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Closing The Gaps In Mobile Health | Dan Pelino | 2,014 | 9 | 26 | As our health system transforms to be more patient-centered, evidence-based and effective, mobile technology has been conspicuously absent from daily healthcare workflow. But if we truly envision a future in which patients are at the center of our health system, it’s time for that to change. Today’s clinicians have access to information that can help them make decisions that are truly individualized for each patient’s unique needs. And new efforts to coordinate complex care needs for patients are helping to tackle chronic illnesses and improve care for the aging population. Yet, despite advances in mobile technology, there is still a significant gap in the effort to bring the power of health analytics and care coordination directly to the patient. Every day, clinicians are working to better coordinate care and mine healthcare information to make individualized, data-driven decisions for each patient based on their specific medical needs. In today’s growing mobile healthcare ecosystem, what if we could reconfigure the workflow completely around the patient all while transforming the way doctors and nurses deliver care? The challenges are not only in making mobile devices work seamlessly and securely with hospitals’ IT infrastructure and electronic medical records, but also in designing job and role-specific apps that put critically important data in providers’ hands to improve decision-making and patient care. Many doctors already have smartphones with 68 percent using iPhones and 59 percent using iPads. Yet, those mobile devices are not well integrated into the hospital and health systems where they work. Mobile devices are rarely used to access patient records or access background information on the latest evidence-based treatments. At the same time, many hospital software programs on desktop computers haven’t been redesigned for mobile platforms. When clinical apps are designed for mobile with the clinician and patient user experience in mind, mobile will deliver even greater value to our medical system. It will put the patient at the center of the system’s mobile strategy – enabling users to efficiently share information among a patient’s entire care team and to apply advanced analytics at the point of care. To do this, smartphones and tablets need to be connected to a network that is highly secure. Data must be stored in a privacy-aware cloud, where sensitive health care information is released only to authorized providers and the patient. The network and the data need to be managed and controlled. With mobile security in place, future progress will also result in advances in personalizing the healthcare experience for each patient. We will be able to incorporate data from patients’ own mobile devices into the healthcare ecosystem. Devices people wear or use daily, like fitness trackers, glucose monitors or blood-pressure cuffs, may be set to upload data that alerts caregivers when someone’s health is at risk. Realizing the benefits of mobile healthcare is a goal of the alliance announced between my company, IBM, and Apple. With apps designed to create a positive user experience and increase productivity and responsiveness, while integrating healthcare providers’ iPhones and iPads with the existing infrastructure, doctors, nurses and other clinicians will be empowered to better manage their patients’ health issues. Moreover, both companies have formal ties with major delivery systems and leading EMR providers such as Epic Systems, which provides electronic medical records for about half the U.S. population. There has never been a clearer path for the integrated handling of patient healthcare information, putting more decision-making power in clinicians’ hands at all times. Ultimately, the use of smartphones and tablets will continue to change the way healthcare professionals interact with their patients and provide care. By enabling a more secure, integrated mobile healthcare system, the patient truly will become the center of care. |
Yahoo To Shut Down Qwiki, Yahoo Education And The Yahoo Directory | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 26 | Yahoo today it’s shuttering a handful of products, including Qwiki, a mobile app Yahoo last July for $50 million, which helps users create movies from the photos and videos in their Camera Roll. Also getting the boot are , a site designed to connect users to educational content and providers, as well as , the 20-year old listing of websites which is how old people used to browse the web. I kid, I kid. We’re not so old! Still, seeing Directory shut down for good has an “end of an era” vibe to it. It’s not like anyone ever used the site anymore to browse the web – – but seeing it snuffed out may leave you feeling a bit nostalgic for the good ol’ days of the pre-Google era. Yahoo Directory will be shut down on December 31, 2014, the company says. Yahoo notes that advertisers will be upgraded to a new service. (There were advertisers?! They must have been targeting .) Meanwhile, Qwiki, also the , will be closed down on November 1st. Yahoo says that the team will be tasked instead with creating “new digital media experiences” for Yahoo users. (You can download your Qwiki videos from .) Yahoo Education is the first of the trio to close, and will end its life on September 30. |
With 10M Users, Israel’s Moovit Tries To Follow In Waze’s Footsteps For Mass Transit | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 9 | 21 | After to Google on the back of crowd-generated data for drivers, it feels obvious that someone should do the same thing for the world’s mass transit systems. And indeed, another company out of Waze’s home market of Israel is trying to provide real-time, crowdsourced data on public transit. Called , its from investors including Sequoia Capital. The startup is adding adding a new city every two days and is growing at about 1 million users per month. Moovit has 10 million registered users total; it’s not sharing daily or monthly actives. Unlike other apps like Uber, which have been criticized for being too exclusive before moving down-market, Moovit attracts a totally different clientele. For instance, many of their users in Los Angeles are working-class Latinos who rely heavily on public transit over commuting by car. With more than 400 cities, Moovit is starting to amass data on the efficiency of public transit in different cities. For instance, they’ve found that Bogota and Los Angeles have the longest commute times with more than two hours in each system per day. While Los Angeles is understandable given its sprawl, Bogota is famous for pioneering a special Bus Rapid Transit system that has dedicated lanes and designed pick-up stops to make bus transit faster. They’ve also found that cities like Rome and Rio de Janeiro have the unfortunate distinctions of having the longest wait times for transit in their global network. Like in Waze, Moovit users can look up directions to different places and see live commute times. They can also put in tips or data that alert other users in the community to delays. That could form the basis of a valuable network of mapping data if they can scale the user base fast enough. Waze took a similar approach and it ended up being an enormous strategic acquisition even though Google already had overlapping mapping and transit data. Google didn’t want the app to fall into the hands of a rival like Facebook or Apple, that could build or improve a competing mapping product with the live Waze data. Moovit now has about 55 employees and is in the process of opening Bay Area offices around marketing and business development. |
Windows 9’s Preview May Not Touch Down Until October | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 21 | Remember that that Microsoft is hosting on September 30? It might not mark the actual release of Windows 9’s technical preview, as was long expected. According , that bit of code might not become available until October. So put your laptop down , because the wait might be longer than you expected. Component to his report on the release situation, dug into a host of other Windows 9 topics, most importantly the update cycle for the will indeed be quite rapid. Here’s Paul [Emphasis original]: Microsoft has created a new so that users can get more frequent preview builds and provide feedback to the company. , you can use the Windows Feedback app to navigate through a menu of top-level choices (Recent Applications, Apps and Windows Store, Hardware and Devices, Download and Install, Internet Explorer, and so on) and then fine-tune it further (Mail, Maps, Messaging, Movie Moments, Music, etc.). You can search to see whether other Insiders have given similar feedback, add more details to that feedback, or start your own, adding text and screenshots as needed. That’s good, given that Windows 9 will — and I deign here to make a prediction about a Microsoft product — generate spirited public debate. The September 30 event is only the first of what Microsoft intends to be a number of events that will see the company break out its new operating system across different user groups. That is evinced in the simple fact that the coming event is, by the company’s own banner, aimed at the enterprise. Presumably, consumers are next. As I’ve , the initial era of Windows 8 is now all but over, at least in title. Much of what the controversial operating system brought to Windows will remain, albeit under a hopefully smoother regime of integration. We’ll see. |
11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Anna Escher | 2,014 | 9 | 21 | As we reflect on the week, we give you the 11 best stories from 9/13-9/19. 1. It was announced that Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle since he founded the company in 1977, has . He is to be replaced by a co-CEO structure consisting of Mark Hurd and Safra Catz. 2. , opening trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $92.70 per share, up 36 percent from the $68 share price of its initial public offering. The opening price gives the company a valuation of $237.7 billion, and to bring you the details. 3. 17-year-old Kai Kloepfer has invented a . The high school student from Boulder hopes that his prototype, which employs a user ID and fingerprint match, will help reduce gun-related accidents. 4. , a service through which you can hire attractive men to wait on you hand and foot for $125 an hour. In an effort to dig deeper into this controversial idea, , switching every gendered noun from male to female. He argues that a service objectifying either men or women does not bring us any closer to gender equality. 5. , but that it will continue to make the game available across iOS, Android and PlayStation, as well as on Xbox and PC. for Microsoft. 6. on the basis that using a name other than your birth name is a violation of the company’s real-names policy. Despite meeting to speak in person with members of the drag community in San Francisco, . 7. Tomorrow Group founder about how he sees the Internet as a destructive force against the foundations of business and how digitalization has skewed economic balance. 8. We got to know the new iPhones a little better. Darrell Etherington reviewed the and the , and Matthew Panzarino showed us what using these new devices is actually like in real life, as . 9. and both interpreted the recent comments made by Benchmark venture capitalist Bill Gurley regarding the risk-driven nature of Silicon Valley and companies’ proclivities to burn up money. 10. Mike Ducker took us back in time with his story in which he discusses how to develop ecosystems that will support the job-creating entrepreneurs of the future. 11. , suggesting that there is “probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there” telling Thiel that he’d get back to him when he finished his bag of Doritos. In other news, , confirming as many as 56 million payment cards were potentially exposed. Josh Constine walked us through . We also compiled a gallery of the and gave you a list of that are dominating the App Store. |
An Early Investor Offers Some Lessons From Alibaba’s Evolution | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 21 | co-founders Thomas Ng and Joel Kellman got to know Jack Ma in 1999, in the early days of when the company was just starting up in a small apartment in Hangzhou, China. Fifteen years later, firm co-founder and managing director Hany Nada can only marvel at what his partners’ investment has wrought. Although no longer a major player in the company’s fate, GGV Capital was witness to the company’s earliest days, and watched how Jack Ma parlayed his marketplace for buyers and sellers into a global business which spans web services, payments, e-commerce, online-to-offline shopping, a mobile operating system, along with investments in ride-sharing companies, online video companies, music streaming services and much more. “When we first met Jack, his vision was about making the pie as big as possible,” says Nada. It’s a sentiment that Ma has carried from his earliest days as an entrepreneur to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where he said: “Today what we got is not money what we got is the trust from the people. Millions of small businesses, so many shareholders. I am very honored and so excited because when you see these shareholders, the responsibility I’ve been thinking about the next five to ten years, how I can make sure these shareholders are happy,” Ma told CNBC. GGV Capital made 40 times its original $8 million investment in Alibaba, which managed to boost the firm’s first fund’s returns to four times the capital invested (without Alibaba the firm still would have returned two-and-a-half times the capital committed). Nada says the return would not have been possible if Ma had not been had the spirit of inclusion that extends beyond his vision for his company’s customers but to its other executives and (at least initially) its partners as well. That includes the somewhat tumultuous relationship between Alibaba and Yahoo, into the Chinese e-commerce company Nada still considers the most successful investment by a Western company in China. “Most tech companies that are trying to go into China… they just do it wrong,” says Nada. “They spend hundreds of millions of dollars and have a local competitor outmaneuver them.” Yahoo made a very successful and astute observation, says Nada, which was the company’s decision to enlist a strong partner to enter China’s market. “The biggest lesson [from Alibaba]… if you want to be successful in Asia it has to be through a strategic investment like the one Yahoo did with Alibaba.” Nada thinks that it’s hard for a foreign company to gain significant traction in China because the Chinese ecosystem is so protected. However, Chinese companies have an equally difficult time entering international markets because of the cultural differences between nations. What is certain, says Nada, is that Ma and his executive team have only begun to test the waters in the U.S. “They’ve done dozens of investments in the U.S.,” says Nada. “Some have been made public and some have not… They haven’t made their major push yet. Once they figure out and commit to a vision, they’re going to execute and they’re going to execute something big.” |
Don’t Let iOS 8’s Accidental Selfie Feature Ruin Your Life | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 21 | Who has already sent an accidental selfie in iOS 8’s Messages app? I did. This one: Not great. I’m late to the game when it comes to iOS 8. Many of my fellow tech journalists weaseled their way onto the beta version of the operating system, but out of laziness, or perhaps a feigned belief that I can stay away from punditry of any kind, I normally wait to get the new version of Apple’s mobile OS with the public. iOS 8 was the same. On Wednesday, I stared at my iPhone screen with the rest of the huddled masses, for the coveted new OS to finally arrive. I fell asleep with my phone plugged in, safely connected to Wi-Fi, and slowly updating. The new Messages app in iOS 8 represents a big shift for Apple. Though the company’s own messaging platform has shifted closer and closer to platform-agnostic chat apps over time (with the introduction of iMessage itself, as well as conventions like Read Receipts), iOS signifies the biggest push towards current social apps and communications apps. For instance, iMessage in now lets you send voice memos and videos that expire unless you choose to keep them. These features are built into the new keyboard, with an icon on the right that you can hold down to record audio, and a familiar camera button on the left that is slightly more tricky. If you tap this camera button, you are given the same options that you’ve always been given: Choose from Camera Roll or Take Photo or Video. If you hold the button down, however, two second buttons emerge: the top button is a camera and the button to the right is a red, circular record button. As points out, this behavior of holding down your thumb to send a photo or video is highly reminiscent of Snapchat. Once you hold the button, you can release and press the camera or record button or simply slide your finger over to those buttons to take a pic or video. But here’s the rub. With both videos and voice memos, iMessage lets you review the content before sending it. You can play it back and then choose to delete or send it off into the world for other peoples’ viewing and judging pleasure. With still pictures, however, the photo is automatically sent the second your finger releases the camera button. Cut to me, waking up for the first time to iOS 8, and excitedly toying around with the new iMessage. I open up a conversation and start fiddling with the voice memos, safely staying in strict “draft” territory and playing back silly little audio notes. I then venture to the left, where my camera shortcuts live. And before I can even realize it, I’ve sent out this: I’m sure many of you are far more clever than I am, but if it helps anyone avoid my own mistakes, heed this warning: The camera shortcut in iMessage |
SoftBank Leads $6 Million Round For Ed-Tech Startup EdCast | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 21 | After with the Alibaba public offering, has returned to the early stage market, this time to lead a $6 million investment into , a new online education company launched by serial entrepreneur Karl Mehta. This is the second time SoftBank has backed one of Mehta’s startups, albeit in very different sectors. Mehta had previously founded PlaySpan, a manager of virtual currency systems, which was sold to Visa Corp. in a $240 million deal. Now, SoftBank, Mitch Kapor, Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, Cervin Ventures, Aarin Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund/ CoLab and the Stanford StartX Fund, are all investing in Mehta’s latest endeavor — the transformation of higher education online. Mehta first worked in startups in 1999, with MobileAria, a startup delivering voice-enabled news, weather, financial information and sports over wireless devices. “It was during the boom time and the explosion of the internet and dot-coms, where we had a really clever idea of bringing internet content to mobile networks. It was an idea and a product way ahead of its time,” Mehta says. “We launched with Verizon and Sprint, and then 9/11 happened… We pivoted from consumer to a business-to-business company and converted it into a mobile asset management and mobile tracking service.” From mobile content, Mehta then turned to payment networks a year after MobileAria was sold to Wireless Matrix (now owned by CalAMp Corp). “The idea was to provide a virtual currency trading platform for gamers so they had a market to buy and sell virtual currencies,” says Mehta. “That grew to include a virtual currency wallet infrastructure and we became the largest wallet and payment processor for all mobile gaming. Way before Bitcoin, we were the first virtual currency platform.” Not satisfied with the solid return he netted from the roughly $240 million exit to Visa (after raising $30 million from SoftBank and Menlo Ventures — where Mehta now serves as a venture partner), Mehta is back looking to change higher education through EdCast. with its announcement that sustainability expert and economic policy guru Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University and f , would be teaching a sustainability curriculum for the 250 institutions in the . Mehta’s strategy for EdCast is to continue partnering with higher education networks that have multiple institutions as members. Alongside the financing, the company announced a partnership with the Open Education Consortium, a network of hundreds of higher education institutions, including Madrid Polytechnic, Osaka University, the University of Cape Town, Delft University of Technology, Korea University and Michigan State University. “My goal is to build a multi-billion dollar company,” says Mehta. However, instead of competing with universities, Mehta is trying to find a way to open them up to even greater collaboration, and potential sources of revenue. He envisions a “multiversity” where students can tailor their education by picking the best classes on offer from any university in any country around the world. “We’re trying to build the next big thing for the industry, rather than trying to take away the value from them,” he says. With SoftBank’s capital, and the support it engenders for expansion into new markets from other parts of the far-flung SoftBank empire, EdCast will definitely have some deep-pocketed help. EdCast is one of two education technology companies in SoftBank’s 50-company strong portfolio, with Echo360 serving as the firm’s other ed-tech bet. “Education is a massive industry that is just starting to see the impact of some of the technologies which have reshaped much of the rest of the commercial world. Social sharing, interactivity, video and deep data analytics all hold the promise of delivering on improving outcomes for students which if successful would be immensely important to the global economy,” wrote SoftBank partner Steve Murray in an email. |
Facebook Highlights Its 1-Billion-Video-Views-Per-Day Reach By Adding View Counts | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | To prove to advertisers and the world that it’s not just YouTube that has massive video engagement online, it now delivers 1 billion video views per day and will begin showing everyone view counts on publicly posted videos from users, Pages, and public figures. This could convince advertisers shifting TV ad spend to digital to look to Facebook, which recently for between $400 million and $500 million in July. To put the 1 billion daily views in context, YouTube last said it racked up 4 billion views per day as of early 2012, but it’s grown massively since then. Sixty-five percent of Facebook’s video views are coming from mobile where Facebook’s user base is shifting, and views grew 50 percent from May to July, in part thanks to the viral ALS ice bucket challenge finding a home on Facebook. As I wrote nine months ago, video is a huge growth opportunity for Facebook, and today it finally puts its efforts there in the spotlight. Facebook today also confirmed that it’s recommending additional videos to watch after you’ve seen one, a new feature . Today’s announcement also noted that Facebook is letting video publishers include a “call-to-action” link that viewers can click at the end of a video. Finally, it noted that video publishers and Pages now have access to previously announced about view counts and unique viewers, as well as how long people kept watching before moving on. The new video views and analytics could make the impact of Facebook for video marketing more transparent, which could get more advertisers allocating video ad budgets to the service. Meanwhile, the calls to action can help advertisers drive sales or other returns on investment beyond just getting attention. For users, the view counts shown next to the familiar like and comment counts on videos with the ‘Public’ privacy setting could help make Facebook more of a home for viral videos. When people see high view counts, it can reassure them a video is worth their time. The recommendations could inspire people to watch chains of videos one after another instead of returning to the feed or a friend’s profile. One thing sadly missing from today’s announcement is a much-needed that I’ve been blathering about for a year. It’s absurdly outdated at this point, lacking the tap-and-hold to record, multi-shot videos, filters, or any editing tools. Hopefully some of the video tricks from Instagram and Slingshot will eventually make their way to Facebook’s enormous smartphone user base. Video holds massive potential for Facebook to both deliver on its mission and build its business. Video is such a compelling way to communicate, and the tools for recording it (like ) keep improving, that the medium could connect people more vividly than the status updates and photos Facebook grew up on. And by combining its vast trove of user-targeting data with the long session times and attention-holding property of moving pictures, Facebook could catch the wave of ad dollars flooding from TV to the Internet. |
Shower With Friends Wins The Disrupt SF 2014 Hackathon Grand Prize, Blitz And Interactive Markdown Are Runners Up | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | Over the weekend, 132 teams worked tirelessly at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 hackathon to come up with their ingenious hacks and creations. At the end of a long night filled with Nerf guns, pizza and , the teams presented their hacks to the world on the Disrupt stage for final judging. At the end of the afternoon, the judges convened and decided to award the grand prize to Shower With Friends. And no – it’s not what you think. is a hardware hack that helps you manage your water consumption by monitoring your shower’s flow rate. Accompanying the hardware hack is a mobile app that lets you compete against your friends as to who can take the shortest shower. With Shower with Friends, you would be alerted to how long you were in the shower today, and how many gallons of water were used, as compared to the previous day or days. You could then enable sharing of this data with your circle of friends and engage in competitions. You could also challenge your friends – similar to the Ice Bucket Challenge – to consume less (or as much) water as you did. is an iOS application that offers Notification screen shortcuts to specific pages and functions within your iOS apps. For example, you could save a shortcut that, when tapped, would launch Google Maps with directions to your home already routed for you. Or you could tap a shortcut to the Uber app that would show you the current price for an Uber from your location to another, and call the service for you with just one tap. The feature takes advantage of deep linking and APIs from apps like Venmo, Yelp and more. This functionality is available for the first time with iOS 8 and will allow users who frequently waste time on tedious tasks to use their phones with much more efficiency.
Interactive Markdown, built by Chen Liang, Henry Shi, Kartik Talwar, Kevin Wang and Zach Latta, is a Chrome extension that lets you run backend code in your browser’s front end. It’s open sourced, and on GitHub, which means you can use it today. One of the extension’s most impressive features is the ability to run not only client-side code in the browser, but also server-side code (like Python, Ruby, Node, Java, etc.) and even full Android applications. The team set up a sophisticated CoreOS cluster on DigitalOcean to support live streaming of Android mobile applications via an optimized VNC dynamic reverse proxy directly to a web canvas. This streaming works on both desktop and mobile devices. They also set up a build process in docker to allow the running of numerous languages on a generic backend platform written in Go.
As the hackathon winner, Shower With Friends will take home $5,000, and the top three teams also get a chance to present their products on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. In addition the winners listed here, TechCrunch’s API partners also handed out several prizes, including iPad minis, Xbox One consoles and more to those teams who demonstrated creative use of their company’s content. Our judges for this year’s hackathon Stephen Garcia, Director of Product Innovation at Netflix; Dr. Jhilmil Jain, the Head of Android User Research at Google; Sahil Lavingia, founder and CEO of Gumroad; Morgan Missen, founder of Main; and Nicholas Mitrousis, Group Technical Director at AKQA. |
The #Gamergate Question | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | Depending on how closely you follow the gaming and tech press, you may have heard of # . Those of us inside the industry have. This week it’s essentially all we’ve been able to talk about. What is it? Well the short version is that #gamergate is a reactionary movement on Twitter largely in response to what gamers perceive as an attack on them and the corruption of their media. It started in bowels of 4chan but has taken on a life of its own, becoming a call to do something about a situation that has been perceived to be wrong for quite some time. #gamergaters think a scene has supposedly taken over video games and seems intent on wrecking them for financial gain. have emerged in support of #gamergate, along with hundreds of thousands of tweets. Articles questioning or denouncing it have appeared on a variety of sites but seem to only fan the movement’s flames. Every day brings new revelations, new momentum and new ignominy as this band of conservative geeks goes on the warpath to set the video gaming world to rights. #gamergate began a few weeks ago when an ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn posted an online accusing her of sleeping her way around the games industry. He posted screengrabs of chats they had, presented his side of the story as the noble and maligned man being led astray by this faerie creature who turned out to be full of lies and so on. His revenge-porn/character-assassinating rant went all around the gaming world at the speed of rumor and was followed by hacks and “doxxing” activities that purported to show that gamers had been right to be suspicious about Quinn. In its wake a torrent of abuse and more abuse started to build a head of steam. Allegations of conspiracy, of women using sex to manipulate the industry and all the rest of it gained outsized publicity largely due to a video shared by actor Adam Baldwin. And then, somewhere around the same time, Anita Sarkeesian published her latest video and the waves of rage and accusations of agenda-pushing in the media began all over again. However the ignition point came in response to the media’s response to all of the craziness circling Quinn and Sarkeesian. Leigh Alexander published a piece on Gamasutra urging game developers to stop thinking about gamers as their true audience. . Similar pieces appeared in a variety of venues around the same time (which some interpreted as conspiracy) with this idea that gamers were dead. Thus was a hashtag spawned. As #gamergaters would tell it, their movement is about the gaming media, about how they perceive the media to have disconnected from the majority base, and how it has become about dodgy deals and pushing agendas rather than objective coverage. It’s about the cosy relationships between certain journalists and game makers. It’s about how the gaming media promotes and pushes indie games that it considers interesting such as and how this constitutes corruption. It’s about how some gaming journalists contributing a small amount of money to fringe game makers via Patreon constitutes bribery. It’s about feeling not represented. And so on. Those under attack cry bullshit. They say that #gamergate is actually a co-ordinated 4chan campaign that has swept up many naive muppets, that through it and other tags like #notyourshield and #writeakotakuarticle the social media campaign has maintained a facade of reasonableness while in fact actually being about women after all. To support this, Zoe Quinn and uncovered numerous damning chats between users talking about their campaigns to harass, but also to counter harassment accusations with all manner of dirty tricks. See, Quinn says to #gamergate, y’all have been played for chumps. The roots of #gamergate are indivisible from the reaction of traditional gamers to women, transgendered people and other non-stereotypes coming into the scene. Current proponents of the movement claim that the debate is not really about that, but in many ways it really is. It’s not to say that most gamers are active misogynists, but rather their default mode of receiving gendered opinions tend to follow certain lines. Women in the games industry, for example, are often more readily believed to be on the make than men. Women are often perceived to be using their sexuality in negative ways. Women are often far more likely to be said to be crying foul, to be faulted for being imperfect in the how they respond, and to be told that they have agendas. Women are often assumed to begin operating from an inherent position of dishonesty. One example is Jade Raymond, the producer of the franchise. Raymond appeared in many videos promoting the game, just as any producer would, and some in the media noted that she was photogenic. This helped push the game as a great story of how women can be just as successful in games as men, but no no no. Some gamers saw it differently. She was clearly on the make, clearly in need of being taken down a peg. . Another example is Anita Sarkeesian, she of . Sarkeesian is one of the games industry’s cultural critics and her videos are presented much like many other critics do. Her tone is factual, intellectual and probing. But in some sections of gamerland Anita Sarkeesian is the Devil. Some feel she’s calling them misogynists. Some feel her videos impinge on free expression. Some fear her work precipitates the medium’s descent into “political correctness”. Often Sarkeesian is personally attacked as a woman on the make. She’s accused of cherry picking in condescending tones. She receives endless threats, is routinely called the c-word on social media and someone even made a game in which you can . These are not reactions that happen to male critics. Zoe Quinn, she of the jilted ex-boyfriend, has also long been the subject of much virtual abuse. Quinn made a choose-your-own-adventure game called that attracted a lot of gaming media attention as a game that pushes boundaries. From the time that it first appeared Quinn has been the subject of relentless accusations of , of concocting fake attacks on herself as a way to obtain exposure, told she’s not a “real gamer” and that hers is not a “real game”. And the list goes on. Leigh Alexander, possibly the most gifted writer operating in the gaming media, regularly gets anonymous emails and tweets calling her a self-promoting bully and glorified blogger on the take. So too do Jenn Frank, Carla Ellison and many other. Trans-gendered game makers like Anna Anthropy and Mattie Brice receive regular assaults on their life choices from the aether. All of these women constantly and consistently get attacked by gamers who think they’re breaking what gaming should be and hiding behind their shield of womandom. As I say, #gamergate is inextricably linked to all of above, but some voices try to say otherwise. It may have started out as a stunt but the emotional point of gamers being told that they’re over gave it a life of its own far beyond 4chan. A lot of people who don’t conform to the stereotype of the white male basement dwelling angry nerd feel maligned and have taken to social media to say so. Gamers, they say, are much bigger than the harassers. One example voice is Boogie. A YouTuber with nearly 2m subscribers, Boogie actively says that the conspiracy theories and whatnot surrounding #gamergate are nonsense. He supports Quinn and Sarkeesian, and says that the way they’ve been treated is shameful. However he takes exception to the idea that gamers are dead or that guys like him . The term “gamer”, he says, means everyone that plays games and isn’t going away. Don’t mistake the behavior of a few assholes for the general body of gamers, he urges. This is a beautiful sentiment, but it’s not true. If it were then there would be nothing needing to be saved, nothing to be -gated. “Gamer” does not represent everyone who plays a video game. The word for that is “player”, much like “reader”, “listener” or “viewer”. “Gamer” is a subset of “player”, a cultural identifier of tribes who align for deeper reasons than engaging in a physical act. People both inside and outside video games understand that, which is why you get plenty of people who play but don’t consider themselves gamers. Of course gamers are not one uniform club: Some are only fans of certain kinds of game or games from certain platforms. Some consider themselves indies, some hardcore. Some consider casual gamers to be a part of the club, some don’t. Some ascribe the term “real gamer” to a smaller subset, indicating those who commit all the way by buying high end PCs, or meaning non-hipster players. As gamers see it they are the majority market, the primary reference point around which all gaming culture should operate. Leigh Alexander’s point is that that is no longer true. In terms of raw numbers, gamers are a pretty fixed (or if growing, merely incrementally) audience, and have been for at least 10 years. At a guess there’s about 150-200m of them around the world shifting around from console to console, franchise to franchise, an audience consistently served with ever-more-expensive products from ever-fewer high end studios. They’re certainly a big interlocking set of tribes, but compared to the numbers who play casual, smartphone, casino, sport and social games, gamers are a minority. Perhaps more significant than the numbers is the politics. Gamers seem to think that they represent the political center of the gaming universe, but increasingly they act like the center-right. They possess a high degree of conservatism for their culture (this is not to be confused with conservatism in the wider political sense). They’re greatly concerned about the gaming culture to come as it relates to the past, maintaining a strong affinity for a shape of the industry and medium of yesteryear. Gamers love their traditional gaming consoles at a time when the rest of tech world considers consoles a weird throwback. Gamers have held onto their PCs and largely rejected newer platforms like tablet or browser as “new-fangled” and not “proper”. And so the context is not that “gamers” are the center, indie game makers (often snarked at as “social justice warriors”) are the extreme left and “gamergaters” maybe a bit to the right. It’s that “gamers” are the right, and all the casual/social/mobile players are the true center. In that scheme indie game makers are still probably on the left, but not to the extreme that the gamer-centric spectrum would dictate. And where does that leave #gamergaters? “gamergaters” are the far right. They’re our Tea Party equivalent, replete with all the same inclinations to see conspiracies where there are none and trying stamp out what’s considered fringe or weird by assaulting the people rather than the product while co-opting their language. #gamergaters portray themselves as “oppressed” by the fact there are some indie games out there that they don’t like. #gamergaters feel “betrayed” by the notion that maybe a journalist and a game developer slept together. #gamergaters give credence to all “evidence” that confirms their this-can’t-go-on mentality and ignore everything else. #gamergaters consider removal of their trolling comments “censorship”. This stance has allowed them to rationalize almost any harassment and to engage in a wide variety of victim blaming. It’s what gave the #writeakotaku hashtag the spur to produce “funny” headlines to satirize the so-called agenda of the pushy media like this:
and consider this fair game. For some in the industry #gamergate is a storm in a teacup, for others (myself included) it looks like the storm has broken the cup. The Twitter hashtag alone generates hundreds of thousands of tweets every day and continues to do so. It’s not just about the harassment either: #gamergaters of sites not to be looked at, demanding apologies and firings, and in some cases threatening “retribution”. They’re polarized and continue to be polarizing, and going to some very strange places trying to make their argument stick. When you find yourself as a banner example of how reasonable you are, something’s wrong. There’s the very real possibility that #gamergate will end up breeding a kind of cultural acid test, much as when the Tea Party types started doing the RINO thing. Counter-reformation movements often do, first starting at a grass roots level where they go unnoticed and then attempting to build a consensus through co-ordination. Their thinking is often that the middle is a ground to be won through deception even if their core positions are contradictory. (And they really are: You can’t expect a “fair” media if you also demand that it only “represent” you). Imagine, for example, if some reviewer voices or sites emerged that certified games based on whether they are #gamergate-kosher or not. Imagine if #gamergaters became more co-ordinated on Kickstarter, sending mass objectionable-content reports against games that didn’t fit their cultural barometer. Imagine if they actively took down some game makers’ games by hacking their computers and deleting their work. None of these are far-fetched scenarios and some of them have already begun to happen. It sounds trivial but this is the sort of thing that could actively set the industry, the medium and indeed games themselves back by decades. If we get into a situation where the far right has to be constantly kowtowed-to and wields outsized influence then there will come a point where the choice for game makers is only core or casual, conservatives or mainstream, and the opportunity for a diverse middle ground of experimentation would go away. It’s or and that’s all. I for one think we need to do more to prevent that. In the middle of last week I considered creating a social media campaign to combat the spread of #gamergate called the “Cherry Pledge”. My thinking was to circulate this: 1. Read this text.
“I pledge my support for all game makers, journalists and participants in the games industry who believe in its positive and progressive future. I support all efforts to develop that medium in all directions. I support all the people involved and act from the point of view of assuming that they are all honest, open and sincere. I reject all intimations of otherwise, all abuse, all harassment, all deception and all slanderous campaigns that seek to drive voices out of the industry, its media or its player culture. I pledge my support for this campaign with this cherry.” 2. If you agree, sign this petition [Sidebar: this would be a change.org petition]. 3. Copy and paste the above text onto a page on your blog, site, corporate website, social media profile, wherever. Anywhere visible. 4. Change your social media avatar to a picture of a cherry or cherries. This step is vital because as you then post the image will spread again and again, reinforcing the message. 5. Tweet, Facebook, Instagram (etc) your support using the #cherrypledge tag. Unsure of whether this was a good idea or would it merely fan the flames, I posted it on Facebook. As I happen to know a fair few people in the games industry I figured I would get either a voluble yes or no from various voices I got only a few isolated responses. For the most part my industry friends stayed silent. Indeed the general silence of the games industry on #gamergate troubles me deeply. It’s a vacuum begging to be filled. To be fair the IGDA (an industry body that represents many of us) has condemning harassment and is working with the FBI. Similarly a couple of notable game makers like Tim Schafer have been involved, and an that attracted thousands of signatures. But that’s basically all so far. Development studios and publishers seem content not to do anything and let #gamergate play out by itself, but what are they letting happen by doing nothing? #gamergate asks a very big and difficult question of the games industry, not its fans or its journalists. It asks whether the games industry is content to placate ugliness, whether video games as a medium can ever grow beyond their conservative wing – and if so will it be the industry as it exists that brings that change about, or will it be left to outsiders? Personally I don’t think it’s enough to simply stand by. There are some highly significant lessons coming out of #gamergate, things that we should all be paying attention to as we attempt to move forward: All in all I find #gamergate to be the most depressing thing to have happened in games for quite some time. We think we’ve come so far, and we have, but it seems there is so much further to go. Nonetheless we have to go there. In the long timeline I don’t think that what it is to be a gamer will die, but I do think it will evolve. My sincerest hope is that we do so soon. |
Experiment 8 – Guess It, The Hack That Wants You To Play “The Price Is Right” For Discounts When You Shop | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | The team behind Experiment 8 – Guess It has a terrible name and a simple idea: Guess the price of any product on its website correctly and get a deep discount. Come close and get a smaller one. Their vision is to gamify the shopping experience and breathe new life into the moribund model that existing daily-deal e-commerce websites currently use ( ). See, the hack from Experiment 8 – Guess It also answers the question, when is a hack more than a hack? As the name “Experiment 8” implies, this is the eighth attempt from the team at to find a way to increase engagement with their company’s site. They came in to the hackathon yesterday with little more than their seven months of working together as a team with the desire to do something to improve the way shoppers bought goods online. It’s unclear what the team would do with the prize for the TechCrunch hackathon if it wins. But what is certain is that any validation of the hack could go a long way toward improving the shopping experience on Daily Steals. And who doesn’t love ? |
TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon Developers Learn To Simplify Under Pressure | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | Under the pressure that is the , one team found itself stuck. The product was too complex to complete on time. The team members were tired and depressed and ready to give up until one member of the team, software engineer Alessandro Diogo Bruckheimer, came up with an idea to simplify their goal, and the app was born. The app is designed to help users determine whether they should ride their bikes. Several of the team members are from Brazil and the weather can be rather volatile, says team member Alan Rafael Fachini. Wake up in the morning, he told me, and it’s sunny and beautiful, but four hours later there might be severe thunderstorms and flooded rivers. If you have your bike, it’s not a pleasant experience. To alleviate that problem, the team connected to geographical data, weather data and SMS and each morning instead of pulling out your smartphone and checking the weather, the app checks it for you and gives you a simple message: Take your bike or leave it home. To make it a bit more interesting, says product designer/front-end developer the message includes a fun cartoon to illustrate whether you’re taking the bike or leaving it at home. The team members only met Sakamoto yesterday. They had a team of developers, but they didn’t have a UX designer. They connected at the Hackathon and the team was formed. The beauty of the app is in its simplicity. It does one thing and it does it well, which for a Hackathon makes for a reasonable and more reachable goal. Before they simplified, the had a broader vision, according to Fachini. They thought about an interface where you could enter the starting point and ending point, and the program would analyze the weather throughout the journey throughout the day. As it turned out, that was too complex and too hard to pull off. The team made use of several API tools to make the final product come together. First of all, the weather information gets pulled from the Weather Underground API. The SMS piece call got built with the Twilio API and they used esri and ArcGIS for geolocation information. “I’m happy with result and the new idea we came up with,” Sakamoto said. At this point, they aren’t sure if they will polish it and make it into a product because they were unsure how to organize the next steps, but in an age where apps are growing ever simpler -think the Yo-ification of apps -this team came up with a simple workable idea. “Instead of just leaving,” Fachini said, “we decided to focus on a thing we could deliver and we were able to do that.” And let’s face it, a lot of software developers could learn a lesson from their experience. Instead of going for the whole idea, come up with something you can deliver and get the product out the door. The final member of the team was 27-year-old software engineer Evandro Luis Dutra. |
Git Bounty Wants To Help Open-Source Programmers Get Paid For Bug Fixes | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | If you’re using open-source software, you’ve probably come across a bug that you want to fix but don’t have the expertise to do it yourself — and the original author isn’t all that interested in fixing it. With Git Bounty, which was dreamed up by a team of French Canadians (and one Frenchman) from Montreal at our Disrupt SF hackathon this weekend, you can incentivize open-source programmers to fix those bugs for you. Git Bounty lets you pick a bug you need fixed, set a reward and then publicize it. The hackers (Angus MacIsaac, Adam Burvill, Anton Shevchenko, Nathan Boiron, Martin Coulombe), which all work together at Montreal development shop , told me that they came up with the idea on Friday night before the event. “We wanted to do something that was meaningful and useful for us,” Osedea’s Coulombe told me. Recently, the team had a project where they would have happily paid $2,000 for somebody to submit a fix to an open-source framework they often use rather than fixing it themselves. Often, that means moving resources off another — and paid — project. Coulombe told me that the team plans to keep working on Git Bounty after the event. “We see the potential and the value. We just have to see how it gets accepted in the open-source community,” he said. He also noted that while the project is mostly focusing on bug fixes right now, it could also be used to pay programmers to add new features to a project. The team used the time at the hackathon to learn a new framework ( ) and used Twilio’s APIs for sending notifications and Stripe for payments. In the long run, the idea would be to take a cut from the bounties, but Coulombe noted that the team also thought about giving developers the option to donate that cut to a charitable organization. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 26 | null |
Persona’s Machine-Learning App Lets People Follow Different Sides Of Your Twitter Identity | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | Our identities are prismatic. We’re not the same person to everyone. Yet when you follow someone on Twitter, your feed overflows with a combination of their personal, professional, and social tweets. But thanks to project Persona, you can choose which dimensions of someone’s identity you want to see. Persona uses machine learning to classify people’s tweets into separate themed timelines around different topics they tweet about, like their work, personal life, and interests. If you ever wished you could just get someone’s smart professional insights without knowing what they had for lunch, or love their taste in art but yawn when they nerd out on tech or current events, Persona could banish boring tweets from your feed. Mani Doraisamy demos Persona on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 Hackathon , I bet some of my Twitter followers would be relieved to follow just one side of my identity. By day I’m chronicling startups and analyzing the latest Facebook product changes, yet by the afternoon I’m sharing silly memes and soothing songs, and at night I’m posting photos from parties and hippie-dippie life affirmations. Entrepreneurs, culturenauts, and friends all follow me for different reasons, but I fear I overwhelm their streams with types of tweets they don’t want. Persona could solve this. It was built by the machine-learning guru and CEO behind , we covered last month. Mani Doraisamy and his brother Prabhakar tell me that on Twitter “we’re blowing our own trumpets,” more concerned with broadcasting our opinions than with those who receive them. So while Persona began as a hackathon project, Mani plans to formally . Persona will automatically scan the words used in your tweets and assign them to three streams on your Persona page: personal, professional, or social. Alternatively, you can add custom labels to these dimensions of your identity and tag your tweets into them, which also teaches Persona’s algorithm. If you want to check out the different version of someone else’s Twitter stream, they don’t need to have signed up. Persona will run its machine learning algorithm on their profile and do the categorization for them. By working with the Twitter dev team at the Disrupt Hackathon, the Doraisamy brothers learned how to build Persona without running into API limit problems. And while they don’t plan to monetize the app directly, they’ll feed its learnings into Mani’s app Guesswork. Some believe we should all own up to the different sides of personality and live with a unified identity. But that’s easier said than done if you live or work with people who might not take kindly to your political views, humor, or after-hours adventures. You should never be ashamed of who you are, but with an app like Persona, you can still respect the time and attention of people who follow you, no matter who they want you to be. |
Fantasy Bit League Wants You To Bet Bitcoin On Football | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | On stage this morning at the , Fantasy Bit League pitched its creation: A way to wager bitcoin in your fantasy football league. As it turns out, betting on fantasy football is legal in every state in the U.S. Apparently it’s considered a game of skill, and not chance. Think of it as more like poker than blackjack, if you will. The guys behind Fantasy Bit League are firm bitcoin believers, calling the cryptocurrency the “international currency.” The interface is still a bit rough, but given that they built the idea in a hackathon, that’s forgivable. I took the Fantasy Bit League guys back stage for a quick chat, digging into why they built what they did and what’s next for their project: |
FitLine Monitors Your App Usage Like A Fitness Tracker | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | If you’re the kind of person who attends hackathons on a regular basis, chances are you spend some of your time on your laptop or smartphone on activities that, in hindsight, probably aren’t actually worth your attention. Knowing its audience, a team of hackers from advertising tech firm came to the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon with an idea in mind: an app that collects your web and app usage and presents that data like the fitness-tracking apps from or . It only collects how much time you’re spending on each activity at a high level, so it won’t know whose pictures you’re looking at on Facebook — just that you’ve had that tab open for 20 minutes. FitLine’s presenter, Saket Saurabh, told me that the idea for the hack came from his wife telling him he spent too much time on Facebook. As he began his retort, he realized that he didn’t actually have numbers to back up his defense. Saurabh and the three other hackers who built the FitLine demo managed to build data-collection tools that work across platforms. For today’s presentation, they built an app for Android that records how long you spend in each app and sends it to their service, as well as an extension for the Firefox web browser (which Saurabh says could be ported to Chrome pretty easily). He also said that Apple offers APIs for iOS that would allow them to build a launcher that tracks app usage on the platform, though Apple may not be happy with using it for their purpose. I’m a big fan of fitness-tracking apps and gadgets, so the idea of getting people to change their behavior by showing them what their current habits look like appeals to me. FitLine is especially cool because it’s easier to work into your life and doesn’t have laziness working against it — instead of visualizing how little I’m exercising in order to get me motivated, it’s showing how much time I waste in the aggregate. It seems to me that figuring out how to spend less time doing something wasteful is easier than making time for something most people don’t really want to do. We had a quick chat with Saurabh after his presentation: |
Blitz Lets You Create Shortcuts To Your Favorite iOS Apps | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | Presenting on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco hackathon this afternoon was the team from an iOS app called Blitz, which aims to offer Notification Screen shortcuts to specific pages and functions within your iOS apps. For example, you could save a shortcut that, when tapped, would launch Google Maps with directions to your home already routed for you. Or you could tap a shortcut to the Uber app that would show you the current price for an Uber from your location to another, and call the black car service for you with just one tap. The Blitz app works by utilizing both APIs and deep linking technology, the latter which is now an increasingly common feature in today’s mobile applications. With deep links, you can link directly to a specific page within an application, rather than just to the app itself. The idea to use the iOS 8 Notification Center to display deep-linked app shortcuts was something team member Nick Lauer, a Facebook engineer by day, had wanted to experiment with while at the hackathon this weekend, explaining that the feature wasn’t currently well-documented. He built Blitz along with fellow Facebook employees Jamie Karraker, Shayna Lauer, and Josh Lauer – yes, this hack was a family affair! Although the shortcut to Uber was still a little buggy by demo time, the Blitz app already supports a number of shortcuts to popular iOS applications, including Yelp, Rdio, Venmo, Yo, and to SMS (via the Messages app), for example. The iOS 8 Notification screen will only support up to 8 of these shortcuts, the team tells TechCrunch – enough to fill the iPhone’s screen. The shortcuts themselves are not “ephemeral” – that is, they don’t disappear after you tap on them the way normal iOS notifications do. Instead, they stay put so you can easily access them at any time without having to flip through your numerous iPhone screens, and then tap your way through the app’s screens to get to the information you wanted. Having gotten a somewhat functional prototype built over the weekend, the team says they’re now going to work on Blitz in their spare time so they can later publish the app to the iTunes App Store. Stay tuned. |
If Switzerland Is Fucked, Then The iWatch Is, Too | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | As we approach Peak iWatch, it’s important to consider just what the new device (if it even launches) will do to the watch market as a whole. I can assure you – and this is based on a deep and nuanced understanding of the – that the jolly watchmakers of Geneva aren’t giving the iWatch a second thought. First, let’s address where we got the idea that the Swiss are, to put it bluntly, fucked. Apparently chortled that the iWatch would tear down the Swiss watch hegemony. Low-end watchmaker on future wearables, a partnership that could bring about such delightful but also awful chimeras as the and Microsoft’s SPOT platform. Silicon Valley watchmakers have failed so many times that they are barely a contender. But the thought that the Swiss watch industry is concerned about the iWatch is a tantalizing one. It’s also full of hubris and a fundamental misunderstanding of how that strange, incestuous, and sometimes predatory clan does business. While I’m sure Ive knows this, it bears exploration. First, the Swiss watch industry is not Apple’s target market. The real niche here is the limited wearables space. First, but estimates have ranged from the low tens of millions to as high as 90 million. I am more than willing to assume that the wearables market is that large. We know, thanks to the , that Swiss makers sold 28.1 million timepieces last year for a total of $23 billion. That’s an average of $836 a watch, but is skewed by the very cheap (Swatch) and the obscenely expensive ( .) for the wristwatch for almost a decade. Today better than 60 percent of 18-34 year olds get the time from their phones. Watches are rare in the wild and when you see them they are worn for a reason. The most expensive watches go to collectors, whose rationality is suspect, and the very rich. The mid-range watches go to folks who appreciate the artistry of a fine mechanical timepiece. And the wearables – the iWatch, if you will – will go to everyone else. The Swiss watch industry knows that and is more than willing to let it happen. Watches, particularly luxury watches, are rarely purchased because they tell time. For that you have your phone, your Timex Ironman with Velcro strap, and your microwave. Instead, luxury watches are either purchased as a fashion statement or as a nod to an old and storied tradition. Even on the low end, in the Swatch world, Switzerland doing is fine. You buy a Swatch because you like the styling and the slightly wicked, slightly retro feeling of insolence that comes with wearing a watch with hands. Swatch sales, in fact, buoy most luxury watch sales, at least when it comes to brands like Omega, Breguet, and Tissot. The watch world generally works like this: Watches priced between about $1,000 and $8,000 are approximately all the same. There may be slight cosmetic differences, but the bill of materials is so cheap (in real terms) that the profit would make Jony Ive cry. A few dollars in steel, a movement that costs about $500 assembled, and a nice band are all it takes to make a luxury watch. This means you could sell a $510 watch for $8,000. If you’d like to team up and make a watch brand, let’s go in on and hire a metalsmith for a day. It will cost us a few thousand in total to make a $10,000 limited edition timepiece. Still not convinced? Check out . All the watches there are intrinsically the same. They are as alike as any page of laptops on the Best Buy website. The only thing that differs are the materials used and the marketing involved. That is it. Anything over $8,000 – anything from $10,000 to $100,000 (to the millions, but let’s not go there) – means you’re getting a one-of-a-kind piece with little or no mass-produced parts. These watches are called “manufacture” and a manufacture movement is rare and very desirable. In fact, buying a $100,000 watch means you are probably helping a single watchmaker with a small team of assemblers make his next boat payment. You are essentially paying them a stipend to make you a piece of art. Then there is the very low end. This keeps all of these other business alive. The late Swatch Group CEO Nicholas Hayek told me the industry was a pyramid. Swatch was on the bottom, massive and dense, and the more expensive models hid out in the rarefied air near the top. Even if the base is decimated, he believed, the rest of the industry could survive. The profit on most jewelry is nearly 100%. Official distributors buy watches for $2,000 and sell them for $4,000. Rules and regulations force these sellers to stick to these rules against the pain of losing their license. And people will pay these outrageous prices because they understand that they are receiving either a true piece of art or they’re making a statement of conspicuous consumption. We can’t begrudge anyone either of these, and this behavior has been happening since the first cave lady hoarded a cache of seashells that she then wove into a handsome bracelet. The market for Swiss watches is not the iWatch market. The market for Swiss watches is populated primarily by people who want to own a fine watch because it is a fine watch, not because they want something that can tell the time. To suggest that the iWatch will influence Swiss watch buyers is like saying the market for a fine Bordeaux is affected by the advent of a new flavor of Vitamin Water. Who, then, fucked? Fossil. Fitbit. Pebble. Intel. Android Wear. Motorola. LG. In short, everyone who is trying to produce smartwatches and wearables. Those guys are royally fucked. Just as makers of MP3 players imploded once the iPod arrived, these companies will have to face a similar threat and many will fail. I don’t particularly want that to happen – I love the Fitbit and the Pebble – but it will. In short, the only way Switzerland can fail is if people with money stop buying things. And this would also ruin Apple’s day. But that is the only overlap here. The iWatch isn’t playing in Switzerland’s turf and Switzerland will never play in Apple’s. Moleskine notebook sales didn’t tank after the iPad launched. In fact, the company sold 3.3 million units in 2013 and is probably selling more this year. Muji stores didn’t go out of business once the landed with its electronic stylus. In fact, the company expanded around the world, selling pencils and odd stationery to millions of Luddites. The market for fine Japanese pens does not overlap on the market for the . And the existence of a $12,000 Rolex, however ludicrous it seems to the uninitiated, does not preclude the popularity of a quickly obsoleted bauble by even the best hardware company on earth. |
An Energy-Saving Air Vent In The Cloud Designed By A 13-Year-Old | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | Father and daughter team Gabi and Shani Zuniga put their heads together with neighbor and long-time friend Danny Eizips to create Ventix, a home heating and cooling device controlled by the cloud. Think of it like , but one step into the future. While the Nest thermostat controls your entire home, the Arduino-based Ventix can be individualized to each room in your home or office. This tiny computational device communicates with the open-sourced and is hosted on . It hooks into a mobile app as well as sends SMS text to your watch. The mobile app allows you to control the atmosphere in any room to which the device is applied. Zuniga and Eizips had been discussing this idea of redirecting airflow and saving energy in each room of your home for over a year and a half now. “There was even a that never delivered,” stated Zuniga. He may have been referring to KeenVent. actually was part of a past Disrupt and went on to Techstars, though they did acknowledge on Indiegogo that they have had some delays. But it wasn’t until the Disrupt SF Hackathon that the group decided to put its idea into action. Zuniga enlisted his 13-year-old daughter as the app designer. This was her first ever hackathon but she’s been learning to create graphics for a while now. Shani designed the entire app for both iPad and iPhone and says she’ll now be working on one for Android. The group wasn’t sure if they would be uploading the idea to Kickstarter for funding or if it made more sense to go for a partnership. However, if they were to partner, they say it would make the most sense to partner with a vent manufacturer. “They have the hardware and the distribution channels. We have the technology,” says Eizips. In any case, the group hopes to at least win a ticket to Disrupt. This would be the first Disrupt for all of them. |
StudySpots Helps Students Escape The Campus Bubble | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | I wish StudySpots had been around when I was a college student. I’d spend hours hunched over books and my laptop in my dorm room or the same cubicle at the library, accumulating a layer of grime and tears as I crammed for an exam or struggled through a term paper. StudySpots, presented by a team of five young women from Girls Who Code, wants to prevent students from turning into accidental hermits. The site, which presented at San Francisco TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon today, presents you with a list of study spots based on the weather and your mood. The team behind StudySpots—Roxy Banik, Natasha Driver, Nikki Allen, Michelle Polton-Simon, and Lily Yuan—includes three high school seniors and two college freshmen. They were inspired by , instead of just confining yourself in one place all the time, can actually help with memory retention because the brain makes associations between information and the sensations it experiences, consciously or not, in different environments. To use StudySpots, you first enter your zip code so the site knows how the weather is in your location, and then you choose your state of mind: focused and ready to roll or in the mood to procrastinate. Then based on those two factors, StudySpots gives you a list of places, including cafes, parks, and libraries, where you should go. StudySpots is based on a simple idea, but I think it has the potential to vastly improve the life of students. Not only would studying in different places help boost their information retention, but it would also help them escape the bubble of campus living and improve their mood by decreasing isolation. By patronizing local businesses and venues, students can also help the economy of the area their campus is located in and build better “town/gown” relationships.To monetize and grow, StudySpots would expand with sponsored deals and pictures of locations, so students can get a preview of study spots before they haul their laptop out. The five women participated in today’s Hackathon as part of a between Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization, and , a site geared toward Millennials that is run by AOL (which also owns TechCrunch). They’ve spent this summer rebuilding Cambio, which gets 7.5 million unique views a month, and took a quick break from working on the site and school to fly to San Francisco from New York for the Hackathon. |
Venture Investors See Wave Of Tech Cash Coming From The East | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | Not to overstate the obvious, but the Alibaba IPO . The $155 billion public offering would make Alibaba one of the largest in U.S. history, but it has repercussions that extend far beyond its impact on the U.S. Stock Market. Investors like GGV Capital and DCM, which have commitments in both the U.S. and China, see the Alibaba shift as a wake up call for U.S. technology companies. “The Alibaba IPO represents a tectonic shift in the new world order,” says DCM Capital’s David Chao. “We have two companies from China that are now worth more than $100 billion.” Alibaba’s growth, and dominance of the Chinese market mean that while today its focus has been primarily the Chinese market, the company’s soon-to-be $60 billion war chest all but assures that tomorrow will see the company tackle rest of the world. The numbers for e-commerce in China are staggering. The starting gun of the online Christmas shopping season last year, December 1st, 2013’s Cyber Monday, saw shoppers spend . The Chinese equivalent, “Singles Day” on 11/11/11 saw buyers dish out $5.75 billion. “For VCs who have already been investing in China we’ve known this all the time. For those who went to China and stepped back, I think they need to recognize that there are some markets that have significant tech sectors that are bigger there than they are here,” says Chao. These investors expect to see the wave of Chinese companies coming to the U.S. to expand their global footprint and pick up technology begin to increase. “For the first time since the Yongle Emperor, Chinese entrepreneurs realize they can go out and make a difference,” says GGV Capital’s Managing Partner Hans Tung. In fact, the top Chinese companies are already here. Alibaba has invested in , according to CrunchBase, as part of a broader . Meanwhile, Tencent has been pouring money into the U.S. out of its . “Many of these top Chinese companies are coming to the valley and investing,” says Chao. “With $60 billion and a $155 billion market capitalization, you can do a lot of damage.” As these companies make moves in the U.S. some investors said they’re looking for primarily one thing — the secret sauce of innovation. While Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu (and mobile upstarts like Xiaomi) have successfully built multi-billion dollar technology businesses, there’s a sense that there may be that these companies need to do before they can succeed in the U.S. market. “If you think about it, Baidu had basically followed Google — Alibaba they followed Amazon and eBay in their business model. Now with smartphone penetration in China, which has hit critical mass, they’re in the $200 billion club and [Alibaba] has to innovate,” says one investor. “Rightly or wrongly, they view Silicon Valley as the hotbed of what’s next.” Even that perspective might be changing. that significantly parts ways with Google’s user interface through Glass. , despite , has created a remarkable smartphone at a ridiculously low price point. If disruption is predicated on lower cost products with more limited features supplanting higher-priced, better quality products by creating new, broader demand and eventually moving up-market (as tomorrow’s ,) Silicon Valley should prepare for a sea-change, because the tide of Chinese disruptors is coming in. Photo via Flickr user |
iBeacon Hack Makes It More Efficient To Wait Tables | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | It’s still pretty early days for beacon tech, but practical applications for the Bluetooth trigger hardware are set for . Beacons can be embedded into all sorts of everyday objects linking them to smartphones and their users via a companion app. Here at the 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt SF hackathon two-man hack team, Ray Ho and Mark Watson, showed off a simple but promising concept that combines $3-a-pop Bluetooth iBeacons with restaurant software Clover to make the process of waiting on tables more efficient. The concept is to embed Bluetooth beacons into every restaurant table so that table occupancy can be remotely monitored via the restaurant’s point of sales software backend, i.e. rather than needing staff on the floor constantly checking and noting when new customers sit down. “The whole idea is to integrate with the Clover tables application which is how restaurants handle tables coming in and out, servers if they’re busy, and what tables are ordering,” said Watson, demoing the SmartTables app which the duo hacked together overnight. SmartTables detects when a user has entered the restaurant and checks them into the particular beacon-enabled table they have selected, after about 10 seconds. At this point the restaurant can see within the Clover point-of-sales software interface that a table has been occupied and could send waitstaff over to take an order. But if the staff is all occupied the customer is able to place their food order via the app, and that info is pushed to the restaurant’s software. One thing to note is that the app doesn’t necessarily replace human interaction — those who want their food order taken on-demand can order via the app, but people who want to, y’know, talk to a human, can just wait for a server to come to their table, safe in the knowledge that the restaurant knows they are waiting. “We think the most interesting part is that you can handle almost everything on the customer side or the restaurant side. So if something gets busier and the customer is impatient they can just order something, or they can totally ignore the iPhone application and just do it as they normally do… It’s fluid,” added Watson. The app also lets customers sum up how much they have spent at any point before choosing to make a payment. “If you’re sitting at the restaurant and you want to say ‘I wonder how much I’ve spent; I’ve been eating a lot of appetizers’, you can get the current check, and then you can either pay for the check manually, a server can take your payment like they normally would or if you just get up and leave — which takes 10 seconds [to register] because it doesn’t want to be flaky and pretend you leave when you didn’t — we already have the user’s information stored on our servers, so it will go through MasterCard, check out, pay for it. And you can tell Clover that they’ve also paid for it,” said Watson. The restaurant would then be notified via its point of sales software that the payment has been made. “Right now people are using [beacon tech] in big outdoor venues like music venues and live sports, and they’re not really making that much use of the actual data — they’re just collecting it and seeing where users are going. So I think it’s interesting finding specific applications for iBeacons,” added Watson, who is also the founder of a fully fledged beacon analytics startup called . Check out the video below to see Ho demoing SmartTables on stage at TC Disrupt. |
iWatch’s Killer Feature Could Be Two-Factor Authentication For Payments | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | How will Apple make us desperate to ? By taking the risk and clumsiness out of mobile payments. Imagine if your iWatch could recognize that your iPhone is within range as a pre-payment security check. The two could then connect to a retailer’s point of sale via Near Field Communication (NFC), and a “Pay $20 to Starbucks?” confirmation could pop up on your iWatch. With a simple tap or voice command, you could complete the payment without ever entering a password or even taking your phone out of your pocket. Simple, speedy, and safe, this could open mobile payments to the mainstream with Apple at the core. You can practically see the slick Apple demo video showing a mom with babe-in-arms gracefully paying for groceries, even with her hands full. While a slew of smartwatches have launched this year, most have been met with a resounding “meh” from the public because they don’t do much you can’t already do with a phone. Google Now activated by voice command has big potential to deliver utility through a watch without the need for a keyboard, but the average consumer might balk at shouting into their wrist on the street. Apple’s answer to why we need the iWatch may not be what it can do that your iPhone can’t, but what they can do together. Apple is already poised for this strategy because many people buy all their high-tech gadgets from the company. iPhones, iPads, iPods, MacBooks. There were some synergies between iPods and Macs, or using iPhoto or iCloud across devices. But the iWatch/iPhone two-factor authentication trick could let you replace your wallet if you join the cult of Apple. |
Reddit Takes Down Groups Hosting Celebrity Nudes, Walks A Blurred Line On Free Speech | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | did two things last night that, on the surface, seemed pretty contradictory. It published offering an explanation for why the site does not generally take down “morally objectionable or otherwise inappropriate” subreddits. At around the same time, Reddit took down /r/TheFappening and related subreddits, where many of the images from were posted. The post itself has been updated to acknowledge that this was a little weird, explaining the situation like so: Those two events occurring together have created great confusion. That is: we put up a blog post explaining why we don’t ban things for reason X (which some people want us to, but we will not), but at the same time behavior in a subreddit started violating reason Y (a pre-existing and valid rule for which we do ban things) and we banned it, resulting in much confusion. Apparently “Reason Y”, in this case, has nothing to do with the general horribleness of sharing stolen nudes, and more with the fact that Reddit was receiving takedown notices, i.e., legal complaints from copyright owners. In , Wong wrote, “I said that we don’t ban subreddits for being morally bad. We DO ban subreddits for breaking our rules, and one of them is repeatedly and primarily being a place where people post copyrighted material for which valid DMCA requests are being received.” (Another result of the scandal: .) Not everyone has been satisfied with Wong’s explanation, particularly since Reddit was willing to keep the Fappening up for a week (benefiting from a big boost in traffic), and because it hasn’t taken down other subreddits, such as /r/SexWithDogs and /r/CuteFemaleCorpses, that are pretty horrible but aren’t drawing as much ire from celebrities or the media. On the first point, sysadmin Jason Harvey . He said that at first, the Reddit team was just trying to take down individual images in response to DMCA requests (as well as concerns that some photos showed minors), “but it quickly devolved into a game of whack-a-mole”. As a result, “It became obvious that we were either going to have to watch these subreddits constantly, or shut them down. We chose the latter.” On the question of other awful content, it sounds like Reddit won’t be taking down most objectionable groups unless it’s getting letters from lawyers. For what it’s worth, I do think Reddit was in a tough spot here, albeit one that it benefited from in some ways. By the nature of the site, there’s going to be content that really pushes the boundaries of both legality and morality, and that means it’s going to face questions without easy answers. At the same time, limiting itself to DMCA requests and a few other narrow legalities might not be an adequate way to grapple with those questions. (And by the way, offer suggestions about how Reddit can increase transparency around this process.) If nothing else, it makes high-minded posts with titles like “ ” (and descriptions of Reddit as “the government of a new type of community”) ring a little hollow. |
Shower With Friends Lets You Gamify Water Consumption | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | An engineering team from may have a good solution to California’s drought problem – just shower with friends. The team of five presented Shower with Friends at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon today, an Intel technology similar to Arduino that lets you compare your water use against that of your friends. The idea for Shower with Friends actually came from a kegbot in the Mashery office. As you might guess, the kegbot actually detects how much beer each person is drinking to compare who drinks the most. The story goes that Intel CEO dropped by the office one day, saw the kegbot and asked the engineers if they could apply the same idea to something he would actually use in his house. Thus, the seed for Shower with Friends was born. Shower with Friends is different from your regular old . It will sense your total use of water and then send you an SMS notification to let you know if you are using more or less water than the previous day. It can also show you how much water your friends (or roommates, or sister) are using to compare your consumption to theirs. This could be an important device in a drought-heavy state like California. According to the , most of the state is currently in an an extremely exceptional drought. Over 58 percent of the state is in this state, with 82 percent of the state listed in the extreme drought category. The National Drought Mitigation Center calls this “a once in a generation type of event.” According to a UC Davis study released in July, California agriculture faces the greatest drought ever seen. According to creators of Shower with Friends, Neil Mansilla, Bob Pielock, Tarandeep Bali, George Perry and Vivek Chopra, the product can also be applied to other household water usage such as toilets, your dishwasher or even for watering your lawn. Krzanich mentioned he would surely adopt this device in his home, should the group build it at our hackathon. Though I personally love the name Shower with Friends, the group agreed the name would have to change should they plan to commercialize it. Trickle Down was mentioned as a possible replacement in the future. |
A Peek Behind The Scenes At Disrupt SF | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrG6OGfay9w] Can’t make it to ? Want to see what exactly the team is doing behind the scenes? Watch this shaky, inaugural video by our new drone, Jitterz, as she flies around the backstage area, through the presentation space, and out into the Hackathon/Start-up Alley room. It’s our first effort at drone-video and, as you can see, it’s a load of dangerous, low-flying fun. Remember that and it will begin tomorrow morning at 9am. You can check out the . Music by , “ .” |
Watch The Disrupt SF Hackathon Live Stream Right Here! | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 7 |
The Hackathon is nearly over, and yet it has only just begun. Hundreds of developers and tinkerers came together yesterday to kick off TC Disrupt SF with a Hackathon. Based on the way it smells here at Pier 48, these folks have worked through the night to build something awesome. Today, the presentations begin. Each team will get exactly one minute to demo their product to a panel of expert judges. The ultimate winner will take home $5,000, and the top three teams will get a chance to present their product on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Plus, our API partners are handing out loads of prizes, including iPad minis, Xbox One consoles, and plenty more. I know — for those of you who can’t make it out here, it’s tough to miss out on such a spectacular afternoon. But you don’t have to. We’re bringing the Hackathon right into your home with a live stream, so sit back, relax, and place your bets on which Hackathon company will go on to be the next GroupMe. (Also, tune in tomorrow morning at 9am PDT to watch Disrupt SF live.) |
FishingBooker Helps You Book Fishing Trips | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | This year’s Audience Choice at Disrupt SF has a WHALE of a tale to tell you. Called , this Belgrade-based company is streamlining the process of booking fishing boats. Yes. Really. Founded by Vukan Simic and Nemanja Cerovac, the startup won a pitch-off I attended in Montenegro this year and came all the way from Serbia to hang out on the show floor. When they heard about Audience Choice they notified everyone in Belgrade and swept the voting by connecting with some high-profile Serbian tennis players. It’s a Cinderella story (with fish.) What does the app do? “It’s Airbnb for fishing charters. It’s where people can find their boat, read reviews, and book a fishing trip online,” said Cerovac. They have 600 captains in 54 countries and they’ve booked about 300 trips so far. They have boats in Mauritius, Australia, the Bahamas, and other destinations. They hope that their chance on the big stage will blow up their fishing business (not literally) and send more traffic their way. They plan to stay in Serbia even if they start swimming with the BIG FISHES. “The main thing is that we will stay in Serbia. We love it because it’s a low-priced market for customer service and programming. People are really great. They’re open-minded and creative,” said Cerovac. The guys are FISHING for the grand prize but they’re really excited just to be chosen by a SCHOOL of their PIERS. FISH. That’s a story you can take the BANK (of water, by which a fishing boat could dock). |
The Disrupt SF 2014 Battlefield Finalists Are Alfred, Partpic, PatternEQ, Shipstr, Stack And Vinli | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | In our new conference venue at Pier 48, 26 battlefield competitors (and two Audience Choice winners) have pitched their hearts out onstage at these past two days. It’s been a nerve-wracking process for these founders, as they presented their business ideas to some of the most accomplished people in our industry who gave feedback on whether those ideas are worthy. While their founders are all talented and hardworking, only 23 percent of those startups will move on to the final Battlefield round tomorrow. Our Disrupt SF 2014 Battlefield Finalists are Alfred, Partpic, PatternEQ, Shipstr, Stack and Vinli, in alphabetical order. Tomorrow, those six startups will present in front of our esteemed Finals Judges: (Sequoia Capital), (SV Angel), (Greylock Partners), (Yahoo), (Khosla Ventures) and (North, Google Ventures). And in the end, there will be only one. And that one will take home the and $50,000 in cash. Check them out for yourself. Alfred is the first service layer on top of the shared economy that manages your tasks across multiple on-demand and local services. Partpic is visual search for replacement parts. PatternEQ is an advanced analytics platform that provides analysts data mining capabilities without having to rely on data scientists. Shipstr streamlines the complex, opaque, unreliable, time-consuming and expensive international shipping industry through a cloud-based aggregation platform. Stack is the first responsive lighting solution that produces the right tone of light and brightness to maximize comfort and energy savings. Vinli is the first truly open platform that enables developers to build applications and services for vehicles. |
RezGuru By TableGrabber Helps Restaurants Take A Smarter Approach To Pricing And Reservations | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | aims to help restaurants fill their empty seats, and to that end, it’s launching a new platform today called at the Disrupt SF startup battlefield. The goal, as laid out by co-founders (and siblings) Sonia and Pawan Marwaha, is to adjust things like pricing and reservation availability in a way that maximizes revenue. For example, a restaurant might be so crowded that it’s turning people away between 8 and 10 pm, but it’s half-empty at 6 — so wouldn’t it make sense to encourage people to show up earlier, and maybe offer them better deals if they do? Pawan (who’s also the company’s “chief grabber”) and Sonia gave me a quick tour of the RezGuru dashboard, which highlights things like a restaurant’s current revenue, as well as revenue averaged out across each available seat per hour. Restaurants identify the numbers that they want to maximize, then RezGuru will create pricing strategies for different times of day to make that happen, complete with detailed predictions about how performance will change. Sonia told me that RezGuru makes those forecasts based on 21 different data points. Some of the data comes from the restaurants themselves (RezGuru can integrate with their point-of-sale systems), while some of it is external, including things like upcoming events and weather. [gallery ids="1053633,1053634,1053635,1053636"] And while the forecasting is RezGuru’s main selling point, TableGrabber actually offers a full content management system, so it can use a restaurant’s photos and digitized menu to create a presence on the web, on mobile, and on services like Seamless and GrubHub. (In India, Brazil, and Chile, where there isn’t a big player in online reservations, TableGrabber runs .) Then it dynamically updates each of those channels to reflect the broader strategy. There’s less flexibility in physical restaurants, which most likely have printed menus, but Pawan said that even there, restaurants can add special deals and create more customized menus (lunch versus dinner, weekday versus weekend, etc.). Not only can a restaurant use RezGuru to fill seats, but it can also avoid waste. If they’ve got steaks that will go bad in a few days, they don’t have to frantically try to get rid of them on the final day, because RezGuru can project the likely consumption and recommend whether prices need to be lowered to sell the steaks off more rapidly. It’s not just about pricing, either. Pawan said that RezGuru can also recommend strategies like splitting four-seat tables into two tables for two people each (if most of the demand comes from couples), or closing an hour early (because late customers aren’t bringing in enough money to justify staying open). I don’t know much about the restaurant business, but I was struck by about how restaurants are extremely sensitive to alienating their regular customers. So I wondered if RezGuru customers run that risk if they adopt this kind of dynamic pricing. Pawan pointed out that generally speaking, customers won’t pay more than the standard menu price — what they’re going to see are the discounts and deals. “On the other side, when I’m sitting in an empty restaurant and still have to pay full price, I feel cheated,” Sonia added. In addition to launching RezGuru for U.S. restaurants today, TableGrabber (which was founded in New Delhi) is opening an office in Palo Alto. Q: Isn’t there a big incumbent in the space?
A: OpenTable is just a reservation system, not a forecasting system like us. Q: I don’t like the idea of paying more during peak hours.
A: Yeah, we’re used to doing that in an airline or hotel, but not in restaurants. We don’t encourage restaurants to raise prices, but during peak hours they can set a few tables aside for people who commit to spending a minimum amount. Q: If a restaurant wants to offer a deal, how do you make them aware of that?
A: We’re not in the business-to-consumer market, but we have open APIs to update other services. Q: Are you relying entirely on third-party apps for promoting deals?
A: We created our own consumer platform, TableGrabber, in other countries, but in the US we wanted to pick our battles. |
null | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 7 | null |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 09.09.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | – Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Dan Farber, Benedict Evans, and Steve Gillmor. |
Up Close And Personal With The iPhone 6 And 6 Plus On Video | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | Apple’s new iPhones are now a , but perhaps you haven’t yet had a chance to get a more intimate look at them. We had an opportunity to try them out in person, and to run through all of the new hardware features and software functions they offer. Both the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus offer unique advantages and disadvantages with respect to one another, but ultimately, they’re cut from the same cloth and should serve the needs of most mobile users well based on initial impressions. Some of the more interesting bits here are being able to navigate iPhone 6 Plus in landscape on the home screen, and getting a whole bunch of additional features in some built-in apps when the phone is on its side. The one-handed mode is also something that makes a lot more sense when viewed in action. We’ll have a closer look once the phone is actually available, but for now, this provides a pretty concise overview of the major reasons this device could be driving a lot of consumers to new purchases this holiday. |
FOVE Uses Eye Tracking To Make Virtual Reality More Immersive | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | wants to ramp up by the virtual reality experience by creating the world’s first consumer-oriented headmount display to use eye tracking. The Tokyo-based startup was founded by CEO Yuka Kojima and CTO Lochlainn Wilson and is launching today on the Disrupt SF stage. Fove’s name comes from the words “field of view” and “fovea,” or the part of the eye that is responsible for sharp central vision. The headmount combines eye tracking technology, orientation sensing, and head position tracking so users can control the 360-degree display using only their eyes. FOVE’s virtual world looks different from other virtual reality systems, which have entire scenes in sharp focus, by replicating the depth of field you see in the real world. It does this by tracking the users’ gaze and determining where in 3D space he or she is looking. Then its graphics engine adjusts focus. The headmount display’s technology makes it possible for users to do things like make eye contact with characters in games or aim weapons much more quickly than with a mouse or keyboard. By the time a FOVE user has reacted to another character, they are already aiming at it. The founders currently can’t dwelve into too much detail about exactly how FOVE’s technology works because it is patent pending, but the headmount display uses unobtrusive infrared eye tracking technology that can track eye movements with very low latency and high precision. “The magic here is that we do this in a way that does not interfere with field of view in anyway and is invisible to the user,” said Wilson. FOVE’s potential competitors include virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus, but Kojima and Wilson say FOVE won’t necessarily take market share away from those products. Instead, the startup wants to expand the market that Oculus Rift opened up and give people an Iron Man J.A.R.V.I.S.-like experience in their living rooms. FOVE’s founders are aiming for gamers who are willing to pay a higher price for a headset for a more immersive experience. The startup is currently participating in Microsoft Ventures Accelerator London program and will talk to Microsoft about potentially integrating FOVE into Xbox, but there are no concrete plans yet. Wilson notes that pricing may be a challenge, because gamers are usually reluctant to buy an accessory that costs more than a console, and FOVE doesn’t yet know what the final price of its headmounted display will be. But FOVE isn’t just for gamers. It can also help people with limited mobility because of ALS, motor neuron disease, or spinal cord injuries by serving as a user interface for functions such as typing, gaming, or playing musical instruments. Researchers at universities in Japan are currently studying how FOVE can be used to benefit people with limited motor control or help treat conditions like autism. In addition, FOVE is working with a London company to make interactive wearables that can respond to eye movements and will allow quadriplegics to look around without help from other people. FOVE can help people with conditions like Aspergers and autism, who often have trouble making eye contact with other people, by creating characters they can interact with in a non-threatening environment. FOVE is currently in the advanced prototyping stage, with multiple proofs of concept, and the startup is currently developing a manufacturable prototype. Next year, the company plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign and SDK for game developers, and then hopefully make a consumer version of FOVE available for sale by 2016. The company has already secured angel funding from investors in Japan and plans to seek seed investment soon. [gallery ids="1056386,1056385,1056384,1056383,1056382"] A: We believe that the tech is quite inspiring. We can bring Iron Man JARVIS-type technology right into your living room. We want to inspire people and developers. A: There’s not a lot that’s really out of our control in this field. We’ve got the eyetracker software working. We just need to get the head position tracking right and that’s just a matter of time. A: Yes, when it comes to the gaming ecosystem we plan to market our product to gamers by playing on the inspiration and coolness factor of what we do. And it’s not just games, we are working with researchers in Japan to bring eye tracking to people with mobility issues and disorders like ALS. A: It’ll be slightly more expensive than Oculus Rift because ours is a better experience and we also have a slightly higher hardware cost. A: We’ll have fairly good margins. We’ve got good suppliers in Japan, excellent hardware suppliers, and they are giving us good prices. A: Higher than that. |
YouTurn Is Like Hyperlapse With Benefits | Jay Donovan | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | is probably wincing that I compare it to the extremely popular . In my defense, there are similarities that simply must be noted — primarily that the app creates super-fast videos of events. However, YouTurn, which is showing its concept on the floor at , has a slightly different angle, and it revolves around taking road trips in your car and also (most importantly) scoring your videos to soundtracks. So let’s discuss the objective of YouTurn. In short, it is sort of a dashcam app. However the app’s focus is for capturing time lapse videos of road trips and of the landscapes through which you drive. These aren’t short three- or four-minute videos, mind you. These could be hours-long videos of your trip. This is where one of YouTurn’s main differentiators comes into play. Their app allows you to capture video at specific and smaller frame rates — like maybe one frame per second or maybe five. In this way, they are achieving a similar effect as Hyperlapse, but are compiling a much smaller video file while doing so (instead of a much larger file like Hyperlapse). This is how they turn a one- or two-hour video into a five-minute video…they get rid of frames. It’s kind of old school really. Creators Michal Niezgoda and Felix Pletzer said that this method of content creation is not distracting for the user (who could be driving a car). You’re not fooling around with your phone to create these videos. Instead, you put your smartphone on your dashboard and then you “set it and forget it.” While Hyperlapse is definitely compelling, some of the most memorable videos I’ve watched were scored to music, and since the app doesn’t do this itself, the result was likely achieved through post production. YouTurn does this out of the box and this is another great differentiator. Once you have created your video, you can choose audio from SoundCloud and score it to your video. YouTurn doesn’t actually compile the audio into the video file. Instead it uses reference files to sync a separate streaming audio feed with your video. This requires the both audio and video to remain hosted on servers and therefore not resident on you computer or Smartphone, and that’s a tradeoff, but they avoid rights-protection issues (in theory) by using SoundCloud’s API this way. That’s an interesting approach. They want to consider other streaming services in the future. Another cool thing about YouTurn is that it’s capturing location information at certain intervals so that you can tell where the events on your screen happened. Neat. It’s not perfect, though. For starters, this is currently going to be an Android-only solution out of the gates. Also, because you are eliminating frames, you will never have the original, un-edited source file like Hyperlapse does, meaning that you will never be able to slow down the video. Also, there is no image stabilization in its first version. This means that you really will need to keep the phone that is capturing the video mounted somewhere stable — car, train, plane — and the faster speed you are moving the better the video will look. But, as mentioned, that is the use case they are aiming for, so at least they are sticking to their goal. So how are they going to make money? Like many early startups, they have several ideas that they will reveal at a later date, but right now they’re focused on building out a community of users. They plan to have this concept finalized and available in Google Play before the end of 2014. |
Correction: Switzerland Now Has An Incredible Competitor | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | So here we are, in the hours after the , and we need to address just what the When I first saw the watch I literally thought that Jony Ive was right in regards to how – ahem – ruined the Swiss watch industry was. However, as I thought about what the Apple Watch was (and wasn’t) I’ve come to a more nuanced conclusion. In short, the Apple Watch replaces the regular watch. This doesn’t mean it will actively replace the TAG Hauers and Rolexen out there. Instead, it will fill the blank space that is currently on most of our wrists. This space has, of late, been home to Fitbits and Pebbles and the like but, for most people, a watch hasn’t been a must-have accessory. And now it is. Apple made watches cool again and new buyers of watches who may or may not have worn watches in the past will be its biggest customers. It will sell millions. That’s why Switzerland should be scared. Because they will now have to compete with Apple and they can’t. So they will have to improve their own wares and make mechanicals and quartz watches much more compelling. I won’t wear an Apple Watch 24/7. I still prefer my Omega Seamaster and my Bell&Ross. But I will wear the Apple Watch when I’m traveling or need to be aware of incoming messages. There’s why Switzerland is safe. It’s still a geeky toy, no matter how fancy the band looks. While I can see the Apple eating some of the low end market it won’t touch the higher end. Consumers buy expensive watches for different reasons than they buy the Apple Watch. That’s why Switzerland is safe. So what is Apple doing right? First, their band system is amazing. The buttons to remove the band totally from the case aren’t new – Jaeger-LeCoultre has used them in the past – but you can also remove links from the bracelet by pressing a little button on the link, which could put small watch repair folks out of business. The bands are also well-machined and quite handsome. This custom band availability also opens up an entirely new ancillary market for custom straps and buckles. I could see Burberry and Louis Vuitton slapping their logos on there and selling bands that cost more than the watch itself. I also think Apple has completely changed the pricing equation. While many have noted that you can buy a few nice cheap quartz watches for $349, those cheap watches should still be scared. By selling a powerful smartwatch/iPhone combo for about $600 in real terms, you decimate the desirability of very low-end watches. Finally, Apple has obsoleted almost all Android Wear devices without even firing a shot. I wonder how long it will take for Motorola and the like to copy the functionality that barely anyone has even seen working yet. I think the hardest hit will be the Fossils of the world, the fashion watches sold in department stores and the like that depend more on the whims of the buyer than his or her bank balance. High end watches will remain safely ensconced in Geneva’s rarified air and the smaller guys will scramble as the Apple Watch looms over them and crashes into their markets. So no, Switzerland isn’t fucked. But plenty of others are, and we’re just getting started. |
Russia’s Webex, Webinar.ru, Secures $7.3M, Just Before Sanctions Bite | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | Web-conferencing and video-conferencing software company has raised $7.3 million in a Series A funding round led by and (the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development) and also included and previous investor . On an interesting note, this is the last investment of EBRD in a Russian company because of the sanctions on Russia right now. We’re assuming you’ve been reading the news… Intel typically invests in one Russian company a per year. We’ll see if they do any more in a year’s time. Webinar.ru pioneered the Russian web-conferencing market and has a lot of corporate clients in the country, including Russia’s biggest financial institution Sberbank, Microsoft Russia and local telecom giant Rostelecom. Over one million people now use it in the country. The service can be used either purely online, or on-premises, works on any device and requires no software installations. The company managed to beat out Webex (owned by Cisco) and Citrix in the Russia-speaking market, partly by merging with competitor COMDI just under a year ago. |
Sciencebite Is Metasearch For Scientific Expertise | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | A great startup idea often has a chunk of science at its core. But getting the discrete worlds of industry and academe to combine is not as easy as it could be. So says Berlin-based Sciencebite, a startup co-founded by Oxford- and Cambridge-educated scientist Samson Rogers who spent 10 years working in academia and consulting for industry before deciding to make a business out of strengthening those very same links. “We want to take applied science out of the paywalls and put it in touch with industry,” said Rogers, presenting on stage during the startup battlefield competition here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. [gallery ids="1053609,1053610,1053611,1053612,1053613,1053614,1053615,1053616,1053617,1053618"] Sciencebite’s plan to oil the wheels of industry-academe collaboration is a real-time, algorithmically powered matching platform that makes it quicker and easier for industry to find the right scientific expertise to get a project off the ground. It’s not going after lengthy consulting engagements involving commercial players outsourcing an entire project to a scientific team. Rather, its focus is to become a platform where experts can be found to provide personal, one-on-one advice on specific questions to help kick off a commercial project or spec out an idea. Think of it as a highly specific Quora for scientific expertise. It also wants to become a platform where scientists can raise their public profiles generally, so that it’s easier for industry to find them. Sciencebite is today launching its matching platform in open beta. Of course it’s entirely possible to track down an expert to advise on an R&D project yourself, armed with digital tools like LinkedIn and Google and a bit of time online. But Sciencebite’s metasearch cuts out some of the legwork by narrowing the search to experts in a niche area from the get go. “We let scientists, for instance R&D professionals, enter key terms or search terms into the Sciencebite search engine and we crawl and we analyze academic literature online. We apply our algorithm on it and we are able to identify the best experts, the best scientist, who can address that technical query,” explains co-founder Stéphane-Bertin Hoffmann, discussing the Sciencebite search process. The company is starting by conducting weighted keyword matching of expertise queries with academic data published online but obviously hopes to build up its own knowledge base by attracting scientists to use its platform and flesh out their own profiles on Sciencebite. It doesn’t need mass sign-up of scientists to begin functioning, though, with Hoffmann noting that it’s able to obtain contact email addresses for experts via the abstracts and papers they have published online. That means there’s no need to gather a critical mass of experts before the platform has the chance to become useful. Another advance over a manual expertise hunt (via LinkedIn et al.) are the additional features built in to the Sciencebite platform that likewise aim to take the strain out of knowledge cross-pollination. [gallery ids="1051423,1051431,1051426,1051430,1051429,1051427"] For instance, the platform gives scientists the option to respond privately to a request for their expertise, and at that point it also becomes a marketplace where they can charge a fee for carrying out the requested work. (In the future Sciencebite hopes to establish set market rates for these fees, based on factors such as industry type and engagement, but initially scientists will be able to set their own rates.) Or they can respond publicly to the request, sharing their knowledge with the Sciencebite community but forfeiting the chance of a fee if they do so. They might choose to share something publicly to raise their profile on the platform which scores contributors based on participation and reviews — so they have more chance of being foregrounded in future searches. If a scientist can’t or doesn’t want to answer an expertise request query themselves, the platform also lets them refer it to a colleague who may be better placed to help — and earn a slice of any payment for resulting consulting work. Sciencebite’s business model is to take a 10 percent cut of any transactions agreed via its platform. “The user can click on the scientist we provide, can review the scientific literature backing the profile, and he can get in touch with the scientist directly and send a question. The difference with just using a search engine, or maybe using Google scholars is that we are actively connecting both sides and we are incentivizing the scientist to support and help with the question,” says Hoffmann. “We are targeting specific know-how, niche know-how owned by an individual scientist. And this know-how we expect it would usually turn into one, two, three days engagement, which leads us to fees in the area of €2,000, up to €4,000,” he adds. The platform is tackling IP issues that might prevent collaboration by proving a standard NDA agreement that scientists and those requesting their expertise can quickly and easily utilize to kick off the knowledge sharing. Sciencebite also allows for proprietary NDA agreements to be used in the event that the standard NDA is not sufficient. In terms of competitive landscape, Sciencebite competes with established expertise matchmaking businesses such as GLG which take a human-powered approach to the problem. So it’s claiming advantages of speed, scalability and impartiality vs those rivals’ more manual approach. It also has cross-over with open innovation platforms, such as Innocentive, Ninesigma and Kaggle, according to Hoffmann, but again hopes to stand apart because of its real-time matching element. The real-time matching element will not necessarily lead to instant results of course, given that the length of time it takes a scientist to respond to a request for their expertise is not something Sciencebite can control. [gallery ids="1056403,1056402,1056401,1056400,1056399"] Academic tardiness in responding to email is certainly a risk for its business. But it’s hoping to counteract that by incentivizing responding on the platform with social ratings, such as scores and reviews, that amplify the visibility of those who do engage in a timely fashion. And of course by building a low-friction route to market for scientists to sell their expertise. “[Response times are] a challenge we’ll have to deal with, at the beginning especially — when the platform is not seen as a reference for those sort of issues,” concedes Hoffmann. “But we are really offering something of value to the scientist who has been contacted. For instance the user who send the request has their identity checked [by Sciencebite] because they have to sign in with LinkedIn. So we make sure that those are real requests, from real persons in industry. And we provide them with a specific question, specific need — so there is a trust created with a connection. “And we also capitalize on the fact that scientists, especially in academia… they really do want and seek connection with industry. They are looking to promote themselves, promote their expertise and they don’t have, we believe, the right tools to do so so far.” Sciencebite has been funded by Berlin-based angel investors thus far, and is now seeking additional seed funding to grow its team and make good on the vision. Areas of focus for new funding will be beefing up the technical team so it can improve its matching algorithm and partnering with R&D companies to get the tool in the hands of people who are going to want to use it, says Hoffmann. There are a couple of companies that are connecting high end whitepapers with industry and individuals. Do you measure yourselves against those companies?
The relevant competitors are The Open Innovation crowdsourcing platform… Nobody has yet got the right model for bridging the two sides. We’ve got the right model… Most companies simply don’t use the Internet for this… they hire offline brokers. The whole communications take place offline You had a very simple question you were asking [in the on stage demo]. In the real world most of the questions that stymie a team aren’t so simple. Have you tested this with R&D teams?
Yes we have. We’ve been in private beta for the last few weeks… that question was related to a real problem that I had. We’ve had people with immediate needs asking questions and scientists have replied It seems like if you just focus on the heavy R&D science and scientists, rather than this piece of it which feels like a consumer business I feel like those are two pretty different markets. The connecting science bit feels like it would be less of a Q&A based function, less about profiles and more exclusivity to it. How have you navigated that or is it too early to tell?
There’s a bit of both. There’s a profile which has my credentials but actually more important in commercial R&D is establishing this very specialized answer to a question… They need an answer to a question and there isn’t a way to do this.
If you compare this to software development where there are well developed tools online and communities that share answers… There’ s a joy to share knowledge in software development and it’s a terrible experience in science R&D Again that’s very transactional. Developers have had years to build reputations in profiles… Where you guys are willing to create motivation for people to answer questions to create scale seems like an area where you have work to do…
Indeed. That’s why we’ve focused on this matching tech to find people to answer specialized questions What happens if a simple question requires a much longer answer and the expertise turns into a consulting engagement? Are you involved in that process?
Consulting engagements are what we want – especially short engagements for know-how. A few days work, for which we take 10% [of the fee]. That’s our main business model Aren’t there IP issues involved with sharing?
IP and confidentiality are very important for our customers. We design that with those in mind. In the team we have a background in R&D… knowledge brokering, consulting and R&D funding… The way we’ve set it up for the clients is with this in mind What’s a typical fee?
Two to five thousand dollars People would pay that for the answer to that specific question?
Typically one would expect to establish some relationship to discuss the matter but almost any question has a lot of considerations and that’s something that would involve a few days work What is the frequencies for companies to solicit external expertise?
That varies a lot. Some 5% to 10% of R&D budgets of large companies are outsourced for know-how based services |
Here’s Apple Pay In Action | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | Apple has revealed its , and it features NFC and Touch ID, as many expected. The system works as fast as they joked it did on stage – which is why in our demo we ran through a number of different payment scenarios. Essentially, with the new iPhones, a user holds their phone near a payment terminal, and the payment card they’ve set as a default is called up, prompting a Touch ID action where the user authenticates their transaction. [gallery ids="1056366,1056367,1056368,1056369,1056370"] This system is similar in practice to a lot of existing ones, but Apple has done a lot of work to remove even more friction than most others. You can use cards already stored in your iTunes account, for instance, or add them simply using your iPhone’s camera. The Apple Watch works for Apple Pay in the same way, so you can imagine what it will look like based on the demo above. It doesn’t require fingerprint authentication, however, so it’s likely we’ll see payment card providers put transaction limits of a certain number of dollars on payments made with Apple Watch alone. |
Hands On With The Apple Watch | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | is out there, and the way they’re looking to distance themselves from the crowd is by introducing a smooth, highly usable interface with unique control mechanisms, and creating a device that embraces apps and features beyond notifications, but in a way that makes sense for a small-screened device. The also cozies up to mobile payments, with NFC and Apple’s new ‘Secure Element’ for storing payment information embedded within. That means the Apple Watch can enable Apple Pay on any device it works with, which includes the iPhone 5 and later. But with this pre-release version, we were only able to check out basic features, including a demo reel while we wore the watch on our own wrists, and functioning devices operated by Apple employees to show us more advanced functionality. Features will require more time to assess – the notifications and quick replies seem very interesting and worthwhile, but the new paired communication mode that Apple demoed, which allows one user to connect directly to another for real-time sharing of hand-drawn messages, customized animated smileys, heartbeats and more, initially strikes as a bit of a strange concept. Apple’s messaging is all about the novelty of the feature, however, which means that whether it catches on or not, it’ll take some acclimation. [gallery ids="1056308,1056309,1056310,1056311,1056312,1056313,1056314,1056315,1056316,1056317,1056318,1056319,1056321,1056322,1056323,1056324,1056326"] The “Taptic” feedback that accompanies those messages, as well as other kinds of notifications, is definitely pleasant though. It really does make it feel like another person is lightly tapping your wrist, which contrasts tremendously to the jarring notification vibration of Android Wear smartwatches. It’s still impossible not to notice, but it’s less harsh. In my brief experience, it also felt like the 38mm Apple Watch variant produced a better Taptic notification experience than the 42mm version, if only slightly. Overall, though, I preferred the 38mm. As a watch fan myself, the smaller case felt more like the classic designs I prefer in standard time pieces, and it still wore well on my relatively large wrist. This isn’t a women-specific design by any means; it’s just another option, and I suspect it’ll be a popular one despite the slightly smaller screen. Apple’s leather bands are well-made and comfortable, and the sport band definitely feels like it should offer comfort during active use. The link bracelet’s offering of easily removable sizing links is just a great innovation regardless of the fact that it’s applied to a smartwatch in this case. As for the buttons, they also seem to have been paid very close attention, and the smooth rotating action on the digital crown should make it an interface control element people enjoy using. I still have questions about how much time people will actually spend navigating on-watch interfaces, vs. using it more as a passive monitoring and notification device, but Apple has done a lot of work providing genuine innovation for how users might think about exploring wearables that others to date haven’t seemed to have put much thought into. |
PatternEQ Wants To Help SaaS Companies Use Data Science To Kill Their Churn | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | This afternoon at the Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, launched into private beta with an aim to help software as a service (SaaS) companies attack on of their chief foes: churn. Call it data science for the common man. takes in data from a startup’s various sources — MixPanel, for example — weaving the information into its own algorithmic tools to help a company make actionable sense of its data. PatternEQ has built a number of algorithms that it quickly checks against a company’s data. It then selects the one that is most astute, and applies it to the collected information. The company has bigger goals for its software, but it’s starting with a focus on SaaS churn. That’s a reasonable selection, given that the SaaS market segment is quickly growing and has cash to spend given the current fundraising landscape. PatternEQ is predicated on the point that hiring a data scientist for your firm is expensive and slow. If you need results on your data quickly, you can’t afford to wait for a service that you might not be able to afford. PatternEQ will cost about $1,000 per month, a sum that should be in the price of companies with enough subscribers to desire a deep look into their churn. The company went through and is looking to raise more capital to hire additional engineers. Founder told me that the product can accept any data set from a user and run its algorithms against the information. Barlaskar also indicated that the company is building a number of templates that will help the less technical user better parse their results. Those templates will be ready in the fourth quarter of this year. In short, PatternEQ wants to become the nexus for all your company’s disparate information sources, bringing them together and spitting out insights that were previously obscured from sight. If PatternEQ can pull off its vision, it will be cheap at 10 times the price. Data science has almost joined big data and cloud in the pantheon of terms that are so overused that they lose all meaning. But in the case of PatternEQ, its premise — helping SaaS companies cut churn — is constrained enough that its effort to democratize data science is a reasonable use of the phrase. When PatternEQ releases its templates product, we’ll check back in with the company to see how quickly it is growing. Automation, the user doesn’t have to pick what sort of algorithm that they need to analyze their data. Small businesses, others can use it, but we are focusing on small businesses. Don’t think that people will graduate out of the product. It’s data science as a service. We don’t want you to do other services on top. The hardest part is getting the data into the same place. People have a hard time getting a unified view of their data. Other thing is that people are still learning about predictive analytics. Tableau is not predictive. Domo is a BI tool, and so they don’t provide predictive analytics either. It’s a SaaS service. The target market is not going to set up a Hadoop cluster, so we do that for them. We decide the best technologies, and you just focus on what you do. You can upload files, or you can connect to our APIs, so it comes into our servers. You can choose which events you want to pull into the platform. |
MailTime Turns Your Email Inbox Into An SMS Chat Session | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | There has been no shortage of apps and startups looking to fundamentally change the way we communicate by email. They range from products like Mailbox, which seeks to help users reach inbox zero, to Acompli, which adds file management and scheduling directly into your inbox. But in each case, the format of the emails you receive look more or less the same. MailTime is different. The app, which launches today as part of the Startup Battlefield, is designed to change the way in which users interact with email and make it more like text messaging. It starts with the thesis that email hasn’t fundamentally changed much since it was first invented decades ago. Most email clients, either on mobile or desktop, display content in the same way that they always have. And, as a result, users are stuck with a whole lot of information that they don’t need clogging up their messages. [gallery ids="1053572,1053573,1053574,1053575,1053577"] To deal with that, the app strips out all the unnecessary bits of email — subject lines, email signatures, etc. — and whittle them down to appear as SMS-like chat messages. By doing so, it hopes to make those messages more manageable, easier to read, and quicker to respond to. The app has an intelligent content parsing engine and the ability to summarize long emails in a way that places messages into a conversation view. Emails that include multiple participants are displayed like a group chat, enabling users to reply-all or easily add and remove people from the conversation. MailTime has some other interesting features. With the app, users can tag other recipients, which adds them to the conversation and assigns a task to them. It places all mentions in a place that makes them more like to-dos that require attentions and can be completed. To recipients, messages sent with MailTime won’t look different from any other emails in their clients. And if you ever want to view the full text of a message, subject line and all, there’s a way that you can toggle to a more classic email inbox display. MailTime’s founders had previously worked on a mobile push-to-talk app called TalkBox , which they developed in 2011. Not surprisingly, that feature has taken off on a number of different other messaging apps. Now the team is looking to reinvent the way users do email. Q: What’s it like for users receiving emails on the other end? A: We only require you to use the app if you want to use it. If someone receives an email from you, they will receive a very normal looking email. Q: What insights do you have about your solution that other email providers don’t have? A: If a normal email providers want to do this, they might do this for their users. But we have built an algorithm and other companies will have to build that. Q: What problem does this solve? A: More than half of all emails are sent from a mobile client. Any time people reply by phone, they only type 50 words. The problem is that email clients haven’t adapted to that today. Q: What’s the security model? When the client connects to email, all you get is that there’s a message waiting? Is that right? I would never use Mailbox because I could never have that mail sitting on someone else’s server. A: Every single email sent and received by mailtime goes directly from the app to the email server. We don’t make any changes, so when you open the app, you will receive it directly from the mail server. Q: Do you have any of the Mailbox features? A: We believe there are many tasks inside mail but don’t believe that every email is a task. We consider what things people ask you to do as a task and that’s it. |
Microsoft Said To Be Close To Purchasing Minecraft’s Parent Company For Around $2B | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | It appears that Microsoft is prepping to follow Facebook into of gaming acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal that the software giant will buy the gaming company behind the mega-hit Minecraft for around $2 billion, perhaps as early as this week. The deal, which Microsoft can well afford with its nearly $86 billion in cash and equivalents, would bring a popular title into the company’s software domain. The purchase would be massively ironic given that Markus Persson, Minecraft’s founder, has been in the gaming community for his criticisms of Microsoft, especially its Windows 8.x operating system. Microsoft has several irons in the gaming fire: Its Xbox line of games, Xbox on Windows Phone, and, of course, games sold through its several applications stores that are part of its operating system platform. The oddity here is that Microsoft tends to build platforms that other companies and developers then build on top of, and has tended to have less of a focus on building games itself. Perhaps with the Minecraft deal, Microsoft is looking to change that fact. You can imagine a few synergies: Bundling Minecraft with new devices, adding exclusive content for Windows users, and the like. Minecraft has become a sensation, with a gameplay set around free-play, the creation of virtual worlds that are bent to the whim of the user, and are generally limited only to the creativity of the user playing. The game has also spread its roots into the physical world, with toys sourced from in-game creatures finding retail homes at Walmart, Toy R Us, and other locations. Facebook , a virtual reality gaming headset. If Microsoft buys Minecraft, expect a bevy of hilariously bad op-eds parsing why the deal makes great sense. Microsoft declined to comment. |
Watch All The Videos Apple Showed During Its Keynote | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | It’s been . There’s not just one but two new (and bigger) iPhones, the Apple Watch, and a new system for paying for things at physical retailers with a quick tap of your phone or watch. That was a lot to process, and Apple had to break it all down with a series of videos strung throughout its keynote. For many (including yours truly), Apple struggled to provide a consistent stream of the event, so a lot of the shorter videos weren’t even seen by those following the announcements. Thankfully, Apple uploaded all of the videos to YouTube as a single playlist, so if you don’t feel like watching , you can skip to the juicy bits in the embed below: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries?list=PLHFlHpPjgk713fMv5O4s4Fv7k6yTkXwkV&w=680&h=383] |
Stack’s Smart Sensor-Packed Light Bulbs Run Autonomously, No App Interactions Required | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | Over the past few years a swath of self-styled ‘smart lights’ have pushed into the market. The likes of and Kickstarter fueled . Aka connected lightbulbs that can be controlled via an app. But this is just the first wave of smart lighting — and it’s really not-so-smart, argues new lighting focused startup Stack, launching today on stage here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Stack’s view is that smart connected objects should be autonomous, rather than require their owner to continuously tend to their needs via an app. Because, well, as I for one have , needing to use an app for every bulb in your home is just tedious. So Stack’s ‘lightbulb moment’, if you will, is to create smart lights with built-in ambient light, motion and occupancy sensors — enabling them to respond dynamically to their environment without the need for constant app-based interaction. The bulbs are packed with sensors, Bluetooth, Zigbee and iBeacon hardware, and microcontrollers allowing them to react autonomously once installed. During the initial set up process the owner is asked to specify (yes, via an app) whether the bulbs are installed in a commercial location or a home. And once they choose one of those two options they’re good to go, with the system using a series of commercial or residential pre-sets to dial light up or down, based on ambient light conditions, time of day and occupancy of the room. [gallery ids="1053638,1053639,1053640,1053988,1053991"] “If you say ‘home’ it automatically defaults all the bulbs with a pre-set,” explains Stack CEO Neil Joseph, who left his day job at Tesla to set up the company. (Another co-founder used to work in electrical engineering at NASA and is now helping Stack nail down its light sensing algorithms.) “In the morning it’ll be a cooler, blue light, and then as the day goes on the lights will automatically adjust their color temperature. All the way to a warmer color by the evening,” he adds. Initially the residential market will be the startup’s target, although Stack has big plans for business use — hence the iBeacon integration and a planned analytics offering so commercial users will be able to use the bulbs to determine things like footfall within a store. Using connected light bulbs as iBeacons offers a high-resolution way to surveil a space, argues Joseph. “It’s the same functionality as any other iBeacon except it’s a higher resolution… There are more bulbs in any space than any other electronic device because of how numerous they are.” “The two biggest applications we see is in the retail sector to measure foot traffic and motion throughout a store. As well as with the iBeacon part of it being able to have that interactivity with their customers. The big thing here is because they already have the lights they don’t have to get a whole separate system installed to have iBeacons deployed,” he adds. On the residential side, a key area of focus for Stack’s marketing will be on how its product can help improve users’ sleep patterns. That’s because Stack bulbs are color temperature sensitive to the time of day, meaning the shade and intensity of the light will be in tune with outdoor light levels and therefore with the human circadian rhythm. Hence Stack’s bulbs using a bluer color temperature in the mornings, and becoming warmer, softer and dimmer in the evenings — in an effort to make the indoor environment mimic the natural outdoor light cycle of sunrise, daylight, dusk and darkness. Despite this shifting color temperature, all Stack’s light shades are white. No lurid lighting colors here. “What’s been interesting through this discovery process is learning how light really impacts people’s health. There’s been a lot of technology… that tries to measure how you sleep. There are all the wearable devices that try to measure that. And the thing is… what do you do about that once you know that you aren’t sleeping well? For your circadian rhythm, one of the biggest influencers on that is light,” notes Joseph. “If you’re able to tune the lights — so let’s say, saying what time you’d ideally like to go to bed and wake up, and have the right tone of light and amount, it will definitely help readjust your body and really maximize your energy focus and overall health. So that’s one of the big things that we’re doing that will be in our app. That’s actually the biggest thing that we see people utilizing our app for; is just simply saying I want to try to go to bed by 11.30pm and I want to wake up at 7am. So as you get closer to the evening the lights automatically start dimming down and they’re a warmer hue and your body will naturally respond to that, and start to relax.” [gallery ids="1056275,1056274,1056273,1056272,1056271,1056270,1056268,1056267,1056266,1056265"] The potential for energy savings using Stack is another key area of focus. Joseph tells TechCrunch the bulbs yield energy savings of between 60 and 80 per cent compared to LED bulbs across residential and commercial deployments. This is owing to their ambient light-sensing smart dimming, so there’s never any redundant light energy being expended. Rather they shine as brightly as conditions require. Also helping conserve energy is their ability to switch off entirely when rooms are unoccupied, so again bulbs aren’t left burning unnecessarily. It’s worth noting that some commercial environments already have sensor-powered lighting control systems installed that respond to — for instance — room occupancy, to switch lights off at night when the last employees have clocked off and gone home. But Joseph says Stack offer a much cheaper and easier way to install a dynamic lighting system than one of these high cost lighting control systems. No lighting engineers or additional IT installations are required to run Stack. Per bulb Stack costs $60, although you also need a Zigbee hub. A hub plus a two-bulb pack will cost $150 — with each bulb offering a lifespan of around 50,000 hours. Joseph says that cost stacks up well against the upwards of $100,000 a business might need to shell out to install a full sensor-based lighting control system. And of course Stack allows for bulbs to be installed gradually, as budget allows. Today the first Stack bulb is up for pre-order — with an estimated delivery date of Q1 next year. The first bulb format is a recessed can light. It’s calling this bulb Alba. Additional bulbs formats will follow in the first and second half of 2015, according to Joseph. The startup is also intending to make a connected fixture for the smallest MR16 bulbs, which might have trouble fitting all its sensor tech inside the bulb itself. “Over the course of the next year we’re going to have all of the major formats of lights and fixtures,” he adds. Stack’s bulbs will support integration with Google’s Nest and Apple’s HomeKit (IFTTT support is planned too). There will also be a Stack API to extend usage via third party apps, should users want more functionality. The Stack app itself does also support more granular control if the user is so inclined — allowing the setting up of different zones within a house, for instance, although the core philosophy here is to avoid the necessity for too much micro control. Bulbs can be drags and dropped into zones within the app. Zones can also be provisioned by location — so a user could, for instance, stand in their bedroom and tell the app to zone all the nearby bulbs as the ‘master bedroom’. Beyond the individual connected bulbs, launching today, the grand vision is for Stack to form the backbone (or indeed the stack) for many more connected indoor devices. “The way we see it is because we have these sensors in the bulb — and if you think about it, generally lights are the most common electronic devices in a building, whether it’s residential or commercial, we view it as we become the backbone of a responsive sensor network throughout the house,” adds Joseph. “With HomeKit and Works With Nest, with those APIs and some APIs of our own, we’re going to be able to help tie together all of those other products.” Maybe you could walk through the experience of how I use the product…
Imagine just setting the time of when you want to wake up and go to bed. It comes on with a bluer hue of light in the mornig… then by the evening a warmer or yellow hue of light helps you to go to bed What is the major advance here?
The major advance that we’ve done is the embedded sensors and being able to tie all that together I need to be able to control it
It can learn, it turns itself on if there’s a commotion So I can just buy this on Amazon today and screw this into my current light fixture and it’ll work
You can pre-order today and we’ll begin shipping in Q1 The context of how I want my life set up is very contextual… how does it know that context and how does it work in an existing environment where I have dimmers and switches?
Our bulbs will be able to work with all the common dimmers… We have pre-loaded pre-sets. And common pre-sets – like a dinner party mode that’s softer… In the app you can drag and drop. You can adjust [individual bulbs] in the app if you want Is commercial or residential the bigger opportunity here?
We’re going after residential first because we need more formats of lights Marketing question. It’s always a challenge to tell people what a reinvented thing is. What’s your elevator pitch?
Alba is the world’s first responsive lightbulb. You don’t have to touch an app, it will automatically respond to the environment My life is never linear, I want to override the pre-sets what do I do?
That’s why we have the app. You go down to the individual bulbs and adjust them How many of the hubs do you need for a normal house?
You only need one per house. We use Zigbee… it’s a mesh network. One unit can go all the way What is the price point compared with Philips Hue or some of these other smart lights?
We’re pricing it at $60 just like the Philips Hue. Same price but much more functionality What’s the life like?
Generally the newer LEDs will be 50,000 hours… So a home setting you’re talking 30+ years. In a commercial setting on for 12 hours a day over 11 years The challenge of getting LEDs to work correctly with dimmers seems to be an unresolved issue. How do you play nice?
There are many types of dimmers and a common core set that everyone tries to work with but ultimately there we say get rid of the switch long term. That’s our dream for a truly responsive home Tell me about the founders – what led to this idea?
This started when I was at Tesla… I was sitting in the office building and I thought why are these lights on at full power? Why can’t they dim like our phones or TVs — so I set about creating the technology and building an awesome team. |
Brian Chesky Talks About Just How Different The Hotel Business Is From Airbnb | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | The conversation about exactly how co-founder saw his company seemed a bit confusing during his 20 minute panel on the Disrupt SF stage this afternoon. Chesky was adamant that Airbnb is like a hotel until it isn’t. Chesky started off comparing Airbnb to eBay, saying the travel booking service was “like the eBay of space in the early days.” He then went on to admit to moderator Ryan Lawler that Airbnb was like a hotel until it wasn’t convenient for it to be one, “The big misnomer about hotels is that they own hotels. Their model isn’t that different from ours. Hotels are basically like a franchisee – we are but more decentralized.” Chesky then said that Airbnb also wasn’t like a hotel because it was in the trip business. “We had to ask ourselves a couple of years ago we’re not in the business of homes, we’re not in the business of space, we’re in the business of trips,” Chesky told the audience. “But you’re not a hotel?” Lawler asked him. “Not a hotel,” affirmed Chesky. Lawler would later bring up the Airbnb run-in with the hotel lobby. The hotel industry had accused the peer-to-peer hospitality startup of having an unfair tax advantage. The claim was that Airbnb should be paying the same tax as they did for putting people up for the night. The hotel lobby would later recant, saying . New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had also subpoenaed Airbnb’s customer data. Schneiderman believed Airbnb was running a massive illegal hotel operation. Airbnb contended that individuals were renting out their own, individual rooms and apartments, not running a hotel. Airbnb later reached an agreement with the Attorney General to hand over customer data, sans any info that would ID the host. This allowed the Attorney General to investigate without revealing individual hosts who might be breaking their rent lease by renting out their space. Chesky did seem to squirm a bit when Lawler asked him, “What about the sex parties and squatters and listings with 22 beds backed up against each other? Are we just sort of immune to this now?” Chesky paused for a bit and then answered back with, “I think we need to put these incidents in perspective. [Airbnb] is the size of a small city and you can imagine a small city so there’s a percentage of things happening like this but there’s only so much you can do.” Chesky and Lawler also discussed the rent problem currently plaguing SF and the criticism from an article in the SF Chronicle. , professional property managers were renting out over 5000 empty homes on the Airbnb site – homes that went to travelers instead of into the SF rental market, thus upping the rental market price. “The thing is some people are renting homes on behalf of other people while they are gone and these people are being thrown in with property managers,” explained Chesky. This was a bit odd to defend, especially after Chesky added minutes later that many of the hosts on Airbnb didn’t have an income before. “A third of our hosts depend on airbnb for a job. They say they think of us as partners.,” he said, reffering to the new Airbnb host meetup. Lawler drew laughter from the crowd when a giant picture of the new Airbnb logo went up on the screen. “What body part does that look like to you?” Lawler asked. “I think it’s an ear,” Chesky joked. “I guess it’s whatever you are thinking about,” he added. Lawler asked him exactly how many people actually worked on this logo without telling the CEO it may look like any number of private parts. “I know where you are going with this and the answer is yes, but we fell in love with this.” Chesky then gave an expected answer that he’d given before – the logo symbolized belonging. The interesting thing here is that a)he then admitted that the idea that the new logo might look pervy had been brought up numerous times and b) he then said the logo actually had the effect he was hoping for – that everyone not even think of what was there before. “I guess this is a really good way to get ppl to forget the old logo,” said Chesky. |
Palate Is A Smart Grill That Takes The Work Out Of Cooking | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | While the standard George Foreman has long been the go-to grill for busy executives on the go, it’s time for Big George to hang up his gloves. is on the scene and launching at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014. This smart grill will cook almost any food perfectly based on weight, composition, and desired done-ness and can be controlled via your mobile device. “With the Palate Smart Grill, you start the cooking with a few taps on an iPad, and the grill executes a precision-temperature cooking process that cooks the food exactly the way you want it,” said CEO Eric Norman. “With the Smart Grill’s technology, food is cooked perfectly even if the meal is delayed because guests are an hour late; it’s impossible to overcook or undercook the food.” [gallery ids="1053660,1053661,1053662,1053663,1053664,1053665,1053666,1053667,1053668,1053669"] What witchcraft is this, you ask? I’ll let Norman explain: We saw the device a few months ago and it is, in short, awesome. The food that comes out of it is perfectly cooked based on programmed profile. The searing function alone – the process of caramelization at high temperatures – is well worth the price of admission. Created by Eric Norman, Don Norman, and Jim Reich, the product is launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. [gallery ids="1056239,1056238,1056237,1056236,1056235,1056234"] Are people fanatical about this?
People want great food Who is your target and how did you identify it?
The primary users we want to identify are these food enthusiasts who want the best meat. People value convenience. When their foodie friends tell them about this they will want it What are the steps? Is it so easy that even I can make this?
It’s one touch… You can make this steak no problem Can you tell me about design?
It’s beautiful. We wanted something to be proud of on your counter top What’s the manufacturing process?
It’s not unusual for hardware development to break out some of the key parts, so we’ve done that. It’s our electronic board driving it, our sensors. It has some mechanisms we’ve designed… We’ll be crowdfunding manufacture [at a later point]. How defensible is the technology here?
There are several patents on the tech… but this isn’t just a matter of making a little tweak here and there. To get it right we have to get everything right — thermal design, control algorithm — so it never overshoots and that’s a big shift for these guys. You have to think about what’s going on inside the food where you can’t even put a thermometer in it Does most of the processing happen on the device?
The control part of it happens on the device… Recipes on the backend. Where do you see it fitting in on the never cooked before vs somebody who is master chef in their own home?
Our dev chef is a great example… he was really blown away by… the lack of moisture loss. The food is really juicy. Those people are going to be blown away I can cook fish in this?
Fish is amazing Do you have any awareness of altitude?
Shouldn’t be a major effect here. We’re detecting thermal mass and heat. We control all the heat |
Apple Accepting iTunes Donations For ‘City of Hope’ Center During October | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | Apple will be accepting donations for the during the month of October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the company revealed today. The organization is a research and treatment center created to combat not only breast cancer, but also diabetes and other life-threatening diseases including lymphoma and brain cancer. The organization aims to make it easier to detect life-threatening diseases, as well as prevent them before they start and treat them once they’ve affected a patient. The organization has a long list of successes under its belt, including funding research that identified the link between women getting a at least three to four hours a week and a lessened risk for breast cancer. Apple using iTunes as a donation platform for charitable causes is not a new thing – the company has previously collected relief funds for the Japanese tsunami in 2011, for the typhoon that devastated the Philippines in 2013, and for . This marks a move into more open philanthropy not tied to a specific event or disaster, and is probably indicative of CEO Tim Cook’s greater mission of doing more public good with Apple’s considerable influence. Cook’s track record includes announcing a new charitable matching program for employees in 2011, and detailing $150 million in charitable contributions made by the company at a town hall meeting in 2012. Cook has also ushered in an era of greater transparency at Apple when it comes to its supplier and environmental sustainability record. |
Firespotter Labs Becomes Switch, Providing A Cloud-Based Phone System For Google Apps | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | Unified communications has long been touted as the future, but being able to provide access to all of one’s calls and messages on multiple devices is an idea that has just barely come to fruition. Now, the folks at Firespotter Labs think they’ve built a solution — a cloud-based platform for enterprise communications called . Firespotter Labs was probably best known for building UberConference, a that a couple of years ago. (It also built a few lesser-known apps, which included , , and , but has been mostly focused on solving this communications problem.) Over the years, Uberconference continued to add features like , , . But in the background, the team has been working on a whole new communications platform for enterprise users. This isn’t the first time it’s worked to solve this type of problem: Much of the team has been working with Switch co-founder and CEO Craig Walker during his various other efforts at building communications tools. Prior to Firespotter, Walker founded GrandCentral, which was and became the backbone of Google Voice. And before that, Walker led voice-over-IP company Dialpad, which was acquired by Yahoo and became the basis for Yahoo Voice. Now he and team are once again building a telephony solution that will allow users to make or receive calls from any number of devices — from the desktop to their mobile phones to even the phones placed on their desks at work. The new company, called Switch Communications, provides a cloud-based platform designed to give users access to their voice communications wherever they are or on whichever device they prefer or have handy. Things have changed since Google Voice, and the folks at Switch hope that means they are getting better. In addition to having a single number that rings on all their devices, Switch users also get features like call transfer, company directory, visual voicemail, and switching between devices. It’s able to provide many of those features thanks to a series of mobile apps that it’s built out for Android and iPhone devices, as well as desktop apps. For companies that use Google Apps, Switch is positioned to take the cloud-based productivity suite that Google provides and offer voice communications on top of it. On the back end, Switch integrates with Google Apps to give enterprise users access to company directories, contacts, and calendaring. It also integrates with Hangouts to enable video conferencing, and, since it knows the people in your organization, can show the presence of your coworkers — you know, whether they are online or off. Being built on top of Google’s infrastructure also means it’s ultra-easy for businesses to get signed up. Switch needs only connect with a company’s Google Apps admin to get set up. Once that’s done, admins can provision accounts and numbers to employees, as well as set up a virtual receptionist system, dial-by-name directory, custom greetings, and office hours. Google Apps is huge, and Switch is hoping to grab some customers who are looking for improved telephony services. The company is charging $15 per employee per month, which includes a free number and unlimited text messages from within its platform. Switch has raised a total of $18 million since being founded, with investors that include Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. The company now has about 60 employees and is headquartered in San Francisco. |
Vinod Khosla Doesn’t Like Eggs, But He Loves Machine Learning | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | Today at Disrupt SF, TechCrunch founder and alum Michael Arrington interviewed venture capitalist Vinod Khosla in a conversation that covered a number of topics including egg substitutes, animal cruelty, city design, Uber, the usefulness of most members of the professional investing community — and one of Khosla’s newest interests, machine learning. Parts of it were a reprise of sorts, as Arrington and Khosla have previously tangled about Hampton Creek, a company that creates a plant-based egg substitute and Khosla Ventures investment. And so, Arrington endured yet another taste test on stage of two sets of cookies, some made with eggs, and some made with a non-egg substance. What was established instead, in the waning moments of the interview was Khosla’s interest in smart machines and robotcs (a subject he’s touched on in ). On the TechCrunch stage Khosla unveiled two new portfolio companies (the still in stealth) MetaMines and the not-quite-as-stealthy . Perhaps most interesting in the discussion was Khosla’s , “In the next 20 years, machine learning will have more impact than mobile has.” I suspect that most people familiar with the promise of machine learning doubt that it will have a large impact on technology, and the world, when it becomes more intelligent, but at the same time, mobile has a proven track record of changing the world. It’s a large claim to make, especially since mobile will only continue to have a greater impact itself, as smartphone and tablet penetration rise around the world. Regarding other venture capitalists, Khosla was willing to that 95 percent of venture capitalists add no value to companies that they invest in, and 70 percent actually bring negative value. Yesterday, Clayton Christensen said that it was not “clear to [him] that Uber is disruptive.” Khosla found the asseration silly, raising the idea of the compound impact of one large disruption paired with a second large disruption. His example — Uber itself, paired with driverless cars — detailed the idea that a single innovation can perhaps have magnitudes greater impact when linked to a separate new technology or idea. Uber can reduce the cost of getting around your city — depending on where you live — but assuming a lower per-ride cost using a driverless car, it would become dramatically cheaper than owning your own set of wheels. After being asked by Arrington how many cars he owns, Khosla stated that he owns “a lot of cars,” but that he would be “happier” to not own a vehicle. The venture capitalist said that he was disappointed in Christensen. And finally, Khosla looked at Secret, which recently raised a large chunk of money, saying that he had looked at the company, and weighed whether it fell in the positive, or the negative, and decided it was neutral. [gallery ids="1055946,1055945,1055944,1055943,1055942,1055941,1055939,1055938,1055937,1055936,1055935,1055934,1055933,1055932"] |
YC’s Altman Thinks Reddit’s Community Ownership Experiment Could Be A Model | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | The thought of using crypto-currencies to back shares of a company first crossed Y Combinator head Sam Altman’s mind about two years ago. “It was an idle thought that popped into my head,” he said. “It was not until Reddit reached out to me about fundraising that I thought about it again.” So when he decided to , it was a chance to put this concept to the test. He said that over the years, many community-based and social networking companies have wanted to let users in on stock, but it was too logistically and legally difficult until crypto-currencies became popular. “No one wants to make 100,000 stock certificates and send them out to contributors,” he said. “It’s even hard to keep track of all the changes in SEC rules. It’s mechanically difficult to do.” On top of that, the SEC limits the number of shareholders that a company can have until it has to start divulging financials in a similar way to what publicly-traded companies have to share. When the JOBS Act passed in 2012, that expanded that number from 500 to 2,000 total shareholders, which is still far lower than the number of shareholders a broad-based community site with millions of users might want to have. He’s not the only one who has tinkered with this idea. A Palo Alto-based crypto-currency crowdfunding startup called is trying to fund itself through this method. SWARM is a crowdfunding platform that allows for crypto-equity fundraising. Instead of incorporating in a physical jurisdiction, the company incorporates directly on the bitcoin blockchain by creating a coin. Each individual “coin” becomes an equity share in the company/project (we call them Distributed Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs). Coins can then be sold to investors to raise funds or traded like corporate shares on the stock market. They’re trying to do a with a series of projects. Another early model was Ripple Labs, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, that created its own crypto-currency based IOU system called the Ripple. The plan was to . If the value of the system increased, so would the value of the Ripples and then the company. Today, the total value of all Ripples in circulation is $134.9 million, making them the third-most valuable crypto-currency ecosystem behind Litecoin and Bitcoin. But part of the Ripple team broke off and started an alternate project with a , as a non-profit in partnership with Stripe. The total value of all Stellars is . These are all very, very early experiments. As far as Altman has consulted with various securities lawyers, such a concept should be legal even if all the details aren’t ironed out. Anyone who ends up in possession of a crypto-currency backed by shares in Reddit would have to be responsible for their own capital gains taxes. Given that Altman for pressuring companies to be too focused on short-term quarterly results, I’d be curious to see how a crypto-currency and community-based model would insulate companies against day-traders and speculators. “Reddit will have to do the work to figure this out and implement it,” said Altman, who added that he led the round in part because its structure was so non-traditional that it would have been difficult for a conventional venture firm to lead. Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are participants in the $50 million Series B round announced today. If it works, you might see it elsewhere. “I certainly hope this could be a model for community ownership,” he said. |
Here’s How Windows 10 Will Make Your Mouse And Fingers Get Along | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_O-LrGL-YQ&feature=youtu.be Earlier today during its event in San Francisco, Microsoft played a video detailing how its coming Windows 10 operating system will handle a fusion of touch, and more traditional mouse-based input. I filmed a bootleg copy, but Microsoft just published a more polished version, so you are in luck. Handling both touch and mouse input is a rough line to walk, given that computing form factors are often based with a focus on one form of input more than the other — this is one, of several reasons, why Windows 8 has struggled. Windows 10 will have a focus on both handling standard mouse and keyboard inputs, touch, and everything up and down from smartphones to servers. Windows 10 is Microsoft’s apparent bid at bringing its platform under a single roof. They are still building it. Don’t expect what you see in the above to break out in tomorrow’s technical preview. of : Windows 10 will switch modes depending on how it’s being used. Continuum switches the system behavior depending on what hardware is available, and it will dynamically change the interface paradigm as that hardware changes. So plug the keyboard into your Surface Pro 3 and it’ll switch from touch-oriented to mouse and keyboard-oriented. If Microsoft can pull this off — today it only showed the shortest of demos — it will have built something approaching a truly flexible operating system that could, perhaps, work from both here to there, and back again. In the Baggins sense, naturally. |
A Messaging Giant Goes Public In Korea And DCM Reaps The Rewards | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | As the mobile messaging company Kakao Corp. on the Korean stock exchange, a world away, on Sand Hill Road, the partners at venture capital firm are probably getting ready to do some celebrating of their own. Three years after its initial investment in Kakao, the venture firm will be able to harvest the fruits of its labor with the blockbuster $10 billion pubic offering Kakao is making today. The IPO follows , which was announced in late May. “We invested in Kakao in 2011,” says , the DCM partner who made the firm’s original investment in . “Back then, they were only a messaging app, similar to WhatsApp.” However, the company had a broader mission, says Honda, which was to become a platform. The company wanted to create something akin to or , which would incorporate gaming, commerce and messaging into a social platform. “A lot of stuff that was initially done on the web we are trying to figure it out on the mobile side. Kakao was the first messaging company on mobile that started monetizing.” And it’s continued to monetize. Unlike the U.S., where messaging applications like WhatsApp have remained focused on messaging, as Kakao expanded into a platform encompassing mobile commerce, gaming, and other tools, the company’s revenues ballooned. Honda says it will be one of the most successful exits DCM has had. “We’re probably going to make 20x to 30x on this investment,” says Honda. “It’s going to be double-digit multiples for sure… Conservatively speaking 20x is good, but we’re hoping it’s going to be bigger.” |
ERA Demo Day Has Something For Everyone From Truckers To Teens | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | The unveiled their latest cohort today in New York, with companies launching services for everyone from chief executives on the go to college kids looking for the meaning behind their messages to a subscription based perfume service to give women and men new scents to make great memories. Behind the glass and steel walls of the Frank Gehry-designed headquarters of IAC/InterActiveCorp then ten latest entrepreneurs to make their way through ER’s accelerator program took the stage to talk about their latest news. The day began with Jason Cahill, a former Green Beret and the chief executive of Traansmission explaining how his company was changing the trucking industry and ended with a pitch from Mauhan Zonoozy, whose company is looking to make high-quality video clips easy to make and share across social media. In between, companies like presented their app for executives to book any service on offer at high-end hotels through their mobile phones; , pitched its app that analyzes text messages to better manage relationships; and showed how it can better boost results for financial advisors and insurance reps. To the companies! – The trucking industry is a multi-hundred billion dollar marketplace, and independent truckers represent roughly $45 billion of that. Cahill’s app, Traansmission is a logistics marketplace that connects shippers and truckers so that no truck ever has to make a long haul empty. The company’s in a pre-release beta and has already signed up 188 truckers in 25 states. Cahill says that he’ll have 1,000 truckers on the app before the end of the year and sign up $1 billion worth of shippers. MobileSuites chief executive Dennis Meng wants to take the antiquated hotel experience and “bring it into the 21st century”. The company’s app brings the incredibly taxing process of ordering room service, spa treatments, or any other amenity a hotel might offer to mobile phones. Already, MobileSuites has signed up 500 hotels and created a database of all of their amenities and services. By the end of the year the company expects to be in 1,000 hotels, and expects to be integrated with 20,000 hotels by 2015. So far, $1 billion worth of spending has been transacted through the platform. So say goodbye to the front desk, and hello to MobileSuites. Pull – Being a tween, teen or college kid is tough right now, says Pull chief executive Lauren Talbot. Teens and twenty-somethings send roughly 1.7 billion texts per day and yet with all of that communication they still can’t seem to understand each other. “Seven percent of our communication is conveyed through the meaning. [So] when we text we lose 93% of what we’re trying to say. Using data, Pull is attempting to get at that meaning behind all of those messages by tracking response times to messages, allowing people to recall messages after they’re sent, and incorporates calendaring and scheduling features into messages. “It’s an entire relationship management app,” says Talbot “It’s texting with sharing, undo, and analytics.” (N.B. I think the relationship angle is the worst use-case for what is essentially a pretty nifty technology that brings email functionality and features to text messaging.) For the millions of lawyers in the U.S., life may get a lot easier thanks to . The company, co-founded by Nehal Madhani, is automating paralegal work with software. The company automates workflows like filing government paperwork and collecting client information — essentially busywork that has created a roughly $15 billion industry. PlainLegal currently has 60 law firms using the service. Poacht – For those who want to launch their next job search discreetly… well, now there’s an app for that. Maisie Devine, the co-founder and chief executive of , wants to make looking for a new job as easy as launching a mobile app. Available on Android and iOS devices, Poacht lets job seekers create a profile and tailor it to show exactly the kind of position they’d be willing to take. Headhunters, recruiters and companies can then reach out and woo potential employees with the perfect offer. There are currently 200 employers using Poacht and has 10,000 candidates using the app. “We’re taking a complex, time-consuming, public process and re-engineering it,” says Devine. Selling a subscription service for new perfumes (and eventually colognes), is looking to give women a new way to buy fragrances. Roughly 63 million women in the U.S. use at least 5 different perfumes at different times, says ScentBird chief executive and co-founder Mariya Nurislamova, and they can spend up to $1,000 for ten bottles. So a service that charges $15 per month for women to have their pick from name brands and small boutiques is transformational for the roughly $14 billion fragrance market, Nurislamova says. “ScentBird is an experience company,” she says. It seems to be a successful one, with its first pilot run sold out and 90% of its subscribers filling their perfume queues for the next 12 months. For busy professionals looking for a healthier option than delivery (or DiGiorno) and who want to select their own meals rather than have them curated, there’s . Founded by Yuni Sameshima, Chicory is a service publishers can add to recipe pages online that allows a reader to buy all of the items needed to make the meal in the recipe. “There are up to 5 million recipes viewed online every single hour, but it’s still just content,” says Sameshima. “Chicory places a get ingredients button natively on recipes to make recipes interactive and transactional.” The company has partnered with for deliveries and is developing a feature to make particular brands the default option for certain purchases. “We automatically recognize the ingredients in recipes and match them to products sold by the online grocer,” Sameshima says. “We re-imagine the way recipes are used online. “We allow food brands to be the default product for any ingredient [and] this is changing the way food brands spend their $33 billion.” The company has partnered with the Daily Meal and has inked a new deal with Time Inc. “Chicory is the future of how food, media, and commerce interact on the web,” says Sameshima. Komal Raj and Arti Anand were two consultants who had an eye for fashion and wanted to be able to wear well-made clothes that wouldn’t cost them a fortune — thus was born. Calling it a fashion brand for the professional woman, Numari’s tailored looks have solved a problem which has bedeviled the online retail industry for years: the dreaded return. According to Raj, 40% of apparel bought online is returned because the clothes don’t fit. Numari’s return rate is 7%. Users take their own measurements and then order a customized article of clothing made to their exact measurements. The company’s dresses start at $160 and the Raj says the company’s margins are roughly 54% on the items it sells. “It’s going to take my co-founder and I a few years to be the next Sheryl Sandberg or Arianna Huffington,” says Raj. “But in the meantime, we can look just as good.” Helping the close the deal, has developed a social customer relationship management tool tailored to financial advisors and insurance agents. The company tracks financial advisors’ and insurers’ networks to look for key life events, like promotions or a new job, or a new addition to the family. The company launched a pilot with Northwestern Mutual and will launch at Mass Mutual later this year. Guardian Life Insurance has also come on board as a customer. “We monitor advisors’ networks looking for life events that would correlate with an actionable need,” says At Bubbl, the goal is to make the best media social and shareable. The company has developed a technology to enable users to grab the exact part of a video they want to share and distribute it across social media networks. As content becomes more “snackable” according to chief executive Mauhan Zonoozy, video sizes continue to shrink and Bubbl provides an ideal tool for sharing clips and other content. “We integrate seamlessly on top of video players,” he says. So far, Bubbl has partnered with Warner Bros. Studios and The Hobbit to embed its technology into their promotional sites. |
Go To TechCrunch Disrupt Europe: London For Free #TCDisrupt | Travis Bernard | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | TechCrunch Disrupt is coming to London this October, and to celebrate we’re giving away a free pair of tickets to the main event. All you have to do is fill out the entry form and come up with the best caption for this photo of Kyle wearing Google Glass. We’ll select the winning entry, and the winner will be notified by email. Good luck! |
Tony Hsieh Steps Down From Vegas Downtown Project | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | , the CEO and founder of Zappos has stepped down from his leadership role at the Las Vegas Downtown Project, . Hsieh created the massive $350 million project to revitalize several city acres east of Las Vegas Boulevard and convert the area into a tech hub. Hsieh’s announcement comes right on the heels of a massive 30 person layoff at the project. Hsieh had called a surprise all-hands meeting at the Inspire Theater to announce the layoffs, witnesses to the meeting first told . Several different sources have said the layoffs mainly affected non-revenue generating entities including the Learning Village, tours and music programs. A source close to the project reportedly said the layoffs were the result of the project “bleeding money.” The project had invested in real estate, a private school, restaurants, an ambitious transportation project and the purchase of what some may think of as frivolous and expensive items such as several Burning Man sculptures intended to decorate the area. Most telling of the troubles to come may have been the closing of Factorli, a $10 million manufacturing plant that opened just this year. “Tony is not always altogether the most wise judge of character.” a source told Re/code. “There’s a lot of family. There’s a lot of drinking buddies. And some poor choices were made.” University of Iowa professor David Gould wrote an about his disillusionment with the man he once heroicized after the announcement was made. Business is business” will be the defense from those you have charged with delivering the sad news. But we have not experienced a string of tough breaks or bad luck. Rather, this is a collage of decadence, greed, and missing leadership. While some squandered the opportunity to “dent the universe,”others never cared about doing so in the first place. There were heroes among us, however, and it is for them that my soul weeps. Downtown Project spokesperson Kim Schaefer said her team *was working on addressing what they see as inaccuracies in the press. This is the official statement she was able to share about Hsieh’s move to step down for now: Since January 2012, Downtown Project has been working to help revitalize downtown Las Vegas through several hundred investments and initiatives. At this time, we are focused on streamlining our operations as we continue to execute on our plans. Doing so requires that we restructure our operations and focus on follow-on investments. We continue to evaluate all of our initiatives in terms of those that achieve the right balance of both ROI (return on investment) and ROC (return on collisions). The Downtown Project on their site a list of what they say are inaccuracies circling around in the news at the moment about Hsieh stepping down. The post addresses misleading headlines, goes deeper into an explanation of what the project is and gives a breakdown of the timeline of events for the project by year. |
TC Cribs: Ticketfly, Where Meetings Morph Into Impromptu Jam Sessions | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | In this episode of Cribs, we headed over to , the startup that runs a ticketing platform for all kinds of live events. As you can see in the video embedded above, going to visit Ticketfly HQ is kind of an event in itself. The place is decorated with nods to all sorts of famous venues, from the Louvre to the erstwhile NYC club CBGB, and musical instruments are never more than an arm’s reach away. [gallery link="file" ids="1064252,1064251,1064255,1064257,1064303,1064261,1064284,1064286"] And since a good percentage of Ticketfly’s staffers are musicians, those instruments aren’t just sitting there collecting dust. It’s not unusual for a meeting with Ticketfly CEO Andrew Dreskin to turn into a full-fledged jam session — as we found at the end of our tour. Any meeting that ends with playing the tambourine is a good meeting indeed. |
Make Bold Statements With Biz Stone’s Goofy New App “Super” | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | After trying to with his Q&A app , Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is back with a more light-hearted product called . I just stumbled into the unannounced beta of Super, which lets you share statements starting with “The Best”, “The Worst”, “I Wish”, “Check Out”, “Don’t Ever”, or a few other prompts. You can sign your name or not, and people will see your declaration in “Friends”, “Everyone”, and “Nearby” feeds. But what’s special about Super is that it scans what you wrote, and then automatically adds a background image and offers a few alternates based on your keywords. At first glance, Super might seem like an anonymity-optional clone of Secret, but the prompts could squeeze serious opinions out of us while the image generator keeps them interesting to read. In that sense, maybe Super has the same goal as Jelly. Just instead of getting us to help each other answer questions, Super could show us who feels the same way. The world’s less lonely when someone shares your opinion. Super is currently in beta and I was able to via mobile, but there’s no telling how long the beta will be open now that the word is out. [ : Super has cut off this download link to limit sign-ups while it’s still in beta testing. It now leads to a .] While Jelly earlier this year, its Q&A app doesn’t seem to have found much traction. Super signals that Jelly is either pivoting, or morphing into more of an mobile development studio with multiple products, not just its namesake app. We’ve contacted Stone’s Jelly Studios about when to expect an official release. [Update: Jelly tells me “At the core of Jelly Industries’ mission is a desire to help people. We’re learning quite a bit from Jelly. In doing so we’ve been dedicating some resources to new ideas. What you’re seeing with SUPER (that’s short for “superlative”) is a new way for friends, colleagues, and strangers alike to offer up recommendations, opinions, and ideas.To help one another.” So it sounds like Jelly will be developing additional apps while not necessarily pivoting away from the old one.] Update 2: Biz Stone himself has now gotten back to me with his thoughts on Super: “I decided to go back to my roots and build something fun. I’m also working very closely with our two designers to create a visual look and feel in line with my personal taste (my background is design). Super is fun! Setting up Super is…su…it’s quick. Enter your username and real name, confirm your phone number, let it scan your contacts to help you find friends, and shoot a selfie as a profile pic. Super hovered some goofy sunglasses over my camera window so I obliged it by lining them up on my face. The pen icon lets you start a post with one of the 11 proclamations, such as “You Should”, “I Am”, or “The Craziest”. Write your text, and choose how to sign the memo. Then pick from the background suggestions Super provides or use its internal image search engine to find one. Finally, add a link or location, and toggle whether to stay anonymous or let people swipe your Super post to see who wrote it. On the lurker side, you can choose to view posts from Friends, Nearby, or Everything. Naturally, you can Like, but to comment, you reply with a whole new Super post. That puts up a sizable barrier to discussion, unfortunately, but keeps inane comment reels at bay.. The whole app is so colorful and collage-like that its a refreshing change from the drab, monocolor palates of most of today’s red or blue apps. The rainbow vibes can be a bit exhausting, but they certainly keep the app exciting.
If Wikipedia is for facts, and Quora is for answers, Super wants to be the home for opinions. It might not be designed as a database like those two, or many other failed opinion-sharing apps like State, but that’s fine because most people’s opinions probably aren’t important enough to live forever. Instead, Super focuses on making them fun to share and eye-catching for the reader. The prompts give it enough structure that the community has some focus, but with anonymity optional, there’s plenty of room to goof off. So far, the posts on Super range from the same tales of intrigue you’d find on Whisper or Secret, to absurd non-sequiturs you might read late at night on Weird Twitter. Community management will be critical to keep Super from devolving into utter insanity…unless that’s the plan. Super’s potential rests in the ability to coax out our inner most thoughts. Social apps usually leave the text field without restraints other than character count, openly asking “What’s on your mind?” or “What’s happening?” By providing a little spark for the imagination, and some boundaries to play within, Super might make us more creative than a blank canvas could. |
The iPhone 6 Plus Is Great For Gamers | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | While I hate the word “phablet,” there’s no denying that it’s helpful to have a term for what is becoming a unique category, separate from the smartphones and tablets that came before them. Not always the most convenient in one hand on the go and not as suited to content consumption as a tablet when at home, bigger phones have their own niche that appeals to users who demand big screens and longer battery life. With the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple has stepped into the category by scaling the hardware of the 6 up while (in some ways) scaling the software from the iPad down. The result is a device that you can use all day to do some of the quick tasks we always do on our phones while also consuming media as you would on a tablet: traditionally, in landscape, held in two hands or propped up against something. Among the many things we use our phones for nowadays, one activity that fits particularly well with the way you use the iPhone 6 Plus is gaming. When it comes to one-handed use, many games that are played in the portrait orientation either place touch targets near the center of the screen or rely on taps and swipes without regard for where you touch — think swiping around the change “lanes” in an endless runner like Temple Run. While the 6 Plus is often criticized for requiring two hands in order to feel like you’ve got a good grip on the thing, gamers are used to holding something with roughly the same weight and dimensions for hours at a time: console controllers and handheld game systems like the PlayStation Vita. The iPhone 6 Plus next to a Playstation Vita — Kyle Russell 🚀 (@kylebrussell) The iPhone 6 Plus is far more comfortable to hold for hours at a time than either the Sony’s Vita or the Nintendo 3DS — it’s lighter, made out of nicer materials, and its curved edges feel better in the crooks of your hand. Its size also plays up the strengths of non-casual games designed for touch gameplay on an iPhone or iPad, like Giant Spacekat’s , which uses frequent Mass Effect-style prompts that affect the outcome of story sequences and quick-time events to keep you involved during cutscenes. On the smaller iPhones, I felt a little cramped under the pressure of having to swipe a specific pattern in a blink, while on the iPad I’m generally not a fan of playing with the tablet in my lap while I play with my index finger. On the iPhone 6 Plus, I felt like could comfortably get to everything with my thumbs with the same reaction time as if I were playing something on a controller. Giant Spacekat’s Revolution 60 is a story-focused sci-fi thriller that’s powered by the Unreal Engine. That’s not always the case, though. At home, I could play Revolution 60 and hear the story through the speakers without bothering anyone. But on the go, I need to wear headphones if I’m going to hear the game’s voice acting. Let me tell you: there’s a reason the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS have their headphone ports on the bottom of the device. It’s really annoying to have your headphone cord get in the way of your grip on the iPhone. This was true with older models, but considering I’ve found myself playing games more often since getting the 6 Plus, it’s more noticeable than ever. Still, not all games require you to play while holding the phone in your hands. If you get ahold of an MFi (made for iPhone) controller, there are quite a few titles that let you play using a more traditional setup with actual analog sticks, face buttons, and triggers. In a game like , which has twitchy action and awesome narration, it’s difficult to get across just how much better the experience is when playing with headphones an external controller. That, and packing a cheap controller into your bag that takes up less space than a dedicated handheld console is way more convenient when traveling. Beyond the ergonomic advantages that come with the 6 Plus’s size when gaming, screen quality and battery life do a lot to make gaming on the device feel like less of a compromise compared to a dedicated handheld console. Simply put, its 1080p “Retina HD” screen is a step above what you find on the Vita and leagues ahead of what you find on the 3DS. As game developers figure out how to take advantage of , games on the iPhone 6 Plus and its plus-sized successors will likely surprise casual gamers with their flashy shading and particle effects. While the 6 Plus’s battery life has gotten a lot of acclaim when compared to previous models of the iPhone, it’s even more impressive when compared to its handheld gaming rivals despite the fact that they have more room to squeeze in big batteries and don’t sport cellular connectivity. While a Vita or 3DS might last 5 hours on a charge when playing games that tax their hardware, the 6 Plus is an absolute beast, handling multiple hours-long sessions playing a variety of graphically-intense games. It’s nice to know that you can get to an airport in the late morning, play games all day as you fly across the country, and still have enough juice to get you through the evening, all on one device. Unless you simply must have access to Sony and Nintendo’s exclusive games, it’s not hard to imagine shifting all of your “hardcore” handheld gaming over to the 6 Plus. As time goes by, those in the Applesphere will discover the advantages of bigger phones and game developers will take advantage of the fact that the ; it will be interesting to see whether gamers will be willing to pay premium prices for gaming experiences that mirror what they’d get on dedicated consoles. That doesn’t seem to be the case on Android phablets, where users tend to be less willing to pay for things in general. On the 6 Plus, which users are already paying a pretty hefty premium to get, it seems plausible that high-end smartphone gaming could finally get some real attention from consumers. |
Arduino Is Building A Sub-$1000 3D Printer | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | There is a shortage of teams working on low-cost 3D printers. Kickstarter is absolutely overflowing with them. But, as many of those teams quickly realize, shipping hardware is . A challenger approaches! Arduino, the company best known for building and shipping the absurd number of microcontrollers that power a DIY electronics project, is about to enter the 3D printing market. Arduino made the news official today, announcing a partnership with Italy’s up-and-coming printer manufacturer, Sharebot. Their first printer will be called the Materia 101, and is built to print in PLA. While they’re holding off on announcing the exact price for now, they’ve ballparked two different models: a pre-built package that will sell for “less than 1000 USD”, and a DIY kit that will go for “less than 800 USD”. Is it the prettiest printer in all the lands? Nah — it looks a bit like the super early MakerBot Cupcake machines, albeit white. Does it have the biggest print bed? Nah — see below for the specs there. But it’s exciting to see a company like Arduino, with its damned impressive ability to scale and its tendency to opensource everything it does, get into the space.
Printing technology: Fused Filament Fabrication
Printing area: 140 x 100 x 100 mm (5.5 x 3.93 x 3.93 inches)
X and Y theorical resolution position: 0.06 mm (60 microns)
Z resolution: 0.0025 mm
Extrusion diameter: 0.35 mm
Filament diameter: 1.75 mm
Optimal temperatures with PLA: 200-230°
Tested and supported filaments: PLA
Unsupported but tested filaments: Cristal Flex, PLA Thermosense, Thermoplastic Polyuretane
(TPU), PET, PLA Sand, PLA Flex
External dimensions: 310 x 330 x 350 mm
Weight: 10 kg
Usage: 65 watt
Electronical board: Official Arduino Mega 2560 with Open Source Marlin Firmware
LCD display 20 x 4 with encoder menu
Preloaded with PLA printing presets
Extruder block with filament pressure regulation |
Reddit CEO Yishan Wong On Giving Stock To Users: “We Have A Crazy Plan.” | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | One of the defining ironies of the social networking IPOs over the last decade is that the financial returns have been concentrated among so few when the value has been created by so many. But current Reddit CEO Yishan Wong wants to change that. When Wong served as an early director at Facebook for five years, crypto-currencies were around, but they weren’t as widely accepted or understood as they are today. He and Y Combinator head Sam Altman, who a in the company announced today, want to use them as a tool to distribute shares in the company back to the millions of Reddit users, or Redditors, that log in every day. They’ve set aside 10 percent of the round announced today for that purpose. “Everybody who has ever run the company has always wanted to give some ownership back to the community somehow,” Wong said. He went on, “We have a crazy plan and what we’re going to do is create a crypto-currency that is backed by those shares. Then we’re going to distribute the currency to the community through some reasonably fair way that reflects the contributions of community. That is one of the more complex subproblems we have to figure out.” Distributing crypto-currency backed shares will not be solely tied to Reddit karma, or the reputation scoring system that measures how Redditors contribute back to the community. “You can game ‘karma’ and we don’t actually want to create an incentive for that,” he said. “That’s why there’s no financial aspect tied to karma and that’s why it’s a crypto-currency kind of thing.” He also added that Dogecoin was not specifically an inspiration. The Shiba Inu-inspired crypto-currency was originally popularized on and has been used to tip contributors. “The fact is that there are a lot of crypto-currencies. They’re viable as a thing as we have a technology to create a crypto-currency that is exchangeable for shares of Reddit,” he said. Wong couldn’t share too many details about how the process will work out because they haven’t defined every aspect about it. The company’s new $50 million Series B round explicitly asks that 10 percent of the shares go back to the community. Altman is investing in the company through his fund . Other participants include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, , Ron Conway, , , , , , , or Snoop Lion. “I’m prepared for the inevitable complexities,” he said. “We’ll try and do this in the best way that we can, but I’m familiar with the fact that people will say it’s unfair and there will be lots of acrimony.” He said he and Altman talked through the plan, and could not find anything illegal about it. “It’s very complex and no one has ever done this before, but we believe it aligns with a lot of the things that Reddit stands for,” Wong said. |
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Suffering From #GapGate | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | Another day, another -Gate. This time the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, the latest phablet to enamor the Android crowd, has been reported shipping with a thin gap between the screen and the walls of the case. The issue, reported on in South Korea, seems to affect a small number of devices. According to the piece, two pieces of paper or a business card can fit snugly into the gap. This could introduce dust and liquid into the devices. The company just released the Galaxy Note 4 in South Korea and sold out of its entire 30,000 unit initial run. It appears that Samsung Korea is aware of this issue will ignore the problem, at least according to : |
Noice Lets You Send Emoji With Sounds To Friends’ Phones | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | Yes, my friends, there is an app more annoying than . If having your phone randomly shout “Yo!” at you (or “ !,” if you preferred the spin-offs) drove you batty, wait until you get ahold of this: , an app that lets you communicate using only emoji and sounds. Really! OK, OK, I kid. Noice is actually kind of fun, in a very juvenile, very silly way. In fact, there’s a distinct probability that kids will like this thing, which was product-tested with tweens and teens. After all, , its now-reclusive creator Dong Nguyen once told us – he saw his app was being passed around mostly school kids, he said. While you may remember jelly bracelets or pogs among the viral toy trends of your own childhood, kids these days collect goofy apps. Noice fits the bill. , I tell you. The app is pretty basic to use. Sign up with a username. Add friends by username. Send them emoji. Send them of emoji, until they’re forced to put their phone on silent mode or just delete the app to escape your sound barrage. Senders hear the emoji they’re choosing to share after selecting it, and then recipients get a push notification on their phone with the emoji you shared and the accompanying sound. And, oh, the sounds. I mean, how did you really survive this long without being able to send fart noises to your friends’ phones? I have no idea. And how genius is it to have a business model where that’s the sound you actually have to pay to acquire? “It will change communication as we know it. It transcends language. Culture. Other stuff,” says Noice co-creator Brad Mahler, who is clearly in on the joke. Mahler, a co-founder at Studio Tentpole, built Noice as a side project with co-founder Mark Tholking. The two create apps as their day job, having previously published a product scanner for adding thing to Pinterest , an iPad text editor called , and a location-tracking utility (On my way), which is the studio’s core product. Noice was just meant to be fun, says Mahler, but he also sees it as a way to experiment with apps you can use without taking the phone out of your pocket – that is, apps that are mainly about sharing sounds. Noice ships with 150 emoji-sound combinations, which include the sounds associated with every version of the smiley/frowny face emoji, and most of the other regularly used emoji like the hearts, the hands clapping, people dancing, all the animals, a lightning bolt, rocket ships and more. The team has also roped in Emmy winner (credits: ) to provide a bunch of exclusive sounds for the app. (And no, you can’t make your own sounds, if you’re wondering. <Frowny face goes here>.) Mahler heard Schrab doing sound effects on the and blindly reached out, he says. ( , Community co-creator, and Schrab have worked together, and won an Emmy for their efforts with the 61st Primetime Emmy Awards.) “We can’t pay, but would you be interested?,” Noice’s founders had asked Schrab. “And he said yes,” Mahler explains. They only requested a few sound effects, but Schrab sent back a 26-minute long tape that the founders then turned into 70 different sounds – some of which they couldn’t, , use. Asked what motivated him to get involved, “I want to use [the app] to piss off Dan Harmon,” Schrab told them. Noice is iOS-only for now, and [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMrcHLZy4MA] |
Doublie Spices Up Your Selfies With Homemade Stickers And Celebrities | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | Your photos are boring. can fix that. The app lets you add any of 10,000 stickers and celebrity cut-outs to your pics so you can fake a selfie with Beyoncé, get a kiss from Obama, or have Miley twerking in the background. You can even make your own stickers of your face or anything else, paste them to a photo, and share them to SMS, Facebook, or anywhere. Doublie isn’t trying to reinvent Instagram. It doesn’t have its own feed. Instead it wants to make our pics sillier and more unique, no matter where we post them. That might seem frivolous, but were rapidly reaching photo sharing fatigue because everything looks the same. The first phase of mobile self-expression was snapping pictures indiscriminately. Then came filters, selfies, and videos. Doublie is betting the next phase is augmenting our photos with LOL-worthy fantasy and special effects. Bono loves me, even though I think his new album is garbage That’s actually what Doublie’s first App Store screenshot says. If it wasn’t obvious, this isn’t your dad’s photo app. The whole thing is filled with ridiculous little flourishes, starting with the tour of the app being led by Kanye West wearing a horse head. Basically, you open the take or upload a photo, then tap the flyout wheel in the bottom right to choose from a wide array of categories full of themed stickers to slap atop your pic. There are celebrities ranging from Michael Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio to Justin Bieber and…Steve Jobs. Some are cut outs of them kissing the air, so if you want to look like you’re getting a smooch from Ryan Gosling or Angelina Jolie, Doublie can make your fantasy come true. There’s also categories of accessories like sunglasses and Batman masks, superpowers like laser eye blasts and Wolverine claws, and Mike Tyson’s face tattoos that you can use to jazz up your mug. Or if you hate your face, you can cover it with a lion head, or distract people with Grumpy Cat or Boo. There’s even a whole “Tech Bro” section so you can add Google Glass, a drone, don a hoodie, or outfit yourself like a venture capitalist, which apparently means a fleece vest and khakis. There’s a ton of options, but an upcoming search feature will make it easier to find the perfect image without endlessly spinning through the wheel. If none of the pre-made stickers suit you, you can also cut out your own, similar to the Imoji app. Trim off the background and color in what you want to keep with Doublie’s relatively easy tool. Once you pick or make a sticker, you can resize it, move it around, and paste it into your photo. Then you can share it with SMS, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat. Did y’all know I invented Microsoft? Photo and messaging companion apps are blowing up right now, so Doublie will have to fend of , , , , and more apps for making stickers. Founder Shane Walker hazes himself thanks to the magic of Doublie Doublie was dreamed up by Shane Walker [Disclosure: Shane is a friend from college], who previously . Taking a scientist’s approach this time around, Walker worked through a bunch of ideas and prototypes until he found something overflowing with virality. Walker and his team went down to the train station and showed teenagers mockups of news readers and geolocation apps, but it was Doublie that kids called “dope as hell.” After a few months, the 5-person, mostly Stanford-bred team had turned Doublie into a real app and secured incubation from Founders Den plus funding from Great Oaks, Tandem, Chasm, Tenoneten, Leviathan, and a few more angels. With a stint at and solid organic growth, it’s raising some more money now. Following in the footsteps of Line and KakaoTalk, Doublie plans to earn revenue with a premium sticker store. Walker calls Doublie “A real-time meme generator for your phone” that breaks the 1% rule of the Internet, which dictates that just 1% of users create the content consumed by everyone else. While Instagram did that by creating a camera phone social network, Doublie knows you don’t need another place to share, you need more captivating to share, so it focused on remixing. Walker likens it to the , saying “We’re making it easy to be funny.” In a world drowning in narcissistic selfies, smug food porn, and cliché sunsets, lets us take ourselves a little less seriously. Getting fierce with Queen Bey |
Tune In To TechCrunch Radio On Sirius XM 102 Indie Tonight | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | It’s Tuesday again, which means that TechCrunch is jumping off of the internet (kind of) and into your ears tonight at 6pm ET/3pm PT. on Sirius XM 102 Indie is this whole new thing we’re doing, and today’s show is set to be our best yet. We’ll be joined by musician, film maker and entrepreneur , and then we’ll head into our rapid-fire pitch-off. Five companies will have approximately one minute to pitch their wares to guest judge , John Biggs, myself, and our fine Sirius XM listeners. We always have a good time, and if you’re going to be on the road during rush hour, we’d love to have you join us. Especially since Sirius offers a free one-month trial to listen online , so you don’t have to worry if you’re not a subscriber. Entrepreneurs interested in participating in the pitch-off for next week’s episode should keep reading.
1. You must have a product that is available to general users. No sign-up pages or pre-orders with a TBD ship date. There must be a link we can give to listeners/readers where they can access your product, service, what have you.
2. You must be an early stage company. If you have raised a Series A or later, you are disqualified. Bootstrapped or seed stage startups are welcome.
3. You must be able to pitch your product with your words only.
4. You must be able to operate a telephone.
It’s going to be a hoot! |
Lots Of Pictures Of Windows 10 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | I suck at taking photos, but, here we are. Here’s a bunch more pictures of Windows 10 in action at the Microsoft event that took place earlier in San Francisco today. Also: Featuring me making accidental duck face, and of Ars Technica singing the song of his people. [gallery ids="1064220,1064221,1064222,1064223,1064224,1064225,1064226,1064227,1064228,1064229,1064230,1064231,1064232,1064233,1064234,1064235,1064236,1064237"] |
Watch Jeff Goldblum’s GE Link Spot, The Smartest Smart Home Ad Ever | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egIY7ushchU] Hey, who here gets excited about smart lightbulbs? Probably four of you raised your hands, and two of them were me. GE has taken a different approach to selling its new Link connected bulbs, eschewing sales pitches of convenience and connectivity in favor of trotting out a shirtless (and well-preserved) Jeff Goldblum. The celebrated chaos theoretician is doing what’s known as “acting” in this spot, playing an equally celebrated famous individual whose demanding life is made better thanks to GE’s bulbs, which connect to the new Wink smart home hub developed by . If the ad feels somewhat comfortable and familiar in addition to odd, it might be because you’re a fan of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the comedy duo also known as Tim & Eric who created Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Tom Goes to the Mayor and the inimitable Dr. Steve Brule character portrayed by John C. Reilly. They’re the team behind this spot, which shows off their peculiarly angled brand of humor. Smart home shoppers have been mostly early adopters so far, but this ad now expands the circle of those aware such options exist from just tech enthusiasts, to tech enthusiasts and fans of edgy, off-kilter humor with specific, limited appeal. We’re getting there. |
Apple’s OS X Yosemite Reaches GM Status, Nears Consumer Launch | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | Apple’s OS X Yosemite operating system is arriving soon, and the fact that the developer preview just reached Golden Master status, alongside a , means we probably don’t have long to wait. Last year, Apple released its Mavericks GM build about three weeks before it released the update to the Mac App Store for everyone to download, so Yosemite is on track for the mid-to-late October launch window many are predicting. Apple is expected to launch Yosemite at a special event, at which it will also reveal new iPads, according to multiple rumors. The event will probably take place either in the first two weeks of October, or during the last week of the month, following a report from the always-accurate Jim Dalrymple that it won’t happen on October 21 as originally reported by at least one source. Given the timing of this GM release, either an October 14 or an October 28 date make the most sense. The GM build is generally the same (or very close) to the final release that Apple makes available to consumers. Last year, a revised version of the GM was introduced just two days prior to the final launch of Mavericks, which took place on October 22, at a special event during which Apple introduced the iPad Air, as well as the iPad mini with Retina Display. Sequels to those two devices are likely on the agenda for any October product refresh Apple has planned this year. New Macs are also likely in store, though exactly what will be revealed remains up in the air. Some reports suggest that there will be a Retina iMac line for the first time since the debut of Apple’s Retina display technology for Mac hardware with 2012’s MacBook Pro. There has also been a lot of buzz around a 12-inch Retina MacBook Air, though reports are mixed on whether this would arrive this year or next. Another question mark is a 12.9-inch iPad that Apple is said to be developing, according to Bloomberg, with a reported launch date early next year. Given that Apple also plans to launch the Apple Watch in “early 2015,” it’s possible we’ll see a separate follow-up event that includes some of the products mentioned above alongside its official availability announcement. Either way, this Yosemite preview software launch is likely the last before full consumer availability, so get your computers, hearts and minds ready. |
CloudAlloy Makes Docs In The Cloud More Secure By Breaking Them Into Pieces | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | One of the key issues facing companies when they put their content in the cloud is security, but what if you could send your documents to the cloud without security concerns? , a company displaying at the this week, breaks your documents into pieces, spreading them across the cloud services and putting them back together whenever you call the document. Vinay Purohit, founder at CloudAlloy says it’s a simple concept. You just split the document into pieces, encrypt those pieces and then pull the document back together on your device. Purohit says by breaking these documents into pieces, it makes it very difficult for hackers to put them back together, but he says, “the encryption makes it bullet proof.” For now, the service works with Amazon S3, Google, Microsoft and HP. Purohit says you could also combine local storage in a data center and the public cloud services in a hybrid model. However you do it, it normally requires at least 2 services (although he says you could potentially do it with one service with an eye toward layering on more services later on), and the more services you layer on, the more secure it is likely to be by spreading the pieces of the document over multiple services. Once you call the document, the pieces are pulled together and Purohit insists there is no latency in this process. In fact, he suggested it would be faster than simply calling the entire document in a more traditional document retrieval scenario, and as long as the services are up and running, he said there should be zero errors when putting the document back together. If you’re wondering what happens if one of the services goes down, he said, they store a bit of extra information with each piece they distribute to a cloud service, so they can still put it back together even when a cloud services stops working. If two services were to go down, CloudAlloy would offer a plan to let you get it back, but it would require additional fees to have this level of service. And although the service works just across the four cloud storage vendors for now, Purohit said if a large enterprise customer truly wanted to add a particular service, they would be willing to work with them to add it to the mix if they were large enough. The company has been around for two years and is completely bootstrapped by Purohit. They have two large reference customers, whom he would not name, who are working on a trial basis, but if they pass their trial Purohit said the customer plans to distribute CloudAlloy on every desktop and mobile device. CloudAlloy offers a simple way to secure the cloud, one that doesn’t require user input or heavy involvement of IT. You simply sign up for the service and as you move documents into the service, it breaks them into pieces for you automatically giving companies a simple, but effective way to ensure document security in the cloud. |
Teleport’s Experiment In Nomadic Work Starts With $2.5M And A Tool For The SF Bay Area | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Teleport, the startup that’s building infrastructure to help nomadic workers seamlessly move from place to place, from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Seedcamp, and angel investors including Scott and Cyan Banister and Fortumo founder Rain Rannu. They’ve called themselves the “search engine for digital nomads,” and they ultimately want to build software that will help workers figure out where to live, how to pay taxes and how to get visas. Part of the vision is a world where workers can easily move from place to place in ways that maximize their quality of life and take-home pay. Much of the team was early at Skype, which was a distributed team that built tools that arguably transformed cross-border communication. “With remote work on the rise, you have these people who are perpetual travelers, who might move several times a year,” said CEO . “They have a lot more flexibility around how they live.” As a first step, they’ve launched a tool for Bay Area workers to figure out the best places to live. It asks where you currently work, and where you currently live and makes suggestions about neighborhoods that could be cheaper without severely diminishing quality of life. You can add in extra parameters like whether there is access to the outdoors, nearby train stations or gyms and yoga studios. “Isn’t this like a gentrification optimizer?” I asked. “We’ve had very deep discussions around this internally, about the morality and ethics of helping people to make these decisions,” Tamkivi said. He pointed out that the product excludes demographic data, like racial make-up. “We philosophically want to see more diverse communities.” But I pointed that that might be part of the problem, because certain parts of the Bay Area are cheaper than others because of legacy effects from old policies from the 20th century. New residents aren’t really aware of these legacy effects and part of the Bay Area’s current class and racial tensions stems from obliviousness on part of the newcomers. It was a problem he said he’d have to think through more for a solution. The desire is to build a company with a more global outlook, that helps people find the places that make the best use of their talent will giving them the best quality of life. As it should be obvious, not every tech worker needs to be in Silicon Valley. In the that Tamkivi wrote announcing the company, he said. “Jobs do not equal places any more. Millions of more people every year can live anywhere and work remotely. This started first in tech-heavy professional circles but the wave continues: already one fifth of all working people around the world telecommute.” Teleport itself is a distributed company with two people in Palo Alto, three in Estonia and one in Germany. |
Valor Water Analytics Helps Water Utilities Stay Afloat As Customers Conserve | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | As more Americans become aware of the need to conserve water for environmental reasons, or due to drought-related water use restrictions, the water utilities have found themselves struggling to stay financially sound as they begin to sell less water to their customers. is a company moving into this largely ignored sector in order to provide utilities with software that can help them better understand how customers’ changing water usage patterns will affect their bottom lines, and what they can do about it beyond just rushing to raise rates. The company was founded by Christine Boyle, who holds a doctorate in water resource planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The idea for the software program actually came out of a grad school project, she says, where she had developed a set of analytical tools to help utilities who were struggling financially as customers conserved during a drought. Though she first began working on the tools back in 2007, it took some time for her to license the technology from her university. But now Valor has a worldwide, exclusive, transferable license for the technology, and the software is currently being used by four utilities in N.C., including those in Cary, Fayetteville, Greensboro, and Chapel Hill area. These utility customers are pilot testing the program, but they’re not the first to have done so. Valor is working with the Urban Water Consortium, explains Boyle, which directs which utilities will trial the program at what time. Over the years, Valor has worked with 15 utilities in total, she notes. Officially incorporated as of last November, Boyle is now preparing to take Valor Water Analytics from being more of a research effort into a software-as-a-service business. Using an online portal now being re-coded with more modern programming languages, utilities can log in and view how water use changes impact revenue. A variety of product lines help them address concerns around conservation and drought, allowing the businesses to increase charges more appropriately. For example, it may target rate hikes at those who are water, rather than an across-the-board rate hike which effectively punishes those who are conserving water appropriately. Utilities can also structure pricing with things like “water budgets” which are like guidelines for customers’ water usage. If you exceed your water budget, you might pay more, for instance. Boyle says that the software isn’t just about putting this business intelligence data into an online dashboard, but also guiding the utilities to make better financial decisions. “We run the analytics but we also deliver advising and insight…we layer it with suggestions,” she explains. “Utilities were so hungry for this information.” Prior to her company’s software, most utilities didn’t have programs that could do this sort of number-crunching, says Boyle. Instead, they’d sometimes have data analysts creating fancy Excel spreadsheets, or would bring in outside consultants every few years. “It sounds weird that they haven’t been looking at this stuff…but they’re really not. That’s why this is exciting for us,” she says. Valor Water Analytics, now based in the Bay Area, has just landed its first California utility customer, and is working to sell to others across the state and the U.S. The company generates revenue at a rate of about 38 cents per customer during year one (which tends to involve the integration work with backend systems), and then at 18 cents per customer afterwards. At Disrupt, Valor launched its “Drought Conversation Toolkit” for utilities, which is a product that’s specifically designed to help a utility manager measure the revenue impacts of drought-related conservation. Also at Disrupt, Valor announced a partnership with ESRI and a deal with Sonoma County’s (CA) water utility. The startup, which has a small amount of angel funding, is looking to raise an additional round of $500,000 in order to get to scale faster. [gallery ids="1053556,1053557,1053558,1053559,1053560,1053561"]
CB: How long is the sales cycle?
A: We went to market in June, and the first sale quick. We have 10-15 in the pipeline, we don’t know how long it will take close them. I know it’s government, so it could be slow. I’m going to say 6 months as a guesstimate. CE: Market size? How many utilities and what kind you charge them?
Is it a problem getting all their data into your software? A: U.S. has over 50K water utilities. But we’re going after middle and large sized utilities.
Extracting data – we work closely with the utilities I.T. dept, and extract data from billing system. So far, it has worked. To scale, we have some other choices to make, in terms of working with third parties. CE: Is there a reason for a utility to not work with you?
A: [Some] don’t know why they need to change from the way they’ve done things for year. We need to push them to adopt new solutions because yesterday’s solutions aren’t working today. We’re working with a ‘coalition of the willing’ first, then will fight the harder battles after we have a reputation established. DT: What benefit have utilities extracted?
A: We help find hidden revenue. We are able to locate cost and efficiencies. Utilities are concerned with affordability and community issues, and we help with that, too. |
Donde Aims To Make Online Product Search Far Less Frustrating | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Today’s audience choice for TC’s Startup Battlefield — plucked from the packed exhibition floor of Silicon Alley to pitch on the Disrupt SF 2014 main stage — is , a Silicon Valley and Israel based ecommerce startup that wants to make it easier for shoppers to search for items based on how they look. Co-founder Liat Zakay said the idea was sparked by the frustration of searching online for very specific items. “This experience is very, very difficult and frustrating, [I was] spending a lot of time,” she told TechCrunch. “It was clear to me that everything is going online it’s only a matter of time that a very quick and easy solution will be there. This is why I started working on Donde.” “This technology… creates a very unique way to fetch a specific item — we created an engine that analyses items and finds the right questions to ask the user for her to create a seamless and delightful experience when she has an intent to buy,” she added. The initial focus for Donde’s visual search app is clothes — and even more specifically dresses — but Zakay says its technology can be applied to any type of item that can be visually distinguished. So the plan is to expand the business to other product categories in time, once the UX has been fine tuned. Donde is currently launched in private beta as an iOS app — which went live about two months ago — with hundreds of thousands of dresses in its inventory and an initial group of user testers at the University of Southern California. The app works by letting users select what color of dress they’re looking then stepping them through a series of questions about other aspects of the dress — such as what its sleeves look like, or the shape of the hemline. These choices are displayed visually, with graphics that display silhouettes of the shapes/styles to choose from. As the shopper selects each style point the search narrows and the app continues to refine the actual items it displays below these icons — which are being pulled in from clothes’ retailers’ websites. Users can then click on an item and hit a ‘buy’ button to purchase a dress they like the look of. [gallery ids="1055046,1055045,1055044,1055043,1055042,1055067"] “Our technology is crawling the websites of brands and retailers and we extract the unique features of the items — either from the image or the description. We create a unique tool that does it. And then we create an ontology, a common language of all the brands, because a certain feature [in the products of one brand] is not the same as another — [for example] the red of H&M is not the same as Zara,” said Zakay. Visual search makes plenty of sense if you’re looking for an item of clothing of a specific shape or style — say a dark green backless dress with an asymmetrical hem, three-quarter length sleeves and a peplum. Searching for such an item by chaining words together is a pretty clumsy option, and can also require specialist vocabulary to describe exactly what you mean. So it’s a hit and miss process, and often a time-sink. Donde aims to fix that. We have had a visual retail search startup ( ) in TC battlefield before, back in October last year at Disrupt Europe. But Asap54’s focus was on taking photos and building a tech that could locate similar items. Donde’s interface does not require the user to have a photo to begin their search. Its system is better described as a quasi-‘build your own dress’ interface — matching whatever the user constructs with real-world items they can actually buy. The tech underpinning Donde also factors in contextual information such as the user’s age and location as it makes decisions about the type of dresses to present to them as potential purchases. So, in other words, a teenager in Alabama is not going to be shown the same dresses as a 40-something woman in New York. It’s tailored product search that aims to be a whole lot smarter. Inspiration for the questions based interface came from the ‘twenty questions’ game whereby players try to guess the identity of a famous person based on asking about specific attributes, according to Zakay. “We thought of why not taking that to the product world, where I need to find a product and I know what I’m looking for,” she said. “I would need just a computer that would ask me the right questions and would lead me in seconds to finding it, using artificial intelligence of the contextual information — who you are, what’s your location, what’s your environment.” [gallery ids="1055143,1055142,1055141,1055140,1055139,1055138,1055137,1055136"] Donde’s current business model is based on taking a commission on any affiliate sales generated by the app — it’s not processing payments itself but rather using retailer APIs — but Zakay sees potential to build a data driven business in addition to a commissions revenue stream, based on the real-time trends data the app could generate. “We’re already are building and developing the tools for you to see in a certain spot what people are searching for, which kind of products they are interested in, and analyzing it based on the characteristics of your products that would be very beneficial for the companies to get real-time information about what your customers want,” she added. “Also in predicting the designs and real-time inventory, what is more popular.” Donde was founded more than a year ago and has brought in a small round of angel funding thus far. The startup also spent four months in UpWest Labs, an accelerator for Israeli startups. It’s now looking to raise a seed round. The three co-founders have a background working in Israeli military intelligence, including Zakay who spent four years in an elite tech unit in the Israeli military. “We’ve developed a lot of computer, cyber-security projects and after I graduated in computer science and economics and started working on the earlier version of Donde,” she says. “I didn’t want to be boring like all of my unit and go into cyber security because this is too regular.” The team’s time in the Israeli army brought it into proximity with various data analysis tools — and that laid the groundwork for the technical foundation of Donde, adds Zakay. Donde’s dev team remains in Israel but the startup is incorporated in the U.S. and has established an office in Silicon Valley — with its focus being fully on the U.S. as its initial target market. You guys built scrapers… how do you make sure that your product universe is relevant?
Our tech tools are scraping the data a few times per day, making sure the info is updated. It’s really important for the shopping experience Could you license the tech to existing platforms?
Yes it’s definitely an option. We’re currently focusing on optimizing virality and user engagement but we’ll definitely build partnerships What’s your business model?
On every purchase we get a commission Why is this viral or social?
First of all this is intuitive mobile search for every visual product that has characteristics and sold online. We chose to start with fashion vertical because you can choose to share it with friends when you need advice; this is exactly what we’re doing right now So far you have dresses?
Right now it’s dresses but the tech is generic for every visual product and we’re working right now on expanding it to all the categories, brands There’s some pretty good and big search companies out there, what’s the hardest thing you’re doing here?
First we’re focusing on the mobile experience, second we’ve built a tech that creates a very intuitive way for people to search visual products. There are a lot of products trying to do image recognition by taking a product – we have a wider proposition. It doesn’t have to be in front of you to do it. We are very focused on our tech and the way we build it. It’s unique. Proprietary algorithm. The idea of the questions You’re building taxonomies to understand different clothing types?
We have hundreds of features we can ask about a product. It’s all the intuitive ways that people use to describe something. We use everything we can from the website and item description… and then we use our algorithm that analyses the user to decide the questions How do you acquire users?
We’ve successfully proved we’re viral within sororities. We’re still working on optimizing this. At a later stage we’ll focus on user acquisition What’s the incentive not to serve the most expensive dress to the user?
The most important thing here is to be an objective search engine, not biased on price or partnerships with different retailers. We can monetize in a lot of different ways |
IsItYou Promises To Make Face Authentication Actually Work | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Facial recognition as a form of authentication, like many of the technologies that have bubbled into reality in the past few years, is something that Sci-Fi has been promising for decades. Alas, it’s… not always very good. Android’s face-based unlock mode, for example, tends to be fun for a few minutes before it just gets frustrating. IsItYou, a company debuting at Disrupt SF 2014 today, claims to do it much, much better. Presenting on stage today, company co-founder Benjamin Levy claimed that their algorithms have at least two advantages over Google and the rest: it works in extreme lighting conditions (like a dark room, where the only light is from your screen), and its anti-spoofing tools make tricking the algorithm tough. I spoke to Levy, who explained why better facial recognition is so crucial. “On most of the phones out there today, the facial recognition fails 2 or 3 times out of ten. With our solution, the false-negative rate is closer to 2 or 3 out of 10,000” False negatives are one thing — but what about false ? Android’s facial recognition got some bad marks early on when someone managed to trick it Google later fixed this by requiring the user to blink on command — but that solution feels like training the user, rather than training the phone. IsItYou analyzes not just your face, but how it expects the lighting on your face to behave in different situations. Light bouncing off of a flat surface (like a printed photo, or a tablet screen) behaves much differently than light bouncing off your face. They demonstrated their algorithm rejecting a printed photo of Levy’s face — then, taking it one step further, had someone don a 3d printed mask of Levy’s face. It, too, was rejected. [gallery ids="1053655,1053643,1053644"] As for the business model: IsItYou intends to be a solution for others to plugin to their apps, whether it’s your bank or your favorite social network. They’d charge per authentication. The company plans to launch into private beta in Q4. You can They’ll be able to get in. Even in this massive market, we think that situation is quite rare. Your face is already in the public arena. Do you want your fingerprint in the cloud somewhere? We’re launching next quarter [so it’s too early for that.] Technology only gets you so far. We need to get this in as many applications as we can. We haven’t done that yet, but with the way we built this technology, yes. |
Rallyteam Helps Companies Foster And Retain Talent | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Many businesses these days struggle to retain their employees — and especially the millennials who are now entering the workforce. Instead of just a stable paycheck, many now look for a bit more in their jobs, and the companies that can offer that are the ones that will keep their best employees for longer. , which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 today, sees itself as an “employee empowerment platform.” The service helps employees find interesting internal opportunities on which to spend a few hours a week that will help them broaden their skill set and expand their horizon inside the company. Rallyteam’s Canadian co-founders and came up with the idea for the service after working in large corporations for a long time. On the one had, these large corporations often offered few opportunities for growth and that the professional development opportunities they offered were mostly boring. But at the same time, they also noticed that many departments often resorted to outsourcing projects even though there were probably people in the organization that could have (and likely would have) been happy to spend some time learning about the problem and fixing it. [gallery ids="1053579,1053580,1053581,1053582,1053583,1053584,1053585,1053586,1053587"] “To take that next step, you need real-world experience and connections, but unfortunately, many organizations don’t provide any platform for this,” Ho told me. “I knew there were opportunities that existed because as a manager, I was constantly outsourcing projects even though I knew there had to be people in the company that could solve this problem.” Rallyteam tries to solve both of these problems by capturing the projects inside a company that have either been on the back burner for a while or that are about to be outsourced. The software then tries to match these projects with employees who have the right skill for them. Ideally, that gets the problem solved without having to spend money on outsourcing and gives employees an opportunity to work on something new for a few hours a week. When the system finds a match for a new project, it automatically notifies all of the employees who look like a possible match. Ho likened the service’s matching algorithm to eHarmony. Rallyteam looks at the project’s description and tries to figure out what kind of core skills it would take to complete it. Ho argues that many businesses already encourage their employees to spend a few hours a week on learning, but instead of just listening to an online lecture or clicking through an online course, Rallyteam will offer them experiential learning. Currently, there are a number of companies that are already running pilots with a number of large companies, including Orange, the University of San Francisco and Finland’s entrepreneurship hub. Rallyteam is also working with to see how nonprofits (which it won’t charge for its service) can use its platform. [gallery ids="1055106,1055108,1055105,1055104,1055103,1055101,1055100,1055102,1055097"] Rallyteam will use a standard SaaS business model with a pricing scheme. While the company wasn’t quite ready to disclose the actual price yet, Ho tells me that Rallyteam will charge companies a monthly subscription for every employee that’s part of the program. The co-founders started working on the service when they were still employed full-time in the energy industry in Houston. Later, they got accepted into Orange’s accelerator and moved to San Francisco. As Ho noted, “the startup scene in Houston is pretty dry, so we decided to go to California.” Starting today, the service is opening up , so if you want to give it a try in your organization just head over here [link coming] to sign up. : What are your margins?
: We will charge $1 to $5 per user. : Can you say something about your current users?
: We have a pilot program with Orange Telecom, a non-profit and we are working with a university. : How do you measure ROI?
: The ROI is set by the person who closes out the opportunity. : Why did you build for the web instead of mobile?
: It’s just two of us right now and we are not mobile developers. We also think that starting with the desktop in the enterprise makes sense. : The employee who is advertising that he or she has free hours could run into problems. What if you don’t want to advertise you have free time on the job?
: This is not free time. It’s professional development time. |
CoinSafe May Have Solved The Bitcoin Transaction Speed Problem | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Bitcoin transactions aren’t actually instant. Because each transfer requires a number of confirmations via the mining process, some moves can take minutes or even half an hour. , however, may have created a solution that can process BTC transactions in seconds. CoinSafe, a company founded by Michael Flaxman and Tom Chokel, is a “free Bitcoin ATM service.” It allows almost anyone with smartphone to become an BTM (you become the cash dispenser, in this case). There are about 300 stores signed up now and you can go in and buy and sell bitcoin via an app. You can go to CoinSafe.com and have a free BTM up and running in minutes,” said Flaxman. “Your employees don’t have to understand bitcoin in order to buy or sell it.” However, even with their BTM, bitcoin transactions took half and hour. To prevent this, they began using : “When a transaction is broadcast, we detect that right away,” said Flaxman. “Then we start looking for our transaction in the memory pools of these nodes. If the transaction propagates across the network and no competing (double-spend) transactions are found on any nodes, then we can predict the odds it will eventually make it into a block. In about 10 seconds we’re able to make this prediction, and then the app tells the store to release the cash to the customer. We’re now financially guaranteeing that the transaction will confirm as expected, so both parties don’t have to worry about it anymore.” Flaxen explained that most transactions are somewhere in between being confirmed. “By design it takes an average of 10 minutes for each block to be mined, and each of these blocks adds more certainty that the transaction will eventually be confirmed. The statistical odds of a transaction being double-spent after receiving 6 confirmations on the bitcoin blockchain are astronomically low,” he said. In short, the technology reduces the speed of transactions from 10 minutes to about 10 seconds. It’s very specific to CoinSafe’s system and doesn’t apply to many other bitcoin systems. However, it does make CoinSafe a little more interesting as an ATM provider. |
Property Partner Secures Seed Cash For Its Real Estate Crowdfunding Platform | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | A new startup that lets users invest as £50 in the booming buy-to-let housing market in the UK has launched with £1.25m seed funding led by Octopus Investments. The investment round in also includes participation from a number of high profile European funds and investors. These include venture accelerator Seedcamp; Betfair co-founder and Funding Circle Board member Ed Wray; Better Capital founder and venture capitalist, Jon Moulton; Daniel Quai, Crescendo Real Estate co-founder; and BSkyB CFO and Just Eat Board member Andrew Griffith. The financing follows a previously unannounced £0.15m raise in February 2014, in which Wray, Quai and Griffith also took part, taking total funds raised to £1.40m. Founded by BSkyB’s former head of commercial development Daniel Gandesha, the startup lets investors take a share in buy-to-let properties and receive an income from rent. The idea is that Property Partner “crowd funds” investments in buy-to-let properties. The platform has a secondary exchange which allows users to sell their investments via the platform whenever they want. The proposition to investors is that they will get a better return investing in the property market in this manner, instead of putting their cash into bank accounts which attract only low savings rates. Octopus Investments was one of the earliest backers of Zoopla, which recently successfully IPO’d. Wray is on the board of Funding Circle, the crowd funding website for business loans. Now, this is a big market. Residential property is the UK’s largest asset class – worth in excess of £5 trillion – with Buy-to-let transactions exceeding £20bn each year. Crowdfunding for real estate has attracted major players in the USA, such as Prodigy Networks, Fundrise, and Realty Mogul although mainly with a focus on commercial property and not with a platform that allows investors to subsequently trade their interests. Prodigy Networks crowd funded a $172 million skyscraper in Colombia from 3,100 investors. Realty Mogul did the same with a US shopping centre in less than 6 hours. And Fundrise recently announced a Series A fundraising at a $100m valuation. As you can see this is an ongoing trend and we can expect to see more than one player appear in this space. |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 9 | null |
SOP Notify Launches A Waze For Power In Emerging Markets | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Before they selected their first office in Abuja, Nigeria, the team behind power monitoring and outage alert provider thought they’d done thorough due diligence. They’d been to the space three times and were assured that they’d have a consistent source of power to do their work. As soon as they signed the lease and moved in, the power went out for days. And so, a company was born. They’re not alone. Even in the U.S. power outages cost the economy some $80 billion. In emerging markets where the problem is endemic, that number could be in the hundreds of billions, because the unreliability of the grid is systemic. “75 million Nigerians experience blackouts every day. Not just the poor, not just the middle class, but the rich as well,” says Toks Ogun. “Even with privatization the issues continue.Services that were supposed to supply 50 homes are now supplying over 500.” In this environment, Toks Ogun, the company’s founder has come up with a sensor network that lets utilities track power outages and communicate information and billing to their customers via sms, mobile applications, email, and social media. The company makes money by charging power companies and regulators a fixed monthly price based on the number of locations they want to monitor. The company’s in two cities in Nigeria now, but expanding to six more by the end of the month. The technology works by taking low cost android phones and turning them into sensors to determine whether there is power in the field at a specific location. The company has a proprietary case that allows them to slot into the network. Users can follow their location and their friends’ locations to determine whether there’s power at a user’s home or at a home in their network. If there’s a power outage, a user can look through their network to see if there’s a friend in the network that has power. If users don’t have access to a smartphone, there’s also an option to use the service on SMS. The company is also looking beyond power, and basic notifications and into mobile payments for power services. It’s a huge market. Nations in Africa spend $27 billion on power and only serve 50% of the population. Right now, power companies can’t build plants fast enough to meet the demand that exists already, according to Ogun. “We believe that SOP notify will become the number one power notification company in Africa,” Ogun says. [gallery ids="1055028,1055027,1055026,1055025,1055024,1055023,1055022,1055021,1055020,1055019"] |
StudyRoom Lets College Students Join Online Study Groups, Book Tutors | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Launching publicly on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage this afternoon is a company called , which aims to take student study groups and tutoring online, and make them more social. The company has already been running trials of its program in six universities, starting this spring, and now claims to reach 40,000 students across the U.S. who use it as a platform for social, peer-to-peer learning. Explains co-founder and CEO Emerson Malca, the idea for an online student-led studying platform is something he was inspired to build, having been a tutor himself. He said the experience helped him to understand that sometimes the best way to learn things is to teach others.
One incident really got Malca thinking about how prevalent the problem still was today, was when a friend came to him for help with her physics homework. He asked her why she didn’t just ask someone from her class, and she said she only had two phone numbers for fellow students. One didn’t reply, she told him, and the other didn’t know how to do the problem. “We realized nothing had changed at all since we were in college,” says Malca, describing he and his co-founder Pindi Albert’s reaction to hearing this news. “For us it was shocking to see that the most social, most connected generation ever couldn’t get in touch with the people they see everyday in class,” he says. [gallery ids="1053479,1053480,1053481,1053482,1053483,1053484"] With , that changes. The online portal lets students sign up and locate their class’ page at their supported school. Here, students are sharing their lecture notes, asking questions about homework, sharing resources, collaboratively building study guides, forming study groups, and asking each other for help. Meanwhile, the school page, which is something like a Facebook news feed of all the activity at that particular college or university, includes a broader array of content, including posts about events, social activities, students asking about various professors, and more. What makes StudyRoom different from other e-learning platforms designed for the classroom is that it’s 100% student-led. “We don’t want to become another lame BlackBoard that sells to universities,” says Malca. “One of our biggest differentiators is that we’re building a product that students really like.” He says that some teachers have joined as well – they are allowed – but it tends to be the “cool” professors. As you may expect, not all professors are thrilled about StudyRoom, which also allows students to access the resources students from previous semesters have shared on the platform. One could argue that there’s a fine line between getting help and actively cheating, which StudyRoom could face. “Back when we were building the app, [some professors] wanted to turn off some features, to have more control and to moderate the students. They wanted all these options – to have attendance, all this stuff – they wanted to make a product for them,” says Malca. “But we really wanted to build one that was for the students.” He says a flagging feature allows students to report others who misbehave, including if they began to share answers in a way that would be deemed cheating. However, StudyRoom offers no “moderator” roles, and is fully dependent on this self-policing. Still, Malca says that if something gets flagged and the company finds it to be a case of a student “seriously cheating,” they’ll remove the post. But Malca doesn’t get hung up on the idea that the potential for cheating in StudyRoom should be a big concern. “Homework is just way for students to practice,” he says, arguing that professors shouldn’t put a big emphasis on homework as a way to assess a student’s grasp of a subject anyway. And the real goal for the service is to allow students to learn from each other. It even has an anonymous feature that lets students ask questions they would be too embarrassed to admit to not understanding, or too shy to ask during class. And it lets students learn by having them help these students better understand the material – not all that differently from how an “offline” study group would work. Today, the company is launching its service beyond the initial six universities, and is making itself available at 100 schools across the U.S. just in time for fall semester. It will also soon be switching on a new feature, which also happens to be its business model: online tutoring. For students who need personalized help, StudyRoom will offer “peer mentors” who will be paid a flat rate ($24/hour) to tutor other students. (StudyRoom will take a small cut of those transactions.) These mentors can be any other student on the platform, but will be able to build up their reputation by posting resources and earning “reputation points” through their work. Only those with a certain number of points will qualify to be a peer mentor, which works as something of a vetting mechanism. This system will be ready by mid-terms, says Malca. Menlo Park-based StudyRoom is team of five, and is backed by $375,000 in angel funding. [gallery ids="1054993,1055008,1055004,1055001,1054998,1054997,1054996,1054995,1054994"] Leary: Don’t you need to partner with universities for this to work?
A: Absolutely not, we’re doing a student led/peer-to-peer model.
Leary: How do you verify the students are in the classes?
A: We ask the students for their .edu email, so we can verify they attend the school. Conrad: But don’t you ultimately want to work with universities?
A: We’ve talked to a lot of universities. Getting them to adopt a platform like this is hard. Our approach is to take over the entire school first then go back to university, and show them all the things we’re doing. Plans to share data with them around social learning. Lyne: During the beta, you had 40K students…any feedback from them about whether they did better than peers?
A: We talked to hundreds of them, and we still found some people needed extra help. That’s why we’re doing the peer mentor model. Conrad: How did you get 40K students signed up?
A: Did a big marketing push on social media. We started talking to students on Facebook and Twitter; Students think it’s awesome and want to help; We’re also doing on-the-ground thing, and we’re working with fraternities/sororities Prager: It’s absolutely brilliant…would have signed up if it was avail when I was in school. Haven’t seen something like this. My only question…is the only revenue right now the student mentor model?
A: Yes, that will be the main core of our business. Lyne: If you do succeed, at certain point students graduate – do you think about what you can do with that population going forward?
A: For people who graduate, if they’re having trouble getting a job, they could still go in and be peer mentors to others. |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 30 | null |
QuickFire TV Helps Broadcasters Get The News Out Faster | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | QuickFire’s speed is the result of the startup building a complete stack for its service, including custom hardware and software designed specifically to reduce transcoding times. Each rack in the servers that make up its hardware platform (which the company calls T-Video) contains a custom motherboard built to accommodate 11 quad-core Intel Core i7 processors. Each of those processors work in unison, with work distributed by a software layer QuickFire calls V-Fabric. Furthermore, each rack in the server is tied together with another layer known as Q-Data. Lee demonstrated the platform on-stage by transcoding which he called “The Kardashians of video editing — it’s everywhere.” In seconds, he encoded 50 minutes of video for 20 different platforms. Considering the versatility of graphics chips from the likes of Nvidia in tasks that can be processed across many cores, I expected QuickFire’s servers to heavily rely on large clusters of them. But before today’s presentation, QuickFire TV CEO Craig Lee told me that the company’s servers don’t use any graphics processors except those built into Intel’s high-end CPUs. That’s not the case in applications I’m familiar with (video games and video editing), but Lee was adamant: “Intel is a force to be reckoned with in the GPU space.” [gallery ids="1054944,1054956,1054953,1054952,1054951,1054950,1054949,1054948,1054946,1054945"] In addition to providing a complete stack on its end, QuickFire offers with documentation and sample code so video production teams can put together their own workflows and custom tools for uploading videos and checking transcoding progress. While telling QuickFire which profiles (frame rate, resolution, color and audio settings for different platforms) to generate still has to be done with a quick call or email chat, it only has to be done once. After a free evaluation period, QuickFire charges its customers a base fee per minute of output: $0.10 per minute for standard-def video (for streaming to viewers with low bandwidth or on mobile) and $0.20 per minute for HD. Lee tells me production teams that regularly transcode large video segments can also negotiate discounts. [gallery ids="1053445,1053446,1053447,1053448,1053449"] After their presentation, the Battlefield judges asked Lee a few questions covering things he didn’t directly touch on. Here’s the gist of what they asked about and Lee’s responses (they do these things rapid-fire): No, not in production. The key is to find the customers willing to pay a premium for speed — we can build up on any cloud. We think that the current upload times are too long for younger users — they simply don’t want to wait a few hours or overnight to see their videos on YouTube. We’re part of the regular video workflow — just tell us where it needs to go and we’ll transcode it. We don’t have a content management system, we only get your videos ready for wherever they need to be. |
Allre Lets You Buy And Sell Your House Online Without A Real Estate Agent | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | The Internet has disintermediated almost every business that used to rely on brokers — except for the real estate industry. There, we still pay huge fees to agents who often do very little for their money and aren’t necessarily on our side. , which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 today, wants to bring the real estate business into the 21st century by giving buyers and sellers a single platform for buying and selling their homes. We already buy everything else online, after all, so why not a house? Allre was founded by Kathy Dryden, who used to be a real estate agent, and Dave Mercer in 2012. In her work as an agent, Dryden realized that many clients — but especially millennials — considered it a hassle to work with an agent, especially now that they can get their information from a multitude of different services like Zillow, Trulia, Redfin or Estately. In the end, they barely need an agent, but to close the deal, the seller still had to pay the full fee (and given that most sellers will figure that into their price, the buyers indirectly pay, too). [gallery ids="1053489,1053490,1053491,1053492,1053493,1053494,1053495,1053496,1053497"] At first glance, Allre looks to be a new play on , but it’s quite a lot more than that. While it does offer sellers the ability to list their homes, the real power of the platform is in the fact that it lets you handle the transaction completely online. You start with your basic listing, then you add some images and/or videos, set the standard terms for the transaction (title, escrow, etc.) and your listing is online. As Dryden noted, one thing that’s often a roadblock for sellers who want to go direct is that they don’t know how to price their homes. For them, Allre offers a pricing tool that takes the data from the previous year’s worth of sales in a neighborhood and creates a list of comparables. Sellers are always in full control of the price they set, but buyers get access to the same data, too. Buyers — who are all verified and have to show a pre-approval letter from their banks — can then find listings on the site and set up a time for a showing (or attend an open house, which can also be scheduled on Allre). Once they are ready to buy, they get three options: Instabuy; a traditional offer; or a real-time online negotiation. With Instabuy, buyers simply accept the sellers’ terms and that part of the deal is done. Allre founder Dryden likened it to the “By Now” options on eBay — just for a somewhat larger transaction than your usual Hummel figurine splurge. Users who opt for the traditional offer process can either submit their offers (which can always be lower or higher than the asking price) and go through the negotiation process that way, or opt for a guided real-time negotiation that happens completely online. Once the deal is done, Allre will help walk all parties through the rest of the process to get to the closing date as smoothly as possible. Of course, there are still parts of the process that involve other parties, and some things — like home inspections — can obviously not be handled online. To get Allre where it is today, Dryden had to negotiate with a large number of major players in the real-estate ecosystem. The company has a deal with one of the largest closing services in the world, for example (though it can’t disclose that company’s name yet). It also has a partnership with in place to help buyers with their financing. Getting all of that in place is one of the main reasons it took Allre so long to launch. To make any marketplace work, there have to be enough buyers and sellers on the platform. That may be a challenge for the company, as it needs to get its name out to enough homeowners and it has to overcome the inertia that still pulls buyers and sellers into the traditional real estate ecosystem. Dryden, however, believes that the MLSes are losing traction. Plenty of real estate transactions already happen outside of the regular channels, and many houses are sold today without ever being listed on an MLS (and Allre doesn’t get involved with MLSes at all, either). The company expects to make additional revenue from referral services for things like mortgages and home warranties and inspections. Allre will also feature ads on its site. Dryden, who is quite outspoken about the state of the real estate industry, argues that buyers and sellers are now at a point where many will feel comfortable handling such a huge transaction online. Starting today, the company is open for its public beta. [gallery ids="1054959,1054978,1054976,1054970,1054969,1054968,1054967,1054966,1054965,1054962,1054960"] : What is your business model?
: We don’t charge our users anything to avoid issues with real estate regulations, but we will partner with companies that offer home insurances etc to collect affiliate fees. : How do you go to market? How do you get enough buyers and sellers?
: san Diego is our home market, that’s where the majority of our contacts are. We have investors who will give us exclusive inventory. We’ve also been building an interest list for quite a long time. : You mentioned some regulations that would be in the way. If you charged any fee, would you have to deal with a lot more hurdles?
: If we charged a fee, we could be considered a broker and then real estate regulations apply to us. : Could a buyer and seller still use an agent and use your platform?
: Yes – we encourage our users to do what makes them feel comfortable. We hope that our platform will allow them to pay lower fees. : This is complex stuff and looking at your site, there’s a lot going on. How can you make this even simpler?
: It’s really difficult to show everything we do in six minutes. There are about 15 moving pieces at any time. We have a dashboard that helps you managed your real estate life on Allre. Our goal is that once users get familiar with the technology and they can see how everything works, they get more comfortable. : Obviously, this is right for disruption. Key here is to get buyers interested.
: We did a study. There are a few ways people find houses: Google searches, friends and family, neighborhood knowledge and the MLSes. But owners can also use sites like Zillow to market their homes and that will bring traffic to Allre. |
Mark Cuban Explains The Four Parts Of An Ideal Investment Pitch | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | “I’m very transparent with my companies,” Mark said. “You should know the companies I’ve invested in, why I invested in those companies and how your company is going to be great.” He noted that in Silicon Valley, young companies often view getting fundings as the “end-all, be-all.” Mark explains that he is more interested not in how the company will exit but rather how the company will be a success without an exit. He is looking for the company’s plan to become, as he says, insanely cash-flow positive, which makes it easy for him, as the investor, to keep on funding it. But don’t pitch Mark by starting out by implying your company will be a success if they just capture a tiny portion of a billion dollar market. That, he says, is something that makes his eyes glaze over. Instead, Mark is looking for four things: The company’s core competency, why you’re great, how the idea is protectable and how it can scale. It’s that easy. [gallery ids="1054478,1054475,1054474,1054473,1054472,1054462,1054461,1054460,1054459,1054458,1054457,1054452,1054451,1054450,1054449,1054448,1054447,1054446"] |
Peter Thiel Tweets | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Peter Thiel could have tweeted about his early investment in Facebook, his loathe for Uber or the future of anti-aging. Instead, the Libertarian billionaire carefully chose the stage at Disrupt SF to send out his first ever tweet about his new book, “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.” Thiel’s venture, Founders Fund, famously displays the tagline, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” But according to the co-founder of PayPal, that wasn’t meant as a personal dig on Twitter’s business. “We never said Twitter isn’t innovative,” said Thiel. He then sent out his first tweet on stage this afternoon just to show he meant that. from zero to one — Peter Thiel (@peterthiel) “Twitter is a fantastic communications tool but it’s not enough to take our world to the next level,” added Thiel. Tsotsis then shot Thiel a quizzical look. “You still think it’s not relevant with Ferguson and Arab Spring?,” she asked. “Well it’s not built on bits and atoms,” explained Thiel. You may have to read the book to get what he means there. It may seem kinda late to join in the twittersphere, but Thiel is an unconventional guy. He’s invested in some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley in the past decade from Facebook to Stripe and says Silicon Valley will be the center of the U.S. economy for the next decade or two to come. The key to the companies that will make it, according to Thiel, is about timing. The early 2000’s were a good time to start companies in Silicon Valley. The timing was right in 1999-2000 to make it all happen. [PayPal] would not have been possible in 2005. It probably would not be possible in 2014,” said Thiel. Tsotsis drew quite a bit of laughter from the crowd when she asked Thiel if he recognized the similarities between himself and the Peter Gregory character on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Thiel was a bit bashful and said he was not equipped to answer that but that he was flattered. “Silicon Valley is the place where people are going to think of tech culture,” said Thiel, referring to the show similarities. “In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, Silicon Valley became the place to go. I don’t want to hype it up too much but it’s the place to come in the next 10-20 years,” said Thiel. However, this Silicon Valley dynamo was almost never on the radar. Thiel revealed onstage that he had a set track from the 8th grade to become a Supreme Court judge one day. He planned to go to Stanford, then law school and then the Supreme Court. However, Thiel ended up not getting the clerkship he wanted and thus not fulfilling his super-tracked plans. “We often look back and wonder whether those really are the most terrible things,” said Thiel. |
Beartooth Keeps You Connected With Your Friends When The Cell Network Can’t | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | I can’t imagine that there’s anyone reading who hasn’t been in this situation: you’re at a conference, or a concert, or some other big event where you’re surrounded by way, too many people. Your cell phone’s signal meter that everything is okay… and yet, nothing actually works. The Beartooth smartphone case, launched at Disrupt SF 2014 this morning, keeps you connected to your friends even when the network tanks. So how does it do it? A smartphone case can’t pull signal out of nothing, after all. Instead, the Beartooth a network — a peer-to-peer network made up of you and other nearby Beartooth users. [gallery columns="4" ids="1054796,1053517,1054222,1053521"] The Beartooth case is actually two handy tools in one — it’s one part 2,000mAh backup battery and one part VHF/UHF radio. Wrap the Beartooth around your handset, launch one of their apps, and you’re now connected by voice and text to anyone else with a Beartooth case within a few miles (like a walkie talkie, range will vary a bit depending on geography). In time, Beartooth intends to open up their development platform to expand its functionality As it’s a wraparound case, it’s not available for all phones right off the bat. Instead, Beartooth is starting with the handsets with the largest potential userbase — for now, that means the iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, Galaxy S4, and Galaxy S5. Beyond just keeping concert-goers connected, Beartooth hopes to find fans amongst rock climbers, hikers, and others who find themselves off the grid and far out of cell network range on the regular. Oh, and a little added bonus for those folks: the Beartooth adds backwards compatibility for legacy walkie-talkie frequencies to your phone, allowing you to use your smartphone as a walkie-talkie in a pinch. Beartooth doesn’t expect to start taking orders for a few weeks, though they put a small batch of units just for Disrupt. The final price is as of yet undetermined, but this first batch will cost $250 per case. : We have the pre-existing radio market, the battery market. Currently, we don’t think we have any direct competitors, but it’d be foolish to think others won’t respond We’re already talking to both Tier 1 and Tier 2 manufacturers Absolutely — our lawyers will thank you for asking that. We can’t ship these until we get approval, though we’re currently going through that process. |
Athla’s Velocity Mimics $1,200 Radar Equipment For The Price Of A Fancy Coffee | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | We’ve all seen the speed of a pitch in baseball recorded, either in person or on TV, and most have probably seen the radar gun used to clock the ball’s velocity. That tech is expensive, however, with systems ranging to around $1,200 to measure the speed of smashes, hits and kicks in sports ranging from baseball, to tennis to soccer. Athla, launching today at Disrupt SF, is a startup that uses existing hardware standard on any iPhone to replicate the functions of these expensive radar guns, using only a piece of software called ‘Velocity’, with sport-specific in-app purchases that cost only $6.99 apiece to unlock. The man behind Athla is Michael Gillam, a medical doctor who has worked in tech for much of his career, following his residency in emergency medicine at Northwestern University. Gillam was Director of Research at the National Institute of Medical Informatics, took on graduate studies at Singularity University, the academic institution co-founded by futurist Ray Kurzweil. After that, he spent time as the Director of Healthcare Innovation at Microsoft’s lab designed for that purpose, and he acted as a judge for Nokia’s Xprise challenge in the category of personal health sensing technology. Gillam has spent a lot of time and effort on using tech to improve treatment and curative medicine, but he also became interested in how advances in technology could be applied to sport and performance. [gallery ids="1053451,1053452,1053453,1053454,1053455,1053456,1053457,1053458,1053459,1053460"] “All my work has been in the sort of electronic medical record and illness space,” Gillam explained in an interview. “But there’s about two billion people worldwide who will never see a doctor in the course of their lives, and about a billion of those people already have cell phones, and it’s believed that the next billion will come online in the next three to five years. So I was looking for something to do in the mobile space, I kinda learned mobile programming inside and out, and I was looking for something that was impossible today but that could kind of ride Moore’s law, and that was in the fitness and wellness space.” Velocity is the project Gillam came up with, which took two years of bootstrapped development to get where it is today. During that time, Gillam saw Moore’s Law in action – the original iPhone 4S camera could only read speeds of up to around 50MPH, while the iPhone 5 can manage up to 120MPH. The next iPhone, Gillam predicts, will probably be able to manage nearly twice that. [gallery ids="1054805,1054806,1054807,1054808,1054809,1054810"] Initially, Athla is aiming to sell the app direct to consumers, for sports fans, amateur athletes, freelance instructors and hobbyists to use. After that, there are opportunities to partner both with leagues and sports organizations, and with brands for sponsored experiences. Gillam says brands are looking for ways to connect with fans over a longer period of time, instead of just with fleeting ads, so a branded version of Velocity could make sense especially for those trying to market to a sports audience. There are plenty of other opportunities for the tech down the road, too – other apps are forthcoming, including ones that let you chart the speeds of passing cars or just about anything in motion. Athla is also considering an SDK, to let other app developers leverage its velocity tracking software abilities. [gallery ids="1054923,1054926,1054925,1054924,1054922,1054921,1054920"] The app is out now for iPhone, and other sports are coming soon, in addition to the baseball, tennis, cricket and soccer currently offered. It’s yet another example of apps eating the world, this time with mobile software replacing elaborate, expensive, and complicated hardware without any extra work required on the part of device makers, beyond areas they were already innovating to begin with. Q&A Q: How big is this market, how big can it be? A: It’s an unexplored market, and we haven’t yet put dollars around that, but it’s something we see as commoditizing a huge existing market and capitalizing on the fact that a huge percentage of the world’s population engages in some kind of sport. Q: If I suck, how does it make me better? A: It boils down to the technique. Just adding a snap to my wrist added 4 MPH to my serve speed with tennis. Q: Do you offer those tips? A: We plan on partnering with people who have training and are experts to offer improvement advice that’s safe. Q: Who is the primary market? Parents, coaches, kids? A: Videogamifying of sports is one of our opportunities, and that just pulls kids in. Your score now is actual physical achievement, as opposed to a video score. So at least for now that core market is the kids to give them a sense of self esteem and achievement. |
Partpic Makes It Easier To Find Repair Parts For Your Whozits, Whatsits, And More | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Are your thingamobs broken? Did the knob fall off of your widget? has you covered. The company, which is launching at the TC Startup Battlefield in San Francisco, was created to allow consumers to snap a picture of a replacement part and immediately receive a part number and order page in return. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAELPZZVIrM] “Partpic was born out of necessity. Transitioning from Google to McMaster-Carr, a 100+ year old company that has mastered supply chain, but has evolved slower in adopting new technologies, our co-founder Jewel Burks recognized very clearly there were many problems in the parts distribution process. A huge opportunity to better serve customers existed for suppliers and distributors if they were willing to evolve,” said Jason Crain, COO. The company is built for the enterprise. The goal is to offer easy-to-use image recognition apps for large suppliers and they’re attempting to move warehouse logistics away from the “text/label” style of retrieval into a more interesting visual recognition system. [gallery ids="1054857,1054846,1054855,1054854,1054853,1054852,1054850,1054849,1054848,1054847"] The company was founded in frustration. “Jewel Burks was working in sales management at a large industrial distributor, and became increasingly frustrated with the difficulty associated with searching for parts. She witnessed that both the staff members she supervised and the customers they served met challenges when trying to search for parts without key information such as part number or supplier name,” said Crain. Burks hired two Georgia Tech Ph.D.s, Troy Nunnally and Nashlie Sephus, to help build an image-recognition system that can quickly scan parts bins and make assessments on part number and style based on a simple snapshot. “This is fun. Everybody understands the problem we are solving and are eager to use our technology,” said Burks. [gallery ids="1053503,1053504,1053505,1053506"] |
On The Record With Max Levchin | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Earlier today I sat down with at Disrupt SF 2014 to talk about what he’s building at the moment, and to get his take on the current technology market. Max is best known for his work at PayPal and his second firm, a gaming company called Slide. PayPal sold to eBay, and Google picked up Slide. Now, Max is building , which hopes to change how people borrow money, at least at the start. During our chat, Max said that eBay should spin out PayPal, that PayPal is worth about as much as Twitter — $30 billion — dodged a question about the price he sold PayPal for, and dug into why he thinks that Affirm is a better consumer loan option than credit cards. I had hoped that Max would dish on companies in the market that he thinks are over-valued, but he was a bit more politic than that. What’s fun with Max is that he’s generally regarded as one of the smartest technical people in the Valley, which is the chief reason Affirm has earned the attention that it has. Now it’s up to Max to do it again. Apple, he did confirm, has not tried to buy Affirm. Max drew a line in the sand during our talk: In 12 months, Affirm will have $100 million loaned out to consumers. We’ll hold him to that metric. The video at the top is highlights from our discussion and here is the full interview. |
How Peter Thiel Knows If A Startup Is Crazy Smart, Or Just Crazy | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | Can see the future? You’d be forgiven for thinking so considering he invested early in Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Stripe. His strategy with Founders Fund and Mithril Capital is to fund ideas that sound crazy to most people, but have the potential to radically change the world. Exponential innovation > linear innovation. But how does Thiel tell the crackpot schemes from the brilliant black swans? It boils down to confidence in the team, technology, and business strategy, as he describes in this backstage interview at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Here, Thiel also discusses the philanthropic tendencies of some who’ve made their fortunes on technology. He sees the the trend of founders retaining control of tech companies even after they grow big as fueling a new passion for putting money to use for the betterment of mankind. |
Mashr Resurrects A Tinder Experiment To Make You A Matchmaker | Billy Gallagher | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | In May 2013, Tinder introduced Matchmaker, a way for users of the popular dating app to introduce their Facebook friends to each other. “Right now introductions are a very difficult process,” Tinder Ceo Sean Rad . “They’re slow, they’re socially awkward. This is socially a acceptable environment for you to make introductions in an easy way.” Matchmaker has since been phased out of Tinder, but a new startup, , is resurrecting the feature as its central thesis. Rad’s quote about the friction of introductions still rings true over a year later, and Mashr co-founder argues that Matchmaker did not succeed because it wasn’t a true piece of the core Tinder experience. Mashr is straightforward: a user pairs two of their friends together and offers a quick explanation on why they should meet. If both agree Mashr makes the connection much like Tinder. Nichols is counting on the fact that I might actually go out with Rachel if my friend Lindsey introduces us and explains why we’re compatible, instead of if we just swiped right for each other on Tinder. “I know Tinder is all the rage these days, but does it really make sense to meet up with a complete stranger?,” Nichols argues. “Wouldn’t it make more sense (and be safer) if you were connected by a friend to your future significant other?” Will Mashr really be able to succeed with an experiment that Tinder abandoned? “People are on Tinder for themselves, to play the game of tinder,” Nichols argues, explaining that he is in a relationship but has many friends who are looking for dates who he’d like to easily introduce. Nichols co-founded Mashr with Michael and Will Perl, two brothers who attended Stanford and also co-founded a company called whose apps have accumulated over 35 million downloads. Nichols, who met the Perl brothers through mutual friends, convinced them to step outside of building games to take a shot at creating a new dating app in Mashr. Besides Tinder, Nichols says Mashr primarily competes with Hinge, which connects users because they share a mutual or third degree Facebook friend, and CoffeeMeetsBagel, which restricts users to one match per day in order to make those matches more meaningful. He argues that Mashr’s human matching can do better than other app’s algorithms. Users on Mashr can pair any of their Facebook friends together, even if those friends haven’t downloaded Mashr yet; those friends will then get a Facebook notification about the proposed match, which the team hopes will drive app downloads. In addition to the primary one-to-one matching aspect of the app, Mashr has a few gamification aspects to galvanize users to mash their friends together. MashPlay is a timed game where you try to match as many friends together as quickly as possible. MashFeed shows a list of all the mashes people are making–not just the successful ones. This aspect of the app is intriguing, but could backfire. The team hopes it will cause people to check the feed regularly to see who of their friends might be getting matched, but many people wouldn’t want others to see who they’re being matched with. “We want a really casual, fun and funny experience that also has the opportunity to make meaningful connections between two people,” Nichols says. “We’re trying to strike that balance.” You can download Mashr now for and . |
How To Present A Successful Hackathon Demo | Brandon Kessler | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | It’s sad to stay up for three days building something awesome only to bomb the demo presentation. It’s no surprise it happens: you’re exhausted and racing to finish your project, with little time to plan your words, and only a few minutes to say them. So here’s some advice on how to give a great hackathon presentation. Why did you build this? In a few sentences, explain the problem you’re solving, or the status quo you’re greatly improving. The more the audience grasps the problem, the better. But remember, keep it short and to the point. Some examples: “We all know doing math homework is a total drag, so… I .” Or, “Urban planning is one of the most complex professions in the world. The tools on the market are expensive, outdated, and use two dimensions when the world has moved to 3D. I wanted .” Now that you’ve set the scene, it’s time for the most important part: showing your project in action. Decide what’s important to show within the time you’re allotted. Briefly mention key technologies you used, or impressive technical challenges you overcame. Skip mundane flows such as creating user credentials, and have any needed text copied to your clipboard. Whatever you do, it’s crucial to show resolution to the problem you initially identified so your audience can see a) what your project does, and b) that you’ve completed the key components of it. Now that you’ve shown your project actually helps solve the problem you identified, spend a sentence or two highlighting its potential and any ambitions you have, so your audience understands its long-term impact. Most hackathons require you to submit your projects online first so you get maximum exposure, and because judges use the platform to determine finalists. Start early as it will pay dividends and help you crystallize your thoughts. Like your verbal demo, a great online presentation will describe the problem you’re solving, show what the hack specifically does, and highlight its potential impact. You should mention the technologies you used, anything interesting you learned, and give credit to your teammates. The best presentations we see on our platform include screenshots and a video demo. And remember, just because the hackathon ends, you don’t have to stop hacking. Keep updating your project so your fans stay in the loop. Good luck! |
Chinese Internet Giant Tencent Invests $70 Million In Healthcare Group DXY | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | Chinese Internet giant has invested $70 million in (also known as Ting Ting Group), which claims to be the largest online healthcare service community in China. In return, Tencent will receive a minority equity stake in DXY. As points out, Tencent’s investment in a healthcare company is in-line with its competitive strategy against e-commerce giant . Alibaba has also made several investments in the healthcare sector, including the , a drug data company, in order to that lets users scan barcodes to verify the authenticity of their drugs; and its “Future Hospital” plan, which is to make hospitals more efficient through the use of Alibaba products like online payments service Alipay and cloud computing platform. In a statement from the companies, Tencent will start to offer DXY’s services, which include access to a network of doctors, on several of its platforms, including possible integrations with its popular messaging platform WeChat and microblogging site . In turn, DXY will use the investment to further its strategy of moving from products for doctors and pharmaceutical companies to consumer healthcare, including apps like Family Medicine and DXY Doctor. DXY says it plans to provide medical information to consumers by focusing on three categories: products for WeChat, mobile apps, and Web-based services. “Given the prevalence of fake and inaccurate medical and healthcare information in China, which negatively impacts consumers, DXY is especially focused on ensuring the ‘reliability’ of the information it provides through its platform,” the company said. In addition, DXY will also use part of Tencent’s investment to create a platform for doctors and pharmaceutical companies to communicate and “allow for a more legally compliant and effective way of exchanging ideas and knowledge.” Ting Ting Group said it will also use big data technology to “provide more accurate and higher value human resource solutions to healthcare companies and medical institutions in China.” Martin Lau, president of Tencent, said that company has been closely following China’s healthcare industry. “With a rich pool of over two million professional doctors, we understand that DXY is an industry leader in the healthcare industry. Tencent is capable of connecting DXY’s talented pool of healthcare professionals and their medical knowledge database with tens of millions of users. This improves the ease of which our users can access healthcare information and professional medical help.” |
FreeCharge, Which Gives Users Coupons For Charging Their Mobile Plans, Raises $33M Series B | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | , an India-based online platform that lets user earn coupons when they add money to their prepaid mobile phone plans or pay utility bills online, has raised a $33 million Series B from returning investor Sequoia Capital, as well as Sofina, and RuNet. The money will be used for marketing and to build FreeCharge’s offline-to-online advertising platform, which allows brands to target users by tracking their offline purchasing behavior using FreeCharge’s coupons. The company was founded in 2010. Alok Goel, FreeCharge’s CEO, formerly global product management lead for Google Display Ad Network, says FreeCharge “wants to be an offline-to-online bridge in a unique manner.” To use FreeCharge, consumers either go onto its website or mobile app and top up their mobile phones or pay utility bills. In return, FreeCharge emails them coupons worth the amount of money they spent, that can be redeemed at businesses like McDonalds, Domino’s Pizza, and Amazon, as well as several major coffee shop and movie theater chains. There are currently about 700 million mobile phone users in India and about 95 percent use a prepaid plan, says Goel. The company’s main competitors are offline shops and other vendors where users can top up their phone plans. “In India, there are 40 million transactions that happen every day in the prepaid mobile phone market. Only a fraction of that is online, but the market is growing rapidly,” says Goel. The company currently claims 10 million registered users and that mobile transactions on Freecharge’s app have increased 30 times since the beginning of this year, with 70 percent of transactions now coming from its mobile app. In terms of advertising, FreeCharge’s main competitors are Facebook and Google’s advertising products and network. In order to compete, FreeCharge plans to use its Series B funding to expand into other forms of advertising. “We are working on top of the transaction behavior we see from consumers and that insight is totally different than what Google and Facebook have. Google is working search keywords, Facebook is working on demographics, and we work on products that you consume in the offline world. We can see what movie interests you have. We observe what users are buying, based on transaction data that we see, which allows us to build a very interesting ad ecosystem that Google and Facebook don’t have,” Goel says. “We will use it to expand into a transaction advertising platform. Coupons are one form of transaction advertising, but we have more ideas. We want to create an ad ecosystem around users,” he adds. After focusing on expansion in its domestic market, FreeCharge plans to target other countries where many mobile users use prepaid plans, including markets in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The company recently acquired two companies, and . Wishberg was an acqui-hire, while Preburn is currently developing a product that will provide owners of new smartphones with suggestions for apps they should download. In addition to its Series B, FreeCharge also announced that it has added Gokul Rajaram, Koh Boon Hwee, and Dhiraj Rajaram to its board of advisors. Gokul Rajaram is known as the “Godfather of Adsense” for his role in developing Google’s AdSense network and was also formerly Facebook’s product director of ads. He currently has a . Hwee is the chairman of Credence Capital, a private equity fund. Dhiraj Rajaram is the CEO of , an analytics services provider. In a statement, Shailendra Singh, managing director of Sequoia Capital India Advisors, said “FreeCharge is creating a unique new category, an advertising platform with the ‘consumption graph’ for the most valuable online consumers. We are very impressed with the team’s execution and the rapid growth and engagement of users on the platform.” |
Vinli Promises To Bring Autos Into The Smartphone Age | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | With Vinli, cars are about to get apps. And not just cars made in the future. The system works with nearly any car made after 1996 and is compatible with Android and iOS devices. The company just launched on the Disrupt SF 2014 stage and announced that the Vinli device is available for pre-order. Vinli plugs into a car’s ODB II port — a data interface equipped standard on cars since 1996. From there a smartphone connects to the device through Bluetooth and serves up a multitude of apps, anything from a safe teen driving app to an OnStar-like service to an Automatic clone. The whole platform is open and Vinli hopes developers latch onto the system. Automobiles have been slow to gain true smartphone integration. The auto industry just rolls at a different pace than the consumer electronic world. Several attempts have been made, from the Ford Sync system to more recently Apple and Google’s automobile systems. But these require new vehicles or pricey upgrades. Vinli’s solution starts at just $49.99. [gallery ids="1053522,1053523,1053524,1053525,1053526,1053527,1053528,1053529,1053530,1053531"] The dongle costs $49, but is expandable with little sort of backpacks that click into place. For $149 a buyer could get the complete package, which includes GPS, LTE, WiFi hotspot backpacks. The company is already manufacturing Vinli in small batches and has built an impressive suite of apps that will be available when the product launches. Vinli is not going to launch to an empty marketplace. For instance, the app called Lock & Key locates the connected car and tells you if it’s on the move. eCall is an automated crash detection service much like OnStar and Beagle serves up functions aimed at teen drivers with speed tracking and geofencing. Other apps, like Otto, can diagnose a car for maintenance issues and even have service shops bid on the work. And others still include Drive which logs trips and Race, which logs engine readings, location, and speeds. Then there are apps such as Home that connect to a thermostat and some garage doors. But the best yet is Ride, Vinli’s Google Glass app that allows Glass wearers to have a dashboard of sorts. On their face. The app will send such notifications as school zones, low gas prices and real time information from the car to Google Glass. The company also built a pack of business applications such as Fleet Tracking, which it promises will allow small to medium-size businesses to utilize toolsets generally reserved for larger enterprise companies. The success of Automatic clearly shows that drivers are interested in gaining insight about their cars. However, where Automatic is a single-function device, Vinli’s platform is open and ripe for development. The Vinli device is now available for pre-order and the company is not waiting on pre-order cash to start manufacturing. It is already being made in small batches and the company tells me they are in late-stage negotiations with Chinese manufacturers for mass production. [gallery ids="1054814,1054824,1054823,1054822,1054821,1054820,1054819,1054817,1054816,1054815"] |
LinkedIn Is Quietly Retiring Network Visualization Tool InMaps | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | A little autumn cleaning underway at . The company is quietly retiring InMaps, a tool that let you map out how your LinkedIn network looks. A notice on the notes that today, September 1, is the last day for you to use it, and that it is being discontinued so that LinkedIn “can focus on developing new ways to visualize your professional network.” As of right now, if you want it, you can still download and save your own map for posterity. A slightly longer note in LinkedIn’s help pages explains a bit more: Sometimes we have to retire tools we love so we can focus our attention and resources on creating even better experiences for our members. We’re currently looking at new ways to help you visualize and gain insights from your professional network. That’s why we’re discontinuing InMaps as of September 1, 2014. A little background on InMaps: the service was first launched in as a way for you to look at different clusters in your network, color code them, and see where they may cross over with each other, with separations happening often around current and previous jobs, education, social circles and so on. Through this you could also interact, by clicking on hubs to see different profiles. InMaps was built by Ali Imam, once a transplant from Yahoo Analytics who eventually became a LinkedIn principal data scientist at for a short stint. Three months short, to be exact: by July of this year, Imam . (He’s not the only person on the data science side departing LinkedIn of late — Deep Nishar, SVP of Product, is .) It’s not clear how popular InMaps as a product has been (LinkedIn Labs, , has not). But generally, LinkedIn, now with 313 million users, has been making other moves to rethink how users of its platform interact with the data contained on it. While companies like and have been known for sometimes sweeping spring cleans, LinkedIn’s garden, perhaps less overgrown, has needed a lot less pruning. For LinkedIn, the name of the game right now seems to be more focus on its platform and core experience — or at least trying to steer into what exactly that core experience could or should be. That has included, for better or worse, more restricted access of the company’s API, that violate its ; and to limit the amount of third-party, non-LinkedIn information that can be viewed via the email widget. At the same time, it seems like the kinds of analytics and additional insight that LinkedIn offers to you as a user is coming by way of features more directly integrated into your profile rather than features that take you away from LinkedIn’s main platform and apps. One example: the at the same time that you check in on who has been looking at your profile page. And, now that LinkedIn is also , it wouldn’t be surprising to see new analytics features get released to fill out that business as well. |
When Does Uber Become Cheaper Than Owning A Car? | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | Thanks to the proliferation of local transportation services like Uber, we’re entering a world in which people have less reason to drive everywhere they need to go. But at what point will it become less expensive to rely on someone else to drive you around rather than driving yourself? In a , HomeHero founder does the math to find out, so that you don’t have to. As with any broad economic model, there are a number of external factors that could influence it. The overall cost of owning a vehicle will be determined by its gas mileage, the cost of gas in any given market, the length of one’s commute, and (if applicable) the cost of parking in a major city. As a result, if goes without saying that results may vary significantly. Hill says he did the calculations after selling his own car — in Los Angeles of all places — and switching to mostly commuting by bike. His model is based on the average fare structure of Uber in that city, versus the average cost of owning, maintaining, and regularly filling up the gas tank of a car in the U.S. You should read the post yourself, but the basic gist is that the average cost of owning and driving a mid-sized sedan in the US is $8,876. Economy cars cost less, and SUVs cost more, which is no big surprise. Hill also adds in the estimated cost of annual traffic and parking tickets, the cost of parking, and the so-called “opportunity cost” of driving versus taking a mode of transportation in which you can answer emails or otherwise “get stuff done.” By doing so, he arrives at at annual cost of car ownership at $12,744 per year. Hill then compares that cost with how much Americans would spend on Uber given the average number of trips or amount of time they spend in their cars each year, based on some U.S. Census Bureau estimates. By taking the number of rides and multiplying by the cost of UberX in Los Angeles, he comes up with the total costs of $18,115 per year if a user decided to use Uber exclusively to get around everywhere. Again, caveats: He’s using the base fare and mileage cost for Los Angeles, but fares vary widely by market. Furthermore, there are plenty of places where commuters either don’t have to pay for parking at their home or workplace, and the cost of gas will vary widely based on seasonality and the location of the user. And, perhaps, most importantly — the model doesn’t take into account the effect of surge pricing, which rears its head mostly during peak commuting hours in most markets. Regardless, he tries to figure out what the crossover point is for when Uber becomes cheaper than owning and driving a car. For the average Uber passenger paying L.A. fares, that crossover point would happen at 9,481 miles a year — which, to be honest, isn’t a ridiculously low mileage for someone to amass in that period of time. This isn’t the first time someone has sought to figure out the cost of Ubering versus owning a car. In fact, Uber data scientist Bradley Voytek did just that in more than a year ago. It’s worth pointing out, however, that a lot has changed since then — driven by competition with Lyft and other services, the cost of UberX fares has dropped dramatically since then, making the cost of getting around even more affordable. And the introduction of services like UberPool are set to make getting around that much cheaper. Anyway, while we aren’t quite there yet, we’re certainly much closer to living in a world where it might be the same price or even cheaper to rely on a mobile app to get from place to place than to drive everywhere. And that’s a good thing, right? |
Windows XP’s Market Share Fell By Less Than 1% In August | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | Microsoft concluded support for Windows XP in April. Despite that fact, a large chunk of the global PC market still runs the operating system. And with more than 20 percent share, Windows XP’s piece of the global PC pie isn’t declining very quickly. According to , Windows XP’s global desktop market share fell from 24.82 percent in July, to 23.89 percent in August. That’s just under one percentage point in a full month. At that pace, it will take more than two years for Windows XP’s market share to fully dissipate. Windows 7’s market share has been essentially flat during the summer. The now-dated operating system benefits from corporate customers who want to get off of XP, but are not sold on Windows 8. (Those corporate sales, it’s worth noting, have helped players in the PC market turn in stronger earnings.) But it appears that the larger Windows XP userbase will take an age to unwind. In March, for example, Windows XP had 29.53 percent global PC market share. There are numerous for those who remain on Windows XP. However, less . That fact implies that a large chunk of the remaining Windows XP-running computers in the market are in the hands of consumers. Consumer PC demand has been weak in recent quarters, perhaps causing at least in part the slow deflation of XP. This puts the Windows world into an interesting place: If the can induce consumer excitement of any sort, it could help get regular folks off of Windows XP and onto a far more secure operating system. Add that little tidbit to the cadre of reasons why Windows 9 is a very critical release for the software company. |
Where You Are Is Who You Are Even If It Is China | Paul Rosenzweig | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | Where your cloud data is stored is, increasingly, critical to determining who controls it. Though many around the globe have become concerned about data storage in the United States, there are worse alternatives. Imagine, for example, if your personal data were stored on a cloud server in China, a nation-state actor well known for conducting cyber espionage against U.S. businesses and surveillance of its own population. Soon, you will not have to imagine any longer – that will be reality. For the past year, the world of cloud computing has been in a state of turbulence, mostly caused by the various Edward Snowden revelations about American surveillance activities. One of the recurrent topics is the growing requirement for data localization – that is, the idea that data must be stored in a particular geographic location so that it is subject to the laws and jurisdiction of that country. The localization requirement is thought by some to be a way of resisting external surveillance by other nations. Because of these concerns, there have been proposals in Europe and Brazil to require the domestic storage of data. In a related effort in the United States, Microsoft is to resist American government efforts to access data stored on Microsoft servers overseas. In short, the trend is, haltingly, toward a rule that where your cloud data is physically stored defines who controls it. Thus far that battle has, principally, been a struggle within Western countries and couched as a question of law for the benefit of civil liberties and consumer privacy. But that’s not the only reason data storage requirements are being implemented. More authoritarian countries are using data localization to their own ends – as a means of control over civilian populations; continuing the status quo; and maintenance of a despotic monopoly on power. Though Western companies doing business in authoritarian states instinctively resist these requirements, in the end, data localization in a repressive country is often the cost of doing business. . According to TechCrunch, Apple has agreed to use Chinese-based servers to store iCloud data in China. In public, Apple put a brave face on the move, asserting that Chinese-based data storage is intended to “increase bandwidth” and “improve performance” for its mainland China customers. Perhaps so. But observers are justifiably skeptical. The Chinese government, after all, has voiced national security concerns about Apple’s overseas storage of data, raising the specter of NSA surveillance. While a useful sham, these expressed concerns allow China to advance its own domestic policy agenda. Chinese law already requires the domestic storage of local bank and telecom data for security purposes – and as a means of monitoring the domestic population. Apple’s agreement to domesticate its data in China is part of that larger trend. To be sure, Apple says it encrypts the data that it stores on Chinese telecom servers. But we know that encryption by a cloud service provider is only as effective as its ability to resist government demands for decryption. In Western nations, those demands typically come in the form of legal process where the cloud service provider has an opportunity to protest before a neutral judicial officer. In more despotic systems, like China, the decryption order will often take a more coercive form. Hence the promise of encryption is, at best, a modest road block and, at worst, a chimera. Apple’s decision is, as a business matter, completely understandable. When the largest country in the world demands particular structures as a condition of market access, it is unreasonable to expect any corporate actor to resist. Nevertheless, the consequences of Apple’s move to domestic storage need to be carefully examined. It is already standard policy for most corporate executives traveling to China to leave their personal electronics at home. But until now the concern has been with the surreptitious installation of malicious software and the theft of intellectual property by semi-official government hackers. Now, for Apple users in China, the architecture of the data storage has cut out the middleman. Data uploaded to the iCloud is vulnerable to exploitation without the need for malicious infiltration. Instead, users who bring their own iPhones or iPads may have their data copied directly from Chinese telecom servers at the behest of the Chinese government. The vulnerability is particularly acute for U.S. government officials who bring their own devices to China for personal use. The temptation, as always, is the convenience of a readily accessible device. But for the unsuspecting government official, even the compromise of seemingly insignificant personal data can, in the end, have adverse impacts. Sadly, Apple’s decision means that BYOD in China must end. Whereas China was previously a “wild west” of malicious activity, it is becoming a “closed shop” of digital storage and exploitation. The trend toward data localization increasingly metastasizes into aberrant pathologies that support authoritarian regimes. And, in the end, Internet freedom and privacy suffer. |
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