China. IndoorAtlas will used the capital for research and development, as well as engineering and business development in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. The company’s technology uses the earth’s geomagnetic field to find locations inside a building and says it can achieve accuracy within two meters. In a statement, IndoorAtlas founder and CEO Janne Haverinen said that the partnership with Baidu gives the company access to over 1.34 billion new subscribers. In turn, Baidu will be able to integrate IndoorAtlas’ tech into its existing location-based services and mapping products, said Baidu vice president Liu Jun. “IndoorAtlas’ intellectual property portfolio and global geographical coverage will be instrumental in helping us at Baidu build out our LBS platform for local merchants in China and abroad.” Baidu will demonstrate an IndoorAtlas product customized for its Baidu Maps app at the Baidu World conference, which will be held in Beijing on Sept. 3. This is the latest in several steps Baidu has taken to ramp up its mobile strategy. While it is China’s search leader and considered one of the top three Internet companies in the country (along with and ), Baidu has struggled to compete with its rivals for China’s rapidly growing base of mobile users. But Baidu’s mobile business has been gaining ground. It showed that revenue grew 59 percent year over year, with mobile accounting for over 30 percent of total revenue. Other notable investments that Chinese Internet companies have made in mapping or navigation technology companies include and in May. |
The Meta Watch M1 Is A Next-Gen Smartwatch That Isn’t Ugly | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | go on and on about the features, the battery life, and the fancy software, the , the latest from former Fossil engineer and designer Frank Nuovo, stands out because it’s not ugly. Designed to look more like a regular watch than any smartwatch I’ve seen so far, all of the functionality including call pick-up and control, music management, and PIM notifications appear on a watch that looks quite a bit fancier than your average smartwatch. The M1, which is shipping today, is the culmination of Geiser’s vision for intelligent timepieces. Geiser, who created the in 2003, has been working on the Meta Watch project for years. The new piece, which starts at , has six buttons. The ones at 3 and 9 o’clock control the back and forward functions while the corner buttons, integrated into the lugs, control the light and menu. The watch syncs with any iOS or Android device and allows you to see any notifications that appear on your mobile device. It also includes a handy weather feature as well as sports scores. Is this watch better than the Pebble? It obviously depends on how much you like the styling. As you can see, the piece is made of steel and comes on multiple bracelet and band styles – this one is in black rubber. I prefer the synthetic and leather bands to the bracelets, however, simply because they are a bit more elegant. The watch has been very easy to wear and, more important, lasted almost a week on one charge, a truly amazing feat in the smartwatch world. While beauty is in the eye of the watch wearer, I can say that the M1 is finally a smartwatch that I’d wear with regularity and, even given the potential for future wearables, I’d wear this thing over a color OLED unit any day. While it doesn’t play (yet), it’s definitely one of the smartest smartwatches I’ve seen in a while. We’ll do a bit more on the M1 after I’ve worn it for a bit, but as it stands I’m honestly preferring this new model over my plastic Pebble. [gallery ids="1050983,1050982,1050981,1050980,1050979,1050978"] |
Apple Should Be More Transparent About Security | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | It seems that Apple has gotten embroiled in a security scandal of one sort or another every few months. It dodged Heartbleed but was hit by the . It was called out for not that could have been used to collect data from user devices. Late last year researchers showed off a method for . A year ago a researcher of developers after he says he got no response from Apple. And then there was this week’s celebrity photo hack, which may have been able to be prevented by . In each of these cases, Apple fixed vulnerabilities, released support notes or patched bugs. But in almost all cases, and many others over the years, the company was as opaque as possible about explaining the details of security issues, reluctant to admit to them publicly and very unresponsive to independent security researchers. That leads to misunderstandings and FUD about the extent of the problems and the risks involved for users. This needs to change or it will continue to happen. Apple as a company has shown to have deep concern for the of its users. It very frequently goes against common business wisdom to protect user information from third parties. One example of this is Apple refusing to share subscriber info with the publishers of iPad magazines. Apple sources, including both past and present employees, have never shared any information with me that indicates that Apple is interested in anything less than complete user privacy. But though the company appears on many levels to have the best interests of users at heart, it does not appear to be expending the same kind of deep, detail-oriented effort on security as it is famous for in many other product areas. Apple will obsess over the degree of chamfer on a button, but somehow shoots itself in the foot with silly security mistakes over and over again. I can completely appreciate (and understand) that Apple doesn’t want to make snap judgments about possible security vulnerabilities. Going public with issues before there is a fix, for instance, is a real way to cause more problems than you solve. That’s where the concept of responsible disclosure comes in. But it’s also not taking full advantage of the resources it has available to it, namely independent security researchers. Many security researchers that I speak to are frustrated with the amount of transparency and communication when it comes to reporting vulnerabilities to Apple — and getting them fixed. “I would like to see Apple open the lines of communication between their security engineers and security experts in the field,” says researcher Jonathan Zdiarski. “The only avenue many security researchers feel like they have to get big issues addressed is the public forum. The largest company in the world should have an open communication with the experts who evaluate their software for third parties and governments.” One practical step Apple could take is to either participate in or establish its own paid bug bounty program — in a public or vetted format. This would compensate hackers and security researchers for finding and reporting bugs to Apple. Many of Apple’s contemporaries already do this, including Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Currently, Apple publicly identifies people who expose hacks — recently it even began acknowledging members of iPhone jailbreak teams which discovered vulnerabilities that led to those jailbreaks being possible. But it could definitely afford to incentivize those researchers, or at the very least develop a way to communicate with them more openly and effectively. And it’s not just external security efforts that Apple should work to improve. The ‘ at one of Apple’s Find My iPhone login interfaces was an example of something a hard-core security audit would likely have caught. Likewise the ‘goto fail’ SSL bug that left users vulnerable to traffic snooping for months. There have been many examples of Apple not heeding early warning signs from the security community about possible vulnerabilities. We should expect better from Apple, as it should itself. This is a company whose devices are used by hundreds of millions of people including government employees and world leaders. The question I’ve been asking myself over the months since the SSL vulnerability debacle has been ‘why?’ Why is a company who is generally very well-rounded operationally, and like it or not, produces extremely well-liked and complex devices so bad at communicating about security? The answer I’ve come up with, and this is just a personal theory, is that Apple thinks about security communications in the same way that it thinks about product communications. In other words, it plays its cards incredibly close to the chest at all times by default. These tactics have served it well in the consumer products arena, creating a frenzy of attention around the releases of new devices and services. And that’s great; I don’t mind a little mystery around products as a consumer, even though my job as a reporter is to figure out what Apple could do next and decide whether that’s important enough to talk about publicly. But in security, this kind of ivory tower comms strategy is a losing game, especially as smartphones become an increasingly information-rich repository of our personal lives. Security will become a feature that is as important as any other widget on our future devices, whichever company they come from. As an industry leader, Apple should re-evaluate the way that it handles security, both internally and externally. Be open, be communicative, be honest and we’ll all be better off. |
Apple’s Two Factor Authentication Doesn’t Protect iCloud Backups Or Photo Streams | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | One of the common bits of advice you’ll see people giving you is to enable two-factor authentication on your accounts — including Apple’s. That’s good advice, but it wouldn’t have protected any of these celebrities and it doesn’t protect the other accounts that are compromised by hackers that are able to obtain an Apple ID email and password. While Apple has offered two-factor authentication on accounts for some time now, there is an omission in that system that hackers are taking advantage of. iCloud backups are not protected by two-factor authentication, and can be installed on new devices with only an Apple ID and password. Of course, that’s still a very big ‘only’. Your email and password are as much protection as almost any service on earth offers you by default — and once a hacker obtains those you’re probably in trouble in any case. The early evidence, and Apple’s , indicates that hackers obtained passwords through guessing security questions, social engineering, phishing or other ‘targeted’ attacks — rather than a leak of the password data itself by Apple. Notably, access to iPhone backups can also be accessed using an authentication token (a file created by iTunes) which can be obtained using malware or phishing — and which does not require a password at all. But two-factor is billed by Apple and many security experts as a way to protect yourself from simple password theft. It requires that you have a code sent to your physical device to confirm that yes, it is you logging in to your Apple account. However, Apple’s two-factor solution is actually incomplete. It does not cover many other iCloud services, including backups. In fact, the only three things two-factor secures in iCloud : It does not, however, make you enter a verification code if you restore a new device from an iCloud backup. And that’s the design ‘feature’ that hackers are taking advantage of here. Once they gain access to an Apple account, some are using the login and password to ‘restore’ an iCloud backup using an application by Elcomsoft called the — exporting data including photos and more to a folder which they can then sift through. Even if the hackers do not actually download the entire backup — or if there is no backup on the account — they still have access to a user’s Photo Stream at this point, which is also not protected by two-factor authentication. So, even if all of the people who have had their photos compromised had two-factor enabled, their iCloud backups and Photo Streams would still be accessible. If you thought this was a vulnerability that was fresh and new for Apple — that it wasn’t aware of this loophole — you’d be incorrect. The fact that Apple’s iCloud backups are not protected by two-factor authentication has been known for over a year. Security researcher Vladimir Katalov (who works at Elcomsoft, imagine that) on the iCloud protocol, including what portions of iCloud are protected by two-factor authentication, at the Hack In The Box security conference late last year — and as early as May of last year. Not to mention coverage by , and again . The best thing that Apple could do right now is expand its two-factor security to cover all iCloud services, not just account resets and purchases from new devices. Asking someone to enter another form of identification on a restore or when logging into an account from a new device or location would be good next steps. It’s important to note that there of two-factor to include other iCloud services, but those have not yet been implemented. On the user front, all of the standard pieces of advice still apply. Use a complex password, do not share it with anyone, use a private email if at all possible for your ID — one you also don’t share with anyone. Don’t click on links in emails if at all possible, don’t share personal information over social networks if at all possible and use completely incorrect or random answers to password reset questions. For users that don’t have two-factor enabled at all, doing that will definitely add a layer of security to your account if you don’t have it already — but if thieves are able to obtain your password then that will not protect your backups at this time. In its statement about the hacking incidents, Apple recommended two-factor authentication to increase account security. Apple did not respond to a request for information about expanding its two-factor authentication. |
TechCrunch Disrupt SF Starts With Uber CEO Travis Kalanick | Michael Arrington | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | , a thrice-yearly event where they drag me, the founder of TechCrunch, out like Lenin’s embalmed body to show I’m still around, is but a week away. And if anything will shock me back to life, it’ll be Travis Kalanick, the controversial CEO of the controversial startup (if a company can still be called a startup after raising in venture capital), Uber. Travis is on stage first thing Monday morning to kick things off, and I’ll be interviewing him. And don’t worry that this’ll just be another boring interview. First, I avoid boring interviews like the plague. And second, I’ve known Travis for a long, . There’s much to discuss. |
Associated Content Founder Luke Beatty Is Now In Charge Of AOL’s Tech Blogs (Including This One) | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | So I guess . As , and confirmed by AOL, Susan Lyne is stepping down from her role as CEO of AOL’s brand group, which includes sites like Engadget, Joystiq and, yes, TechCrunch. Lyne will be taking charge of a venture fund within AOL that backs women-focused companies, while responsibility for the brand group will be split between two people — Maureen Sullivan, who will continue to run lifestyle and personal finance sites, as well as AOL.com, and Luke Beatty, who will be in charge of the sites covering tech, autos, and entertainment. Beatty , where he most recently served as the brand group’s head of product. (He’ll continue to lead the new product team.) He previously founded Associated Content, and also worked at Yahoo (which acquired Associated Content) and as a managing director at Techstars. His new title is President, Media Brands. Beatty told me that his purview is “premium content and premium utilities.” We didn’t get into too much detail about his plans (it sounds like he’s still transitioning from a pure product focus), but he did say, “Mobile experiences are going to require utility at some level, and as content brands we have to figure that out.” When I asked if the brand group is being scaled back as , another AOL spokesperson on the call jumped in, saying that even though (and ), it’s investing more in its existing brands. Beatty agreed, adding, “When I first joined, somebody handed me a list of our brands, and it was long. We’ve shut some of those down — mankind probably assumed they were shut down already, but they still had people maintaining them.” Now, he said, AOL doesn’t have to worry about “legacy care and feeding.” Not to be self-centered or anything, but my real question was: Is this good news for TechCrunch? As a lowly writer, I don’t really know — it takes a while before corporate management changes trickle down to affect me. But seems happy, so I’m happy. |
Less Than 1% Of Comments Sent To The FCC Opposed Net Neutrality | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | A of hundreds of thousands of comments submitted to the FCC by the public found that the vast majority spoke in favor of net neutrality. The group estimates that “less than 1 percent of comments were clearly opposed to net neutrality.” There is wiggle room in the data, given that some people are not clear writers, and could have argued in several directions at once. For TechCrunch’s own analysis of the comments, . The data indicates that there is little in the way of vocal grassroots support in opposition of net neutrality. Read into that what you will. There is another piece of the foundation’s report that is worth considering. According to the group, with issues of this magnitude, it is “not unusual for form letter contributions to make up in excess of 90 percent of a docket’s total submissions.” In the case of net neutrality, according to the foundation, something akin to 60 percent of the comments submitted were form letters, a far lower percentage. That fact implies that hundreds of thousands of individuals took the time to write their own comments on the issue. The foundation’s analysis was based on a large, but incomplete, sample, but presuming their ratios hold up for the full, 1.1 million comments submitted during the first comment period, more than 400,000 comments were composed by individuals during the first comment period. The impact of the comments remains to be seen. The FCC , by three days, to September. If you have something to say, you have just under two weeks to say it. |
The Road To Disrupt: Bitcovery And Hammer & Chisel | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | On this week’s Road To Disrupt, we’re back with and and revisit their on-stage Startup Battlefield presentation at Disrupt SF 2013. Bitcovery aims to solve the discovery of bits, or digital content, by connecting you to friends’ collections of content. Jason Citron, founder of Hammer & Chisel, prepares to unveil the first multi-player battle arena game (MOBA) for tablets. If all else fails, Citron knows his game trailer will go over well since “…it’s just a minute of pure awesome.” Citron was also humbled to be included in the group of Battlefield companies, saying that there are companies solving problems “fundamental to humanity.” Just founders supporting founders here at the Startup Battlefield. What’s that you say? Disrupt SF 2014 is next week? Yikes, better |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 5 | null |
3DHubs Raises $4.5 Million To Make Local 3D Printing Global | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | , a 3D printer matching service, has raised a $4.5 million Series A to help bring their local 3D printing system to the world. The service, which allows you to find and order 3D prints from printers in your area, is similar to other services like and but is already available overseas. Founded by former 3D Systems employees Brian Garret and Bram de Zwart, the site was one of the first global 3D printing solutions. They’ve processed over 30,000 3D prints and have about 7,100 printers in 140 countries. To use the service, you simply choose your area, upload a model, and ask for a quote. The 3D printer owner then prints things out and gets it to you via post or sneaker net. It’s a tough market but the team prides themselves on speed. “We’re very fast and average delivery time has dropped to 1.2 days from submission to pickup/shipping,” said Garret. “Competitors like still take about a week for their fastest materials, and much longer for special materials.” They’ve also worked up some excellent partnerships and are already embedded as a service provider for some 3D modeling products. “We’ve got partnerships in place with Autodesk (direct print button to our API) as well as consumer brands like Fairphone. Through these partnerships we drive about 40% of our orders, this is where we see most of the growth in the coming year,” said Garret. “Bram and I started 3D Hubs out of frustration that existing 3D printing services weren’t living up to the promise of 3D Printing. As soon as we launched, the idea really resonated with printer owners around the world who enjoy printing, but often run out of things to print for themselves,” he said. “3D Hubs offers them a way to earn money and collaborate on cool maker projects.” The Series A is led by Balderton Capital. Mark Evans, General Partner at Balderton Capital, will join the 3D Hubs board. The company is opening new offices in New York at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and will improve its API penetration. “We are developing new features that will make the experience of ordering a personalized 3D print similar to traditional e-commerce platforms,” said Garret. Printing and selling small batch hardware is going to be the future. These guys are right at the cusp. It’s definitely a crowded space, though, so it looks like they’re going to have to put all four million of those Series A dollars to work. |
Google Partners With UCSB To Build Quantum Processors For Artificial Intelligence | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | Google today that it is expanding its research around quantum computing and that it has hired UC Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) — one of the most research groups in this area — to work on new quantum processors based on superconducting electronics. Researchers in Martinis’ lab were among the first to back in 2008. Google has long shown an interest in quantum computing. It was one of the first companies to buy one of , for example, even when it was still how (or even if) D-Wave’s processor worked. Since 2013, Google has also been working on quantum computing research with NASA and the Universities Space Research Association as part of its . Now, Google is going beyond using other people’s hardware. “With an integrated hardware group, the Quantum AI team at Google will now be able to implement and test new designs for quantum optimization and inference processors based on recent theoretical progress and insights from the D-Wave architecture,” Google’s Director of Engineering Hartmut Neven today. Martinis and his team will be based in Google’s Santa Barbara office and will continue to work with UCSB graduate students and as part of this partnership with Google, the team will also continue to use UCSB’s fabrication and measurement facilities. Martinis says that he is specifically excited about Google’s expertise in “mapping machine learning applications to a quantum computer.” While Martinis doesn’t explicitly mention this in today’s announcement, he is probably also referring to Google’s , a pioneer in the field of deep neural networking and who came to Google in 2013 from the University of Toronto as part of Google’s acquisition of his startup . While Google will now work on building and implementing its own quantum processor designs, Neven says that the company will also continue to work with D-Wave and use that company’s in cooperation with NASA. |
Announcing The Disrupt SF Hackathon Judges And API Workshops | Jeffery Bennett | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | We’re less than a week away from this year’s Disrupt Hackathon, and are delighted to announce the judges & API workshops. I, along with TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Editor, Sam O’Keefe, will be your Hackmaster and host for the weekend. In years past, our judges have served as combination of part-bloodhound, part-iron curtain, separating the wheat from the proverbial chaff. This year is no different. Our handpicked judges are seasoned veterans and have lived to tell their tales. So without further ado, this year’s Disrupt Hackathon judges: Stephen Garcia ( ) is Director of Product Innovation at Netflix, where he is responsible for the experiences on Smart TVs, Game Consoles, and other connected living room devices. Prior to Netflix, Stephen worked at Beats (recently acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for product innovation, design and strategic partner integrations for Beats Music. Stephen previously held senior positions in product, design and engineering at MOG, Yahoo, and Sapient.
Dr. Jhilmil Jain is the Head of Android User Research at Google. She is passionate about leading teams that execute research and design to shape product strategy. She is responsible for UX research for the core Android platform, 5 screens (Automotive, Wear, TV, mobile, tablet), Google Play, Google Now, Voice, Android One and hardware design. She also serves on the advisory board of Outward, Inc. Earlier in her 10-year career in Silicon Valley, she worked at Microsoft, HP Labs and IBM Research Almaden on mobile platforms, voice, TV, retail, gaming etc. Jhilmil is a known expert in the field – she consistently presents and has held leadership positions at conferences like CHI, UXPA, HCII, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Usability Studies. When Jhilmil is not focused on growing Android internationally and defining the future of computing, she can be found volunteering at Girls Who Code and Humane Society of Silicon Valley. Sahil is the founder and CEO of Gumroad. Gumroad enables creators to earn a living selling the things they make directly to their audience. Previously, he was early at Pinterest — a service that lets users collect, organize, and share the things they are into.
Morgan Missen is founder of Main. Previously, Morgan was Head of Talent at foursquare in San Francisco, the first employee recruiter at Twitter and spent several years at Google as a talent specialist for global engineering teams and its corporate strategy group. She has also done contingency recruitment for Silicon Valley based Fortune 500 companies including Yahoo!, Oracle, EA and Cisco Systems; and advised early stage startups on recruiting and hiring.
Nicholas is Group Technical Director at AKQA, a global advertising agency and leader in innovative digital products and services. He oversees development and technology while working with some of his favorite client products: beer, cars and video games. Prior to AKQA, he led engineering at Thismoment, a social content curation platform and was a co-founder at Proto, an award-winning development shop in San Francisco. Always intrigued by a good solution in search of a problem, he loves designing, building and breaking things with technology. In addition to the hacking & the presenting, the Disrupt Hackathon is also a great opportunity to learn about brand new technologies & how they can make your job easier. We’ve put together some great opportunities for you to up your game & better your chances of walking out of the Hackathon with prizes in hand.
The Evernote API lets you tap into the functionality offered by the Evernote service and gain access to the millions of users around the world who use it every day. In this workshop we’ll introduce the API and look at Evernote’s SDKs, then discuss creating new notes, rendering notes, searching for existing notes and other common operations. You’ll learn how your application can store its data in Evernote and how to tap into the information that a user has already stored in their notebooks. Grand Evernote Prize – iPad Minis! The best overall app in [design, utility, api, originality] that works with the Evernote API. All members (4 max) receive an iPad mini Find out more about Evernote’s API at: .
Learn how to build hyper-scalable web API’s that can power your mobile applications on any device with Node.js. Leveraging the Express framework you can build RESTful JSON API’s and deploy for world-wide availability in minutes with Microsoft Azure. In addition to scalable hosting Microsoft Azure provides a rich Node.js in-browser development environment allowing you to build your API without any setup on any platform. Find out more about Node on Microsoft Azure at: Pebble is the smartwatch that 85,000+ people brought to life through Kickstarter in 2012. After setting the Kickstarter funding record, Pebble has continued to develop into a fully functional and customizable smartwatch ecosystem. Pebble is amazing thanks to its large community and the flexibility it offers to developers. Join us to learn how to write your first Pebble applications in JavaScript or C and how to use Pebble’s APIs. CloudPebble is a complete web-based development environment for Pebble, providing you with the tools to build and run your app from your web browser. Writing apps in C and even in JavaScript (Pebble.js) can be done very quickly and effortlessly in CloudPebble! If you do not have a Pebble yet, we will have refurbished Pebbles for sale at $75! The Pebble SDK consists of different frameworks that are organized by functionality. Each framework includes an API and provides access to the software libraries supported natively by Pebble OS. You use these interfaces (APIs) in the C programming language to write software for the Pebble platform. Find out more about Pebble’s API at: See how developers, start-ups and brands are leveraging the variety of Twitter APIs and data to engage their users, gain new ones, and jump-start their businesses. In this talk, Ryan will introduce you to some examples of Twitter in the wild, and share some simple ways to get started with the Twitter APIs, from the Streaming APIs to Twitter Cards. Get started today with code samples from the TwitterDev Github repo: Clover is the open point-of-sale platform. Using Clover’s Android or web APIs, you can build solutions for businesses that run directly on Clover’s sleek and awesome payment/point-of-sale devices, or build customer-facing solutions that integrate with those businesses using the Clover platform. Clover’s goal is to put an API in every storefront. As more businesses (and more countries) adopt the Clover platform, you as the developer will have the opportunity to reach those businesses directly via the Clover App Market. Clover also understands the exciting changes coming in the payments industry whether it involves chip cards, NFC, cryptocurrencies or paying directly via a neural implant. (OK, we made that last one up, but join our awesome developer community and it just might be possible!) Come learn how to “hack the cash register” with Clover. Find out more about Clover’s APIs at: |
Microsoft Partners Said To Test Windows 9 Ahead Of Public Release | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | Microsoft is . So if you were looking forward to getting your paws on the code, you have only four weeks left to wait. That is, if you are not a key Microsoft partner. According , Microsoft is currently providing some partners with access to the operating system ahead of the public. That’s not too surprising, but it does lend credibility to current expectations that the operating system should touch down — in one form or another — later this month. Sams doesn’t think that the currently disbursed code will leak from the partners themselves, and that may be true. Hope is an eternal spring, not a flat circle. Microsoft declined to comment. I’m somewhat excited about Windows 9. This is due in no small part to a vague notion that I have long had that much of what Windows 8 brought to the table wasn’t bad at all, but merely poorly organized, and disjointed. It felt, as it were, something like a bundle of features hung together with string and bits of chewing gum. If Microsoft can distill the best parts of the Metro interface and fuse it to a top-tier desktop experience, I’ll file a corporate request with AOL for a copy to run on my daily driver Macbook Air. But we are a long way from anything close to that. It’s quite likely that the first preview will contain only a partial feature set, if we can use the Windows 8 preview rollout as guidance. So even when the first official code is released, we won’t have the full picture. Start menu or bust. |
Home Depot Investigating Potentially Massive Credit Card Breach | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | Did you just get your credit card replaced after the Great Target Fiasco of 2013? Don’t get too used to that new card. It’s starting to look like it’s that time again. Home Depot has confirmed that it’s investigating some “unusual activity” with regards to its customer data, and the consistently spot-on is saying that it’s a credit card breach. According to Krebs, two “massive” batches of cards appeared on a credit card number seller site early this morning. It’s unclear just how long the breach was in play — but Kreb’s early analysis of the credit card data suggests that its tentacles reached into the majority of Home Depot’s 2,200 stores, possibly going as far back April of this year. So in other words: if you’ve used a credit card at Home Depot pretty much any time this year, it might be a good time to hop on the phone with your bank. Home Depot’s stock dropped by over 2.5 percent with the news. At this point, I can confirm that we’re looking into some unusual activity and we are working with our banking partners and law enforcement to investigate. Protecting our customers’ information is something we take extremely seriously, and we are aggressively gathering facts at this point while working to protect customers. If we confirm that a breach has occurred, we will make sure customers are notified immediately. Right now, for security reasons, it would be inappropriate for us to speculate further. We will provide further information as soon as possible. Hearing breach window of May '14-present. If true, Home Depot breach could be much larger than Target (40M cards stolen over 3 weeks) — briankrebs (@briankrebs) [Image via , used under creativecommons] |
Sonos Kills The Bridge And Goes Almost Totally Wireless | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | Wireless speaker company has updated its entire streaming system to allow for nearly wireless speaker connectivity. Until today, the only way to connect an entire home to the same speaker network was to use something called a Bridge, a $50 box that connected directly to your router via Ethernet. Now, however, the system can connect directly to your wireless router, bypassing the Bridge entirely. Why is this a big deal? has long been the whole-home audio system of choice for nerds everywhere. Being able to play different tracks in different rooms (or turn on Party Mode for whole home music) has evolved from a process that required an expensive controller and bridges to a system that uses commodity hardware and your own wireless network. Whereas most hardware companies become more insular and difficult to use because of proprietary systems and architectures, Sonos has made its speakers far simpler. By reducing costs and hardware requirements, Sonos has exhibited some of the most intelligent behavior in the hardware industry. Faced with a glut of tablets and phones they discontinued their original (excellent) remote and support iOS and Android. Now they have further reduced costs and barriers to entry by killing the Bridge in some cases. While not every situation will allow for full wireless streaming, Sonos has made it surprisingly simple to wirelessly connect all your speakers. |
Apple Denies Any Breach Of Its Systems In Celebrity Photo Leak | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | Apple has released an in response to accusations that its iCloud storage system might be somehow behind the , whose victims included Jennifer Lawrence. In the statement Apple denies any breach within its systems, but does concede that celebrity accounts were compromised by attackers using standard phishing techniques to guess user names, passwords and the answers to security questions. Apple’s statement in full: CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–We wanted to provide an update to our investigation into the theft of photos of certain celebrities. When we learned of the theft, we were outraged and immediately mobilized Apple’s engineers to discover the source. Our customers’ privacy and security are of utmost importance to us. After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud® or Find my iPhone. We are continuing to work with law enforcement to help identify the criminals involved. To protect against this type of attack, we advise all users to always use a strong password and enable two-step verification. Both of these are addressed on our website at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4232. The distinction Apple is making is clear – certain iCloud accounts may have been accessed, but that didn’t happen as a result of any systematic flaw in Apple’s security systems or cloud services. Instead, the techniques used to access the accounts in questions were the same that make any online accounts vulnerable; those include researching biographical details of a target to guess passwords and answers to security questions, and possibly running through multiple options until you find the right one. Apple’s advice for password creation. Workarounds to prevent vulnerability to this kind of attack include, as Apple mentions, selecting strong passwords (like those created using random password generators) and enabling two-factor authentication, which is an option on iCloud. Users could also employ 1Password and other password management services, which make it easier to use complex passwords not tied to biographical info, and which encourage regular cycling of login credentials. |
Go To TechCrunch Disrupt For Free #TCDisrupt | Travis Bernard | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | Every day this week we are giving away a ticket to Disrupt San Francisco. We’ll announce the giveaways in various locations, so make sure you follow our social accounts for tips. You can earn extra entries to the contest by sharing the giveaway link with friends and following our social accounts. Today’s contest ends on 9/3 at noon PST (24 hours from now), but we’ll announce another giveaway tomorrow afternoon (after this contest comes to an end). Details about Disrupt San Francisco and the giveaway: To enter, click the “enter to win” image at the bottom of this post. . Enter to Win Disrupt SF Tickets |
The Case For Intelligent Failure To Invent The Future | Vinod Khosla | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | The world is changing at an increasingly rapid pace. In the past, experts with spreadsheets and econometric models or social scientists with subscale studies and linear models may have been useful. These so-called experts extrapolated from what came before, but as the rate of change has increased, looking to the past often is no longer meaningful – especially in a world driven by new technology. In 1986, the McKinsey consulting group was asked to forecast the number of cell phones that would be in use in the United States by the year 2000; their model predicted fewer than one million, but the actual figure was more than two orders of magnitude greater at 109 million. How could one predict in 1986 what technology would look like by 2000? Today, the means of production and distribution are being democratized and technology’s ability to enable creative uses and business models is quickly evolving. One person can spread an idea to billions. One person can build a product used by billions. The future will not be like the past. The future will be built by those who will take risks and action to invent the world they want. Our civilization’s needs are expanding rapidly, as seven billion people reach for the lifestyle of the 700 million most well off while our physical resources cannot keep pace. The only way to bridge the gap is with intellectual capital, which will multiply the resources available to us. When five-to-seven billion people all demand equal energy consumption per capita, natural resources per capita (lumber, copper, steel, etc.), medical, health and educational resources and resource-intensive foods (meat, poultry, sugars, etc.); the way out is not linear scaling but rather resource multiplication through innovative technology. Already, Wikipedia is the most powerful medical tool we have globally today; Google the most powerful learning tool; Facebook and Twitter the most powerful social tools. It is an absolute necessity that we develop intellectual property that multiplies our resources if we are to bridge this gap. We must invent our way into a new future. There is many an entrepreneur toiling away in anonymity, working on things few others know is important, but some of them will change the world. Over the years, I have developed great skepticism toward so-called experts and pontificators who seem authoritative in forecasting and create an illusion of knowing based on very little actual expertise. For instance, a University of California study conducted over the course of twenty years polled 284 eminent experts – ranging from politicians to professors and correspondents to consultants – all with widely differing opinions from to . The so-called “experts” made 28,000 about the future, but found they were only slightly more accurate than chance and worse than basic computer algorithms. Most planning and reliance on traditional methods and processes lead to similar errors all while giving people false confidence, especially as the rate of change accelerates. Academics, especially in the social sciences, don’t do much better. On the other hand, I have experienced the power of doers, the chaotic and naïve world of optimistic entrepreneurs who just try things, admit mistakes, fail, learn, iterate, try again and find solutions – often out of necessity. Accepting, even encouraging, the right kind of failure is the best way to discover the solution to our problems and close the resource gap. Learning by engaging, iterating and persisting, rather than pursuing academic studies or writing papers, seem to be the major drivers of change (although I also am a fan of scholarship to expand human knowledge that in some cases entrepreneurs may apply or leverage). In bridging the gap between the resources we have and the resources and progress we want, the biggest risk we can take is to not take any risks at all. Taking risks means accepting failure and also recognizing that not all failure is good. Failure because of intelligent but risky attempts may be the only way we bridge this gap. As Robert F. Kennedy so aptly put it, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” Many smart people have taken big risks and made intelligent attempts at audacious goals but still failed. Sometimes the failure is because they pursued the wrong vision. Sometimes the vision is right but the tactics are wrong. Often, the failure can be simply attributed to just plain bad luck. There are a dozen reasons a good venture can fail. In my decades of encouraging entrepreneurs and innovation, I have learned that an entrepreneur probably only controls approximately 30 to 40-percent of the factors that affect their success. Competitors and environmental circumstances often make up the rest. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, because if we didn’t then the world would approach stasis. If we take the very small percentage of entrepreneurs who succeed (keeping in mind that early in their careers, it’s hard to differentiate the successful entrepreneurs from the failures) and look at the impact they have made and the resources they have helped multiply, the failures seem trivial by comparison. A 90-percent probability of failure means a 10-percent chance of changing the world, if the goal is ambitious enough. We may have lost resources in those failed efforts, and naive journalists may have poked fun at them, but without the attempts, we would not eventually have developed the many innovations that revolutionize how we live today – including the personal computer, email, the Internet, the mobile phone, the tablet or any of the endless applications built on these technologies. We would not have Google, Twitter, Amazon, Uber or countless others. Although a hundred entrepreneurs may fail for each one that succeeds, the successes make the failures worthwhile. Too often, there is a tendency, especially among investors, large corporations, and public officials, to reduce the probability of failure to the point that the consequences of success become inconsequential. In the area of sustainable energy, only cost effective and clean solutions matter, and those are likely to come from entrepreneurs attempting Black Swan technologies or approaches that few believe are possible. Already, Tesla has changed the automaker’s view of electric cars, and Google’s driverless car effort has gotten others moving on self-driving cars. In the areas of agriculture and food, we are seeing early attempts at unconventional approaches and innovation to upend the current resource inefficient system. In education, the old guard laughs at early failures in online learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs) considering them naive, but entrepreneurs are now trying the next iteration after learning from their mistakes (even though many academic pontificators dismiss this education style entirely). Beyond the litany of information technology pioneers, the efforts of innovators in other fields have been equally impressive in forcing change in their respective fields. Entrepreneurs at Genentech in the 1980s revolutionized pharmaceutical drug discovery. Horizontal drilling caused a big, but questionable, shift in energy production, which affected natural gas prices and home heating bills. Entrepreneurship itself is not a complete solution as social and political factors often play a part, but it is still the single most important resource multiplier we have. In fact, entrepreneurship, especially technology-based entrepreneurship, may be the only necessary, if not sufficient, response to meet the global population’s desires for a better life and to give seven billion people the resource rich lifestyle that approximately seven hundred million of us currently enjoy. George Bernard Shaw famously said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” It is encouraging to see entrepreneurs fighting to overcome the naysayers who pervade our world. It is energizing to feel the passion that entrepreneurs with a dream bring to their industry. Skeptics and cynics never did the impossible, and we need the impossible to bridge our resource gap. Please don’t call a committee hearing or start a research study to follow up on this idea. Just go do it. |
Samsung Level Headphone Series Review: Galaxy Owners Only Need Apply | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 2 | Samsung is trying to add some additional cachet to its brand with a self-produced line of high-end audio accessories, dubbed “Level” by the Korean electronics giant. The Level series includes three different types of headphones, including an in-ear model, an on-ear version and an over-ear variety. The Level In, Level On and Level Over each offer a different experience, but they all serve the same purpose (and achieve the same goal): Give Samsung Galaxy device owners a line of accessories to call their very own. The is a “premium” in-ear headset, complete with an inline mic and remote that offers volume control on modern Galaxy devices as well as play/pause and track control. It comes in either white or black, with metallic accents, and ships with various earbuds for varying fit and a carrying case. Samsung’s design is a bit overdramatic for my liking with the Level In, as they appear large and bulky – they seem designed to attract attention, in other words, and perhaps to signal to viewers that the wearer is rocking Samsung buds. The size doesn’t make them overly heavy to wear, but it might contribute to the general discomfort I experienced when wearing these. Somehow, despite presenting a plethora of tip options for various fits of the earbuds, none of those included actually work with my ears, which isn’t a problem I typically have with in-ear type headphones. The squishy memory foam variety come closest, but these still don’t alleviate the slight pain I get in my ears from wearing these for extended periods. Sound quality, when a seal is achieved, is decent, and on par with ear buds in the $100 range. You can still get better sound from buds that are cheaper, however, including the Klipsch S5 series, and those are more comfortable to wear in my experience. The remote controls, especially volume on an Android phone, are nice, but again only real benefits if you have a Samsung Galaxy device. On-ear headphones have to strike a delicate balance in terms of blending comfort with a lightweight design that doesn’t box ears in, and Samsung has managed to create a headset that does that with the . The soft leather accents on the top band and earcups are extremely comfortable, and look good on the white/tan model I tried out. The Level On also folds up for easy storage, and comes with its own hard shell carrying case. It’s light on the head and in the hand, and it comes with a cable with a built-in remote/mic combo that works with Galaxy devices, and provides basic functionality for other Android devices and iPhones. Overall, Samsung has done well with the design on the Level On, but the metal-look accents and slightly pearlescent paint don’t mask the fact that at base, these are still constructed mostly of plastic, and don’t necessarily have the premium feel of other headphones priced in this range. Audio quality is good, with a somewhat strong bass performance, but get muddy at the top end. They’re generally unimpressive performers, however, and if audio quality is your top priority, other options in this range will serve you better. The is Samsung’s top-of-the-line set, and provide big leather-lined cups that completely enclose a listener’s ears. They look much the same as the Level On, borrowing the same design cues and color styles (though the ones I reviewed came in a piano black) and they also wear quite comfortably. Over-ear headphones are generally more bulky, and these are definitely that, and in fact they add a decent amount of weight, too. They do cover my large-ish ears nicely as a result, however. The problem with the Level Over, which have active noise cancellation, is that this key feature isn’t executed all that well; the internal, rechargeable battery works well, but when on the noise cancellation produces a lot of auditory feedback when connected to a source, and still isn’t quite as powerful at blocking out ambient noise as industry leaders like the Bose QC15. Samsung’s audio quality likewise leaves something to be desired with the Level Over (sound comes through somewhat tinny and lacking the rich quality you’ll get with headphones from companies with more audio chops), but the trade-offs in terms of their complete compatibility with the Galaxy range and in-line controls might make that an exchange worth making. |
5 Reasons You Should Work For A Startup At Least Once | Adam Arbolino | 2,014 | 9 | 20 | They say in business you should think big. But when it comes to your career, have you considered thinking “small”? In my experience, a startup is a roller-coaster ride that can offer you incredible career experiences and teach you some invaluable life lessons. Startups can make you more efficient than you’ve ever been, and they can help you expand your responsibility and knowledge and learn how any business, despite challenges, can effectively get off the ground. The feeling you get when you work for a startup is rather hard to describe. In some respects, it’s a little like taking the red pill and getting ejected from the Matrix. Everything you do in a startup makes a difference. No longer are you surrounded by a safety blanket world where you’re a small cog in a large machine. In a startup, everything you do will contribute to the ultimate success or failure of the business. In my experience, leaving a large organization and heading to a startup felt liberating. In the early days, it felt like every piece of code I wrote was making a difference. In fact, startups actually push you to identify and focus on what’s absolutely critical, forcing you to think more creatively about how you approach projects and create value. And best of all, you’ll often get to see results first-hand and share in the rewards and glory. I unequivocally say I learned more in my first two months in a startup than I did in the previous five years of my professional career. The reason for this is that everyone in a startup is expected to wear multiple hats. A startup forces you to adopt new skills and responsibilities to make up for the small-sized taking on the huge challenges of building an empire. In startups, fast learning can also lead to increased responsibility and multiple opportunities to both utilize and accelerate talents and knowledge. All of this can translate into powerful position in the business world and means you’ll have much more to offer as an individual, particularly when it comes time to move on or even start your own business. One of the areas that I’m most proud of at DesignCrowd is that we have built a culture where talented people come together and make work fun (work doesn’t feel like work). There’s nothing more rewarding than feeling excited to come into the office in the morning to tackle the next challenge the world has thrown at us. You will also find that in startups, you get to shape the culture around you. Entering a larger organization usually means that you’ll be stepping into a predetermined culture, set with existing practices, customs and values. Joining a startup, on the other hand, often means that you can directly contribute to the creation and growth of the business culture, offering ideas and practices that can help shape the working philosophy of the company. One of the most rewarding things about startups is that you can find yourself working with a team that is highly passionate and enthusiastic. This can spark inspiration on every level, leading to truly innovative ideas and developments that can help the business stand out against competitors in the greater industry. Being part of an entrepreneurial team is also a wonderful way to learn how to innovate. Entrepreneurs are great people to learn from — they identify a problem and need to find a new efficient way to solve it. Joining a startup gives you the opportunity to start learning what it takes to be your own boss. While they take personal and financial sacrifice, startups pay you back in opportunities and knowledge on how to take charge of your own venture. If you’re toying with the idea of one day being your own boss, working in a startup is the ideal place to educate yourself on how to set goals, execute strategies, take your product to market and implement strong business operations. You can also be required to take on other, more administrative business tasks, which can actually equip you with great business know-how. “You learn that there are lots of details in any enterprise,” . “You might have to name the company, design a logo, find office space, figure out the legal entity, find an insurance carrier and all the thousands of mundane activities that one takes for granted in a larger company.” The key startup lesson in all of this is to never underestimate the power of working for a startup organisation. Startups can equip you with invaluable hands-on tools and experience, growing your skills, knowledge and even responsibilities rapidly – and that’s something that’s difficult to come by in a medium or larger-sized organization. |
The State Of Investments In Europe: A Review Of The Last 5 Years | Christian Hernandez | 2,014 | 9 | 20 | A lot has been written in the last few years on the evolution of the technology ecosystem in Europe, including Christian’s own bullish stance on , Stephen’s piece on the of seed funds in the region, and articles touting and as the two local leading startup hubs. Our intent with this analysis was to use data to determine the challenges and opportunities surrounding the European entrepreneurial ecosystem. European companies raise smaller rounds at each stage versus their U.S. counterparts and make that funding last as much as eight months longer before securing the next one. A clear funding gap remains in Europe at the Series A stage and there is a more aggressive Series B crunch, as well. Click to enlarge However, this is changing. There are a greater number of institutional funding sources as evidenced by the rise of new early-stage venture firms like our own White Star Capital, Passion Capital and Point Nine. We are also seeing growth-stage investors like and close funds with a view to supporting Series B rounds alongside Accel and Index. These new investors are responding to the increasing strength, vibrancy and tenacity of European entrepreneurs. The number of European companies successfully raising seed-stage funding has increased 600 percent in the last five years. The median size of Series A rounds is steadily increasing. European exits are accelerating in volume from Helsinki and London to Madrid and Berlin. The volume of seed-stage deals has accelerated significantly in the past few years across both regions with the US increasing by 85 percent between 2009-2013 to over 2,000 seed-stage deals and the EU increasing almost six-fold to over 900 deals per year. This phenomenon has likely been driven by macro-economic, policy and social factors leading to a greater appetite for entrepreneurship, various tax incentives for angel investors across the region, and a larger number of accelerators and incubators in every major European hub. The median amount invested at seed stage in the U.S. doubled between 2009 and 2014 to $500,000. In Europe, on the other hand, it decreased every year between 2010 and 2013 to $150,000. The first eight months of 2014 saw this increase to a much healthier $300,000 (driven by larger seed deals in Sweden and Germany), but the dataset is too small to conclusively indicate a broader upward trend. In other words, for most of the past five years, seed-stage companies in Europe were under-capitalized relative to their U.S. competitors. This could imply that European founders are building businesses with only one-third the potential of their transatlantic counterparts, but we would strongly disagree with that assumption. We acknowledge that the U.S. market offers greater scale at outset. However, we would point to the growing momentum and global potential of European startups as evidenced recently by King, SuperCell, BlaBlaCar, Klarna, Spotify and others. We would further contend that the global reach of distribution channels like Facebook, Twitter, the App Store and Google Play are making the size of any single market less relevant. When judged by median round size, Europe seems to be catching up at the Series A stage. The number of European Series A deals has almost doubled and the median funding amount has increased 73 percent to $3.75 million since 2009. This compares to a median funding amount of $5 million for the 531 Series A made in 2014 in the U.S., up 28 percent since 2009. However, if we look at the ratio of seed stage companies that succeed in raising Series A rounds, we see that the “Series A Crunch” is twice as acute in Europe. Out of our data set of over 9,000 seed deals since January 2009, only 6 percent of European companies managed to secure an A round, compared with 12 percent in the US. Even more tellingly, only 1.5 percent of the European companies went on to raise a Series B compared to 4 percent in the U.S.
So while the gap in median dollar amount invested at Series A is narrowing, the supply of capital is extenuating the narrowing of the funnel for early-stage companies in Europe and continues through later stages. The U.S. strongly outpaces Europe at the Series B stage both in terms of the percentage of deals that gain funding and also of the round size The number of Series B deals in Europe remained flat over the period while it grew 37 percent in the U.S. Since 2012 there has consistently been a $3 million gap between the median size of a U.S. Series B and a European one. This signals a dangerous under-capitalization of European companies, especially as they attempt to compete at scale with their U.S. counterparts. We dug deeper into this phenomenon by looking at the “speed” of investments. Speed, in this context, is the average number of days for a company that announced the raise of a seed round to raise a Series A round and subsequently a Series B round. Click to enlarge At first glance, the increase in speed from seed to Series A in Europe from 424 to 205 days appears to be a good sign. However, remember that the average seed investment in Europe in 2013 was $150,000 compared with $500,000 in the U.S. We suspect that the reduced time between rounds in Europe unfortunately signals that entrepreneurs are being forced to refocus on fundraising more quickly at the expense of building and scaling a product and the business. For Series B, U.S. companies, on average, raise 375 days after their Series A compared with 486 days in Europe. In other words, European companies (whose Series A rounds were 20 percent smaller to begin with) must make that money last for four months longer before raising a Series B. European startups are likely using a larger proportion of their funding to support burn rather than investing in growth and scale. As European funders and founders, we both strongly believe that the intellectual, technical and creative talent of Europe is turning its attention toward the digital arena. European entrepreneurs have the ambition, competency and foresight to create global leaders in their sectors, and the data proves the momentum, but also the challenges ahead. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.