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Tables, Tablets, Data And Eating | Vladimir Edelman | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | Restaurants as we know them have remained the same for over 200 years, and fables about amazing restaurant tech have inevitably leapt to futuristic ideas: robot waiters, food printers, talking refrigerators. Today’s reality is far more interesting and complex than those sweeping visions. A tsunami of technology, both from established industry providers such as POS and IT companies, as well as nimble startups such as and , are changing the way the hospitality industry functions and what consumers will grow to expect. This new tech creates the “Dorothy Effect”: We are all at once enthralled by the “magic” we now experience on a daily basis, while also being forced to face and fight the lions and tigers and “bugs” that come with it. The role of the restaurateur now involves embracing technology while making sure customers don’t feel like they are overwhelmed or inconvenienced. It’s honestly a very tough job – but here are some insights I have gleaned from my years in the business. Small and medium businesses to better understand their customers. Innovation in data analytics and business intelligence enable businesses to collect more information than ever before about their customers’ preferences and values. But the trick is not in the collecting data – it’s in how you use it. Take Pizza Hut, for example. In 2013, the international franchise thanks to its partnership with customer analytics company . Capillary helped capture, structure and leverage large quantities of customer data, but more importantly, they helped Pizza Hut take its massive customer base and segment it based on expressed characteristics, purchase tendencies and behavioral indicators to better engage each consumer. By implementing data analytics into their everyday marketing endeavors, Pizza Hut has created 6,000+ customer behavioral groups, empowering the brand to predict future purchases and execute campaigns at preferred times via customers’ preferred engagement channels (direct mail, email, text message and more). Investing in such analysis has shown widespread sales growth across its restaurants and delivery business. Pizza Hut has seen a in its customer retention rate. Customers respond well when their favorite eateries take the time to understand their likes and dislikes. And if you’re not in a position to work with an analytics firm or technology provider that includes data analysis as part of their product, there are alternatives. Whether investing in tabletop tablets, ordering kiosks, mobile for food ordering, reservations, or waitlist management, or any of the other myriad solutions – always ask vendors to supply the data generated by customers. There are plenty of online tools you can feed that data into, such or , as these tools provide similar insight into your guests’ dining habits and desires. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, it’s time to start exploring your options and turn thoughts of “big bad data” into “big beautiful data” that can help boost your sales. Americans spend thousands of dollars a year eating out: Restaurants account for one of the largest parts of discretionary spending, with It is a fiercely competitive industry, and yet restaurant owners and managers have been remarkably slow to adopt new forms of technology that could make their business more efficient and attuned to the desires of diners. They spend a lot of time fighting trends instead of exploiting them. Take mobile devices, for example. Every day there is a new story about how people use phones or tablets at restaurants – whether to play games, text with friends or document a meal. Many restaurants bemoan the days of the somber, quiet meal, wringing their hands about how to engage these consumers, or at very least how to get their patrons to put their devices down. These devices aren’t going away – not if Apple or Google have anything to say about it, anyways. Since your customers are already tapping away on their smartphones, tablets and computers, why not make these technologies an integral part of each patron’s dining experience, and learn a thing or two? Major food chains have already recognized this potential, with tablets that allow customers to order food, customize their entertainment, and even pay the bill. By implementing this technology, restaurants can use this established behavior in their interactive environment, complete with brand messaging. For example, Buffalo Wild Wings is bringing Buzztime’s BEOND tablet-based entertainment platform to all of their North America restaurant locations by the end of 2015. The BEOND tablets let Buffalo Wild Wings Guests order food, request songs and television programming, play games (both multi-player and arcade-style), and, pay the bill. Initial research has shown customers arestaying 75 minutes, compared to the industry average of 50 minutes, and they’re returning at least twice a month compared to other restaurants where guests may visit once a month or less. Other national chains that have embraced tabletop tech have seen similar success. In the past year, installed 7-inch Android tablets at all of their locations; the devices,allow patrons to interactively peruse menu items, order beverages and desserts, play games together, share real-time feedback with the brand, and pay the check at the table. In a six-month trial period, Chili’s saw an increase in per-person spend per check, translating to higher income for both the restaurant and wait staff. Servers also reported seeing more tips, as the system increases the spending on their shift. These results show that tabletop technology can be beneficial to servers, not a replacement for them. Additionally, these types of tablets can make it very easy for people to join loyalty clubs: “We saw improvements in guest satisfaction and engagement from many different touch points within the restaurant, including Chili’s guest feedback surveys and Email Club,” said Wyman Roberts, CEO and president of Brinker International and president of Chili’s Grill & Bar. has also rolled out 100,000+ Presto tablets in its U.S. restaurants, with emphasis on ease of payments. Customers can use the tablets to view menu items, browse and add items to a cart, (a la online shopping), play some games, and pay the bill. Applebee’s has seen similar positive results, as in 2013: “(In) a two-year pilot program where Applebee’s tested the tablets across 30 restaurants around the U.S. During these trials, the company found that having tablets available tableside allowed them to reduce the overall table turn time and transaction time for their guests, and guests who were surveyed about the tablets reported a better overall experience.” While tabletop tablets are the latest innovation, the customer’s own phone remains an incredibly powerful tool. Countless companies can help restaurants harness social activity, monitor online reviews, create lightweight loyalty programs, help customers check out, and even create in-store games (through augmented reality) to make sure that the restaurant becomes part of their mobile experience – and not just a place to fire up a phone and read some blogs. Restaurants have been reluctant to jump on the tech-driven dining experience for a number of reasons. Maybe tablet tech isn’t suitable for a fine dining atmosphere, or the futuristic feel clashes with a retro-themed aesthetic. However, the opportunities to implement technology extend beyond consumer-facing, front-of-house operations. They can also streamline food buying, order taking, and even cooking. “Many brands and operators are thinking even further outside the box, adding innovative technologies in the kitchen and at the front counter,” QSR’s Keith Loria explained in his article ‘ . , having invested in kitchen technology with color-coded screens that deliver orders to the kitchen staff, is one example of such outside the box thinking: A red stripe over an ingredient means leave it off, a green stripe indicates an addition. Other colors signify takeout. Similarly, in an attempt to keep its kitchen staff from having to memorize recipes and food preparation policies, Tex-Mex style fast food chain to push recipes to its line cooks. Put simply, if your staff is happy, customers will (usually) be happy too. Kitchen technology like Panera’s and Taco Bueno’s can help cut down on stress and provide happy meals all around. Companies worried about technology pushing humans out of jobs and making employees more stressed out should instead educate their staff about how it is making their jobs easier, letting them focus on being the heart of the dining experience – not just a set of arms and legs rushing from table to table. As the put it, “Restaurants have been late to the tech party, and many are now scrambling to incorporate tablets, apps, computerized kitchen equipment and data analysis capabilities.” When proper strategy and implementation applied, technology solves problems that are fundamental to how restaurants operate and compete. And late is a lot better than never. A whopping . As this trend continues to gain momentum, technology will become increasingly critical for any restaurant’s success. At the rate we’re going, tables and tablets will soon share more than a common etymology – both derived from the Latin “tabula,” meaning plank, tablet, list. One will be incomplete without the other, with technology inextricably linked and indispensable to the casual-dining experience. It may be only a matter of time before your tablet your table (check out this of Pizza Hut again pioneering the modern dining experience). While this may seem like a dream scene from a movie, this type of tech is very real and holds great potential for both businesses and customers in streamlining the dining experience and making it more fun. Now is the time for bar and restaurant owners and managers to research and try new technologies, and make the most of the vast trove of data that falls into their laps every day. |
Apple Publishes The Top 10 Reasons It Rejects Apps | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | Whether you’ve ever built an iOS app or not, you’ve probably heard tales of how frustrating it can be to get Apple’s stamp of approval. But does Apple reject apps? What are the big mistakes that most developers make? In the first release of what looks to be something Apple intends to update regularly, the a running Top 10 list of the most common reasons apps get rejected. Alas, two of the biggest “reasons” seem like fuzzy catch-alls: number one is “More information needed.” Maybe your app’s description is weak. Maybe you forgot to include a link for a support page. Whatever the case, Apple expects some information that you didn’t provide. Number 3, “Did not comply with terms in the Developer Program License Agreement,” is equally broad. The other eight, though, are pretty specific. The biggest, specificly-defined issue? Bugs. At the time of publishing, the top 10 reasons account for nearly 60 percent of app rejections. [Via ; photo via , used under CreativeCommons] |
GuiaBolso Brings Mint-style Financial Management To Brazil | Julie Ruvolo | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | In August a new, homegrown entry raced onto Brazil’s top 10 most downloaded apps. It’s a list usually cluttered by American-made social media, music and gaming apps; but , a Mint-style personal finance app joined the App Store on July 2 when Brazil was midway through a month-long World Cup paralysis and passed Tinder, Facebook and even WhatsApp over the last month to reach the No. 5 most downloaded app in Brazil, with no official launch announcement or marketing budget. The novelty of one app to rule all of your bank and credit card accounts, and Mint’s ensuing acquisition by Intel in 2009, is already ancient digital history in the U.S. But despite of investment in personal finance companies, GuiaBolso, a startup co-founded by , former managing director of Groupon Brazil and CFO of Groupon Latin America, and Thiago Alvarez, a long-time McKinsey alum working with the Brazilian banking industry, is the first company to enter the Brazilian market. “We’re the only ones in Brazil,” Gleason told me on a call from São Paulo, where GuiaBolso is headquartered. “People have been saying, “We finally have Mint in Brazil. Why didn’t this come sooner?” Gleason says everyone he and Alvarez talked to, including a number of companies doing personal financial aggregation internationally, thought it would be impossible in Brazil. “The challenge was building the technology,” says Gleason. “Everyone thinks the banks are giving us their APIs but that’s not the way it works.” , founded in 1999, was the first company to figure out the data integration necessary to launch a financial tracking service, Gleason says They currently power financial apps, including white-hot , a personal finance management startup founded by 30-year-old that has raised $69 million in venture capital. “The other part is that people were afraid of what the reaction of the Brazilian banks would be, and didn’t want to take that risk,” Gleason says. “So we knew the institutional side would be important.” Gleason and Alvarez are well-prepared to navigate the political waters of disrupting the financial industry. In addition to their banking industry contacts from stints at Groupon and McKinsey, they have the support of experts like Neil Daswani, a former early Yodlee employee, web application security expert and professor at Stanford, and Gabriel Jaramillo, a founding partner at and former president of Brazil’s Santander Bank. Valor participated in GuiaBolso’s $1M seed round in March of 2013, along with Brazilian and six angel investors. Valor and e.Bricks returned for a $3 million Series A this May, led by Kaszek Ventures, and Kaszek Ventures’ co-founder joined the board with e.Bricks’ . Brazil’s decade-long economic boom has lifted some 50 million Brazilians out of poverty and into the working class, but has had some unintended consequences. Even as Brazil’s Central Bank reported that household income has doubled and unemployment has fallen by half, has meant more purchases, more consumer debt, and ironically, higher prices. “Wages started rising, unemployment fell and there was a big boom in terms of access to credit cards and car loans, but the consumer-led demand was unsustainable,” Gleason explains. “Default rates started spiking, and with 10-12% interest on credit cards in Brazil, once you get into a hole you can’t get out. So you had this whole drive leading people to not controlling their finances or being able to pay back their loans.” At the same time, Brazilians were coming online in droves – people, or half of Brazil’s population, – and started taking out their credit cards. “Collective buying was a driver, because the ticket price of items on sites like Groupon was lower than big ticket items like TVs and fridges, and it seemed like you were getting a good deal, so literally millions of people joined the ecommerce wave, and that was really the start of it,” Gleason says. “I joined Groupon Brazil right at the beginning and caught the huge boom of the collective buying craze. We went from zero to 700 employees in a few months. It was out of control – we were just trying to keep the wheels from falling off.” But after Groupon’s IPO in 2011, the startup party turned corporate, and Gleason decided it was finally time to start something from scratch, after years of exchanging ideas with Alvarez since they met at McKinsey in 2007. “Two things that came out of that experience,” Gleason says. “In Brazil, interest rates don’t really mean much to people. They are only thinking about the installment they have to pay. The other thing is that people don’t consider themselves in debt if all their payments are current. So if they have a car loan and credit card balance and are paying it every month, they say they don’t have debt, until they start to default.” “At the same time, Thiago was seeing these extremely lucrative banks with all kinds of money and doing nothing to innovate, while on the other hand you have Brazilian consumers, very low levels of financial education, who really don’t understand the basic banking products being pushed at them,” says Gleason. According to 2014 research by Brazil’s National Confederation of Shopkeepers, of Brazilians say they don’t know how to control their finances. “It became clear that there’s a huge knowledge gap, and the Brazilian banks are not interested in creating new tools for consumers to narrow it.” GuiaBolso began as a humble operation out of Gleason’s house in São Paulo in 2012. “We intentionally started out by bootstrapping to manage dilution and know exactly what product we wanted to go forward with,” says Gleason. “We embraced all the lean startup stuff. We threw up a landing page and started to see what people were searching for. And one of the first things we found is that most people who were looking for financial guidance online were from the emerging “C” class, and most of their problems had to do with debt or not being able to balance their budget.” (Media reports often cite that millions of Brazilians were lifted into the middle class, but it’s a misnomer – Brazil’s “C” class, on a scale of A through E, is what Americans would consider working class, making about $1,500-$2,500 household income per month.) GuiaBolso’s first product, launched with their seed round funding in May of 2013, after a year of testing and 4,000 financial consultations in person and via the website, was an online financial consultant that solicited a few data points about the visitor’s financial situation and offered customized and specific advice. But the experience was designed as a one-off tool and required manually inputting your information. “That wasn’t going to be effective over time, so we looked at other markets in the personal finances management space. Mint dominated but all the offshoots went for different niches, like LearnVest [a platform originally designed for young professional women]. They were all using integration with bank accounts to generate tools and recommendations, and in Brazil there has never been account aggregation where you can see all your accounts together in one place, so we shifted our focus to that.” Gleason and Alvarez started off looking for bridge financing, but Gleason says the American venture funds wanted to write bigger checks. They ended up closing a Series A after all, led by Buenos Aires-based Kaszek Ventures, which backed the Latin American success MercadoLibre. GuiaBolso launched their automated product in April of this year, which organizes three months of historical from Brazilian banks Itau, Bradesco, Santander and Banco do Brasil, representing about 80% of the retail banking market into pie charts and primary colors of spending breakdowns versus goals set. “Brazil is different than the U.S.,” Gleason says. “Everything is usually concentrated in one bank, credit cards are issued via the bank, and all of their investments and debt are with the same bank.” Gleason says next priorities are to connect to the Caixa Economica (Brazil’s Federal Savings Bank), Citi and HSBC. “Then there are a few independent credit card companies – Amex, and store-issued credit cards like Casas Bahia.” While GuiaBolso’s first version catered to Brazilians in the working “C” class, the automated product is seeing primary adoption from Brazil’s “A” and “B” classes, for obvious reasons: wealthier Brazilians are more likely to have a bank account and use online banking, have a higher percentage of electronic versus cash transactions, and are more likely to have an iPhone on which they can download the GuiaBolso app. Gleason sees that changing as internet access and smartphone penetration keep expanding to Brazil’s lower income classes. “Our target market is the 50 million checking accounts in Brazil that are eligible for internet banking,” Gleason says, “and they’re projected to grow 40% by 2017, according to 2012 data from .” “But across all levels of income, people have no clue how to manage their finances,” Gleason says. According to a sample of 6,000 GuiaBolso users, about one-third of all expenses are credit card purchases paid for in installments, regardless of the user’s income level. But while that represents only 4% of monthly income for users making over $5,000 a month, it’s 10% of monthly income for users in the lowest income bracket. “People making less income are the biggest hostages to installment payments. We were shocked.” It’s representative of bigger, troubling patterns in Brazil’s economy. Since 2008, consumer loans have , and household consumer debt has almost doubled to of Brazil’s GDP. In 2013, Brazilians spent on short-term interest payments, representing two months of their annual income. “That compares to about 10% in the US,” Gleason says, “But it’s worse: half of the debt in the US is in mortgages, while in Brazil it’s mostly short-term debt.” In other words, it’s an opportune moment to launch free financial planning tools that make it really easy to break down and manage your monthly income and expenses. “Our web product was growing 30% month over month with very little spending on paid marketing,” Gleason says, “and we were pretty happy with that, but our plans changed dramatically after launching the iPhone app in July. We’ve already hit our growth targets for the year and have surpassed $1 billion worth of user financial transactions organized on our platform.” At this rate, GuiaBolso may have the opportunity to figure out the big question Mint got to bypass after it was acquired by Intuit: How to make money. “It’s a free app, and our focus is to keep growing and see where we can help people,” says Gleason, “so revenue is not on the dashboard for now. But if we can keep engagement high and acquire users cheaply, we can do a lot of experimentation with the LearnVest model for advising and long term planning, as well as offer our users products that are suited for them. But I don’t want to send 100,000 people a credit card offer or serve them any banner ads.” |
RunScribe Is A Wearable For Granular Gait Analysis | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | Do you heel strike or are you a forefoot runner? If you have no idea what that question means probably isn’t for you. is aiming for serious running geeks who want to nerd out over exactly how, where and when their feet connect with the ground — and use that data to improve their running technique and (hopefully) avoid injury. Running has been a popular target for fitness focused wearables up to now, with fitness bands and running-focused smartwatches mushrooming forth as forerunners of the nascent wearables category. But as more and more generic fitness bands crop up, an appetite for greater specialism is likely to gather momentum. So enter RunScribe: a device that attaches to the back of your running shoe in order to be well-placed to figure out exactly how you are running. The data its motion sensors capture is stored locally on flash memory during each run and synced to a cloud service after — visualised via various granular charts and graphs — allowing the athlete to do a deep data dive analysis of their gait. (A top tier of the service — called runScribe Science — will even give the user access to the raw sensor data captured by the device.) Last summer’s blasted off crowdfunding blocks with a similar idea, although runScribe involves a bit less faff, given it consists of just the one wearable device that clips to your shoe, rather than a pair of socks and an ankle clip. (Super serious runners can opt to use one RunScribes per foot per run but that level of detail is not required to power its gait analysis). What exactly does runScribe measure? A full 13 kinematic metrics (with its Pro pack) captured via the 9-axis sensor within the device, including stride length, pronation, contact time, swing excursion and stance excursion. It uses these metrics to create a runScore so the user can easily compare one run with another, i.e. without having to drill down into all the individual metrics every time — although that remains entirely possible with the full service. And desirable if you are, for instance, trying out a new pair of kicks to decide whether they are appropriate for your running style. Figuring out which shoes best suit your running style can be a tricky problem, which is why some dedicated running stores offer an in-house gait analysis service where staff watch you run on a treadmill and suggest shoes that might be suitable. The problem there is these staff aren’t impartial, given they are trying to sell you the shoes in their shop. RunScribe aims to provide enough granular data to allow the runner to determine which shoes suit them best — and do that by collectively analyzing the running data of scores of users. If its makers can get their wearable onto the shoes of enough runners they can start building the big data cache they need to power that expertise and pull a community of runners into orbit around pack-leading gait specialism. That’s the vision. For now runScribe is still a prototype. So far they’ve more than tripled their original $50,000 Kickstarter funding target, and still have 17 days of their campaign to run. (No pun intended.) The crowdfunding route offers a chance for this specialized wearable maker to drive enough early users to hit a critical mass of data quicker. To hit the ground running, you could say. The runScribe wearable starts at $99 to Kickstarter backers with access to limited metrics, or from $139 with full access to metrics. It’s not yet clear whether the metrics service will end up requiring a subscription. Kickstarter backers get one year free access guaranteed. After that the device’s makers say it’s tbc whether there will be a recurring charge to use the service, or whether they will offer a freemium model — likely gating the really granular gait analysis behind a fee. The runScribe wearable itself is scheduled to be shipped to backers by this December.
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If Apple Makes A Move Into Mobile Payments, It Could Not Come At A Better Time | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | As Apple inches closer to its , there has been growing speculation that mobile payments will be a part of the action. Apple, the reports say, will add to the iPhone 6, and it will debut a mobile wallet-style service that could include integrations with , and possibly to enable physical, in-store payments using the smartphone. The reports of Apple finally making the mobile payments jump seem to have this , boosted by positive payment comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook himself. If the reports are accurate, a mobile payments service from Apple would have been a long time in the making, coming after of speculation involving ; lots of ; a steadily growing pile of consumer credit card data from its (likely over) ; and as a counterbalance to moves from . It also could not come at a better time, considering how many other mobile payments promises have fumbled or failed, so far, to live up to the promise. Mobile operators used to be seen as an essential lynchpin in how a mobile payments service could work. That was partly because of their position in the mobile ecosystem — holders of payment details, bank licenses, handset deals, and customer relationships. All this has combined to paint carriers as a likely source from which mobile payment services could flow. It it’s partly because telcos are always on the hunt for more services to complement their stale bread and butter of voice and text revenues. Sure, there have been some successful services in some markets, like . But independent and consortium-based efforts in countries like the U.S. (such as the ) and Europe (such as the in the UK) have been slow to take off. Interestingly, from what we have heard, Apple may focus on point-of-sale technology initially rather than the wider applications of mobile payments that might involve services like carrier billing. But from what we understand this is also something that Apple is continuing to focus on as well. For a while, it looked like Square would be the standard bearer of the mobile payments space, riding into the market on the top of Apple’s iPhone. There was a lot of hope and promise around Square’s dongle-based system, a format replicated by and . Initially catering to small businesses by letting them take card payments easily using smartphones and tablets, Square then started to look much more ambitious after a deal with and investment from cafe chain Starbucks, and then a number of other services subsequently developed around and beyond that basic offering. But something , it seems. Now, with a new funding round at a $6 billion valuation on the cards, it seems people are wondering if the margins on these services are just too thin, if growth has simply not come fast enough to make a decent return, and if Square’s other lines of business are going to work out longer term. And while companies like Square and PayPal have made a lot of inroads with retailers, they are not the only ones. Apple, with its own successful chain of stores and resellers, has a lot of insight into how to build out a retail-based payments service that I suspect gives it a lot of credibility with businesses. Apple’s relationship with IBM could also potentially come into play here as well, especially in relation to integrating systems for larger retailers. As Natasha once , NFC — the acryonym for near-field communication, or the technology that allows a handset to effectively be transformed into your credit card at a point of sale — actually stands for “Nobody F****** Cares.” But while the technology has long been a niche idea, it appears that we may finally be approaching some kind of critical mass: While there were only some 275 million NFC-equipped phones shipped in 2013, IHS researches that by 2018 that number will be 1.8 billion, representing penetration of 64%. That kind of critical mass will see more services and acceptance come in its wake. For a company like Apple, what’s interesting is not just the prospect of the company supporting and enabling NFC on the iPhone, but how Apple may choose to link this up with other new technology, from iBeacons for in-store alerts for shoppers, to fingerprint sensors for extra authentication, and its Passbook as a way of aggregating orders and storing receipts, linked up, of course, with Apple’s existing billing information by way of iTunes. Given that so much of this has been put in place already over the the years, the prospect is for a fully-developed product right at launch. (That is, fully developed if Apple captures users’ trust for a new, cloud-based service — something that could potentially get called into question in light of scenarios like the hack.) Like it did with the iPhone amidst a range of other existing smartphones, Apple will not the first mover in mobile payments. Just the one that brings everything together the best. |
Twitter’s Timeline Could Get (More) Algorithmic | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | Twitter has changed significantly over the past 8 years. With every new product manager and leadership cadre there have been attempts to make it more accessible to new users and more sticky for existing ones. But the biggest changes may yet be ahead as Twitter considers altering the core of its product: the timeline. : Twitter CFO Anthony Noto this week confirming what we’d heard, that a more algorithmic Twitter timeline is coming. If you’ve been watching the company for a while — or have been a regular user of the product — then you know Twitter is always experimenting. So much so that It’s become almost a running joke amongst the reporters that cover changes to Twitter. If there is a new thing someone is seeing then it’s most likely a Twitter experiment. Twitter VP of Engineering finally just that Twitter PR points everyone to when they inquire about new experiments. “It’s rare for a day to go by when we’re not releasing at least one experiment,” he wrote. I’ve written before about the way that Twitter was collating and interpreting the data from these ongoing experiments, but many of them have been centered around user growth or ‘engagement’ — getting people to interact with tweets and content. Even now, Twitter is conducting a host of experiments in dozens of ‘buckets’ of thousands of users. Recently, faves of in feeds of activity — effectively curtailing the use of the fav as ‘shorthand’ and placing close to par with the ‘retweet’. And Twitter has already experimented with injecting other content into your timeline, as . Not every ‘fav’ translates into a tweet being shoved into your timeline, instead an algorithm is used to determine the ‘velocity and momentum of interest’ in the tweet. If they’re significant in your network, then Twitter will surface them for you, even if they would not normally have appeared in your feed. If this sounds familiar, then you may be thinking of the Magic Recs experiment, which that sends you push notifications when a tweet, account or hashtag has gotten a lot of play in your network. But, we’re told, the team behind the fav experiment is separate from Magic Recs — though both have the common thread of using an algorithm (an equation for interest, so to speak) to determine which tweets to surface. But we’ve been informed by sources that Twitter isn’t done experimenting yet. In fact, a new effort internally will be touching many aspects of Twitter’s consumer products — including the timeline. Specifically, a more ‘algorithmic’ timeline that chooses things to share with you based on your interests and interactions and those of your network. Until recently, the Twitter timeline was an inviolate representation of who you chose to follow — and what they chose to share — in reverse chronological order. Then, ads and promoted tweets started getting more prominence, and the ‘reply’ mechanic started mucking around with the chronology of the timeline, bumping up old tweets when they were responded to. Now, Twitter is set to go further, with a more ‘algorithmic’ approach to users’ timelines Personally, the first thing I check when I hit Twitter is not my main timeline or the Discover tab but my Notifications tab. This is where the ‘life’ on Twitter is for me. People replying to me, favs being thrown back and forth, people mentioning me when they think there’s something I’d be interested in. I’d personally be just fine if the main timeline was melded more with things like this, as they make Twitter feel more engaging. I’d be willing to bet that it’s hard for most new Twitter users to get this kind of feeling and experience from the platform, especially with how difficult it has been for them to nail the on-boarding experience. Years after I first Twitter gave to new users, the company just rolled out a new on-boarding process that improves on some things but still misses the mark in others. It still focuses, for instance, on lists of people who it feels you should follow, enforcing a minimum of follows if at all possible. “Forcing follows like this seems like the wrong approach, since enjoying Twitter is about curating your timeline,” says Owen Williams in a . I agree that forcing follows is a bad idea, but I don’t think that forcing ‘curation’ right from the get go is wise either. Another solution would be to ask about interests and present users with an algorithmically driven timeline that allowed them to get up and running right away — curating their own follows and culling content they didn’t like over time. Sources inside and outside the company I’ve spoken to emphasized to me repeatedly that the biggest challenge Twitter faces is how to show the ‘good stuff’ of Twitter to people who haven’t built a decent timeline. As any long-time twitterer knows, the service is very much ‘what you make of it’ and poor choices in initial followers (or difficulty understanding how to make those choices) likely kill off many potential users before they get hooked. In the on-boarding process, Twitter could use signals (who you picked to follow initially, who your friends are via contacts etc) to generate an automatic timeline of content that showed you stuff that wasn’t completely dependent on your ‘good taste’ in follows. As one person put it to me, Twitter could see that you followed a particular player from, say, the Yankees — but not one who used Twitter particularly well — and it could show you other, more prolific or ‘engaging’ Yankees players in your timeline without you having to follow them or other people in your feed having to explicitly share them via retweets or favorites. The key, of course, is all about timeline relevancy. Twitter’s power comes from the fact that it provides and up-to-the-second snapshot of the world shared over the web. Facebook’s algorithm focuses on the most read (engaged) or most likely to be read content. Twitter’s should — and I say this hopefully, not factually — focus on delivering content that’s ‘right’ for the right user at the right time. That’s both in content and, more importantly, temporally. Thresholds for how ‘old’ the packages of content we formerly called tweets can be before they’re no longer ‘relevant’ will have to be tweaked and tuned carefully. Before you get up in arms about this kind of algorithmic content shifting your timeline around too much remember that retweets, one of the earliest additional functions of Twitter, already offer a mechanism for presenting older content as ‘fresh’ in your feed. The difference being that one is initiated by another human you’ve chosen to follow and the other by a server in a room somewhere. If Twitter is able to honor the same kind of relevancy in older content that RT’s do (humans believing they’re still current) then its algorithmic timeline could actually make for a more compelling experience. Selfishly, as a Twitter ‘power user’ of sorts, I would love a toggle that gave me the ‘plain Jane’ timeline as it exists now — but that adds complexity so who knows. This new effort is said to be headed by Twitter’s VP of Product Daniel Graf, a former Googler in the Maps department. I’ve spoken to people inside and outside the company who have had both complimentary and doubtful things to say about Graf’s new approach and his understanding of Twitter. But that’s not out of the ordinary with any incoming product head. Graf was hired earlier this year to replace long-time chief Michael Sippey. A recent reported that ‘user interface’ changes were in the works, driven by Graf. I’m sure that some will react negatively to the concept of an algorithmic timeline — especially when you consider that the approach will likely be used to show you more ‘promoted’ content as well as organic content. But I think that it’s an important step in making a Twitter that can attract and retain a billion or more users at some point in time. If you consider the ‘ ’ philosophy that many companies apply to making a mass appeal product, then Twitter’s current core concepts are in even more need of a rethinking. With billions of potential users out there and only ~280M of them on board so far — who do you design for? Recent events like Israel and Gaza, Ferguson and have demonstrated to me that there is a real, powerful benefit to a Twitter that can show media and text in conjunction with real-time reporting and news — and that is designed that way from the ground up. The challenge would be to not give up the unique qualities that made Twitter the place to be for those events, not Facebook — mostly the real-time and . Will I miss the simple, straightforward timeline? Sure. But am I convinced that this will ‘ruin’ Twitter? No. Could it? Absolutely. The timeline as a concept was so powerful, so concise, that it powered the first 7 years of Twitter without any real structural changes. That’s extremely rare in a product, especially in today’s pivot-happy startup environment. But it also makes it that much more difficult for Twitter to make large changes without upsetting core constituents. Selfishly, I don’t want Twitter to change too much, and if it does I want it to emphasize personal conversations and content over something that’s interesting to the rest of the world but not me. But it’s an incredibly tough challenge and there are no easy answers to what’s best for the ‘next billion users’. Twitter did not respond to inquiries about upcoming changes to its product. |
Press Fit Standing Desk Review: An Affordable Option With U.S. Manufacturing And Materials | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | A standing desk is a resource for the home office that’s increasingly common, but they’re still not affordable or convenient in most cases. The began life as a Kickstarter project designed to fix both those problems, with an innovative standing desk design that’s easy to assemble/break down and reassemble, and that won’t break the budget. Press Fit is a new furniture company out of Boston founded by MIT graduate students David Yamnitsky and Isabella Trombo, which aims to create affordable furnishings that are built out of solid, sustainable materials, which can be manufactured in the U.S. and which can be assembled, taken apart and moved around easily by just a single individual. The company’s first piece of furniture, the Press Fit Standing Desk initially sought $10,000 on Kickstarter to fund its first production run, and managed to raise just under $65,000. Now that the project has come to a close, Yamnitsky and Trombo are bringing the so that those who missed the chance to get in on the action during the campaign can order one now. [gallery ids="1050123,1050124,1050125,1050126,1050127,1050128"] Yamnitsky sent over one of the first production prototypes off of the line so that I could check it out in action, and it’s impressive out of the box. Assembly, even on my own, took about 5 minutes, and most of that time was spent removing bubble wrap from the individual pieces. There’s no hardware, nails or screws to deal with, and yet the desk feels solid and doesn’t exhibit any noticeable shake when you’re typing away on your laptop while standing. Plus it breaks apart in less than a minute for easy transportation to another room or a new location. The Press Fit has impressive fit and finish, too, even if the industrial design isn’t going to blow anyone away in terms of style. Also, I learned quickly to remember not to move the desk just by picking it up by its top surface, as it’ll just come off of the base. For just $200, Press Fit’s option is a durable, convenient option that is amazing simply because of its easy assembly. If you’ve been shopping around for a standing desk but haven’t found one that suits your budget/space constraints, this is definitely worth a look. |
Vandrico Wants To Become The Wearables Platform For The Workplace | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | If you know about Vandrico, it’s probably because of the company’s we featured . That was just a byproduct of Vandrico’s research, however. What the company is really about is bringing wearables into the workplace. I first met Vandrico co-founders Kenna MacKenzie and Gonzalo Tudela at last year’s . At that time, the two had a general idea of what they wanted to create, but they were still far from having a fully working product. I met up with the two again at Grow (this time ) and by now, Vandrico doesn’t just have a working platform (dubbed “Canary”), but it has already signed deals with a number of large companies that are testing its products. As Tudela told me, the idea here is to create a very flexible platform that allows businesses to deploy wearables to their employees, no matter whether that business is a mining company, utility or a small business. For the most part right now, the platform is mostly about being able to send alerts to users. Because it’s completely platform agnostic, a worker could be wearing a smartwatch, a head-mounted display like Google Glass or any other wearable. Here is how the team described how the service could work in a mining company: Say there is an emergency in a mine and the worker is using a smartwatch (probably something more rugged than an LG G watch). An alert would go right to the watch, but besides just showing a red “emergency” screen, the watch could then also show exactly what to do next — maybe in the form of a map that leads to the nearest safe spot or a checklist for managing the emergency. To show off how Vandrico works across platforms, the team showed me a demo that simultaneously sent an emergency alert to a smartwatch, Google Glass, a and, for good measure, a good old smartphone. Most companies will probably want to deploy Vandrico’s Canary server behind their own firewalls to ensure that they can use the service internally even when their regular Internet connections are down. Canary offers a REST API, so integrating it with existing services should be pretty straightforward. As Tudela tells me, there is a lot of excitement about wearables in the enterprise. Vandrico itself is working with the large Canadian communications company Telus, for example, to bring wearables to the workplace and one of Vandrico’s latest integrations was with Motion Metrics — a for the mining sector. Here is another example for how a mining company could use the service (Vandrico being a Canadian company, the energy sector is obviously high on its list of potential users): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhrExUlRnEM The enterprise is notoriously slow when it comes to adopting new technologies, but from what I’ve seen and heard in the last few months, there are many companies that are interested in at least starting some pilot projects because they see the some tangible benefits. |
Are All Accelerators Decelerators? | Ashwin Ramasamy | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | |
What Students Really Carry Back To School | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | click fodder. They allow for marketers to feel they are directly addressing a group of easy marks. After all, when is your life more insecure than on the cusp of a grade change or a trip to college? The world, then, is in upheaval, you hunt for answers, sometimes in the as potential sources of meaning. But I was thinking: what are students really carrying back to school? And is technology as invasive as we really assume? To find out I performed a journalistic exercise that many former school newspaper folks are familiar with: the man-on-the-street. I took to the OSU campus with , a writer and news director of Lantern TV who shot some photos and approached students with me on campus. “My phone is my life,” said Haris Malik, a senior in Chemical Engineering. “I don’t carry a laptop. I have an iPod from seven years ago with all my music on it.” Most of the hardware he uses is in the ChemE labs he frequents. His freind, Sana Nisar, a sophomore in Public Health, carries a Macbook Air that she uses for note-taking. Neither of them had anything particularly fancy, just a few tools they used on a daily basis. Malik’s most exotic piece of tech? A TI-89 calculator that was as big as a a paving brick. Aaron Carpenter, top, is a freshman in Mechanical Engineering. He came to school with his Microsoft Surface. He also had a cellphone that he didn’t show us. He uses the Surface to take notes and thinks it will be helpful for text books, but he isn’t sure yet. After all, those were his first few days of school. I’ve been out of college for over 15 years, which is a bracing thought. The biggest difference, besides the version of Windows Carpenter was running was a move away from physical textbooks. Many of the students we spoke to carried a few books but Sara Collins, for example, read the text in a tiny window on her Macbook. Collins, a freshman finance major said she could do most of her work on the iPhone. “I usually have my laptop with me, though,” she said. One outlier in our research was Adil Peerbhoy, a juggling undecided freshman, who only carried a Samsung Character from 2011. Peerbhoy said he couldn’t afford a smartphone but he didn’t miss it. “I’d like to be able to use social networks,” he said, but he felt his phone worked well and that he didn’t need to upgrade. I almost felt bad for him. To have to suffer with a phone from 2011 is an injustice no modern social-media user should experience. But he didn’t mind. It’s just a tool, he said. Finally we talked to Franz Ross, a senior in Film Studies. Ross works for LanternTV with Ritika and he’s working as a professional video journalist, or at least the closest to it he can get in college. He carries pounds and pounds of gear – cameras, tripods, and lights – on a daily basis and files stories on the trustees, OSU sports, and student events. In short, he’s working while in school. What’s unusual is that his tech intake is no different than any of the other students we interviewed. While technology is integral to his job, he doesn’t carry unique hardware or devices. He carries the bare necessities. Education is changing rapidly, but the tools are the same. There are still books, folks still carry pens and notebooks, and some students decided to sit out the purchase of expensive tech entirely. Are they better off? More focused? More efficient? That’s not clear. What is clear is that the average student can safely ignore most back to school flyers in the local paper. All they really need are the basics and, as needs arise, better stuff can be bought. We’re living in the future, but not too far in the future. |
Here’s What We Know So Far About The Celebrity Photo Hack | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | : Clearly this post was written very early on in this incident and information has since come to light which . As you will , around 100 women celebrities (including Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande, Victoria Justice and Kate Upton) have had naked and explicit pictures seemingly hacked from their iCloud accounts and published online, first on 4Chan and now all over the place. As a reminder, iCloud automatically stores photos, email, contacts and other information online, allowing users to sync this data across different devices. Many of the photos have been confirmed as being genuine, most notably by Lawrence. The anonymous hacker who originally posted the images first on claimed they were taken from iCloud accounts. They demanded donations via PayPal and Bitcoin in exchange for posting them, but only received 0.2545 BTC in donations, which is verifiable at this address: 18pgUn3BBBdnQjKG8ZGedFvcoVcsv1knWa While it’s highly unlikely to be a security issue with iCloud, the incident has served to remind us all of the issues around internet security in general. So what do we know about the celebrity photo hacks?
The mainstream media is reporting the phones were “hacked”. As usually, this is rarely defined. Lawrence has previously said she uses iCloud, : “My iCloud keeps telling me to back it up, and I’m like, I don’t know how to back you up. Do it yourself.” Metadata in the images shows that the vast majority were taken using Apple devices.
There is a suggestion that iCloud . There has been absolutely no confirmation of this from Apple. It’s highly unlikely that the “hacker” (or it may have been a group of hackers) was not able to breach Apple’s security in general, but instead targeted specific victims using a combination of social engineering, cracking the password or using Apple’s “Forgot my password” route. They could also have used other less technical methods (it’s usually the non-tech method that turn out to be the culprit, btw).
Jennifer Lawrence was once quoted in a Time article about her email address containing a key word. Not a wise move. Never give clues in the public domain. Once an email address is known, a hacker could email the target person purporting to be something else (Apple’s iTunes for instance). The target puts their email and password into the hacker’s fake page. Voila. This phishing attack is . Also, having the same password for multiple products (such as eBay and Amazon) means a hacker, if they can get one account right, could use the same password to access your email or iCloud. Also, Apple’s “Forgot my password” system means that if you know the victim’s birthday and the answers to some security questions, you might gain access to their account. There is a LOT of information out there on celebrities, so coming up with ideas for passwords is entirely possible. Once inside it’s not possible to see photos or videos which are automatically uploaded from your iPhone to iCloud but you can use software to download it all. Again, voila. To gain access to Photostream, you would need to login with the iCloud user name on a new OSX or iOS machine. If you do that, iCloud sends you an e-mail that a new machine has logged in. You also get a notification on all the other machines using your iCloud account (iPhone, iPad, Mac) telling you a new machine is logged in. So, basically, when you get both mails and notifications, the normal reaction would be to realise you were being hacked and to change your password immediately. Since the notification is almost instant, changing the password very quickly would mean Photostream wouldn’t be able to sync to the Hacker’s machine fast enough for it to download 30 days of photos. This is one of the main reasons why most experts don’t suspect this incident to be a hack of iCloud.
Another method might be a ‘brute force attack’ on an iCloud account via an automated program. This is hard on iCloud, though theoretically possible. The Next Web that a Python script on Github (and shared on Hacker News) recently allowed malicious users to ‘brute force’ a target account’s password on Apple’s iCloud, thanks to a vulnerability in the Find my iPhone service. Apple . There’s no official confirmation this is the culprit though.
Since many of the images appear to have been taken with Android devices and webcams, the leaked images may not have originated from the iCloud photo backup service at all. Many services have automatic backup tools, and could be accessed in similar ways to iCloud (as above).
Some of the photos had text overlaid. Were they from Snapchat? Probably not. These are most likely screen shots on someone’s phone.
Were phones hacked via WiFi, perhaps at a celebrity event? This is also not known or confirmed.
Personal assistants and bodyguards often have access to celebrity phones. It’s a possibility. Was this hack an employee with access to data somewhere? Again, there’s on confirmation of this (and no suggestion it happened).
There is aways the physical theft of a phone or laptop of a celebrity or belonging to someone well-connected to celebrities.
No. iCloud is almost certainly safe. This looks like targeted attacks on well-known and ‘high value’ celebrities using some of the above methods. : Clearly this post was written very early on in this incident and information has since come to light which .
The best way is to turn on two-step (or ‘two factor’) verification for your iCloud account (or any online account), meaning a hacker would also need physical access to your phone AND your phone’s password to get in, via a text message sent to your phone with a temporary PIN. All the other services, like Google, also have two-step authentication. Check out Make your security questions more complex (e.g. not your date of birth, your pet’s name etc). ‘qwerty’ or ‘123456’ are the dumbest passwords ever. Still really, really, really worried? Then completely turn off iCloud photo syncing through Settings > iCloud. Or any similar automatic backup service. Then the photos will only ever be on your phone or the computer you back them up to. Then you have to worry about the phone or laptop being stolen and losing your photos… This is not the first time private celebrity images have been compromised. In 2011 many celebrities had images compromised by who got into email accounts simply by guessing passwords. Chaney was caught and sentenced to 10 years in prison. But guys like that are rarely caught. So use better security for your personal stuff. And remember: Taking naked photos of yourself . It’s the hacker in all these kinds of cases that is the criminal. |
Yohann Is An iPad Stand Jony Ive Could Be Proud Of | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | I didn’t think I’d ever get excited about an iPad stand. But the , designed by Swiss architect Berend Frenzel, ticks all of my boxes. First up, it’s a thing of beauty, with an incredibly simple but clever — why didn’t I think of that — design. It’s also highly functional, in terms of viewing angles and positions. And it’s European-made. Two versions are currently . One manufactured with a glassfiber-reinforcedpolymer body covered with a high-end “piano” lacquer finish, and a second handcrafted wooden version, made in Germany and Italy, respectively. However, the most impressive thing is the way Frenzel has managed to take something so simple and make it so functional, allowing the one piece stand to house an iPad in three discrete viewing angles — from upright to a much more lean-back angle — in both landscape and portrait mode, as well as enabling it to be used resting on soft surfaces, such as your lap or bed. As Jonathan “Jony” Ive , “true simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absences of clutter or ornamentation. It’s about bringing order to complexity.” And, dare I say it, the zen-like Yohann looks to have achieved this in spades and is a product the Apple design chief himself might well be proud of. With that said, the Yohann is (like many of Apple’s own products) premium-priced. The glassfiber-reinforcedpolymer and lacquer-finished version is currently available at $69 for early Kickstarter backers (the cheapest option has already gone). And, likewise, the various wood versions start from $129. The former fit the iPad 2/3/4/Air, while the latter adds the iPad mini, too. That higher pricing is, in part, attributed to being manufactured locally, “under european working conditions and ecological standards and [in the case of the wood version] made from sustainably grown regional wood types.” There’s also a patent pending in the U.S. and China, presumably to fend off inevitable cheaper knock-offs. |
A Walk Through The Disrupt Hackathon | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | It’s still early at the Disrupt Hackathon but that doesn’t mean hackers, programmers, and other cool folks aren’t busy working away. We’ll be posting updates from the floor over the next few hours but until then enjoy this random walk featuring Jon Sheiber and I as we wander the Hackathon crowds. |
So Many Platforms, So Few Developers | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | As I walked around the today, I talked to a lot of vendors who decided to set up tables at the event for one reason: to lure developers to use their APIs and build applications on top of their platforms. In fact, I spoke to almost a dozen vendors including Evernote, Twitter, Microsoft Azure, The Weather Underground, Pearson (the book publisher), GoGo InFlight and many others. I even spoke to a hospital representative who was there because they had built an open source hospital management platform, and you guessed it, they were hoping to lure developers to join them and build applications on top of it. With so many platform plays out there though, it’s exceedingly difficult for them all to achieve the necessary critical mass to get the developer attention they crave. The old chestnut holds of course. Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come. In fact, at a VC panel earlier this week at the customer conference, said, of course everyone wants to be a platform, but that doesn’t mean it’s always a realistic goal. “Third parties only engage when you achieve critical mass. You have to do something else and become a platform. You aren’t born fully formed as a platform.” Using Box as an example, O’Driscoll pointed out enterprise file sync and share may be a commodity today, but it was considered pretty darn innovative in the 2009 timeframe and Box managed to get a lot people using the product. In turn, that got the attention of developers, precisely because they believed they could make money by building on top of Box. Today, Box claims to have 47,000 developers building applications on top of its platform. Without that critical mass, whatever that number happens to be, only a few people are going to come, and so companies proactively try to attract developers to the platform by showing up at events like the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, where they have a large captive audience of developers at their disposal. And they are trying a number of strategies including offering cash and merchandize for the developers who write the most creative programs on their platforms. Many of the vendors are also holding free API workshops to help the developers who are interested in them get started or learn tips and tricks to make it easier to build applications. Some of the companies like Twitter, Yammer and Evernote of course have achieved that scale and companies are happily building on top of the platform for the very reasons that O’Driscoll outlined. They know that if they build there, they have a huge potential audience, so the investment of time and resources is worth it. Yammer takes it a step further by working with a startup incubator called the . Participants get $28K, access to additional funders, customers and mentors from Yammer and elsewhere to help them build their products. At least some of these projects will ultimately be built on top of Yammer (although it’s not a requirement). As said at that Box VC panel, one of the problems every technology company faces today is the dearth of programming talent in the market and that’s led to intense competition around hiring, and in turn to attract them to the platform each vendor is pushing so hard. “I’ve never seen the competition for developer talent as fierce as it is today,” she said. And that means you have a limited supply and great demand. For platform players, it means they have to work harder than ever to attract developers to build tools on top of their products. To paraphrase the old , “Mamas, you may want to let your babies grow up to be developers,” because there’s crazy competition for their attention and that’s a great place to be. In that context, today’s Hackathon attendees all win. |
Barbarians At The Password Gate | Igor Sill | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | We’re now using the Internet for a wide range of everyday activities, including online banking, stock trading, online shopping, bill paying, socializing, gaming, entertainment and online research. In the last few years there’s been a massive growth in the number of social networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Craigslist, Instagram, Tumblr. We share all kinds of personal details on these sites as well as music, pictures and videos, most of which we would certainly prefer to protect, safeguard and keep private. Unfortunately, all of these sites have been “cracked” by hackers who exposed passwords and other personal information from thousands of users. If you haven’t had your password hijacked, it’s really just a matter of time. Today you need to remember or store many passwords for all your online accounts, the list is endless. If you’re like most, you use the same or very similar password for each account, essentially your password is only as secure as the weakest site you access with it when a hacker cracks that site, you then become victim of identity theft. The criminal who has stolen your personal data can use it to fraudulently obtain goods and services in your name. A hacker armed with the right password can get almost anything of yours including hijacking cloud-storage accounts, accessing your bank account, obtain credit cards in your name, apply for a new drivers license or passport in your name, then, simply steal money directly from your bank account. Identity theft is occurring more and more frequently, it happens to thousands every day. In addition to threats we face from website cracking, most of us have at some point had our smartphones and tablets misplaced, lost or stolen making it easier for these thieves to exploit our misfortune. According to the KPMG Data Loss Barometer, 1 billion people have been affected by lost and stolen information in the last five years. Unfortunately, the more personal details we make available, the more exposed we become to online identity theft. Hackers can access your personal life’s assets from anywhere on the globe with an internet connection, and from a virtually untraceable location. Hackers generally buy your password from data breaches. As you have probably already heard, a gang of Russian hackers, codenamed CyberVor, accomplished one of the biggest data breaches in history. CyberVor cracked 1.2 billion usernames and passwords, along with 540 million email addresses from 420,000 sites, according to Hold Security. More than likely, you’re already using more than a few of those compromised sites. CyberVor will most likely sell that information on a per name, per account basis to individual hackers with criminal intent. These hacks are personally devastating and cost businesses billions of dollars every year. So, you probably need to start thinking about protecting yourself. One way that CyberVor may have stolen that much information is through SQL, the structured query language used by popular databases which is where most sites store user information. This was the method used by hackers to breach the retailer, Target. The number of data breaches so far this year represents a 20.5% increase over the same time period last year and continues to grow at an increased rate, says the Identity Theft Resource Center, in a issued last week. Large-scale password cracking like CyberVor’s is simply a process of exploiting system security flaws to recover passwords from stored data on your computer or other devices or running brute force attacks. However, the real trouble begins when groups like CyberVor sell the data they’ve stolen to individual hackers. Let’s say an individual hacker purchases your email password or one of your social network passwords. That hacker can use that particular account as a tool to exploit website account recovery methods for your other accounts. They’ll initiate password reset and wait for the email to arrive, or use popular features like “Login with ‘your favorite social network’” to access your other accounts. Once the hacker has reset your password, they’re in charge and have full unauthorized access to your accounts, internet websites and sometimes your computer. With so many company websites being hacked this year, news of yet another major data breach seems routine. JPMorgan Chase’s announcement this week that it may have been the target of a major cyber attack is a sign that hackers have found a way to breach one of the most protected computer systems in our economy. Successful breaches against financial institutions are unusual because banks have the strongest cyber security of any industry. JPMorgan Chase said it plans to spend $250 million on cyber security protection this year. Chase may have been breached through the negligence of one of its own employees, who personal computer was hacked in order to enter Chase’s network, according to the Wall Street Journal. So, how secure are you with that secret password of yours, that singular protective word that’s supposed to consist of both upper case, lower case string of alpha characters and numerics that you can barely remember? It’s purposely so super secret because it’s used to authenticate your identity so only you can gain access to your most treasured assets. Its so difficult to remember that most will store their passwords in their browser for convenience. The obvious problem with saving your difficult to remember passwords in your browser is that it’s easy for someone who gains access to your computer to instantly access all your passwords. What happens when you do forget your password? Well there are ample, readily available solutions for retrieving forgotten passwords. Password cracking is generally a process of recovering/resetting passwords from stored data from your computer or other devices so as to recover the forgotten passwords, but of course, in the wrong hands it is conveniently used for gaining unauthorized access to your computer, accounts and internet websites. How easy is it to “crack” your password? In the “old days” thieves used software tools, such as Cain & Abel for cracking the password sequences (hash). This sort of tool used CPU core power for cracking and converting passwords into a plaintext form. So, assuming your password was complex and sufficiently strong (password which includes upper and lower case, alphanumeric and special characters), it would take many weeks and possibly years to process the plaintext from hash. Besides this method, there are other ways at a thief’s disposal for password cracking such as by merely guessing your password (using your pet’s name is a common mistake), by using tools such as keyloggers, phishing attacks, social engineering, dumpster diving, peeking over your shoulder, or of course, buying it directly from cyber thieves like CyberVor, etc. But of course, the easiest and most efficient is by use of easily downloadable freeware designed specifically to locate your password. There are many available online, Hashcat, Rainbow Crack, PWAudit, Accent RAR, and a new super-fast password cracker developed by Ivan Golubev, IGHashGPU, to name a few. Ivan’s cracker tool can crack approximately 790 Million hashes per second, finding that hidden password in seconds. Amazing. So, it’s important to create strong passwords that are different for each of your accounts and it’s strongly recommended that you update those passwords regularly. Truth be known, password security depends heavily on the attack method. People often think that a short password of random characters such as “+*4F#0$” is super secure, but actually a long string of combined random words such as “ferrarimonkeydatemonger” is actually far stronger. This added length causes uncertainty and is computationally more difficult to crack. Essentially, avoid real words that a hacker or cyber thief will find in a dictionary. And, certainly avoid the simple to remember, simple to crack: 123456, Iloveyou, 0000, Fido, etc. Stronger password security can be had via two-factor authentication (2FA) which split the password between two different systems and devices, making it very effective, but not perfect. It means that hackers need to crack two codes instead of one. A higher level, and dare I say, far more secure is the multi-factor authentication (MFA) being implemented by major software vendors, telecommunications, governments and financial institutions. Newer MFA solutions provide tokenless security and give formal verified proof by constantly shifting the user password. The MFA market is understandably growing at a feverish rate and expected to reach $5.5 Billion by 2017 according to Markets and Markets latest research report. Microsoft’s newly released Office 365 products offers an advanced multi-factor authentication, Swivel Secure, as their safeguard to insure password security in the federated cloud. Of course, Microsoft and other vendors are even more concerned over enterprise-wide security for large-scale organizations, thus are evolving towards the data federation model which provides an organization with the ability to aggregate data from divergent sources so it can be used for all aspects of corporate business purposes. This federated model is especially useful for those organizations moving to the “cloud”. The next level of advanced password security is biometric authentication, essentially the process of determining whether someone is actually who they say they are via fingerprint or facial features. Of the many varieties of strong authentication options, provides strong security, simplicity and user convenience. Fingerprint biometrics are indeed stronger because they cannot be easily faked, altered or stolen. If you’re seriously concerned about your password, and you should be, strengthen it using the suggestions above or start using biometrics and/or multi-factor authentication as a company or as a user. You really need to be protected. |
null | Rajat Suri | 2,014 | 9 | 1 | null |
Netflix Vs. Verizon Vs. Consumer: Who Wins? | Dror Gill | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | Today’s consumer is streaming more video than ever before. Netflix alone has increased its subscribers by more than 20 million in the past two years, totaling 50 million subscribers as of . It’s no wonder, then, that the increase in video consumption is not without consequences for streaming services and ISPs. The news media has recently highlighted a drawn-out dispute between Verizon and Netflix, with Netflix blaming Verizon for its congested network and failing to provide the consistent bandwidth required to enable a high-quality service for Netflix customers. Netflix even to its customers blaming their poor experience on Verizon’s networks. Source: Eventually, Verizon that forced Netflix to withdraw these messages, with Verizon blaming Netflix for continued traffic problems due to its limited choice of transit providers.Verizon’s VP of regulatory affairs, David Young, even showed the following diagram in a , claiming there is no congestion on Verizon’s own network, only on the link from Netflix to Verizon through their choice of transit providers. Source: Verizon The debate has continued with Netflix claiming that Verizon should upgrade its connectivity to these transit providers to solve the bottleneck issue. Young that Netflix should use paid peering and pay Verizon for the inbound traffic flowing into its network. And the battle goes on. This dispute is just the beginning of the Internet bottleneck issue. Not only do on-demand video services such as YouTube and Netflix now account for over 50 percent of all North American Internet traffic, but Cisco recently reported in its report that by 2018, video will comprise a whopping 79 percent of global consumer Internet traffic. Whether or not streaming services and ISPs eventually sign peering agreements to settle the disputes, there are still several possible solutions to the video bandwidth problem. An obvious one is to reduce video bitrates in order to lower the bandwidth requirements of the streamed video files. However, because video quality is directly related to the bitrate allocated to the video stream, blindly lowering the bitrate will result in a poor viewing experience and unsatisfied customers—an option that is unacceptable in the age of retina displays and UHD 4k televisions. Another solution is caching the most frequently viewed video files at the network edges. This ensures that when a popular video file is being requested by a user, it can be streamed from a location that is close to the user’s physical location, and does not have to travel again over the Internet backbone. Since most of the online video traffic is generated by a relatively small number of popular streams, caching those streams can be cost-effective when taking into account the storage costs of the cached files vs. the delivery costs of each copy that travels over the network. Adaptive bitrate streaming is another common solution used by content delivery networks. This method detects a user’s bandwidth and CPU capacity in real time, then adjusts the quality of a video stream accordingly to prevent overloading a user’s connection with more bitrate than it can handle. While this strategy incurs additional storage and encoding costs, it can eliminate buffering and provide consistent streaming on both high-end and low-end connections. Finally, there’s media optimization, which takes an already-compressed video stream, analyzes its perceptual properties, and encodes it to a lower bitrate to increase streaming speeds without affecting the original video quality. This would be like taking a ball of modeling clay and squeezing it to make it smaller: It still has the same amount of clay, but occupies a smaller amount of space. Some forms of media optimization may struggle to maintain the quality of the video while reducing file size, but when done correctly using a reliable perceptual quality measure, this process can reduce a bitrate and file size by 20-50 percent while retaining the full perceptual quality. While these major players continue to sort through the congestion issues, utilizing current solutions like caching, adaptive bitrate streaming and media optimization can alleviate the bandwidth bottleneck problem while providing a win-win-win situation for content providers, telcos and end users. |
null | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 8 | null |
The Feds Found The Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht Thanks To A Leaky CAPTCHA | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | You may have heard that the infamous Dread Pirate Robets AKA Ross Ulbricht’s was taken down thanks to a problem in his anonymous Tor server. Now, however, has shown us just how the Feds found Ulbricht’s server and, additionally, the pirate himself. A hole in the Silk Road’s anonymity appeared because of a leaky CAPTCHA prompt. , as we all well know, is the little box that some sites use to prevent robots from filling out forms. If misconfigured, it will point to the server to which it is connected. On a non-anonymous server this would be a non-issue. However, Ulbricht’s anonymous server was misconfigured and sent out the actual IP address of the Silk Road machines with every hit to the login page. The government described their process in a : “The Subject IP Address caught our attention because, if a hidden service is properly configured to work on Tor, the source IP address of traffic sent from the hidden service should appear as the IP address of a Tor node, as opposed to the true IP address of the hidden service, which Tor is designed to conceal. When I typed the Subject IP Address into an ordinary (non-Tor) web browser, a part of the Silk Road login screen (the CAPTCHA prompt) appeared. Based on my training and experience, this indicated that the Subject IP Address was the IP address of the SR Server, and that it was ‘leaking’ from the SR Server because the computer code underlying the login interface was not properly configured at the time to work on Tor.” Is this real? As many have noted, there is some possibility that and that this admission is a cover but, if Occam is to be believed, parsimony will out. In short, Ulbricht mixed anonymized and non-anonymous resources and misconfigured things to release his IP. One would presume this won’t happen again as thousands of CAPTCHA prompts wink out of existence, but it shows just how hard it is to be completely invisible online. |
Tune In On Tuesday For The Launch Of TechCrunch Radio On Sirius XM 102 Indie | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | TechCrunch is about to embark on a brand new adventure. We’re coming at you in a way that you’ve never heard before. World, prepare yourself for TechCrunch Radio! We’re collaborating with the fine folks at Sirius XM to connect with our readers in a brand new way. John Biggs and I will host the show, and each week, we’ll dedicate a good portion of our show to a TechCrunch pitch-off, where startups can call in and pitch their product over the radio to John, myself, and a guest judge. Winners will grab tickets to . We’ll be launching the show on Tuesday, September 9, live from the . For the first half of the show, we’ll be discussing the launch of the new iPhone, which is going down just hours before. Then, we’ll pluck a few startups from the Alley and let them pitch their wares. TechCrunch Radio will air every Tuesday evening at 3pm PT/6pm ET for six weeks. If it’s a success (and it will be), we’ll keep at it until we’re as big as Howard Stern. If you’re a fan of , our , or our regional , chances are you’re going to love this show. Plus, we’ll be able to chat out the news and the latest issues outside of the hellish depths of our comments system. John and I are excited and honored to be connecting with you guys this way, and we hope you’re excited, too. The 6-week series will debut on , at live from the TechCrunch technology conference. Each week, “TechCrunch Radio” will air Tuesdays at with a replay at 6:00 pm PT, drive time for both coasts, on , channel 102, and through the SiriusXM Internet Radio App on smartphones and other connected devices, as well as online at . Subscribers will also be able to listen via SiriusXM On Demand through the SiriusXM Internet Radio App for smartphones and other mobile devices and online at . You can get a . |
Turning The Phone Call Into The New Click | Jason Spievak | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | Remember when you had to pull out a phone book when you needed to contact a business for more information? Today, those yellow phone books get a quizzical look from my kids as we lug them directly to the recycle bin. These days, a few keystrokes and clicks allow us to conduct detailed research on a product and even complete our transactions online. This evolution has defined the information economy and turned Google into the money-making giant it is today. But despite the power of the click, the phone call has been getting a lot of attention lately. Case in point, Google recently announced one of the most meaningful advances in search since AdWords launched over a decade ago — . This new tool lets advertisers get the kind of attribution data for calls that Google has long provided for clicks. Given that the largest Internet company in the world is investing in product innovation for calls, it’s inevitable that marketers are taking notice that voice is still highly relevant — and growing. In fact, the growth of mobile search is driving tens of billions of phone calls from consumers to businesses. So, call tracking in AdWords is a great start. But is it enough? Google isn’t the only one focusing on calls. Twitter began earlier this year, and Facebook is rumored to add the function soon, enabling users to connect with businesses in the easiest way — directly over the phone. Twitter and Facebook are proving the value of advertising on their platforms by helping advertisers generate quantifiable results in the form of leads and sales, not just brand awareness and engagement. But why the resurgence in the seemingly “old-school” action of making a phone call? We all know that mobile is big. We use our phones for everything. In fact, next year it’s expected that local search queries on mobile will outpace those on desktop. And Facebook just reported that more than half of its daily users connect exclusively on mobile, the channel where Facebook is experiencing nearly all of its revenue growth. But despite our addiction to mobile devices for getting our information and finding merchants, none of us like to click through multiple mobile web pages, thumb in our billing info, or fill out forms on a tiny screen. For significant or considered purchases — like insurance, credit cards, cars, trips, satellite TV, plumbers, restaurants, etc. — people want answers before pulling the purchase trigger. That’s why we call businesses tens of billions of times each year. Google says that have already connected directly with businesses from the search engine page using click-to-call. And according to , mobile search will generate more than 70 billion calls from consumers to businesses in 2018. So why should businesses care? While clicks to a website convert into customers about 1 to 2 percent of the time, inbound calls convert into customers 30 to 50 percent of the time, and typically at a higher average order value. The bottom line is that people are more likely to call when they’re further along the purchase path — when they have questions or are ready to make a big purchase and want to complete the process with a human. Google’s move to connect clicks and calls is arguably one of the most disruptive innovations in search because it’s forcing marketers to re-think their playbooks. Attribution is no longer just about online channels. Offline matters, too. And as Facebook and Twitter build out their click-to-call solutions, the need for actionable intelligence around those calls will only continue to intensify (think marketing automation five years ago). It’s time for marketers to think beyond the click. |
3D Printed Hands Just Got Better Thanks To These DIY Wolverine Claws | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | What could be better than giving disabled kids a new pair of hands? How about slapping a set of claws on those hands! Aaron Brown, a maker and volunteer for the , has been building for kids who are missing fingers. These hands are given away for free and the group has made countless children . Now they can be happier. Brown built a set of Wolverine claws that are compatible with the available on . “The Comic loving nerd inside of me (along with some Facebook friends) said there is no way I can make a Wolverine hand without CLAWS…so I modeled some in Sketchup the morning before the makerfaire, printed ‘em, spray painted ‘em silver and velcro’d ‘em on there. Turned out pretty darn cool!” said Brown. “I worked for about 7 years in nightclub security, with a few less exciting factory jobs before that.
Playing around with technology has always been a passion and hobby on the side and when my grandfather passed away unexpectedly last year, I was left with a small amount of funds in his will – just enough to start building my own business,” he said. Now he is working on a small 3D print shop and has been building Wolverine-themed hands for kids since he showed the first hand It’s great to see 3D printing become truly useful and it’s even more exciting to see folks who can move from part-time nightclub bouncer to full time maker with a little time and effort. |
Join Us For A Screening Of Print The Legend, A Movie About Makerbot And Formlabs, On Sunday | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | If you like 3D printing and you’re free on Sunday night, I’d like to take you to a movie. is an amazing (and dramatic) tale of Makertbot, Formlabs, and 3D printing in general. You can and I’ll be leading a panel discussion afterwards with Co-Director J. Clay Tweel, Executive Producer Walter Kortschak, and Co-Producer Andrew Kortschak. It’s an exciting opportunity to grab an advance screening of a great movie. And it’s free! We’ll show the , our Disrupt Venue. It starts at 4pm. Here’s the invitation. Hope to see you there! The TechCrunch Disrupt SF community is invited to an exclusive advance screening of , a thought-provoking film that follows the rise and challenges of start-ups MakerBot and Formlabs as they race to bring 3D printing to your desktop and into your life. Be one of the first to see this provocative new Netflix documentary premiering Sept. 26 at New York and Los Angeles theaters and on Netflix. is both the definitive 3D Printing Documentary – capturing a technology in the midst of its “Macintosh Moment” – and a compelling tale about what it takes to live the American Dream in any field. Immediately following the screening, John Biggs will moderate a panel featuring some of the creators of : Co-Director J. Clay Tweel, Executive Producer Walter Kortschak, and Co-Producer Andrew Kortschak. Sunday, September 7, 2014
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
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The Disrupt SF Hackathon Has Begun | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | The at Disrupt SF just kicked off, and the tables at Pier 48 ( ) are already full of busy coders. Teams have a little less than 24 hours to build some cool products and prototypes, which they’ll present tomorrow morning, competing for a variety of prizes for judges who will be rating all of the presentations. Before we started letting people in, Jordan Crook and I interviewed some of the teams waiting outside. As you can see in the video above, they’d traveled from as far away as Berlin, and they offered a variety of strategies on how they might win. [gallery ids="1053392,1053393,1053394,1053395,1053396,1053397,1053398,1053399,1053400,1053401,1053402,1053403,1053405,1053406"] We’d like to take a moment to briefly cover the rules for criteria needed to advance and earn two tickets to Disrupt SF. 1) Your team will need to earn a 3 or above from the judges 2) Each judge will rate each team on a scale of 1-5 and ratings are then averaged to get the score 3) Teams that advance will be given two tickets in total per team to Disrupt SF 4) Each team will need to nominate the two individuals that will receive Disrupt tickets ahead of the hack presentations on Challenge Post Individuals eligible for Disrupt tickets will receive a code via email and can . |
3Doodler Launches New Accessories Including A Much-Needed, Anti-Burninating Foot Pedal | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | In todays small, hand-held 3D printer news, we learn that 3Doodler (think of a hot glue gun with a lot more usability) has released a few new accessories including a foot pedal that allows you to extrude filament without having to press the button on the device. I played with the a few months ago and was duly impressed. In the right hands – and with the right degree of intensity – you can make some cool stuff. For example, the company commissioned a copy of Tokyo Tower for IFA in Berlin. They also announced new nozzle endings as well as twelve new plastics. There is also something called the DoodleStand, a stand that allows you to to roll a straight line of filament. The company also announced that they’ve sold 100,000 units, an exciting milestone for a small company run by former toy builders. |
What Is The Fate Of Apple’s iPhone 5C? | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | With Apple releasing new iPhones next week, the question arises: what will happen to its existing models? With recent releases, Apple has kept older devices around to serve it at lower price points in certain regions. But which older devices are going, which are staying and what will the prices be? Just as a thought exercise, let’s talk this out. What I would conjecture is that the iPhone 5C is going away, a move that that wouldn’t come as too much of a shock to most, though sales of the device have appeared to pick up lately. Though I personally like the look and feel, and think that it’s well built, the perception is that it’s a ‘lower end’ device that packs older innards. Apple could easily drop it from the lineup to make room for a new ‘low end’ unit. That new low end? Probably the iPhone 4S. Yes, it’s 3 years old, but the hardware is still decent and runs iOS 7 (and iOS 8) just fine. But it’s also 3 years old — that means that Apple has had time to get the manufacturing costs for the device down, way down. By dedicating manufacturing facilities to making these older devices, and using parts and processes that have only gotten cheaper over the intervening years, Apple could afford to charge as little as $300-$350 for the 4S, making it a relatively attractive buy in and other markets were it needs more penetration outside of the ‘subsidy-rich’ US. As far as the iPhone 5S, I’d guess that will probably stick around too — as a ‘medium end’ subsidized model. If Apple is able to get it to clock in at around $500 then it could have real success as a prestige buy for the mid-tier Chinese customer. And Apple could probably find a way to subsidize it down to the $50-$100 range in the US. Because of its status as a premium unit — with premium materials — it wouldn’t fall into the same ‘unapologetically plastic’ perception trap that the 5C did. Too expensive to be considered ‘cheap and cheerful’ but too cheap (perceptively) to be considered a status symbol. Of course, I could be wrong and the 5C could stick around for another year. We’ll see. |
Why Breach Detection Is Your New Must-Have, Cyber Security Tool | Paz Eshel | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | Cyber attacks are all over the news, and it seems like no one is immune — , , Adobe and included. So why are CIOs still fighting cyber criminals with one hand tied behind their backs? Shockingly, most companies are still relying on outdated, only partially effective methods to protect their sensitive data, mainly with technology that focuses on preventing incoming attacks. But actually stopping bad guys from slipping inside enterprise networks and getting their hands on sensitive data is nearly impossible these days. In fact, among organizations with over 5,000 computers, over 90 percent have an active breach of some sort at any given time. What’s worse, those organizations may not even know about it. It’s time for CIOs to start focusing on the next line of defense in the war against cyber crime: an emerging area called breach detection, which focuses on identifying long-tail intrusions after they happen and mitigating their damage, partly through the use of big-data technologies. Your company’s information security may depend on it. Surviving a shark attack is fairly simple: As long as you swim faster than the person next to you, chances are you’ll make it. Not so long ago, security was very much the same. As long as your company had better-than-average security, you were likely safe because someone else would get hit first. Hackers were looking for the “low hanging fruit” — the easy breaches. Online criminals mainly used a broad “spray and pray” approach to opportunistically find targets. In those days, “signature-based” security solutions, which tried to identify known, malicious code patterns and block them, made sense. If one company saw a new threat, a signature could be written for it and distributed to others to protect them from infection. Fast forward to today. As organizations have bolstered their security, hackers also evolved. Attacks today are more sophisticated and targeted than ever before. Rather than sending generic malware, hackers today carefully plot each and every attack, using unique, “zero-day” exploits that render signature-based protections nearly useless. While a number of new security companies, like FireEye, have surfaced in recent years to try to combat this type of attack, hackers continue finding creative ways around these tools. Some hackers go so far as to buy all of the same, state-of-the-art intrusion prevention systems their targets use so they can perfectly replicate the target’s exact security environment — then test their attack and virtually guarantee its success. The initial intrusion in a typical breach scenario takes minutes to a few hours — in some rare cases, days. The real damage, however, occurs hackers get around the first line of defense, making new, after-the-fact breach-detection efforts so critical. Once inside a target, it’s like discovering a gold mine. Hackers study their victim’s internal network, carefully extend their foothold and then begin mining the valuable data they find for months, if not years, before being detected — usually by accident. Mandiant, for example, recently reported that APT1, one of China’s cyber-espionage units, attacked 141 victim companies across 20 industries and stole many terabytes of compressed data in sustained attacks averaging 365 days each. The longest attack lasted more than four years. The most concerning part of all this is that very few organizations are now using new breach-detection technologies and can actually discover these ongoing breaches themselves, meaning attacks are even more destructive for their victims. Despite numerous alerts, Target, for example, didn’t detect the recent breach that led to 40 million stolen credit card numbers. Rather, it was only after the U.S. Department of Justice notified the company in mid-December that Target investigators went back to figure out what happened. According to a report published by Verizon last year, this is not uncommon — only about 13 percent of security breaches are discovered internally. All these factors point to the need for robust breach detection to provide a “last line of defense” against these attacks, instead of just focusing on blocking the initial wave of the intrusion. While after-the-fact detection is not a new concept, the old generation of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technologies generally fall short in today’s data-center environment. Why? Next-gen breach detection is solving, in essence, a classic big-data problem: To be effective, these tools need to analyze a great variety of data in high volume, and at great velocity, to determine potential breaches. Most important, the tools must be precise; too many false positives and their reports will quickly be ignored, just like the boy who cried wolf. A new crop of next-generation startups are working on this. They include Aorato, Bit9, Cybereason, Exabeam, Fortscale, LightCyber, Seculert, and Vectra Networks. Rather than relying on detecting known signatures, these companies marry big-data techniques, such as machine learning, with deep cyber security expertise to profile and understand user and machine behavior patterns, enabling them to detect this new breed of attacks. And to avoid flooding security professionals in a sea of useless alerts, these companies try to minimize the number of alerts and provide rich user interfaces that enable interactive exploration and investigation. To help illustrate how these new technologies work, think of all of the online “breadcrumbs” that an attacker inevitably leaves behind during each step of the attack. He generates network connections to command and control servers, for example. He moves across the organization in ways that are ever so slightly different from what’s normal; he may use whatever credentials he can get his hands on to try to access sensitive resources (e.g. tries to access proprietary code on development servers using a sales executive’s login). New breach-detection startups can sense all of these movements and changes. Combined with an intimate understanding of how hackers operate, they are able to finally piece together all the puzzle pieces in real-time before more significant damage has occurred. There is a lot at stake here. In the end, solutions that effectively cut through the noise and point up just a handful of highly relevant, actionable security alerts will likely become an important “last line of defense” and a key component of the next-gen enterprise security stack. |
From #hackdisrupt Project To App Store Product, A Hackathon Success Story | Leslie Hitchcock | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | Walking into the back in May, wasn’t sure how her hack project would be perceived. It wasn’t easy to coax her partners to join her in building an app which helped women (and so-inclined men) to organize their trips to the nail salon, especially when most of the other hackers were using Oculus Rift and other more popular technologies. Luckily that didn’t stop Ivanova and her co-creators Hristo Hristov and Paul Llanos. Their hackathon project, , was by the TechCrunch judges. This was not the end, but the beginning of a determination to continue building Indulge and ultimately launch it as a product in the App Store. “At the hackathon we just needed to productize, to make sure it works but then when you get out of the hackathon and have to develop a real working app, that’s when the challenges came,” Ivanova told me. Receiving an avalanche of positive feedback following the coverage of Indulge, Ivanova, Hristov and Llanos decided to push it from simply a hack weekend project and commit the time to developing a complete project, setting their sights on launching in the App Store. Capitalizing on the momentum from the Hackathon, the team began working on completing Indulge. Development of the app stretched into July and took about three months. Almost all of work was completed during nights and on weekends since the trio all have day-jobs. The bulk of that time was spent compiling a proprietary database of nail polishes, swatting bugs and fleshing out the product. During that time, Ivanova and the team collected feedback from their beta testers and were even approached by a nail polish brand about a potential partnership. And now? From participation in the Hackathon the coverage on TechCrunch “random people in the tech industry know our app which we couldn’t have done on our own.” From here they are looking to prioritize and add features, based on feedback from their strong user base. When asked if she had any suggestions for hackers about to enter the Disrupt SF Hackathon on Saturday, Ivanova said when she walked in the doors in May she was hesitant that her idea would be worth something and wondered if anyone would like it. “Don’t get discouraged. You never know, being different is a good thing. We were scanning nail polishes and people around us were playing with the Oculus Rift. Having a different idea might be the winning formula in the end.” So who will come out of this weekend’s Hackathon, and will they successfully push their projects to successful products? Let’s find out! |
Remember, Disrupt SF And Hackathon Is At A New Venue This Year | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | Since the dawning of time, was held at the San Francisco Design Concourse. But no more! We have a new and improved location for 2014 and consider this a friendly reminder not to go to the old location. This time the show will be held at Pier 48, just south across the 3rd Street bridge by AT&T Park. It’s easy to get to and there is a ton of parking. So remember, and not the Design Concourse! See you there! [googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m14!1m8!1m3!1d3153.619891148349!2d-122.387355!3d37.77551!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x0%3A0xcfc15409ea2310de!2sPier+48!5e0!3m2!1sen!2sus!4v1410024462681&w=600&h=450] |
Three Marks Of Real Data Science | Michael Howard | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | As a venture investor looking to invest in data-driven companies, telling real data science apart from pseudo science is difficult, but it’s critically important. Investing in a data science application company won’t deliver long-term returns if the company uses quackery. Real data science involves using complex algorithms to collect masses of data, analyze all of it, and convert it into real answers. There’s a lot of pseudo data science being peddled by software companies that claim they can turn data into gold. While these alchemists dangle buzzwords like “big data” and “machine learning,” they really aren’t doing any data science; they’re just querying subsets of data to deliver limited findings. So what is real data science and how can you spot software companies that are really using it to deliver meaningful business insights? Here are three ways to tell if the software company you’re considering funding uses real data science. The first level of distinction between real and pseudo data science involves the difference between a query and an algorithm. Data science uses algorithms to collect and analyze up to thousands, millions, or billions of rows of columns, automatically discovering new relationships in data. Then, these algorithms learn and adapt, getting more and more accurate over time to spot current and future trends – otherwise known as “machine learning.” Using real data science, a predictive analytics to solution might discover, on its own, the top reasons why sales deals go south; a BI tool might take the information the algorithm generates and create a rendered report or workbook showing action-oriented tasks. Algorithms continually adapt and change as they process new data and glean new learnings. On the other hand, queries are simply one-time questions and they never learn from themselves. A database query, however complex, is not data science. A query asks a single question such as “sum sales by territory” but doesn’t provide any actionable insights. The second level of distinction between real and pseudo data science concerns the notion of “model richness” used to create and understand predictive models. To understand this distinction, let’s review what a “predictive model” is. In the case of predicting whether a sales deal will close or not, for example, a predictive model needs data from which to construct a complex model and then make a prediction. This data can come from CRM applications like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, which were designed, up to a point, to capture the dynamic and complex nature of a sales process. Imagine the tortuous steps in takes to sell an American-made plane to an airline in a foreign country. It’s tough, complicated, and takes a long time. But here’s the catch. Salesforce, for example, doesn’t keep a history of a deal for more than 90 days. So in order to understand everything that went into a deal, you have to use data science to gather various data from myriad sources to create a “rich model.” Taking the sales data scenario a step further, the fake data scientists don’t have rich data sets, so they provide only a slim view of a deal – basically, whether a deal was “won” or “lost.” In contrast, real data science would use a rich data model based on a comprehensive, relevant data set to provide accurate, actionable and highly valuable insights. Data science uses “temporal” technology to analyze every aspect of the sales process, and in so doing, can characterize a winning versus losing sales cycle. Rich data sets are hard to come by. Only a few predictive analytics companies have access to data sets large enough to enable scientists to score them to provide not just answers, but accurate predictions about potential future outcomes. Many software companies try to get around having rich data sets by claiming they use more signals than anybody else. A signal is a single data point, for example from a government database on education. Some companies engage in “signal spin,” counting every column of data sources they could potentially use (but usually don’t) to increase their signal count. To distinguish the heavyweights from lightweights, you have to have a data scientist dig deeper and start reviewing confusion matrices and F1 scores. A simpler way to tell when a company is engaging in signal spin is by asking a single question: What are the top 10 attributes considered in your algorithm? Lightweights can’t typically get past No. 3, let alone 4,000. The bottom line: Don’t let the quantity of signals mask the quality required to develop accurate and rich models. In most cases, the signals cited aren’t even used. Telling real data science apart from pseudo science isn’t easy. But if you’re considering investing in a software company that claims to use real data science, just ask them these three crucial questions to find out if they’re real scientists or quacks. Pseudo science, like alchemy, may look good on the surface, but dig a bit deeper, and its fake claims are simply too good to be true. Don’t get stuck with lead and alchemy when the only thing that will deliver long-term financial gains is real data science. |
Online Auction House Catawiki Scores €10M Series B Led By Accel Partners | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | , an online auction house that targets ‘exceptional’ items — from vintage comic books to antique cars — has closed a €10 million Series B Round led by VC Accel Partners. In addition, Berlin-based investor and company builder Project A Ventures, Booking.com’s former CMO Arthur Kosten and Dutch media and Internet entrepreneur Willem Sijthoff, an existing investor, also participated in the round. Moving the complete traditional auction process online, Netherlands-headquartered Catawiki is attempting to differentiate itself from other more general online auction houses by buying and selling what it terms “exceptional objects” and collectables — with a focus on truly unique items. It offers 35 different categories of items for auction, such as comics, video games, antique cars and fine wine. To give you an idea of how this translates in reality, recent sales have included first edition Tintin comics, Rembrandt etchings, dinosaur fossils and Jaguar E-Type sports cars, apparently. So way out my league. Interestingly, however, Catawiki wasn’t originally focused on auctions. “I am an avid collector of European comic books and wanted to build a great tool to manage my own collection,” explains René Schoenmakers, who, alongside Marco Jansen, founded the company in 2008. “To be able to do this in an easy way, Marco and I created a catalogue with detailed descriptions of all existing comic books which collectors could add missing items to, like Wikipedia. This is where the name Catawiki comes from, by cataloguing in a wiki way.” Soon the duo expanded the site into other categories, based on feedback from the Catawiki community, before the search for a way to monetise what they’d created began. “We started to think of a way to make money out of the website and tried different business models. We tried the auction model with real auctioneers in December 2011, instantly gaining a lot of traction. Since then, we completely focus on this model with weekly auctions of exceptional items and collectables, curated by real auctioneers,” says Schoenmakers. To that end, the company employs professional auctioneers and experts in their respective fields to vet and curate what goes up on sale. In fact, of its 70 current employees, 42 are auction specialists, so perhaps not as scalable as a more genuine tech play in that regard. The idea, of course, is to validate what items are put on sale and provide greater peace of mind for buyers. Meanwhile, sellers are advised on how to price items. In other words, this is something quite different from eBay, which Schoenmakers name-checks as Catawiki’s main, albeit legacy, competitor. “eBay is the main online competitor worldwide. It started out as a place where you could buy collectables and interesting things only, but now there is so much, including many new items and those with ‘buy me now’ prices. We are a focused site, and the curation by our auctioneers improves the experience for people who are interested in exceptional objects and collectables,” he says. Of course, traditional auction houses are also competitors. Though, in addition to operating purely online, Schoenmakers says Catawiki competes on price, undercutting the typical 25-30 per cent commission charged. “We charge a commission of 12.5 per cent excluding VAT to the seller and 7.5 per cent excluding VAT to the buyer. So in total, our commission is 20 per cent on everything auctioned.” As well as its Netherlands base in Assen and Amsterdam, the company also has operations in Belgium, Germany and France, and says it will use the investment to expand throughout more of Europe. It also plans to extend the number of specialist auction categories available, and boost its marketing activity and head-count. |
When Old-Economy Jobs Become New-Economy Gigs | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | I love the sharing economy because it’s efficient. Got some spare time? Become a TaskRabbit! Spare space? AirBNB it! A car and nowhere to go? Drive for Uber or Lyft! The taxi industry is a regulatory-capture nightmare. Disrupt ’em ’til they’re dead? Don’t mind if you do! …And yet our 21st-century sharing-economy dream is beginning to look worryingly like a 19th-century robber-baron nightmare. When sharing-economy gigs supplement your income from your job, that’s great, everybody wins. But when sharing-economy gigs your job? That’s different. As the , sharing-economy workers: are less microentrepreneurs than microearners. They often work seven-day weeks, trying to assemble a living wage from a series of one-off gigs […] With piecemeal gigs easier to obtain than long-term employment, a new class of laborer, dependent on precarious work and wages, is emerging. -emerging is probably a better word. In the early 20th century, the labor movement won workers , weekends, paid time off, etc. Before then, most labored like , working long hours all week with no job security, no benefits, no vacations, no real prospect of advancement… …in other words, exactly what you get today when you work at sharing-economy gigs, rather than at, you know, a job. Not that technology is necessarily making those easier either. Another recent piece on scheduling algorithms, which, in the language of Silicon Valley, are ‘ .’ But on the ground, this: pits sophisticated workplace technology against some fundamental requirements of parenting, with particularly harsh consequences for poor single mothers […] Flexibility — an alluring word for white-collar workers — can have a darker meaning for many low-income workers as a euphemism for unstable hours or paychecks Don’t get me wrong. I’m an engineer. I love efficiency and optimization. But it’s hard to simultaneously optimize for both profits and people. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that algorithms which boost the former often tend to be pretty hard on the latter. Similarly, I’m a big fan and frequent user of Uber, TaskRabbit, and Instacart. I think it’s great that people can supplement their income that way. But at the same time, as I’ve : It’s hard to shake the feeling that, as in the 19th century, the world of work is dividing ever further between haves and have-nots–sharing-economy customers, and sharing-economy providers. For haves like us, . And if things are rough for the have-nots, hey, that’s not fault, right? That’s a simple side effect of supply and demand, combined with, you know, healthy competition. The sharing economy is some cutthroat shit: — Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) True, Uber and Lyft are in land-grab mode right now, and drivers are reaping the benefits. But land grabs don’t last forever, and there’s a glut of labor out there. “ ” Once the land grabs are over, most gig workers will be trivially replaceable, or even entirely –and will suffer the consequences. As Danny Crichton , the sharing economy and its algorithms can, in principle, have real benefits for its providers, too: workers have the ability to develop their own personalities and brands … startup labor marketplaces are including computational trust and reputation systems from the beginning, ensuring that employers and employees have an incentive to work together and share credit. This isn’t an entirely unmixed blessing–I’ve seen TaskRabbits sacrifice income in favor of reputation, and I suspect many customers use that tradeoff as leverage to pay them less–but on the whole it’s a good thing. Unfortunately those benefits pale and wither before the inexorable law of supply and demand. If there are too many providers and not enough consumers, too many have-nots and not enough haves, then most people who work in the burgeoning sharing economy are screwed. No scheduling algorithm or reputation system will solve that problem. So the real question remains: is technology faster than it’s ? Are we moving from a world, wherein most people contribute a little, to , wherein an ever-diminishing minority uses the lever of ever-improving technology to move the world to their liking, while more and more are excluded from and must fight and scrap to get by with endless dead-end, barely-livable ? That is one of this decade’s most important questions, and if the answer is “yes,” then the sharing economy is no solution. It’s barely even a band-aid. Image credit: Serfing the wave, |
The Long Fall | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | tech industry of an overinflated bubble is the new cause célèbre. Skeptics point to towering valuations of startups without revenue and the ability for some companies to command similar prices for their equity despite posting massive losses in the name of growth. Why would the fun stop? Despite the economy of the United States posting anemic growth in the aftermath of the 2007-8 economic crisis, its stock markets are trading near record highs in some cases, and local maximums in others. Money is cheap, companies are flush with cash, job growth has somewhat picked up after a host of setbacks, and there are signs here and there of a stiffening economic comeback. Given that, it might seem almost odd that a correction could be on the way for the industry of young, and young-ish technology companies — if things are getting better more broadly, why are things going to get worse in tech? There is no single answer, but a few facts are worth noting, given their potential to upset the economic balance that has funneled so much external cash into the technology space. The Federal Reserve’s program of quantitative easing is , and investors expect that, at some point in the future, the Fed will start to raise benchmark rates. That action will have the result of raising the price of money. Money has been incredibly cheap in recent years. The government, desperate to bolster a disintegrating economy, lowered the benchmark rate to a razor-thin 0.25 percent. Essentially, the cost of borrowing money for some parties — banks, for one — was reduced to nearly zero. In theory, this boosts liquidity by encouraging banks to loan more, spurring demand and, thus, the larger economy. That rate is going to go up. No one knows when, but there is that interest rate boosts could start in the not-too-distant future. Expect the incline to be slow — the fragility of the economy is well known. When the price of money goes up, several things happen: It’s not too hard to understand: If I take my dollar from that and put it over there, where I took it from becomes less valuable. This is not a quick process. Do not expect a 5,000-point decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but a decline in the value of technology companies, our subject, has a number of impacts. A venture capitalist once told me that his industry operates merely as an amped version of the tech-heavy NASDAQ. The impact of a weaker NASDAQ, even if modest in the public market, could therefore have an outsized impact on private companies and how they are invested in. A company whose stock price declines is a company that has less purchasing power. Many large acquisitions are executed with an amount of stock as part of the deal. When equity loses its value, when the share price of large tech companies declines, what they can, and may be willing to pay for other companies is reduced. This lowers venture capital returns. Adding to that, provided a large enough correction in the price of technology companies’ shares, the IPO window could close. And with exits to public companies already under pressure in terms of terms, another exit possibility for venture capitalists would slow. And if you’re a venture capitalist and don’t think that you are going to be able to generate a positive return on an investment because there is no viable exit point, you don’t pull the trigger. From the other side, if limited partners (LPs) see slipping share prices, falling deal sizes, and more malaise and miasma than mouth-watering returns, they may shake up their asset allocations. Less LP money means smaller venture capital funds, and thus less available cash for startups. Great companies will still be able to get money. It will become harder the further down you slide on the quality scale, which isn’t such a bad thing, given that we’re in a bit of a . This all comes at an awkward moment for some companies that continue to build themselves as if money were going to remain cheap. They have high burn rates, in other words. This is a lot of companies, and not just one, mind you. Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist at Benchmark, . He has a point: If you were hoping for several more nine-figure injections of cash to go public, let alone profitable, that cash that you expected to be waiting for you just might not be there. None of this is to say that a large number of incredibly valuable companies aren’t being built at the moment. It means that the price floor that the Instagram-Facebook deal set, and that has been used to price a handful of other mega-deals, might need some correction. More than a haircut, I’d imagine. So things are great at the moment, and they have the potential to be pretty good for some time. But as the price of money picks up, and some money leaves tech, things could become colder over time. If that sounds modest, it’s worth keeping in mind how great the tech industry has had it in recent years: Ever larger venture funds; blocks of cash from non-tech companies in the form of fleets of new accelerators and incubators; an IPO-willing public market with a taste for revenue growth in the face of expanding losses; and, of course, cash and equity-rich large tech companies who are so that they’re nailing down billion-dollar deals in rapid succession. Unsurprisingly, there are optimists in the mix. Marc Andreessen told that he doesn’t have a “crystal ball,” and that while “anything is possible,” he sees “no reason to have some elaborate negative theory at this time.” Gurley’s worries about risk don’t seem to faze Andreessen. Specifically, Andreessen doesn’t take the above argument too seriously, saying that “way too many people are wrapped around the axle on [quantitative easing], Fed policy, inflation fears, etc.” According to the venture capitalist, “[n]egative macroecon[mic] theories are everywhere.” Why is Andreessen bullish? “Reality is pretty prosaic.” By that, Andreessen means that “[p]eople keep going to work, companies keep getting started and evolving, consumers keep buying what they need and want — we muddle through.” That’s a decent encapsulation of a market economy, but it doesn’t deter the fact that macroeconomic and financial shifts can impact sectors and industries that have enjoyed a very long summer indeed. “Tech works better than ever and markets are bigger than ever,” said Andreessen. Again, correct. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a bit of froth in tech that could be shaken out when money gets a bit more expensive. Yo. |
What To Expect From Apple’s iPhone Event On September 9 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | Apple is hosting an event on September 9, and by all accounts it’s going to be a real barn burner. The company is set to announce new iPhones, and this much you can take to the bank, but rumors have also arisen suggesting we’ll see a brand new wearable device of some kind – the great and powerful ‘iWatch’ of legend. Apple will also probably showcase iOS 8, along with more details about features like HomeKit and Health/HealthKit that will probably be easier to demo now that developers have had time to build for them. Murmurs also say we’ll finally see Apple pull back the curtain on its long-rumored mobile payments play, and that launch could very well set the commerce world on its head. The next iPhone is almost certainly going to bring a larger display to Apple’s signature device, and most rumors agree that it will offer up both a . This will be a marked difference from the existing iPhone, given that Apple has remained committed to a 4-inch diagonal since introducing it on the iPhone 5 two years ago, at which point even that was a big step up from the 3.5-inch screen on all previous iPhone devices. In addition to a larger screen, expect Apple to introduce a , one that features softer edges when compared to the current look. Leaks and mock-ups based on supposed components from suppliers suggest it’ll have a lot in common with the design language Apple first introduced with the iPad mini, which then made its way into last year’s iPad Air. Most expect a thinner chassis as well, along with the new rounded corners. Touch ID will almost certainly reprise its role as Apple’s fancy fingerprint unlocked, especially given Apple’s decision to open up access to the tool to third-party developers and apps. It could feature prominently in Apple’s mobile payments plans, too, as an additional authentication layer. , also owing to how it can help its mobile payments efforts, and potentially for easier pairing between the new iPhone and its brand new mystery wearable. New materials used in the iPhone’s construction should include a strong sapphire-based composite of some kind that offers additional projection against scratching and breaking. , a manufacturer that specializes in sapphire production, and indications are that we’ll see this bear fruit, though some reports claim that this new tech might only be used in higher-end models of the iPhone, with standard reinforced glass used on less expensive versions. Finally, expect the usual spate of internal hardware improvements, including a more capable camera, better network connectivity (802.11ac Wi-Fi and LTE-Advanced are reasonable expectations), a boosted processor (A8 generation of Apple’s in-house system-on-a-chip) and more. While at this point it seems unlikely Apple will actually call its wearable the ‘iWatch,’ it’s still a useful portmanteau for whatever wrist-worn device Apple does launch. Rumors suggest we’ll see some kind of combo, and recent reports indicate that it could feature NFC and figure prominently in Apple’s mobile payment plans. In terms of detailed specs, so far we’ve heard precious little and seen nothing in terms of reputable parts leaks from the supply chain. The WSJ and NYT both agree that we’re probably going to get two sizes of screen, with both a . That screen will be made of a flexible, OLED material that curves around the wrist, say these same sources, and will be rectangular in shape. Apple’s iWatch has to offer something more than the basic feature set included in existing smartwatches like Pebble and Android Wear hardware, since neither has excited consumers in a way that makes the things fly off the shelves. If Apple wants to mainstream the wearable, it needs to impress out of the gate, and that could be part of the reason rumors say it won’t actually ship the device until early next year, despite an initial reveal next week. That would give software developers the time to build solid experiences for the platform, and it gives Apple more leeway in terms of ramping up production. We know that iOS 8 will arrive, and Apple has already revealed much of what the new software update will contain, including support for third-party keyboards, a new Health app and HealthKit APIs for developers, plus the HomeKit connected home software tools. Apple has revamped its own keyboard, too, and built-in automatic typing suggestions, plus new Messages and Photos experiences. Multitasking now provides recent contacts for quick access, you can share iTunes accounts with your family, and iCloud drive makes it easier to use iCloud for cross-platform document storage and retrieval. Apple has already launched a , which shows off Continuity and its new Handoff features that let users start actions like composing emails or browsing the web on one device, and pick them up on another, but with the actual launch of iOS 8 we should get a better look at how those work. We’ll also finally see how it handles transferring non-iMessage texts and non-Facebook phone calls to your desktop, since there’s no media gag on the Yosemite preview this time around. Most interesting will be seeing what Apple does with HealthKit, HomeKit and its . We’ll finally see what these aspects of its software, which are basically empty vessels, can do when filled with content from developers. Will Apple make iOS a full-featured hub for health and medical records? It is reportedly working with healthcare providers, but on Tuesday we should get an idea of how deeply these partnerships run. Expect consumer availability to follow the Tuesday event closely, with availability either the same day or within a week’s time. We’ve heard just a little about this possibility, so don’t count on it, but KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says there will be an , instead of at a separate one in October, when Apple revealed new iPads last year. The new iPad Air might then be a fairly minor update on the version introduced in 2013, possibly with the addition of Touch ID, and maybe with some additional against in terms of thinning the device case. This one isn’t in the bag, but if Apple is focused on the rest of the line for updates this year, it could roll iPad announcements into this event. That would still leave October primed for new Mac announcements. OS X has an update imminent, as is obvious from the Yosemite preview and continuing beta updates, but it’s unlikely we’ll see it launched for the public at the event, despite the Continuity features that tie into iOS 8. Apple would be hard-pressed to ship two such major software updates at the same time, and so much change across their device ecosystem is also a lot to handle for consumers. The availability of the consumer preview of Yosemite means that there’s less impetus on getting it out the door in sync with iOS 8, since Continuity can be shown off in other ways to whet user appetite for a later launch. I’d also expect Apple to hold any new OS X launch until it plans on shipping new Macs, and it makes more sense for Apple to wait until October to do that, rather than adding yet another hardware announcement to its full slate for next week. Apple’s event on Tuesday is going to be just packed to the gills with announcements, no matter how much of the above comes true. New iPhones alone would be plenty to crow about, but we’ll almost certainly also finally see Cupertino’s wearable tech play unveiled, and given all the question marks there, that may be an even more exciting reveal. |
Gillmor Gang: Too Soon | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 9 | 6 | The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @dbfarber, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Bending All The Phones: iPhone 6 vs. HTC One M8 vs. Moto X | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | Before the launch of the iPhone 6 Plus, the idea of people being concerned about how “bendy” their phone is would’ve seemed laughable. A week later, I’m hearing random people in my just-outside-of-the-echo-chamber coffee spot talk about it like they’d talk about the weather. Strange. Yesterday afternoon, following complaints of new iPhones , YouTuber Lewis Hilsenteger managing to bend the iPhone 6 Plus without much effort. Today, he’s back with more phones. Does the iPhone 6 bend the way the 6 Plus does? What about other aluminum-backed phones, like the HTC One M8? [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IROcoJeVfSI&w=704&h=426] It’s about as unscientific as it gets, but if we’re considering “however hard this guy can push with his bare hands” as a standardized unit of measure, the iPhone 6 seems to fare considerably better than the 6 Plus did. The One M8 groans a little and the screen temporarily jumps out of place, but there was no permanent damage. The 2014 Moto X, meanwhile, seems to put up a helluva fight. And for those who missed it, his original 6 Plus bending video: |
Jack Dorsey’s Advertising Agency Couldn’t Make A More Pretentious Website If It Tried | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | , but it looks like we have a new champion in the endless battle to have the most pretentious startup website. , an advertising agency founded by former Apple exec Allison Johnson in 2011 with backing from Jack Dorsey and Ray Chambers, has managed to claim that spot with a site that offers absolutely no information about who works there or what kinds of services they offer. Instead, you see a rotating set of images overlaid with the word “west” shown in different languages, including Braille and binary. [gallery ids="1062272,1062279,1062271,1062277"] Right before the agency launched, a that it would have a different, new model, that “does not conform to a typical agency.” That description certainly comes across in the website’s design. While there are probably some companies that don’t want a “typical” ad agency, I’d say there’s a good chance that most people would like to know what a company might offer them upfront, before having to email back and forth about what wonderful solutions they might have available. To check, I went to the websites of the top three ad agencies on . Guess what? All of them prominently feature links to the company’s works, team, culture and more: Of course, in the insular world of Silicon Valley startups, who you know is often more important than how you present yourself. Chances are, those employing West’s services were pitched either “An ex-Apple marketing exec is in charge!” or “Jack Dorsey has backed these guys!” and were sold. When you’ve got names like that, who cares what your site looks like? But I can’t shake the image of some startup exec getting an email from her newly hired assistant (because the company just raised money, and can thus afford both advertising and assistants) giving a list of candidates for agencies that could run the startup’s first big campaign. Scrolling through her iPhone, the exec taps on West, opening a new tab in Safari. After giving the site 30 seconds to load, the exec still only sees a random photo and one word of text. She refreshes the page, only to see a different photo and some random percentage signs. Flustered, the exec pecks out a quick email to her assistant, chastising him for not looking to see that clearly this company isn’t doing well — they don’t even have a functioning site! A source has told TechCrunch that Dorsey and Co. has remained quiet about West due to a bumpy first couple of years. Despite their big names and the work the agency has done for well-funded startups (including Path), the agency has lost some of its big talent. Still, that hasn’t stopped some rumors from floating into our Tips box suggesting that the agency has growth in its SF-based office and has just opened a location in New York. |
Digital Telepathy Is The Future Of The Human Species | Dan Kaplan | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | The story of life on Earth thus far has had an unmistakable direction, and it has moved toward greater complexity. Sure, evolution has seen lots of fits and starts and collapses and mass extinctions. And yes, some replicators (like viruses) seem to have become less complex over time. But from a 100,000 foot view of Earth in the last, say, 4.5 billion years, the direction of life on Earth looks approximately clear: given enough time, a process that started with simple organic molecules slowly-but-steadily built organisms with brains that can reflect on themselves. The evolutionary process takes awhile, but eventually, humans show up — social animals with brains that can develop language, iterate on tools, and reflect on their own nature (among lots of other amazing things). What do we then do with these miraculous brains? We launch a new kind of evolution. It’s hard to overstate how epic this fact is: For the few billion or so years that evolution took to produce us, all of the evolution going on was biological. In other words, evolution’s primary mode of operation began and ended with genes. Humans, for all of our foibles, stupidities and evils, did something pretty miraculous: We switched up this M.O. Suddenly, genes (our genes, at least) took a secondary role in the story of intelligence on Earth. Memes (a fancy way of saying “cultures, ideas and technologies that persist and evolve through time”) took center stage. With the emergence of a life form that could invent new stuff, improve it, trade it with others, and pass the know-how down through generations, the era of cultural evolution had begun. Just as biological evolution started with relatively simple organic structures and slowly but steadily built increasingly complex organisms, cultural evolution took relatively simple social structures (tribal groups) and iterated on them until the result was a global civilization. For the sake of brevity, I’ve made all of this sound like a simple, elegant process. The reality, of course, is dark and ugly. Like biological evolution—a force that mercilessly kills, eats, and starves animals and plants as it selects for fitness and luck against the rough odds of life, cultural evolution has generally used death and destruction as its lathe. Yes, when humans weren’t busy eating, having sex, or finding better ways to eat and have sex, they were waging war on their neighbors and finding better ways to wage war. The cultures, ideas, and technologies that achieved the upper hand in war over their rivals either annihilated these rivals or assimilated them or some combination of both. Over the long-term horizon, this process — which involved more murder, rape and enslavement than I want to think about — brought us from tribes to chiefdoms to cities and states and empires and nations. And so, 50,000-80,000 years after learned to talk, here we are: an interconnected species whose reach and dominion spans the entire planet. To understand why digital telepathy is the logical next step in this journey, it helps to see the major leaps in cultural evolution as breakthroughs in communication technology. By “breakthroughs in communications technology,” I mean the technological and cultural shifts that enabled more sophisticated communication to happen faster and more often between larger and larger groups of people. Specifically, I’m thinking of: There are smart people who argue that humanity’s most important technological advances happened in the first 60 years of the 20th century. They point to urbanization, electricity, medicine, cars, airplanes, mass production, etc., and say that the development of the Internet pales in significance. And to be fair, they are right…so far: Compared to the shifts in the human way of life that emerged in the wake of the industrial revolution, the Internet and smartphones seem a bit lightweight. But these people are just impatient. Along the curve of change that computation and the Internet will produce if we don’t destroy our civilization first, we are nowhere near the apex. Indeed, the revolutionary evolutions that the Internet will ultimately bring into the story of life on Earth are so profound that calling the next breakthrough in communications technology a “singularity” isn’t too far off base. Imagine what it would be like if you could transmit thoughts and feelings between yourself and other people without opening your mouth, putting a pen to paper, or typing a single word. You can’t. We can talk about things like digital telepathy and think about the potential range of consequences for humanity that would spin out of its wake, but because human consciousness is limited to its own experience, it’s impossible for any of us to truly imagine what telepathy would be like. The crazy part is that barring a total civilizational meltdown, the prospect of digital telepathy will eventually stop being a prospect we can only attempt to imagine and start being a reality that some of us live. Here are some recent key developments: I don’t know about you, but to me, all of those things look like seeds that eventually produce brains that talk to each other over the Internet without typing or talking. There are a number of paths that lead the way to digital telepathy, and they are not all roses and unicorns. One obvious, terrifying use case is super soldiers. Few things would confer more of a tactical advantage than the capacity to communicate with your squad and coordinate your collective actions without uttering a single word. If you’re a world leader and you know the tech is possible, are you really going stand idle while rival nations and rich terrorist organizations develop military-grade telepathy? You tell me. The more optimistic guess is that it will start with people suffering debilitating conditions. Are you callous enough to tell the family of someone who is in a “locked-in” state — conscious, but unable to move or speak — that “Yes, we’re going to keep your loved one alive until their body dies, but no, you’ll never be able to communicate with them again?” And if the technology requires drilling a small hole into their skulls and implanting electrodes and a chip? Yikes. It gets murky fast. But it’s hard to see what — short of the downfall of human civilization — would stop the evolution of digital telepathy from eventually happening. There are just too many structural forces that are larger than any of us pushing it forward*. When the time comes for the human species to evolve, it will look to us like we are in control…that by manipulating our own DNA or implanting computers into our bodies, we have somehow seized the reins of the process and become gods. But this appearance will only be a ruse. Evolution — whether it is truly a blind, purposeless watchmaker or not — has been around for a while. It is older, more powerful, and more subtle than we could ever be. It will continue doing what it does, driving complexity and consciousness higher, allowing us to think we are playing it when really, it is us getting played. —— |
A Manual iPhone Camera, Finally | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | “Finally” is a funny word, especially when it comes to Apple. I try to avoid using it because I’m cognizant of the fact that Apple’s pacing is often a lot different than the hive mind’s idea of what it should be. Just see how long it took to implement third-party keyboards in a way that was for an example. But, as the iPhone long-ago crossed the rubicon of becoming the , I think Apple has taken its extra sweet time in allowing developers — and by extension, users — access to more control over the camera that’s always with them. iOS 8 does just that, over focus, shutter speed, manual white balance and gray card support, ISO (“film” speed), exposure compensation and more. Developers can build truly powerful, flexible photography apps for the iPhone…finally. As photography used to be my profession, I’ve always kept up with the major apps and choices out there. Most folks I spoke to over the years gave the impression that developing a photo app for the iPhone was something of a black art. The genre was full of “hacks,” tricks, false starts and , and everything had to be done by feel, as Apple didn’t provide direct, official access to manual controls. The salt in the wound was that competing operating systems like Android and Windows Phone actually enabled more flexibility and complex photography far sooner than iOS. I’m really, really happy that Apple now does, after all these years. I’ve over telling people that I was a former pro photographer that had long since moved to an iPhone as my primary (read: most used) camera. I’ve never implied that the iPhone could best an SLR for quality and I wouldn’t shoot a wedding on an iPhone (yet) . But the iPhone has done more to make great photography — in the plebian sense — than almost any camera in history. I think you can put it right there with the Kodak Brownie, the Pentax K-1000 and the Canon Digital Rebel for releases that had the most effect on the democratization of photography. Yes, there were many other “pioneer” devices, but a select few have brought the ease and joy of quality photography within reach of millions or billions. The iPhone is one of those devices. I used to sell cameras for a living, which I enjoyed a lot. When digital hit the wide consumer market — pretty much a year or two after I began — there was a massive surge in understanding that came along with it. Having the display right there for people to may have evoked derision in some photographers (and I still think it’s a weakness of many pros born into digital, but that’s another story), but it also allowed people, for the first time, to see the effects of the changes they made in aperture, shutter speed and the like. It wasn’t just that you could see the pictures instantly, it was that they gave you true feedback, creating a loop that contributed to greater understanding and improvement. Now, the iPhone has that ability as well, and I’m really happy about it. If you’re looking to experience what I’m talking about then I’m sure your favorite camera replacement app like or will be updated to add them soon. Currently, I’m really enjoying , by , which provides a serene, useful manual experience for the iPhone. There could be some argument that apps like Manual — or the equivalent apps for Android or Windows Phone — are “for experts only,” but I disagree. Instead, they’re for the curious, those interested in taking better pictures and all “phone photographers.” Which is pretty much all of us, when you think about it. |
Walmart Now Offering Low-Cost Mobile Checking Accounts Through Exclusive Deal With Green Dot’s GoBank | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | Apple Pay what again? Walmart is getting into the mobile banking space, the company this morning, through a partnership with financial services provider Green Dot Corporation. The company’s low-cost checking account product called is now being made available exclusively at Walmart, offering customers an overdraft-free bank account with no minimum balance requirements. The service is aimed at the low-end of the market, where customers are often referred to as the “un-banked” or “under-banked.” The GoBank account is designed to appeal to those who are looking for the conveniences of a traditional bank – including support for direct deposits, ATM access, bill pay, person-to-person payments, money management tools, and more – without the accompanying fee structure associated with big banks. GoBank users will never be assessed NSF fees for bad checks, and with a qualifying direct deposit of $500 per month, the bank’s monthly membership charges ($8.95/mo) are waived. (There’s also a “starter kit” needed to sign up for a GoBank account, which costs $2.95.) GoBank users are provided with a MasterCard debit card, and there are a few unique features included, too – like “Fortune Teller,” which advises customers in real-time to pass on purchases when it detects that the purchase increases the customer’s risk of going over budget, based on GoBank’s understanding of the customer’s planned income and expenses. Customers also have early access to their direct deposit paychecks in some cases, if their employer notifies GoBank in advance of an incoming deposit. Most importantly, perhaps, is that GoBank includes mobile money management from a suite of applications that work on iOS and Android, in addition to the web. Almost all U.S. customers will be able to establish a GoBank account, provided they have a verifiable ID, the companies claim. Walmart’s involvement with Green Dot/GoBank is not to become a bank itself (it tried and to do this before), but rather function sort of like a branch for GoBank’s customers, who can sign up for an account from Walmart stores, and deposit cash into their GoBank accounts. Walmart, of course, also offers other financial services at its stores, including prepaid debit and credit cards, check cashing, and money transfers. GoBank competes with rival mobile banking products aimed at the same consumer segment, including Amex’s Serve and T-Mobile’s “Mobile Money” product, for example. On a broader scale, it also competes with other modern mobile banking services, like those from startups like Simple or Moven. Walmart says GoBank will be available in its stores nationwide by the end of October. As the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer – and one that attracts the same sort of ‘bargain shopper’ that would be drawn to a product like GoBank – its decision to stock and support GoBank could immediately give that product an edge in the rapidly heating up mobile banking marketplace here in the U.S. |
A Song To Make The iOS 8.0.1 Team Feel Better About Breaking Everyone’s iPhones | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLb8rfrUKNA?list=UUvj5S3f10rO6CoibatfRGzg&w=854&h=510] The iOS team probably isn’t having the best day today. Within of the iOS 8.0.1 update going live, reports started pouring in that it was causing Within hours, it was pulled. Don’t worry, iOS team! There’s already a song meant to cheer you up (or, you know, make you feel insignificant relative to the crushing magnitude of the universe. Whatever works! ) Recognize the singer? Long time TC readers almost certainly will. It’s Jonathan Mann, the guy who writes a song a day and regularly finds himself in our posts. We poked fun at back in 2009, and he almost immediately fired back with a track , MG Siegler. Remember the “If you don’t want an iPhone 4… don’t buy it.” tune Steve Jobs back in 2010? That was him, too. And for all of those suffering from an absence of cell service after updating to 8.0.1: |
October’s Disrupt Conference Brings Together Europe And The Valley | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | Following a massively successful inaugural event last year in Berlin, the second , at the amazing Old Billingsgate venue. The London conference kicks off with the , followed by two days of in-depth onstage interviews and panels with some of the biggest names in technology. Disrupt Europe is being supported by all the key institutions and ecosystem players, and we’re delighted to be joined by some of the best names in our industry. Justin Kan was best known for founding Kiko, the first AJAX web calendar; Justin.tv, a live video streaming platform; Socialcam, a mobile video-sharing app ( ); , a video-game-streaming platform ( for $970 million only this year); and Exec, an on demand maid service ( ). He is currently a partner at the seed fund Y Combinator and is sure to impart his incredible knowledge onstage at Disrupt. Mikkel Svane is the CEO and founder of . He has served as CEO and a member of the board of directors since August 2007. He was appointed chairman of the board of directors in January 2014. He started the company with Morten Primdahl and Alexander Aghassipour to make customer service available to everyone. Today, he leads Zendesk’s global operations and business strategy. In 2009, Mikkel moved the company from Copenhagen to San Francisco. Since July 2011, has been CEO of OZON Holdings, which includes OZON.ru, OZON travel, O’Courier, Sapato.ru and OZON Solutions, and is currently Russia’s leading e-commerce business. Under Gavet’s leadership, OZON’s five diversified businesses grew revenue by 84% in 2011 with sales topping $300 million. The business has since grown exponentially with OZON Holdings reporting $750 million turnover in 2013. Gavet helped secure one of Russia’s largest infusions of VC funding, a $100 million round of funding in September 2011. This round was eclipsed by a $150 million fundraising closed in April this year. London has a large and fast-growing startup ecosystem, one which is increasingly connected both to the European hubs, as well as to the U.S. and Asia. Between 2012 and 2013, more than 15,000 startups were established in the capital and, according to the Deloitte Technology Fast 50, the combined average five-year growth rate for tech startups in London is 1,382 percent. TechCrunch Disrupt Europe will also bring the and to London. Startup Battlefield competitors pitch their companies live and onstage to innovators, investors and influencers in the tech community. TechCrunch identifies emerging companies to demo and compete for a prize of £30,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup. Last year , the London and Berlin-based startup behind the world’s first smart bike lock, was the winner and has gone on to launch its product. Previous Battlefield competitions have launched companies such as Dropbox, Mint.com, Yammer, Fitbit and many more. Startup Alley offers another way for early-stage companies to gain exposure with a format that encourages both exhibiting and networking, as well as high visibility. Roughly 200 invited startups make up Startup Alley with companies showcasing on the Monday and Tuesday of the event. Find all the latest information on the . Grab a ticket and the early bird discount expires. To request media accreditation, email tcdisruptlondon [ @ ] balloupr.com . We’ll see you there! |
Orange Partners Its Startup Accelerator With Visa, Moët, And LG | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | This morning, Orange, a large French telecom, announced that it has secured a number of partner companies to support its fourth startup accelerator batch, forming what it un-ironically and patly calls the Fab Force. The name dings with Microsoft overtones due to Orange calling its accelerator, you guessed it, . Joining Orange in the Force, as it were, are LG, Visa, Hilton, Fnac, and Moët. It’s a surprisingly diverse group. If you didn’t know that Orange had an accelerator for startups, don’t worry, I didn’t know either until recently. In an age when , it is easy to miss a few here and there. I spoke to Orange Fab’s evangelist about the company’s effort: Two batches of six to nine companies each year, $20,000 invested by way of a convertible note, and a focus on companies that are more product-ready. According to Diaine, Orange tends to look for companies that are ready to grow their product, putting them a bit after the Y Combinator and 500 Startups age range. I asked whether $20,00 was too low, and if Orange intended to boost its investment. According to Diaine, the $20,000 figure was originally picked to match what others offered, putting it in keeping with the market. Y Combinator , of course. Diaine indicated that the company was considering boosting its investment amount per startup, perhaps in partnership with the companies that are now partners in the program. Orange Fab’s new startup class will kick off in December. The company isn’t looking to quicken the cadence of its accelerator, but may increase the size of its classes. Why are corporations falling over themselves to invest in startups, and build out an incubator or accelerator program? Call it defensive aggression. If you are a wealthy incumbent, as many technology companies are, you both want to build new revenue streams to protect against top line rot, and get an early look into companies that are trying to kill you. And the cost isn’t too great. All billion-dollar-plus companies can afford to do this. So expect the trend to continue. A caveat: Back in 2000 bubble, one later-noted ‘sign of the times’ was that an incubator incubators was founded. We’re not quite there yet, I don’t think, but watch out. |
To Bridge the Skills Gap, Focus On Improving Computer Science’s Image | Alison Derbenwick Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | It’s becoming increasingly clear that computer science education grapples with a stubborn image problem. And it’s one that we simply cannot afford to ignore any longer. As information technology permeates nearly every aspect of our world today – from personal mobile devices to automated HR systems to the smart grid – it fuels a rapidly growing need for computer scientists. Many indicators clearly demonstrate that we are simply not keeping pace with demand. For example, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2020 there will be 1.4 million new computer science jobs. However, between current professionals and university students, we will only have 400,000 computer scientists trained to fill those roles. In addition to the growing need for computer scientists, there is an increasing need for basic computer science literacy across all fields. With the shift to data-based decision-making for everything from traditional business marketing to local government and healthcare, a basic understanding of how computers work and process information, as well as a basic literacy in computer programming and data analysis, are rapidly becoming workplace essentials – if they’re not already. But, we see a dearth of computer science courses (of all types) available in secondary schools. Today, only 10 percent of high schools offer computer science courses, and the number of introductory computer science courses has actually decreased by 17 percent since 2005, according to the College Board. As this skills gap widens, it is set to emerge as a formidable economic security and social justice issue. While a complex challenge, an ever-widening skills gap is not inevitable, and we can take tangible and realistic steps today to begin to turn the tide. Schools, teachers, parents, government and industry must all be part of the solution. Computer science is inherently challenging. As a result, it can be intimidating to many students who might be unable or unwilling to look beyond the mechanics of coding to the wonder of computer science’s real-world application in nearly every facet of our lives and communities — from mobile gaming apps to personalized medicine. Students have been taught that A’s and perfect test scores are the goal, while computer science demands trial, error and failure to achieve success. Further, many students lack exposure to, and understanding of, the diverse range of opportunities and careers that computer scientists and those with computer science skills can have – it’s not just manipulating command lines on a computer screen, but analyzing how to make buildings more energy-efficient, helping to match homeless pets with families, developing robots to perform microsurgery, and more. The limited reservoir of trained teachers also factors into the mix. According to the College Board, of the approximately 42,000 high schools in the United States, only 9 percent offered the AP computer science A course in 2013. What can we do to turn the tide? It can take 25 years or more to create a computer scientist – from developing core analysis and problem-solving skills to achieving fluency in programming languages. As such, it is essential that computer science education become integrated in the K-12 curriculum. For younger students, that includes teaching concepts like collaborative problem solving, critical thinking, and high-order creativity as part of math, science and language arts lessons. As students get older, they can use basic coding programs, like Alice or Greenfoot, to animate scenes from a book, or create a game to demonstrate understanding of math concepts. All of this builds a foundation in computer science and prepares students to take advanced programming courses in high school. Teachers, parents and administrators can help expand interest in computer science by making the subject more appealing to a wide range of students. Help students understand the connection between computer science and their lives – how it helps them to register for classes at school, enables cell phones to function, and determines the ads they see online. Currently, there is a significant lack of diversity among students electing to take computer science courses, which is contributing to the skills gap by limiting the available talent pool. Of the 30,000 students who took the AP computer science exam in 2013, fewer than 20 percent of those students were female, only 3 percent were African-American, and approximately 8 percent were Hispanic, according to the College Board. It is important to show the diversity – in both people and career paths – that exists in the computer science careers to help drive student interest. This is particularly true for supporting female and minority student interest. Both industry and academia must highlight existing role models and actively encourage mentorships at the community level. Schools can bring in parents and professionals from the community who leverage computer science in their jobs to share with students how the skill can translate to a career. . Schools and industry should engage in an open dialogue to help ensure students are being taught the skills they will need to be competitive in the modern workforce. And, since schools can lack the funds, time, knowledge and/or resources to implement the tools, technology, and curriculum required to teach computer science, this open dialogue can enable industry to help bridge the funding and resources gap and restore investment in public education. Many times, companies already have education programs and other resources in place to help ensure students have the proper tools – and teachers have the proper training – to master these skills. While implementing computer science in classrooms across the nation won’t happen overnight, teachers, administrators, state and local legislatures, and industry need to partner to create a long-term plan to help close the skills gap and ensure students are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. To ensure students are equipped with the right skills to support the evolving economy, we must begin to expose all students to the possibilities afforded by computer science and facilitate an open dialogue on necessary workforce skills between educators and employers. These steps can help increase overall investment in public education and help provide students from all backgrounds with a better opportunity to pursue quality jobs once they complete their education – whether that is as a computer scientist, a public servant, a healthcare provider, a musician, or something else. |
PathSource Goes Mobile, Connecting Careers With Youth On The Go | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | Today, PathSource is launching a to connect students and careers on mobile. PathSource is aimed at giving students direct access to information about professional opportunities that are available to them based on their skills, interests and background. You may remember the company from last year when it launched a aimed at K-12 students along the same lines. Adoption has been good, with licensing its original product to large districts across the country, including to the San Francisco Unified School District and the Chicago Public Schools. But in this process, founder Aaron Michel says that the product resonated best with older high school students. “We found that people in their late teens and early 20s have an even greater need for career guidance than do K-12 students.” These insights fueled the company’s decision to bring the product to mobile and target a slightly older demographic. Given the indecisive nature of U.S. college students (half change their majors 2-3 times) and high unemployment rates for 16-24 year olds, it’s no surprise that recent grads are looking for a solution. Similar to the web application, the mobile app starts with a short “lifestyle assessment survey,” which asks for preferences, what city or state would you like to live in, do you plan to own your home, rent, share with friends. The survey gets relatively granular, asking will you pay for your mobile phone, cable and other household items in addition to extra-curriculars like dining out, entertainment and travel. PathSource’s backend quickly estimates your required salary to achieve this lifestyle. The program listed me at about $52K pre-tax to live in San Francisco which seems a bit low so there may be some need to hone this calculation. But even taking the survey increased awareness of potential future costs, which is a good first step for college students (I know many adults who would benefit from this exercise, as well). Once I completed the career survey, I was prompted to watch videos on careers that may suit me. I was directed to explore communications/PR, entrepreneur and business development, which are all positions I either currently hold or have previously held. From there, PathSource enables you to navigate education options by major, cost and location that are in-line with your future goals. If you’re a college student, PathSource will connect you directly with job descriptions and applications in-app. [gallery ids="1061930,1061928,1061926,1061929"] It appear’s PathSource’s previous K-12 success has been a good indication to higher educational institutions. Ahead of the mobile app launch, the company has already inked seven university subscribers, including Northeastern and the University of Hawaii. For the time being, colleges are being offered free access to the iOS and web versions of the product as long as they ensure that a minimum percentage of students download the product. This is a bit of a twist on solving the distribution challenge faced by many companies in the education space. PathSource hopes that by leveraging university networks, the app will reach the threshold where word of mouth takes hold. And it hopes student success will ultimately entice schools to bump up to the paid version, which includes gamification components, detailed reporting and student management tools. The real revenue model here is a recommendation engine. PathSource can direct students to specific jobs or tools to aid in the process, hinting at potential for future sponsored job listings. Image via |
The First Four-Seater, Solar-Powered Vehicle Hits The U.S. Road | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | Stella, the first ever family sized road vehicle that runs on the sun has made its U.S. debut. The car in the World Solar Challenge and won the Michelin Cruiser Class for completing a 3,000 kilometer journey from Darwin to Adelaide in Australia last fall. While other solar-powered vehicles have been made for racing, the solar-powered Stella is the first vehicle made for road travel. A large solar panel sits atop the roof to power the car up to 500 miles on a single charge. Compare that to a Tesla Roadster, which can run on an electric charge for . The Netherlands team that designed the vehicle took Stella for a U.S. tour to help kick off National Drive Electric Week. They recently traveled up Highway 1 from L.A. to San Francisco, and I met up with them in SF to check out Stella. |
Designer Builds A 3D-Printable “Imura Revolver” In Honor Of Arrested Japanese Maker | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | When for printing his own revolvers, 3D printing advocates in some circles were up in arms. The guns, which only fired blanks, were simple test models called the Zig-Zag. Now, in honor of Imura’s work in 3D printing, a CAD designer has created a newer, better gun that could be used to fire real bullets. The designer, who calls himself , is part of a team of creators called Free Open Source Software & Computer Aided Design. He has begun , adding it to an already . Keep in mind that this gun hasn’t been fired yet but it is designed to withstand normal use. WarFairy, who lives outside the US and preferred to remain anonymous, said that the model is quite difficult to design and print. The finished kit will include metal parts to comply with ATF regulations and to strengthen the firing chamber. WarFairy said that the design wasn’t a political statement. “We called it Imura because the grooving on the cylinder is cribbed from the revolving single action blank gun that Yoshimito Imura produced before being arrested in Japan. Any political statements are inferred by the users.” “Its been a right bastard to get printing properly,” he said in an IRC chat. “It has a steel sleeve. The printed forward section of the frame bearing the inscription has .75″ of printed rifling to satisfy the ATF’s requirement of pistols being rifled. Currently every printer that was working on it has crashed their printer. We’re working on getting back into action,” he said. When can you expect to download the new gun? “In the time-honored words of the startup, ‘When its ready.'” said WarFairy. Until then, the more models and videos in the spirit of exploration rather than, they say, political action. |
Apple Pulls iOS 8.0.1 Update After Bug Knocks Out Cell Service And Touch ID On iPhone 6 Models | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | Apple has pulled the iOS 8.0.1 update from availability, a fix is likely incoming. For now, it appears to only affect iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users. An Apple spokesperson provided us with the following statement: “We have received reports of an issue with the iOS 8.0.1 update. We are actively investigating these reports and will provide information as quickly as we can. In the meantime we have pulled back the iOS 8.0.1 update.” If you’re a victim of the buggy update, restoring your iPhone via iTunes using an iOS 8.0 firmware file appears to be a fix for now. The easiest solution appears to be downloading the iOS 8 image for either the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus direct from Apple, then plugging your phone in, holding the Option key, and clicking Update on your phone’s info screen in iTunes. Select the IPSW file you just downloaded, and it should roll it back to iOS 8 without removing any of your apps, messages or settings, as we’ve verified with our own hardware. An Apple Store should be able to perform this fix for you if you don’t have access to your computer — our own Sarah Perez is on scene at a local store now where this fix is being performed for some affected customers. ! Apple has a new version of iOS 8 out, just a short time after the initial launch of the software. The update, 8.0.1, includes a number of fixes, but most notably (and listed first), it addressed the bug that . It also zaps some bugs with third-party keyboards, which should make them remain the default option until a user switches to another, which has been a sore spot for fans of the new external software keyboard options. Unfortunately, installing the iOS 8.0.1 update revealed that despite Apple’s promised fixes, it actually completely disables cellular service and Touch ID on many devices, though some iPhone 5s and older model owners report no issues. The bottom line is that you should definitely NOT install this update, at least until an updated version appears, at which time we’ll let you know it’s safe to go ahead. As you can see in the image below, Apple is also addressing an issue that blocked some photos from appearing in Photo Library, fixing reliability concerns around Reachability on iPhone 6 and 6 Plus (which brings the top of the screen down when you double touch the Home button), zapping bugs that cause unexpected data use when communicating via SMS or MMS, and improving the “Ask to Buy” feature for Family Sharing, specifically around in-app purchases, in addition to other minor bugs. HealthKit apps should start appearing on the heels of this update, so watch out for those. We’ll now be able to better see how they incorporate data into the Health app, and how Apple has executed health data sharing between apps, too. |
HotelTonight Pivots Beyond Same-Day Booking As Competition Heats Up | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | is planning a major shift to its business model, moving from its same-day booking model to a more flexible offering of seven-day advance booking. TechCrunch has obtained an email sent from to one of its hotel partners, showing that the startup is planning to let users book hotel rooms up to seven days in advance, although it will continue to offer same-day bookings as well. The new model will let hotels set different prices for same-day and advance booking on different types of rooms, increasing the chances of selling out inventory. For users, it also seems to make a lot more sense. Perhaps other people are more adventurous than I am, but trusting that I can book a hotel on the same day I need somewhere to stay is too risky for me. With a week’s notice, the same use-case of iffy trips or last-minute emergencies is still covered, while offering a little added security on the side of the user and the hotel. Here is the wording from the email: Hope all is well! There are some very exciting changes coming from HotelTonight. We’ve heard loud and clear from our partners that you want more opportunities to sell rooms on HT, and that sometimes waiting until day-of to sell rooms is a less-than-ideal strategy to get to a sellout every night. I’m excited to announce that on September 30, HT is expanding the booking window to 7 days in order to allow hotel partners to sell more rooms and to sell them earlier. There is much more information to come on these exciting changes, but in the mean time please keep this information confidential. We wanted our best hotel partners to be the first people to know and we trust you to keep this under wraps until September 30. The first new feature that we’re releasing is the updated HTx extranet, which we’ve rebuilt from the ground up. Our goal is to provide you with an even easier way to view and manage your inventory for the new 7-day booking window. It will have forward-looking pricing guidance for your market but will remain as simple, straightforward and easy to use as always. HTx goes live Tuesday, September 23rd. I want to make sure that you have everything you need in order to hit the ground running. If you have any questions, I’ve included a couple resources (an intro video and FAQs) to help explain the new booking window and HTx. I’m traveling until next Tuesday, but please feel free reach out with any questions and I’ll be happy to answer them as quickly as I can. We can also schedule a call next week to go over this in more detail. The company also included a FAQ attachment, embedded below. HotelTonight was founded in 2010 and has grown to be a powerhouse in the hotel booking space. The company has (far more, probably, considering they raised an undisclosed amount in January) and, as of last year, the company has hotels in over 120 cities with more than 6 million downloads of the app. We expect those numbers have grown since. However, the landscape is changing since HotelTonight launched. A number of competitors have entered the market — competitors like and are inching into HotelTonight turf. And a new member in the space, , has actually been offering seven-day advance booking since it launched at the end of August. Competition has surely heated up. But, HotelTonight has seemingly been prepping for this, offering for users to see the way prices would change same-day. This obviously has laid the groundwork for a move to advance booking. But it’s also an illustration that some users need reassurance if they’re going to wait for same-day bookings, because otherwise they worry it’ll be sold out or the prices will be out-of-hand. HotelTonight plans on making this announcement next week, at which point we’ll likely have a better idea of what the consumer side of the app will look like with advance booking. We’ve reached out to the company for comment and will update if we hear back. [scribd id=240808093 key=key-4bDBOJct889DdFHlqm6L mode=scroll] |
Luxury Travel Club Inspirato Grabs Another $20 Million | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | Luxury vacation club announced this morning it has secured $20 million in new funding from new investor alongside existing investors and . The funding, designed to accelerate growth, brings the company’s total raise to date to $70 million. The additional capital comes not quite a year after Inspirato’s expansion via its merger with competitor Portico Club, which was previously a part of Exclusive Resorts, a company Inspirato’s co-founders Brent and Brad Handler also founded but then sold to Steve Case, CEO of Revolution and founder of AOL. The Handler brothers in 2011 returned to the vacation rental market in 2011 to create Inspirato, which combines the luxury vacation club model with peer-to-peer Airbnb-style listings. The basic cost to join Inspirato is $17,500, then afterwards its annual fee is $3,500, which puts it into the “luxury” market. Today, it counts just under 8,000 members – nearly double from July 2013. Meanwhile, its property portfolio includes 240 luxury homes in the U.S., Mexico, Europe and the Caribbean. The company also inked a deal with AmEx that allowed cardmembers to get $2,500 off the initiation fee, and $400 off the annual dues. |
The $5 Lineable Bracelet Tracks Your Kids When They Wander Away | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | The Lineable, the unfortunately named tracking bracelet for kids, aims to make it easier for parents to keep tabs on their little ones thanks to the magic of beacons. Essentially a wearable iOS-compatible beacon, the device notifies you when your child is too far away and it allows other iPhones to become a sort of ad hoc GPS system that can track your little one through the dark, scary woods (provided he or she is also surrounded by Lineable users.) Created by Tyler Moon, a former Samsung developer, the Beacon and Bluetooth 4.0 compatible device that will cost a mere $5. To use it parents will slap it on their wee ones. When the wee ones leave the Beacon tracking area, the parents get a notification. Then, when the baby is too far from home, other Lineable users get notifications when the kid is near. This mesh network obviously depends on the popularity of the product, but I could see it being useful in bigger schools or playgrounds. The bracelet battery lasts a year and, interestingly, it features a patent-pending method to engage the battery when you’re ready to use the device, thereby preventing run-down while in storage. A “multiple children” mode will allow teachers to keep tabs on multiple kids at the same time. “Lineable connects all Lineable app users globally and use their smartphones to track lost children,” said Moon. “Lineable will utilize the resources of other nearby smartphones with Lineable apps to track its locations and this could expand globally as well.”
What inspired the product? “As Beacon and Bluetooth 4.0 are out in the market, Lineable thought of using these technologies in various areas,” said Moon. “Narrowing down the focus in a specific area, we decided families and children needed help and also children going missing are one of the biggest social issue that United States face as well.” The project has hit on Indiegogo, more than halfway to its $30K goal. The bracelet should ship in February 2015. While the viral properties might be a bit ambitious, I’m sure there are some parents out there who want to know when their kids do a runner. Sadly it’s not hacksaw proof so little Cindy or Charles may be able to cut it off in a pinch. That’s why you have to back it up with a proper prisoner locator, available to parents and select law enforcement. |
Estimote Launches Indoor Location Service Using iBeacon Tech | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtBERi7Lf3c&w=1236&h=695] Estimote, maker of hardware beacon devices and a platform for managing software that uses beacon connections, such as Apple’s iBeacon system, has just launched its Indoor Location features. The Indoor Location system that provides works with the company’s existing beacons, and its updated iOS app. Setup is simple, Estimote says, and requires simply arranging a minimum of four of its devices in a room to define a space. The Indoor Location feature uses beacons placed around a room to map a space using a quick orientation process using the app, with directions provided by the software itself. Once you’ve spent a few minutes setting up the relative location positioning, it’ll let you generate a code snippet that you can then inject in other apps to give them indoor location awareness. If you’re setting up a gallery exhibit, for instance, you could incorporate Estimote Indoor Location to give your visitors precise, step-by-step instructions about navigating the various installations as they walk around your space. Estimote had previously offered proximity-gate functionality, meaning that a beacon could be made aware of your device once it was within range, and start some behavior accordingly, with varied proximity distances available depending on a developer’s needs. What they couldn’t do, was give precise indoor location; proximity was more of an on/off flag, with variable distance, rather than a pinpoint measurement system, which Indoor Location can actually provide. Of course, aside from offering consumer-facing features like detailed indoor guidance, Estimote’s new features can provide businesses with more granular info about shopper or visitor behavior. Tracking a visitor’s path through an establishment can provide literal path analysis, especially if a business is using other Estimote features to track engagement with certain displays, purchase conversion and more. Estimote is trying to own the beacon hardware/platform space, and this is another step towards that goal. Launch partners include Cisco and other big name players, so they appear to be doing something right for now. |
Video: Cirque du Soleil Does Its Thing… With Drones | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C8OJsHfmpI?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] Cirque du Soleil is known for doing incredible things with the human body. Now it’s doing incredible things with quadcopters. In a collaboration with ETH Zurich and its Swiss spin-off company Verity Studios, Cirque has gussied up a brigade of drones to look like lampshades floating about their creator’s workshop. I’ll leave the rest for the video. I’ve been to a couple of live Cirque shows in the last few years. Each time, there was one act that left me scratching my head, trying to figure out how the hell they pulled some act or another. If they’re starting to dabble with automated props that can whiz around the stage or above the audience, these shows are going to get crazy(/crazier). [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YqUocVcyrE?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] [via ] |
Gobble Promises To Help Customers Make Delicious Meals In 10 Minutes Or Less | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | If you like the idea of cooking, but not, y’know, the actual work (or the fact that the food might turn out pretty badly), then may be the startup for you. And I don’t mean that in a condescending way. When I try to cook, I do a decent job of frying an egg or boiling spaghetti, but anything more than that and I start to get nervous. So I feel like I’m on Gobble’s wavelength. In some ways, the Gobble model sounds similar to services like and — it takes the pain of meal-planning and shopping out of the cooking process by delivering the ingredients and recipes for a set number of meals each week. However, there’s a difference between Gobble and what founder Ooshma Garg called the “ingredient boxes.” Basically, Garg’s team takes care of a lot more of the prep work, cleaning and cutting the vegetables, as well as marinating the meat, to give you a “dinner kit” that can be prepared in 10 minutes or fewer, with just one pan. (You can see the steps going from kit to dinner in the collage below.) Gobble has actually been around for a few years, and participating in Y Combinator. It’s also cycled through different models, including a marketplace for home-cooked food and . The current model, Garg said, was an attempt to combine her own fear of cooking with the “cooking prowess” of Gobble’s executive chef . To further illustrate why she settled on this mix of cooking and not-cooking, she pointed to . Apparently, during the early days of cake mix, there were versions that actually required work than cake mix does today, but customers preferred mixing in the water, oil and eggs themselves. It struck the right balance between making things easier and allowing home chefs to still take pride in the results. Garg added that behind the scenes, Gobble is sourcing its ingredients from “longtime local producers” who “deliver their fresh produce, poultry, and meats directly to our kitchen.” After a month of beta testing, Gobble just launched its new service in California and Nevada, with plans for expanding to Washington and Oregon. It costs $11.95 per person per meal, with both vegetarian and non-vegetarian options. |
Mobile Wallet Laughingstock Clinkle Finally Launches To Let You Pay Friends And Earn “Treats” | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | After 17 months of jokes about vaporware college payments startup , its and apps finally launched today at a few colleges. Clinkle lets you pay friends, get a pre-paid Visa, and earn gifts like Baskin-Robbins ice cream for buying stuff with your Clinkle card. The trick is that Clinkle gamifies payments. You can only see Treats sent to you by friends if you pay with your Clinkle card, and you can “Spin the Treat to see if you won a refund on your last purchase.” Oh, and Clinkle trumpets “we’re not into fees” but will charge you them for a dozen different reasons. After raising only to endure a , layoffs, and , at least Clinkle got something out the door. Even if its doubtful anyone will use it. [ : A source familiar with Clinkle’s plans said the company didn’t intend to “launch” today but wanted to have its website up as it starts rolling out to schools. The company is still modifying the copy in hopes of better explaining how it works.] Here’s how Clinkle works. You can send money to other Clinkle users for free as long as you send it from your bank account. Clinkle’s long legalese made it hard to tell if you’ll be charged for sending money to friends via credit card or debit card. Clinkle users can also apply to get a pre-paid Visa credit card that they set to be automatically topped up from their bank account each week. When people use their Clinkle card to pay, they fill up a reward meter. After every seventh payment, Clinkle card users are awarded a “Treat”, such as free coffee or ice cream. They can send that Treat to a friend, who must make some payment with their Clinkle card to open it. Those wide-eyed and bushy-tailed enough to still be on the app can use a gesture to “spin” their treat for a chance to get their last purchase refunded. What Clinkle doesn’t do is allow instant via high frequency sounds without a card like it was hoping. Getting to market early with wallet-less payments was likely what lured Richard Branson, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Index to invest. Clinkle was shooting for the kind of “Innovation” with a capital I that we laud in Silicon Valley. But arrogant, late, and without that technology, most people are asking themselves why they would need Clinkle. The app is certainly slick, with tons of delightful little animation flourishes. These are the kind of things that could make people stick with the app, but it will need more unique and immediately useful functionality to get users in the first place. At least Clinkle employs 128-bit AES encryption, lets you set up a special PIN code to open the app, and insures its cards up to $250,000. If Clinkle had moved quicker, perhaps it could have grown on the back of its peer-to-peer payments feature. But since the buzz started about Clinkle in April 2013, Square Cash launched, Coin debuted, PayPal acquired plus brought added resources to Braintree and its product Venmo, Google Wallet has had more time to mature, and now Apple Pay is on the horizon. With all these competitors, the confusing Treats system, and the fact that you could just use a regular credit card, Clinkle may have a tough time recruiting users and being anything more than a twinkle in our memories. Here’s a look at all the fees you can run into on Clinkle. |
Why Is Box Taking So Long To Pull The IPO Trigger? | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | On March 24th, and went into the dreaded quiet period. It’s been over six months now since Box filed its S-1 form, signaling it would look for $250 million in its public offering. Prior to the announcement, Box was one of the hottest startups in technology, but after months of delay, with its IPO still sitting on the table, it is fair to wonder what the company is waiting for, and why it hasn’t pulled the trigger. While mired in its standard quiet period, Box has been unable to defend itself, as the Silicon Valley skeptics have come out of the woodwork. It didn’t help that the numbers in Box’s S-1 filing showed lots of growth, but also tectonic losses. Box’s full fiscal 2013 earned revenue of $124 million, a large number to be sure. But the company had GAAP losses that were greater: $168 million in the fiscal period. In its recently updated S-1, Box managed to get its fiscal first quarter GAAP operating margin under -100 percent, but its loss still grew 13 percent in the period to $38.5 million. On the plus side, the company’s revenue grew at a much larger 93.6 percent to $45.3 million in its fiscal first quarter. Greater losses, but on even greater revenue. Box showed that on a year-over-year basis, it could grow its top line, but unfortunately didn’t prove that it could do so while reducing its red ink. It’s clear Box has been burning through cash at an alarming rate, the very practice Silicon Valley venture capitalist . But it takes cash to achieve scale and CEO Aaron Levie has always believed in the power of scale. In fact, much of that money was going toward building a traditional enterprise-class, worldwide sales and marketing organization, something that is not cheap to construct. It was also going toward building a customer base and a platform. Levie tells a story early on that when the company was generating some revenue, he decided to switch to a freemium business model. His early financial backers, including Mark Cuban, questioned the wisdom of giving the product away when some were already paying for it. Levie believed that in order to take the company in the direction that he desired, he needed the power of scale, and so he went the freemium route to grow his user base more quickly. That bought him a couple of things. First and foremost, it bought him enterprises he so desperately wanted as customers. Levie bet that enterprises had both the money and willingness to pay for software, and that he could generate more revenue faster with enterprise licenses than he could with regular consumers. This was an idea that Dropbox is only now beginning to understand. Freemium was also a hidden tunnel into large enterprise companies that would never have paid attention to the then-small startup. It’s a well understood sales technique today, but back in 2007 or 2008, it was a fairly radical notion to bypass IT and go straight for users by luring them with a free product. Once Box achieved a certain level of scale, Levie , another stroke of incredible vision at the time. As said at Box’s 2014 BoxWorks event, today this is something every startup wants because it expands the breadth and quality of the base offering, but it’s much easier said than done. “Third parties only engage when you achieve critical mass. You have to do something else and become a platform. You aren’t born fully formed as a platform,” he said. Levie understood this. If Box has managed to grow its user base, develop large enterprise customers like Proctor & Gamble, GE and Schneider Electric, all while nurturing a platform that they say has more than 40,000 developers, why the hell hasn’t it hit go on its IPO? Could it be because the market isn’t sold on Box’s ability to generate sustainable profits, or even cash flow positive? Recent : The market views companies that are burning such huge amounts of cash through tinted glasses — not rose, mind you, but a less presentable color. Box to this point has been a good bet on revenue growth. Unfortunately as they consider an IPO, that approach is now far less in vogue. Instead of forcing its IPO out — and this presumes that it would have been possible at all — in private capital. Using back-of-the-envelope calculations, that probably pushed Box’s on-hand cash in the neighborhood of $200 million. Box appears to have bought itself some time with this raise and it can wait until it thinks the market is right. In other words, if the market isn’t ready for Box’s coming out party, Box has the cash on hand to be patient until it is. To be specific, Box burned through $29.58 million in cash in its most recent fiscal quarter. At that rate of burn, it still has quarters and quarters of runway, provided that it doesn’t increase its burn rate (something it would be foolish to do under these conditions). Presuming that its business model will allow the company to reduce its losses while growing its revenues, at a lower deficit Box could go public whenever it’s good and ready. And it may have the reserves to get there. When asked about the delay, a Box spokesperson indicated they had nothing new to add beyond their official statement. “Our plan continues to be to go public when it makes the most sense for Box and the market. As always, investing in our customers, technology, and future growth remains our top priority.” The market might not be ready for Box and Box may not be ready to go under current market conditions, but it appears to have enough funding to take its time and go whenever it considers the conditions are right. But waiting is still fraught with peril and the longer Box waits, the more people will wonder. |
Microsoft Backtracks After Senior Employee Says “Windows 9” | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | Worried that Microsoft was going to keep the “Threshold” codename on the next version of Windows? Fret not, it probably won’t. In a speech to employees, Alain Crozier, president of Microsoft France, called the new operating system “Windows 9” quite recently, and . I confirmed with a colleague who could translate that the phrase “Windows 9” was uttered. Microsoft has followed up with a statement for the ages: “On September 30, we will be providing an update on what’s next for Windows and the enterprise.” The was more extensive, adding something to the effect of “there is no name yet!” (Spoiler: there is a name.) So Microsoft says “Windows 9” out loud, and then says that its employee — a bigwig, to boot — was mostly talking out of his ass. Microsoft is hedging here, and that’s to be expected. What’s the chance that it is called something else? Lay your bets in the comments. |
Motorola’s Moto X Should Be Your Next Android Phone | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | the era of the ubiquitous Big Phone, it’s refreshing to hold something like the slim and light second-generation . Priced at $500 unlocked and about $99 with a contract, this 5.2-inch phone with 1080p OLED screen and Gorilla Glass front is a step beyond the latest from LG and, while not as feature-rich as the Samsung Galaxy S5, well worth a look as an upgrade to your Android arsenal. I used this phone primarily with the and carried it for a week or so while testing the watch. The model I used, a handsome gray and steel device with a little dimple on the back to help position your finger, is just one of the many permutations available at Motorola’s Moto Maker page. The company, which is still on thin ice, at least in terms of market share, has thrown everything it can into materials. By allowing you to add a pink leather or bamboo back and a colorful trim, they hope to make these Motos yours (and, presumably, reduce returns.) The phone has only two buttons – a rocker for the volume and a single activity button on the right side. The back sports a large 13-megapixel camera and a smaller 2-megapixel camera adorns the front. The phone makes use of the camera in unusual ways. For example, you can wake the phone by moving your hand in front of it to see notifications and you can wake the phone and talk to it by setting a unique “wake up call,” “Hey, Moto, what’s up?” for example. These two features are a bit unnerving at first because the phone consistently perks up while it’s at rest. However, the features didn’t reduce battery life and I saw the phone last about a day on one charge – about average for similar smartphones. So who is the Moto X for? First, it’s for folks looking to upgrade their original Moto X, another excellent flagship phone. This new model is slightly bigger than the older Moto X and is a much nicer product. The materials are excellent and the phone is solid in the hand. You’re obviously losing an expandable storage slot in this design – something many have complained about in this model – but you make up for it in design. Most interesting, however, is the Moto X’s excellent Geekbench score. Clocking in at , a few points higher than the M8 and considerably higher than the original, the 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chip shines in this device. The camera is acceptable, although I saw nothing to particularly recommend or condemn. and I found the same was true of the unit I tested – consistently good (if not amazing) snapshots. You can download the full-resolution originals . [gallery ids="1062084,1062085,1062086,1062089,1062090,1062091,1062093,1062094,1062095,1062096,1062098,1062100,1062101"] The question is then why should you upgrade to this if you’re not a Motorola fan or you’re locked into another series of phones? I’d argue the unique colors materials are one reason you’d jump to this from, say, a much older phone. But that’s not enough for us geeks. The screen, it should be said, is a great upgrade over previous models and is on par with some of the best we’ve seen from HTC and Samsung. The processor is solid and speedy and the version Android installed, namely 4.4.4 KitKat, is unencumbered by much bloatware or odd UI tricks. [gallery ids="1062050,1062053,1062051,1062048,1062047,1062046,1062045"] [youtube=http://youtu.be/a0UgYzhQKwc] I like this phone. It’s light, it’s nicely designed, and it seems to be the epitome of Motorola’s decade-long dedication to quality in design. This phone won’t change the fact that Samsung is still the big dog in Android sales, but it definitely shows us that there are contenders with enough chops to be dangerous. |
How Much Better Is Each New iPhone’s Camera? Here’s An Excellent Comparison | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | It’s easy to say that the iPhone’s camera has gotten better over time — that’s pretty much a given. But better? Lisa Bettany, co-founder of , decided to put it to the test. Eight generations of iPhone, lined up in a row… all taking the same photo. The results are pretty damn neat. The differences start to get a bit less massive as you reach the last generation or two — but they’re definitely still noticeable. I’d forgotten how bad the first two iPhones were at Macro photos. It’s also a great way to highlight the quirks of each generation’s sensor. Take a look at the crazy color processing/flaring of the iPhone 4 photo up top, for example. If you said #nofilter on that, no one would’ve believed you. These screenshots don’t quite do the shoot-out justice. Check out Lisa’s fully interactive (Note: that link seems to be having intermittent issues under increased traffic. If the photos are full size by default rather than a fancy expanding side-by-side, or if the site fails to load completely, try again later) |
PRSS Digital Magazine Platform Acquired By Apple | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | Apple has acquired Dutch digital magazine startup , a platform that makes it easy to create iPad-compatible magazines using tools that don’t require any knowledge of code. The company is essentially a magazine-focused version of iBooks Author, and the deal could mean better native publishing tools for digital periodicals. The acquisition was , a Dutch iOS-focused blog, which reports the deal from a “source with knowledge of the deal.” We’ve received the following statement from Apple, which is as close as the company ever comes to making a positive confirmation of an acquisition: Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans. Prss launched in 2013, and was the result of the work of the founding team’s creation of Trvl, one of the first iPad newsstand magazines. It was the first iPad-exclusive newsstand publication when it debuted in 2010, and featured a photo-rich design. Trvl won multiple awards, garnered very positive reviews in iTunes and was featured in a Tim Cook keynote speech during WWDC in 2012. Prss was designed to leverage the expertise Trvl co-founders Jochem Wijnands and Michel Elings into an open platform any iPad magazine publisher could use. Apple debuted iBooks Author in 2012, as a free tool publishers could use to build content for iBooks. The app is available for OS X, but its WYSIWYG editor is aimed primarily at building textbooks or other ebooks, and isn’t as useful for building publications for Newsstand. If Apple were to provide its own native tools for easy digital magazine creation, they could theoretically attract a lot more indie and small-run content to the Newsstand catalog. Of course, Apple could just be looking to fill out its roster on the digital publishing and design side with some more expertise, and in that case we likely won’t see any product announcements. Still, an interesting deal given the track record of Prss and the publication that spawned its creation. |
Bitcoin’s Price Skyrockets Following PayPal’s Hug | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | This morning, PayPal , allowing merchants to accept the cryptocurrency as payment for digital goods. The reaction to bitcoin itself has been immediate and positive. The PayPal integration is minor — users won’t be able to start stashing their bitcoin in their PayPal accounts, but merchants that use certain PayPal services, and are located in North America, will be able to accept bitcoin. PayPal is relying on several bitcoin payment providers to manage the transactions. The implication there is that PayPal, and its parent company eBay, will never hold bitcoin themselves. The news : Hello bitcoin, and welcome back to form. The other side of the above is that PayPal is willing into existence a host of new exit points for current bitcoin holders. The argument is simple: The easier it is for current bitcoin holders to cash out their holdings for IRL, or meatspace, goods, the more they will. If it was hard to do so, there would be more friction and thus less activity of that sort. PayPal, therefore, is assisting in the creation of potential downward price pressure on bitcoin. If more people cash out of bitcoin by spending it through BitPay and other providers than new money and interest flows into the system, it stands to reason that negative price pressure could develop. And thus the irony: The news that bitcoin is seeing greater adoption among mainstream payment providers sends the price up, even as the facts of the news itself might bring it down. For now, bitcoin fans are having a quite nice time. Keep in mind that bitcoin is rising off its once again. Something to keep in mind. |
Tune In To TechCrunch Radio On Sirius XM 102 Indie Tonight | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | that Sirius XM offers a one-month free trial. Coincidentally, runs for four more weeks for one hour every Tuesday night, starting tonight. So, if, perchance, you were interested in listening in to the show, you could get in on that free trial action from Sirius and follow along with John Biggs and I as we discuss the latest news, interview cool guests, and have a live, call-in pitch-off with startups around the country. The show airs at 6pm ET, 3pm PT, and replays again at 6pm PT for those of you driving home in that West Coast traffic. If you feel like hearing a whole new side of TechCrunch, tune in tonight to Sirius XM 102 Indie. We’re airing the show live from the Sirius XM studios in NYC, and will be following along on Twitter at the , so please join the conversation. In each episode, we hold a pitch-off where five companies can give their quick pitch to John, myself, and a guest judge. We will ask a few questions, get to know the companies, and then deliberate live on the air over who should be our winner. It’s a great chance to get the word out about your company and a fun way to get some feedback. If you’re interested in applying, check out the page or follow the instructions below.
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.
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Expa Brings On Hooman Radfar, AddThis Founder, As San Francisco EIR | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | , a startup studio with , is today welcoming a new member to the team. , founder and Chairman of , is coming on board the team to bring his expertise in big data and web services to the mix. Expa is a powerhouse of talent, with Uber cofounder Garrett Camp at the helm and . Radfar rounds out the team with more experience around big data visualization, and will reportedly be working on his own project as well. The idea at Expa is that each of these entrepreneurs can work on their passion projects with the help and collaboration of other experts in their field. “I love data-driven networks and platforms,” said Radfar. “There are lots of opportunities to take offline networks online and to improve existing ways we exchange information online. Expa already has some projects in this strike zone that I will be helping on, but I have some things coming soon as well.” Radfar represents the first EIR for Expa out of San Francisco. We have yet to see a product out of Expa, but Selvadurai has been there for a few months now, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see some rumbling out of that camp soon. |
Google X Founder Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role As Google VP And Fellow | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | Sebastian Thrun has left the building — the Google X building, that is. The founder of search giant factory to develop and build “moonshot” technologies, who launched the company’s driverless car project and was the project lead on Google Glass, is no longer a VP and Fellow at the company. Thrun, who also co-founded and currently runs online education startup , has an update to his (flagged to us by a sharp-eyed, anonymous reader), which notes that he left his roles as Google VP and Fellow as of August 2014. That same note says that he retains an advisory connection. “While I am now just an advisor, my enthusiasm for Google[x] is as high as ever,” the note says. The news has also been confirmed to us now also by a spokesperson at Google: It’s not clear if this is a between-the-lines message that Thrun wanted to dedicate more time to his education work but that has been the message for some time already. Udacity was founded in 2011, and the other two co-founders are not with the company anymore. Mike Sokolsky, who had been the CTO, left in October 2013, and David Stavens left in April 2013. From what I understand, Thrun has been in more of an advisory role at Google for a while now, with Chris Urmson leading the self-driving car project, and Ivy Ross leading Glass. Astro Teller continues to run Google X. Over the years, Thrun has been an exemplar of the place where science and entrepreneurship converge. He first joined Google in 2007, while a professor of computer science and engineering at Stanford University and having already made big inroads (pardon the pun) into robotics and cars. He left his full-time role there in 2011 when he became a Google Fellow, although remains, even now, a part-time research professor affiliated with the university. Google X, the lab he founded, is a semi-stealth project that Thrun himself describes as a “factory for moonshots… Google’s hardware innovation shop.” In addition to the cars and Google Glass, other Google X efforts that have been made public include for internet access, medical , indoor localization, and . Google Brain, Google’s machine learning and AI project that has contributed to different efforts at the company, also was developed at Google X. We have reached out also to Thrun and will update as we learn more. Image: |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 24 | null |
Belkin WeMo Crock-Pot Review: Not The Smartest Of Smart Devices, But It Gets The Job Done | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | Belkin is going all-out on the connected home, with products ranging from connected lighting systems to smart outlets. But one of its oddest offerings might just be a collaboration with slow cooker industry leader Crock-Pot, whose name is essentially synonymous with fire-and-forget meal-making. Belkin and Crock-Pot now offer the , a $130 kitchen appliance that can connect to Wi-Fi and be controlled from an app on your smartphone, wherever you have a data connection. The WeMo line is Belkin’s smart home brand, and the Crock-Pot can be controlled from the same app that lets you monitor and interact with your WeMo lights, switches and outlets. But the Crock-Pot doesn’t offer much in the way of interactivity with the rest of the WeMo family; it’s essentially a remote-controlled slow cooker, with an on/off switch you can carry in your pocket. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. Slow cooking is already essentially the type of cooking you do when you want something uncomplicated and easy, as it basically involves combining things in a hodgepodge manner and then turning it to one of three vaguely defined temperature ranges and then neglecting it entirely until your stomach notifies your brain stem you require nutrition. What WeMo adds to this isn’t geofencing or triggers based on when your IP camera detects motion – it’s essentially an on/off switch you control from your phone, with the ability to change temperature, view how long you’ve been cooking, and set when it turns off. The added convenience makes it possible to adjust your slow cooker from a remote location, so you can prepare for unexpected eventualities like having to stay late at the office. You can select from high, low and warm temperatures, and the Crock-Pot will switch to warm automatically once the timer you set is through, or if you manually end it. As a standalone Crock-Pot, the hardware is impressive, too: It features a removable, dishwasher safe 6-quart ceramic bowl, and has a single push-button control on its face. The WeMo Crock-Pot is more than twice the price of a programmable countdown Crock-Pot without the smart features, however, so you have to really decide whether the added convenience is worth it. But for a device whose entire purpose is to make it possible for busy people to enjoy home-cooked meals with minimal time investment and regardless of unpredictable schedules, the small number of features the WeMo device does offer might be worth the gap in price. |
Your iOS GIF Keyboard Is Finally Here, Thanks To Riffsy | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | Since the launch of iOS 8 last week, there’s been a in the App Store. That includes the likes of Swype, Fleksy and SwiftKey, all of which have been designed to help users more quickly type and share what they are thinking. But what if they want to share what they are feeling? For that, there’s no better tool than the animated GIF. And now, thanks to a company called , you can quickly and easily search for, discover and share a wide variety of animated GIFs directly from your keyboard. Arriving today on iOS, can be installed alongside all your other keyboards to send out funny animated GIFs via SMS, Twitter, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp in the same way you would send a text. The app leverages a that the company’s users have created or shared with the over the past year. And because those GIFs are usually tagged and identified with specific hashtags like #HAPPY, #EXCITED, or #LOL, it’s easy to find an image that suits your needs. When you first enter the keyboard, it highlights a number of different hashtags that will fit most occasions. You click through to view images under each description, find the one you want, and tap on it. Once that’s done, you’ll have the option of copying the GIF, copying a video, grabbing a link to the GIF, or saving it to your camera roll. To send as an SMS, you simply copy the GIF, click on the text entry field, choose to paste the image, click send and away it goes. You’ve now brought a smile to the face of whomever you’re texting with. Users can browse all the various hashtags that are pre-populated on the keyboard’s home screen, view those that are trending, or search for specific images. The keyboard also keeps track of all the GIFs you send and re-send, making them readily accessible in a favorites tab. In addition to choosing from GIFs that Riffsy users have collected over the past year, you can also add your own, thanks to the wonders of iOS 8’s new app extensions. By enabling the GIF keyboard extension in Safari, users can grab animated GIFs from Reddit, BuzzFeed, Imgur or wherever they may find them and easily add them to their collection. I’ve been using a beta version of the app for several weeks now, and can easily say it’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to my SMS conversations with friends. Now that iOS 8 is out and they can download the GIF Keyboard themselves, I can’t wait to never have to enter text to communicate with them ever again. |
Robinhood Raises $13M To Democratize Stock Market With Zero-Commission Trading App | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | Half a million people have already signed up for ‘s unlaunched . Now the startup has raised to hire talent to make its app totally secure so it can start adding people from its private beta waitlist. Unlike competitors E*Trade and Scottrade that charge people $7 to $10 per trade, Robinhood doesn’t need to spend money on brick-and-mortar outposts and some fancy castle on Wall Street. Instead, the hope is that the will substitute as a source of confidence in Robinhood’s longevity. Robinhood aims to make people comfortable storing money and trading stocks with the app it hopes to publicly launch in early 2015. “We’re making investing accessible to young people,” says co-founder Vlad Tenev (Vlad and his co-founder Baiju Bhatt are friends from college). “Most stock brokerages out there have been around for 30 years, their interfaces are clumsy, and they’re targeting older professionals and active traders. They’re no place for first time investors and that’s one of the things we focus on. Making it accessible. Having it be mobile friendly.” Tenev and Bhatt are serial financial technology entrepreneurs, having launched companies in algorithmic trading and investment bank software. While working on Wall Street in 2011, they saw the 99% movement first-hand, and devised an app to allow anyone to get involved with stocks. “It all comes back to the name” Bhatt says with real emotion in his voice. “We ask ourselves, ‘if we were to use a financial service that called itself Robinhood, what would we expect it to do?'” They brought to see if they could take the commission charges out of stock trading by replacing costly meatspace offices and marketing spend with lean software and a mobile app. This unlocks a much younger, less wealthy demographic that has historically been deterred from stock trading because a $10 fee represents a significant percentage of their total investment. It’s no big deal if you have plenty of money to throw around, but If you only want to buy a few hundred dollars worth of stock, paying $10 up front makes earning returns much harder. Ditching fees has led to 80 percent of beta users being under the age of 30. Robinhood is still in friends and family private beta, but . Engagement looks promising. Fifty percent of customers who’ve made a trade come back every day, and 90% come back every week. In December 2013, Robinhood raised . Today’s Series A round joined by financial tech fund Ribbit Capital, StockTwits’ Howard Lindzon, Path founder Dave Morin’s Slow Ventures, Box’s Aaron Levie, Snoop Dogg, Jared Leto, and Nas of Queensbridge Venture Partners brings Robinhood to $16 million in funding. Bhatt tells me “it’s important that Robinhood as a company is very well capitalized and that we have the backing of world-class venture capital firms that will stand behind the product” so that users know the company won’t suddenly fold. “Financial institutions have communicated their trustworthiness by having their name etched in some marble building on Wall Street,” says Bhatt. “But that just doesn’t resonate with people any more.” Robinhood founders Vlad Tenev (left) and Baiju Bhatt (right) Index Ventures partner Jan Hammer will join Robinhood’s board. Bhatt explains that Robinhood chose Index out of the competitive round because they regularly invest financial startups like WealthFront and SigFig. “For them, investing in a company that’s regulated like us, a financial company, isn’t an unknown. They’re committed to seeing us through all that stuff. Hammer tells me Index chased Robinhood because “the product has been developed by founders for their own generation – it’s a smart, slick and easy-to-use mobile app that revolutionizes the experience of accessing public markets.” He also cited the quality of the founders and the 20-person company’s opportunity to pull a new cohort into investing. You can learn more about Robinhood from this little video it shot with , of Coin demo fame. What’s the plan for the $13 million? Bhatt tells me “we’re a technology company, so we’re growing the team with top-tier engineers and designers from MIT and Stanford with former experience at Facebook, Google and Palantir.” Their goal will be to make Robinhood 100 percent secure and reliable so it can expand its public beta and get ready for a full launch. Bhatt admits “the margin for error is nonexistent.” If people’s trades don’t go through or there’s a security breach, doubt could ripple through its user base and kill the startup before it starts. Still, it’s had some users on its wait list for 9 months now (and its been 18 months since it came out of stealth), so it should do its best to keep people happy and informed while they stew. If it can run a tight ship, though, Robinhood could earn Wall Street-sized bags of cash despite being free for users. The model is to charge other startups to build apps on top of its API for lean trading. It could also charge to let users trade on margin — with borrowed money while their own is locked up in the standard three-day waiting period after you sell stock. It could also get paid by stock exchanges that want more trading volume, which Robinhood hopes to be able to deliver. And if the company can really get people to trust it with their money, Robinhood could earn interest on assets it holds. ‘s success will come down to making something as big and scary as trading stocks feel breezy from a phone. Bhatt concludes “the conventional fear is that ‘I thought I needed millions of dollars to invest in the stock market.’ You don’t even need thousands of dollars.” |
PayPal Enables Bitcoin Transactions For Merchants Selling Digital Goods | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | Bitcoin’s momentum among key merchants and platforms on the web keeps accelerating. After hinting at it a few weeks ago when Braintree enabled Bitcoin-based transactions for PayPal developers, the The company has expressed interest in bitcoin for a while, with eBay CEO John Donahoe saying in the past that it would . Now that large players from Overstock to Wikipedia are now relying on the cryptocurrency for a part of their transactions or donations, PayPal is stepping in. Through partnerships with BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin, PayPal will let its merchants accept bitcoin for digital goods transactions. They decided to go with a handful of launch partners instead of a single one, as PayPal’s Braintree did with Coinbase earlier this month. To be clear, this isn’t about adding Bitcoin to PayPal’s digital wallet and it’s only in North America for the moment. These are baby steps for now. “This is a huge endorsement to the digital currency community,” said GoCoin CEO Steve Beauregard. PayPal will earn transaction revenue through referral fees, which are pretty common throughout the payments world. “PayPal is playing the role of the intermediary, but the cost will be left up to the merchant and the payment processor,” said Scott Ellison, who is PayPal’s senior director of competitive intelligence and corporate strategy. A few weeks ago at TechCrunch Disrupt, Braintree CEO Bill Ready said that it |
Google Currents For iOS Now Called Google Play Newsstand Following Big Redesign | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | Google Currents, Google’s magazine-like news reading iOS app and a competitor to Flipboard, is rolling out a redesign and a handful of new features, including a way to subscribe to topics you’re interested in, instead of only subscribing to publishers, blogs and RSS feeds. The company is also ditching the name “Currents” and renaming the app “ ” in keeping with Google’s now-preferred naming scheme where its apps and services begin with “Google Play” (like “Google Play Music,” for example.) This change also follows the shift from Google Currents on Android, where the Currents mobile app has now been deprecated (though it ) in favor of Google’s own Newsstand service. The new iOS app’s look-and-feel falls in line with Google’s “Material Design” language, which is making its way to all of Google’s properties, including Android, Chrome and Google’s web and mobile apps. In the updated iOS Newsstand app, which is now represented by a blue and white icon that looks something like a newspaper with a page folded down (or confusingly, a little bit like the Google Docs icon turned on its side), Google has introduced revamped top-level navigation for browsing through the news content. There are now a few categories to help readers manage their subscriptions as well as dive into reading the news they care about, including a “Read Now” section which points you to the articles and editions from publications and feeds you currently subscribe to; “My Library,” which is a list of your Newsstand subscriptions; and “Topics,” a way to subscribe to areas of interest. You’ll also note as you browse through Newsstand that articles are tagged by topic. For example, an article about melting glaciers may be tagged “Climate,” another about connected cars may be tagged “Automobile,” and so on. When you tap on these tags, you’re then redirected to a page containing other news from that same category, and you can quickly tap the plus (“+”) button at the top to subscribe to all the latest updates from that category going forward. Many of the tags are a bit too broad as to serve as a useful curation tool for managing your news reading, with a number of tags encompassing categories like “Health,” “Design,” “Business,” and more. After all, you may want to follow a specific sub-category like “Digital Health” or “Health Care,” for example, not just all health news. But even if the article isn’t tagged with a narrower category in the news reader itself, you can do a search for the subcategory from the app’s search button and then subscribe. You can also bookmark articles for later reading, browse news highlights, and read across general news sections, like “Sports” or “World,” which is handy for those who don’t want to manage their own list of subscriptions. The redesign improves the app’s look-and-feel versus the earlier Currents app, and the transitions in between sections flow beautifully, in some cases sliding content up from the bottom or in other cases, in from the sides – and quickly, too. (Or at least, it performed well on an iPhone 6. Your mileage may vary.) The is rolling out now on iOS, replacing Google Currents. Meanwhile remains listed on Google Play, but tells visitors that Newsstand is the new home and Currents is “no longer available for download or use.” |
Google Has Tightened Its European Search De-Listing Request Process | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | , an online service for Europeans wishing to submit de-listing requests to search engines asking for outdated or irrelevant personal information to be de-indexed, has put out new details of the nature of requests it is helping to process — shining a little more light onto what remains a relatively closed-box process at this nascent stage. The operational darkness here is mainly because the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ (rtbf) , which requires search engines to accept and process de-listing requests from private individuals, is so new, only being handed down back in May (even though the data protection legislation it references dates back to 1995). Ergo the various players are still of how the ruling is best implemented. The ruling requires Google and other search engines to accept and process requests from private individuals wanting old/irrelevant/inaccurate information de-indexed from a search for their name. It requires that search engines, as data controllers, balance considerations of an individual’s right to privacy with factors such as whether that individual has any public role and therefore whether there might be a wider public interest in continuing to surface to whatever personal information they are seeking to obscure. NB: Europeans wanting personal data de-listed from Google do not need to use a third party service, such as Forget.me, but can make a request directly via Google’s . Forget.me’s parent company, Reputation VIP, put out some earlier data — — on requests being submitted via its rtbf hand-holding service. At that time it had garnered 13,000 registrations, with 1,106 of those users having submitted right to be forgotten applications — requesting the removal of a total of 5,218 links. It’s latest data records some 21,000 registrations for its service three months after launch, and 15,061 URLs submitted to Google via .me from 30 different countries. Looking at the submitted URLs, Reputation VIP notes that the majority (56%) have not yet been dealt with by Google. Of the 44% that had received a response, a majority (59%) had had their de-listing request denied by Google. Just over a third (36%) had had a de-listing request granted at that point, and a marginal 5% had been asked to supply Google with more information so it could assess their request. The company points to a shift in Google’s decision making since the rtbf request process launched, based on tracking its week by week decisions — noting that Mountain View was far more likely to grant a request made in the first week of the process vs the start of September. According to its data, 57% of rtbf requests submitted using Forget.me were initially granted by Google in June vs just 28% granted in the first week of September. (Of course the nature/type of requests Google has received may also have changed over the three months.) It has also tracked the average time taken for a decision over this period — and notes it has decreased significantly, as you might expect with a new process being established, from a whopping 44 days on average at the start of the process to just four days by early September. The data also indicates that Google has typically had to process fewer URLs as time has gone on, lightening its rtbf workload. Google was evidently initially swamped with requests, and had to work its way through a backlog. But it’s now processing more requests than it receives per week, according to Forget.me (see graph below). All of which suggests Google was perhaps not being so rigorous in assessing the merits of initial requests, in the interests of quickly cutting through the backlog in order to get on top of the process — but has since, perhaps, tightened up its assessments, now it’s not facing such a mountain of requests. (But again, it’s difficult to make a definitive judgement without knowing the content of the requests being processed, and how their complexity may have changed over nature.) Where applications have been refused, Reputation VIP has collated the types of refusals individuals received from Google (listed in the table below). The most common reason for refusal thus far (accounting for 26% of refused URLs) was that information related to the submitters’ professional life. Next most common was that it had been deliberately placed in public (22%). Thirdly Google’s refusal was based on info still being ‘relevant and of public interest’, in its view. Determining who exactly has a public role and who does not should be a key part of the assessment process for Google et al to determine when a de-listing request for individual privacy is fair and should be granted vs when it’s in the public interest not to obscure a piece of information so a request should be refused. Where refusals were based on the submitter having what Google determined as a ‘role in public life’, Reputation VIP checked the listed professions — and found the following job types coming up, shining some light on how Google is making these public role assessments at this point: Where rtbf requesters were asked to supply Google with more information in order for it to process their de-listing application, Reputation VIP said the most commonly asked questions were on the following topics: The wide scope of some of the above questions hints at the complexities involved in making decisions based on individual arguments — complexities which Google is having to grapple with under European data protection law. |
The iPhone 6 Plus Gets Bent | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | Every year, Apple announces a new iPhone. And every year, we go through a very similar cycle. First it’s rumors and leaks, and then spy shots from factory lines, and then the announcement comes! And then it’s reviews, and long lines, and pre-order figures, and first weekend sales figures… which brings us to today. Welcome to the portion of our event, wherein some is exposed a few days after millions of people just bought the new, potentially . Unfortunately, this year we haven’t been able to come up with something entirely new. With the iPhone 6 and, more pointedly, the iPhone 6 Plus, suggest that the phone will bend when left in a pocket, seated, for a prolonged period of time. There are a number of photos in the , and a French blog, , has also put up a photo of a bent iPhone, as well as the . Here they are: First off, let’s get something straight. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are hardly the first Apple products that bend. We saw the same hysteria over bending iPhone 5 units and later, the 5s. And in fact, the has had a . And . While it’s absolutely possible that the thinner, larger iPhone 6 and 6 Plus may be prone to bending after being crumpled in your pocket for a long time, all we’ve seen so far are early reports from a few people. We’ve reached out to Apple to see if they have anything to say, and we’ll get back to you when we know more. |
Dropbox Is Now iOS 8-Ready With A Notification Center Widget, App Extension Support And More | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | Now that iOS 8 is on the loose, Apple users are receiving much-improved versions of their favorite apps, designed to take advantage of new iOS features – like the ability to create custom widgets in the Notification Center. Today, file-sharing application has its , which now includes a new Notification Center widget of its own, offering a quick overview of your files and recent changes. Other new features make it easier to manage folders, connect to Dropbox from other apps, and control permissions for end users if on Dropbox for Business or Dropbox Pro. With the upgrade, the biggest change is that Dropbox can now be added to the iOS 8 Notification Center, providing a view of your most important files, including both those associated with your business and your personal files, if applicable. For those with only business or only personal files, you’ll just see a single list, instead of three separate tabs (All Personal, Business). In the widget, you can track newly added files, as well as changes like renamed files and edits. And with a tap on a file name, you can quickly launch Dropbox without needing to locate the app on your phone. Another change in the new app involves Shared Folders, which can now be created and managed on the go from the Dropbox app on iPhone and iPad. This addition is less about taking advantage of something iOS 8 specifically offers, and is rather about rolling out a feature users have been demanding for some time. You can now share the link to a folder from an action menu in the app, or invite users to a folder and manage their access levels. Also, because iOS 8 supports app extensions, you’ll now be able to import and export files to and from other iOS apps that support Apple’s “Storage Provider App Extensions” functionality. In order to import files to Dropbox, you’ll need to tap on the ellipsis icon (…) at the top of your file list, then choose “More” and toggle on or off the Dropbox as an option under “Manage Storage Providers.” And finally, for Business or Pro users, the iOS 8 update brings the ability to set and manage read-only permissions on shared folders via the Dropbox app, for control over what’s being shared – another more minor (but useful) feature, but again unrelated to Apple’s iOS 8 improvements. The updated app is . |
Business Goals Platform BetterWorks Leaves Stealth With $15.5M Led By KPCB | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | , a new, cloud-based platform designed to help employees set and reach business goals — and the newest project from gamification pioneer Kris Duggan of Badgeville — is coming out of stealth today, as the startup of the same name announces that it has reached some goals of its own. It has raised $15.5 million from a group of top investors; and it has picked up 25 enterprise customers, while in stealth, and in the words of Duggan expects to pass “substantial seven figures in sales in revenue this year.” The round is led by John Doerr and Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and others investing include Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale (via Formation 8). Doerr’s involvement with BetterWorks is more than just that of a VC whose interest has been piqued by a catchy idea: while at Intel, he was involved in some of the early efforts being made by large companies to figure out ways of harnessing people’s ambitions and tying them to more organised productivity. Later, as a board member at Google, he was also instrumental in getting some of these ideas implemented there, alongside Shona Brown, a Googler Emeritus who used to help run operations at the company. Brown, along with Doer, Gordon, Lonsdale and Jason Lemkin, former VP of Adobe and CEO of EchoSign, are all joining BetterWorks’ board. Duggan, who left Badgeville about a year ago (after an from CEO to CSO), has been working on BetterWorks for the better part of a year with co-founders Di Wu (ex-Palantir engineering) and Paul Reeves (another Badgeville alum who headed up customer success). It is a product of some of the issues Duggan was encountering in the companies where he himself worked. When you are around a lot of smart people, how do you keep them creative and motivated but also focused on growing the business at hand at the same time? While there is clearly a connection between gamification for consumers and goal-setting for employees — they are, at heart, about people identifying motivations and a company using those to encourage certain actions — Duggan says that BetterWorks is miles away from Badgeville and could not have been built there. “The inspiration for our dashboard and this product, in a way, is the concept of a Fitbit for work,” he told me in an interview. In other words, it’s the concept of quantified self, regular monitoring made engaging and encouraging — something you can see in BetterWorks’ dashboard. “This isn’t HR software. Most HR companies aren’t thinking of operations. But this is not about performance reviews and all that stuff,” he says. Indeed, you are given a couple of ways of using the platform — both to set specific goals and meet them, or to see how you progress incrementally, based around a timeframe that you give yourself to achieve your goal. The concept is inherently social — you share your goals with team members by default, unless you set them to private, and you invite others along to participate if they are team efforts, so that they become everyone’s objectives. And in a hat-tip to platform plays and other more incumbent HR software, BetterWorks integrates with a lot of APIs for produts like Asana and Salesforce, should you want that data to link up together — with the long-term goal being to integrate all kinds of workflow and productivity apps. There has been some evidence that this is working. The 25 companies have collectively already posted some 20,000 goals and achievement milestones since joining the platform. All while paying BetterWorks for the privilege. The BetterWorks platform is inspired by something called the OKR model (which stands for Objectives and Key Results), first put in place by Doerr at Intel. “Ideas are relatively easy, but execution is everything,” Doerr says in a statement. Ironically, Duggan had already created the platform and business prior to meeting Doerr or even knowing about his connection to the concept. Bing Gordon is a mutual friend, and when Duggan got in touch to say he wanted to talk about his new product with him, Gordon came up with the idea of connecting the two, who hit it off. BetterWorks, which is charged on a $15 per user, per month model, comes down in price on volume discounts starting at 500 users — a sign of the company’s ambitions in terms of how it plans to scale. For now, it’s not disclosing all of its customers but has a few recognisable names that are worth pointing out. They include Zynga (per the Gordon and Doerr connection) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Duggan says there are others that he cannot disclose “yet.” Although Google’s in-house-designed goals platform is, in Duggan’s words, “light years” behind BetterWorks, he’s not fazed about whether it might ever become a competitor if Google decides to productise it in an enterprise push. What he is keen to do is land Google as a customer. “One of our stretch goals is to get Google to use our product internally,” he says. “We are not at 100% on that goal just yet, but Doerr is on the boards of Google and BetterWorks so there is not going to be a competitive scenario there. That is extremely unlikely.” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-yeDb7stlw] |
The $1 Million Race For The Cure To End Aging | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | The hypothesis is so absurd it seems as though it popped right off the pages of a science-fiction novel. Some scientists in Palo Alto are offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can end aging. “Based on the rapid rate of biomedical breakthroughs, we believe the question is not we can crack the aging code, but will it happen,” says director of the Keith Powers. It’s a fantastical idea: curing the one thing we will all surely die of if nothing else gets us before that. I sat down with Aubrey de Grey, the chief science officer of the and co-author of “Ending Aging,” to discuss this very topic a few days back. According to him, ending aging comes with the promise to not just stop the hands of time, but to actually reverse the clock. We could, according to him, actually choose the age we’d like to exist at for the rest of our (unnatural?) lives. But we are far off from possibly seeing this happen in our lifetime, says de Grey. “With sufficient funding we have a 50/50 chance to getting this all working within the next 25 years, but it could also happen in the next 100,” he says. If you ask Ray Kurzweil, life extension expert, futurist and part-time adviser to , we’re actually tip-toeing upon the cusp of living forever. “We’ll get to a point about 15 years from now where we’re adding more than a year every year to your life expectancy,” he told the . He also wrote in the book he co-authored with Terry Grossman, M.D., that “Immortality is within our grasp.” That’s a bit optimistic to de Grey (the two are good friends), but he’s not surprised this prize is coming out of Silicon Valley. “Things are changing here first. We have a high density of visionaries who like to think high.” And he believes much of what Kurzweil says is true with the right funding. “Give me large amounts of money to get the research to happen faster,” says de Grey. He then points out that Google’s Calico funds are virtually unlimited. Whether it’s 15, 25 or even 100 years off, we need to spur a revolution in aging research, according to Joon Yun, one of the sponsors of the prize. “The aim of the prize is to catalyze that revolution,” says Yun. His personal assistant actually came up with the initial idea. She just happens to be an acquaintance of Wendy Schmidt, wife of Google’s Eric Schmidt. But it was the passing of Yun’s 68-year-old father-in-law and some conversations with his friends that got him thinking about how to take on aging as a whole. The Palo Alto Prize is also working with a number of angel investors, venture capital firms, corporate venture arms, institutions and private foundations within Silicon Valley to create health-related incentive prize competitions in the future. This first $1 million prize comes from Yun’s own pockets. The initial prize will be divided into two $500,000 awards. Half a million dollars will go to the first team to demonstrate that it can restore heart rate variability (HRV) to that of a young adult. The other half of the $1 million will be awarded to the first team that can extend lifespan by 50 percent. So far 11 teams from all over the world have signed up for the challenge. All 11 teams are listed below for those interested in following along: Doris Taylor, Ph.D.
Texas Heart Institute, Houston, TX
TEAM NAME: T.H.I. REGENERATIVE MEDICINE (approach: stem cells) Dongsheng Cai, M.D., Ph.D.
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, NY
TEAM NAME: CAI LAB (approach: hypothalamic regulation) Andreas Birkenfeld, M.D.
Charite University School of Medicine, Berlin, Germany
TEAM NAME: INDY (approach: gene modification) Jin Hyung Lee, Ph.D.
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
TEAM NAME: LEE LAB (approach: neuromodulation) David Mendelowitz, Ph.D.
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
TEAM NAME: MENDELOWITZ LAB (approach: oxytocin) Scott Wolf, M.D.
Mountain View, CA
TEAM NAME: VOLTS MEDICAL (approach: inflammatory tissues) Irving Zucker, Ph.D.
University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE
TEAM NAME: ZUCKER LAB (approach: neuromodulation) Brian Olshansky, M.D.
University of Iowa Medical Center, Iowa City, IA
TEAM NAME: IOWA PRO-AUTONOMIA (approach: not yet public) William Sarill, M.A.
Arlington, MA
TEAM NAME: DECO (approach: pituitary hormones) Steven Porges, Ph.D.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
TEAM NAME: POLYVAGAL SCIENCE
(approach: optimizing both the left & right vagal branches) Shin-Ichiro Imai, M.D., Ph.D.
Washington University, St. Louis, MO
TEAM NAME: IMAI LAB (approach: gene modification) Note: It was originally reported that Yun’s nanny came up with the idea. However, it was actually his personal assistant who came up with the prize giveaway. |
Bellabox, Australia’s Largest Beauty Box Service, Raises $2.7M From Allure Media | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | , Australia’s largest beauty subscription site, announced today that it has received $2.7 million in funding from , a digital publishing company owned by . The capital will be used to expand bellabox’s service offerings and improve its market research, as well as hire more staff and expand the the startup to new international markets in the Asia Pacific. Bellabox was founded in October 2011 by sisters Sarah and Emily Hamilton, and has since grown to take 70 percent market share in Australia. The company claims 12 percent monthly growth in subscribers and now has 40,000 monthly members in Australia and Singapore. Allure Media, which publishes blogs like Gizmodo Australia, Kotaku Australia, and Lifehacker Australia, was in 2013. The deal is interesting because it gives Fairfax, a traditional publishing company whose properties include The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, a chance to capitalize on the possibilities of online media, including e-commerce integration. Other print publication businesses that have pursued a similar strategy and Conde Nast, to go along with Lucky, one of its print fashion magazines. Sarah Hamilton, CEO of bellabox, tells TechCrunch that Allure Media’s investment in her startup fits into its strategy because “we see a huge amount of synergies with the Allure Media brands that we will continue to explore and where possible, bellabox will assist in closing the buying cycle for advertisers by pushing the ‘discover and then buy’ experience through our beauty box.” Bellabox plans to expand in new markets through the Asia Pacific and will differentiate from other subscription services with the depth of its market research, says Hamilton. “Beauty boxes are based on traditional sampling market method while layers of sophistication are added to this through customization, targeting, and further utilization of data. We believe that the value-adds we can deliver still have a long way to go, so we are focused on improving this area.” |
Tim Cook Holds Firm On iMessage Security: It’s Encrypted, And We Don’t Have A Key | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | As Apple continues to for how it handles iCloud security, the company’s CEO Tim Cook is holding firm on the company’s priorities when it comes to data protection. In part 2 of an interview with Charlie Rose, airing on PBS tonight, Cook is adamant that Apple is not in the business of collecting data, but rather selling hardware, and, as such, it puts data privacy as a priority. “We’re not reading your email. We’re not reading your iMessage,” Cook said. “If the government laid a subpoena to get iMessages, we can’t provide it. It’s encrypted and we don’t have a key. And so it’s sort of — the door is closed.” The comments sit not just as a defense of Apple in the wake of the , where racy photographs were obtained by malicious, phishing hackers and then distributed online (Apple plainly ); but they are also a reiteration of an argument Apple first brought up a year ago, when the company came out with its of the security of its iMessage messaging platform in the wake of NSA revelations — a position that was and debunked by some security researchers. Cook’s comments are also something of an indirect snub to Google, the search and Android giant that Cook flat-out called in the first part of his Rose interview. Here are Cook’s remarks in full in response to Rose’s comment about how some people feel like “companies like Google” are in possession of too much information, some of it personal. We take a very different view of this than a lot of other companies have. Our view is, when we design a new service, we try not to collect data. So we’re not reading your email. We’re not reading your iMessage. If the government laid a subpoena to get iMessages, we can’t provide it. It’s encrypted and we don’t have a key. And so it’s sort of, the door is closed. But our business Charlie, is based on selling these [pointing to devices]. Our business is not based on having information about you. You’re not our product. Our product are these, and this watch, and Macs and so forth. And so we run a very different company. I think everyone has to ask, how do companies make their money? Follow the money. And if they’re making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data, I think you have a right to be worried. And you should really understand what’s happening to that data. And companies I think should be very transparent about it. He also touched on how this relates to new products that Apple is launching — specifically its e-commerce effort, : From our point of view, you can see what we’re doing on the credit card thing. We don’t want it. We’re not in that business. I’m offended by lots of it. And so, I think people have a right to privacy. He also went back to how Apple has handled and would respond to data requests from organizations like the NSA, maintaining that Apple would “never allow” backdoor access to its servers. Cook’s position is that questions of data privacy will be a “key topic over the next year or so.” And we’ll reach higher and higher levels of urgency as more and more incidents happen. I think that the, for us, in the Snowden thing, just to go along on that for just a moment. What we wanted, was, we wanted instantly to be totally transparent because there were rumors and things being written in the press that people had backdoors to our servers. None of that is true, zero. We would never allow that to happen. They would have to cart us out in a box before we would do that. It’s, if we ever get information, and we finally got an agreement from the administration to release how many times we had national security orders on Apple. And in a six month period, and we had to release a range, because they won’t let us say the exact number, it’s between zero and 250. That’s the lowest number you can quote. Zero to 250. An excerpt from the interview is below: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmm5faI_mLo&w=560&h=315] |
CEO Of Guess Watches Welcomes Apple To The Fray | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | In what amounts to a “welcome” turned sputtering softball aimed at Apple’s broad side, the CEO of Guess Watches Cindy Livingston wrote an open letter to Apple while, at the same time, proclaiming her own interest in the smartwatch world. Guess, a fashion brand founded in the 1980s, is best known for dress watches known as “department store styles”: the kind of pieces available at jewelry counters in major department stores. The most interesting news, to be sure, is Livingston’s announcement that Guess is partnering with , a smartwatch brand that produced a number of unusual pieces but has thus far kept quiet about its reaction to the . Livingston writes: We are part of an old and proud industry. Every year we’ve experienced change in some way. Over these years, we have seen the introduction of quartz movements, the rise and fall of calculator watches, digitals, analogue-digitals and many many brands, both big and small. It seems that the test of time has shown that the wrist is an obvious place for both function and fashion. Fast-forward to today and the world has changed. The proliferation of smartphones and the demand of consumers for round-the-clock connectivity have changed the way people access time. This has caused an understandable fear and challenge in our industry (even if no one likes to admit it). We personally welcome this new challenge to remain relevant to our young, sexy and adventurous consumers who see as much importance in the device they carry and the messaging app they use, as the clothing and accessory brands they buy. Over the past year, there has been dramatic speculation of the future of “wearables” and Apple’s entre into this segment. This week, you delivered! Just as we had in the early 80’s, there are naysayers and believers. I, for one, am a fan! Your innovation and attention to detail is spectacular. In today’s connected world, consumers deserve the next level of combining fashion and function. We’ve always been much more than a watch. Now, we too are going to take that concept even further. As we look forward to the launch of our own connected timepiece for GUESS… “Powered by MARTIAN”, we’re happy to have another true brand innovator in our industry that confirms the wrist as the dominant place for self-expression. Congratulations. Cindy Livingston
President & CEO
GUESS WATCHES Martian is part of the previous generation of LCD- and E-ink-based smart watches that are currently reworking their missions as the Apple Watch looms. Why Guess is partnering with them and not, say, Pebble or Metawatch, is the real question here but I suspect the addition of an analog face coupled with a small digital notifications window matches the Guess aesthetic. While I suspect this was written in the tone of Apple’s “Seriously” ad published in the 1980s, I worry that the Martian platform will be sub par in the face of future contenders, a sobering consideration for the fashion brand. |
Recruitment Trainwreck BranchOut In Talks To Be Acquired, May Sell Mobile Team To Hearst | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | ‘s story is a brutal lesson about the risk of derailment when you build on someone else’s platform. After raising $49 million and growing to 33 million users, Facebook changed its viral channels leading to starve. Now the “LinkedIn within Facebook” wants to throw in the towel. Sources confirm that BranchOut is in discussions with several acquirers in the recruiting space for its main team, product and data, though that may take a little time and the main product will run until then. Right now, it’s in late-stage talks with the to sell its mobile team that built enterprise chat app Talk.co. That info is backed up by the fact that , and its apps have been removed. BranchOut could find another buyer for Talk and its team, though, and the leak of this news could impact the outcome. BranchOut’s Talk.co would potentially work for Hearst on mobile apps for delivering content from the corporation’s magazines and TV channels. That part of the deal is being shopped for “multiple-millions of dollars,” which might range into the tens of millions said one of my sources, so not a big win. The price for the rest of the team, product, and data is unclear. I’ve contacted BranchOut and it refused to comment. [Update 9/20/14: that it has acquired assets and the team from BranchOut, just as I said it was in talks to do. Hearst has formed a new “Silicon Valley digital product development group to accelerate its high-growth, multi-screen digital media offerings…Rick Marini, formerly CEO of BranchOut, and the product, UX and engineering teams from BranchOut will be forming the core of the new group.”
Started in 2010 by Tickle co-founder Rick Marini, BranchOut’s Facebook desktop app was designed to help people find jobs and figure out where their friends worked. It used spammy Facebook wall posts to in its early days, eventually reaching 33 million users after adding mobile apps. The chance to compete with LinkedIn and its progress helped BranchOut raise money from Accel, Floodgate, Redpoint, Norwest and Mayfield Fund. A $25 million round in April 2012 brought it to . But then things went pear-shaped. Few of BranchOut’s users were truly engaged, and the recruitment search tool it planned to make money with never got serious traction. When Facebook banned the spammy wall post method, BranchOut’s churn quickly outpaced its growth and the company deflated. The train tracks were stripped out from under it. In late 2012 it tried turning into more of a about work accomplishments, but no one felt like bragging about their day’s meetings and milestones. Its core use case was usurped in January 2013 when , making it easy to natively see where friends worked. In that BranchOut would pivot to workplace chat, which it in October of last year. The cross-platform app let you sign up with a work email address and see a buddy list of your coworkers. You could ping them with one-on-one and one-to-many instant messages, or set up chat rooms. Unfortunately, Talk.co failed to pick up much steam either, as Slack became the new darling of enterprise communication. Now BranchOut is cutting its losses by trying to find its team a new home and sell the data people gave it about where they worked and studied. Overall, entrepreneurs should take away the realization that if you’re dependent on another company, you’re vulnerable. While Facebook supercharged BranchOut’s initial growth and made it easy for people to hand the app their professional data, that reliance turned into an addiction. When Facebook forced BranchOut to go cold-turkey, the withdrawal wasn’t pretty. Building on someone else’s platform requires a tough balance of opportunity and risk, and startups always have to be ready to stand on their own two legs. |
Watch This Robotic Cheetah Run Like A Real Animal | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMKQbqnXXhQ] It’s not every day that you see a robotic electric cheetah traipse merrily on the MIT quad and football field, but here you go: the Cheetah, a robot that will be able to run as fast as 30 miles per hour, is now wandering about untethered like jumpy younger brother. The Cheetah was made at MIT’s and features a light, powerful collection of electric motors that propels the robot over obstacles and through rough tread with quiet aplomb. It uses something called a High Torque Density Actuator to move the legs quickly and precisely without shattering the metal exoskeleton. The exoskeleton itself actually mimics a cheetah’s real bone structure, making it truly biomimetic. Because it doesn’t use a gas engine like Big Dog it is surprisingly quiet and looks quite jovial. Luckily it does not come with jaws and teeth as an optional accessory – yet. |
500px Co-Founder And Former CEO Ousted From The Startup | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | Toronto’s photo portfolio site and marketplace is undergoing some major changes, as co-founder Oleg Gutsol is out from the company he started. The executive shared the information on Facebook on Monday, saying that he was “ousted from the company that [he] created by the people [he] trusted most.” It’s impossible to see this as a move that was reached equitably by all parties given that description, and we’ve confirmed it was not Gutsol’s decision to part ways with the startup. Reached by telephone, Gutsol explained that after a decision by the board and the founders saw him quietly leave the CEO role for one leading product six months ago, he disagreed regularly with his CEO successor Andy Yang and board members regarding the direction the site should take. “We’re just basically going different ways,” Gutsol said. “They have a very different opinion of where the company should go, and I think it was probably too strong of a push from my direction, it was probably too different – where I wanted to take the company and where they wanted to go.” A sample profile page from 500px. Gutsol’s vision saw 500px’s artist community and marketplace as two sides of the same coin, with the ultimate goal being uniting these sides of the business as a single system. He also says eventually the site had hoped to expand to include other types of artists beyond photographers under his original vision. The board and Yang see the two lines of business as separate entities, as more of a Google operating multiple distinct products type of approach, Gutsol says. “It’s almost like a standalone company,” he said. “I don’t really believe in the ability to build satellite products around the community. There needs to be one solid system, not multiple things that are somehow tied together.” “At some point, I didn’t have enough leverage to push forward for my vision” Gutsol added. When contacted for comment, 500px provided the following statement, which confirms that Yang took over the CEO role without fanfare six months ago, and tactfully addresses Gutsol’s contribution. We would like to take the time to address some of the recent leadership changes at 500px. Oleg Gutsol, one of 500px’s co-founders, is moving on from the company. We would like to properly acknowledge that 500px would not exist today if not for the incredible hard work, creativity, and leadership from Oleg. His name will forever remain on the masthead of this company, and we wish him the best of luck and success in all his future endeavors. Though transitions of this nature are always difficult, 500px is well-equipped to maintain its position as a premier photography community and remains dedicated to enabling and rewarding visual creativity for everyone. Evgeny Tchebotarev, 500px’s CPO and other co-founder, still remains in a leadership role focusing on the four million-plus photographers on the platform. The role of CEO will continue to be fulfilled by Andy Yang, as it has been for the past six months. 500px’s origins date back to 2003, when it was created as a hobby photographer community by co-founder Evgeny Tchebotarev. Tchebotarev brought Gutsol on board in 2009 and relaunched it as its own site. The community has garnered praise for being a Flickr alternative with greater attention paid to design and presentation, which makes it much more suitable for use among professional and advanced amateur photographers. Gutsol says he isn’t sure exactly what’s next for him, though he intends to take some time off and will consider opportunities to help young entrepreneurs just getting started with their own projects in the meantime. |
You Can Now Text Groot | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | seems like he’d be a pretty good friend to have. He’ll always have your back in a fight, he can inexplicably summon fireflies out of thin air when your movie needs more 3D effects, and he’s one helluva dancer to boot. He’s also a pretty good texter, it turns out. At the very least, he’s consistent. Want to see for yourself? Here’s Groot’s phone number: (866) 740-4531. Shoot him a text and prepare yourself for some of the deepest conversations you’ve ever had. Save it to your address book and blow your friends’ minds (or, at the very least, mildly amuse them for 10 seconds) next time you’re at the bar. [Note: If you haven’t seen Guardians Of The Galaxy and this post makes absolutely no sense, don’t worry — you’re not crazy. Also, go see Guardians Of The Galaxy.] [Note #2: This was built as a gag by Twilio employee ] Working on a new SMS chatbot with some pretty amazing AI. Can’t wait for you all to see this. Launching this afternoon. — Ricky ✈️ (@rickyrobinett) |
Microsoft Confirms Its Windows Event Will Take Place On September 30th | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | Microsoft today confirmed its Windows event that will take place on September 30 in San Francisco. The event is widely expected to include a release of the technical preview of Windows 9, the successor to the controversial Windows 8.x operating system that was released in 2012, along with the Surface line of tablets. Microsoft is not expected to release a preview of its updated version of Windows RT, which may include Windows Phone components, until early 2015, though that information is less concrete than the Windows 9 news itself. Windows 9 , with videos showing off its new Start Menu functionality, along with a number of business-facing features like virtual desktops. Given that the first released build should be a technical preview, expect it to be more focused on developers and enterprise customers, than consumers. Given that, we likely won’t be shown, or be able to use, some of what Microsoft is building for the common man. The event is two weeks out, meaning that it is go time. Let’s see if Redmond can right the Windows ship. |
The FCC Has Received More Than 3 Million Comments Concerning Net Neutrality | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | The FCC has received more than 3 million comments concerning the current net neutrality notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM). That figure is dramatically higher than the . The massive jump comes from the FCC chewing through a deluge of comments that were filed last week as part of a that saw large websites ask their users to speak up on net neutrality. The FCC , to better handle the quantity of submissions it was receiving. Today is the last day to comment, in case you have yet to file your views with the government. Comments will be accepted up until 11:59 PM, Eastern Time this evening. That net neutrality was surprising to many. Net neutrality is arcane, technical, and difficult to explain to the uninformed. Sustained public campaign overcame those speed bumps, it seems. Comments submitted to the FCC have been . There is slight tension among net neutrality advocates concerning which set of legal rules should be used to support an open Internet — , for example — even as the majority opinion seems to have set around Title II, over Section 706. 3 million comments deep, the public has said its piece. What the FCC will do with the collected public opinion isn’t clear. |
DipJar Raises Funding For A Tip Jar Where You Pay With Plastic, Not Spare Change | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | The move to a more “cashless” society has not been without its victims – namely, those whose incomes relied on the spare change and small donations that once came from customers emptying their pockets, but are now locked up in and credit card swipes. The lowly tip jar today often sits empty, as few carry around the quarters and dollars with which to fill it. A company called wants to change that, and has now raised a $420,000 seed round to scale production of its hardware. The round was led by , the new fund from Bob Mason, Brightcove founder, and Katie Rae and Reed Sturtevant, former Techstars Boston directors. Other angels in the round include Will Herman, Warren Katz, Joe Caruso, Mike Dornbrook, Bill Warner, Scott Heller, and others. The New York-based company, currently incubated by the Bolt accelerator in Boston, was founded by CEO Ryder Kessler, a former director of strategy at New York cab-sharing startup Bandwagon and VP of Sales Jordan Bar Am, previously of McKinsey, and the co-founder of fruit importer Oke USA. Kessler said the idea occurred to him simply because he began to “feel like a jerk” at one of his favorite coffee shops which only offered tipping via a cash-only tip jar. Not only was everyone paying with plastic these days, reducing the tips overall, the baristas there also confided in him that they would rather the store stay empty since there was no financial upside to an influx of customers. The problem with the reduction in cash-based tips means lower-income workers or those who once depended on a tip-based boost to their salaries, would likely turnover faster as they exited to try to find better-paying jobs, Kessler realized. That’s bad for the businesses who would then have to incur more training costs, and, ultimately, the turnover could affect customer service, too. Baristas, of course, aren’t the only ones affected by customers’ disappearing cash. Deli workers and sandwich makers, ice cream scoopers, coat checks, valets, barbers and hairstylists, hotel housekeepers, and more also once relied on handfuls of dollars customers gave to them, whether by hand, placed in tip jars, or left in envelopes. Though customers are now paying by credit or debit, they’re not always getting receipts, or getting those that do don’t necessarily have a line to enter a hand-written tip, because business owners don’t want the hassle of accounting for the extra funds and distributing those back to their employees. This is what the , as it’s called, aims to solve. The company began building custom prototypes of the DipJar tip jars, and rolled just under two dozen out to New York-area businesses and charity groups starting back in summer 2012. One recent adopter of the technology is the which used the DipJar to raise funds from those attending a film festival, and now plans to roll it out to visitor centers. Currently, the DipJar’s hardware involves off-the-shelf parts, but with the funding, the company is working to scale up to mass production. The unit itself is basic: inside the jar is a standard credit card reader, and not much more. The customer inserts their card and pulls it out to swipe, and the jar will automatically deduct a pre-configured amount (as determined by the business). Just as important, the act of swiping makes a loud “change clinking” sound so the employee will know you’ve tipped. That will save you from one of those awkward Seinfeld situations ( because he wanted to make sure he got credit for having done the deed?). Kessler also says version 2 will include a light array as well, along with other refinements, to help encourage and notify other customers and staff of the tips being processing. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svWjtDhGQFg] The funding will be used to grow the team of two to 4 or 5 over the next few weeks, and further develop the software for businesses that will allow merchants to enter in employee information and track tipping as a metric of customer satisfaction, if they choose. The team is also working to automate the payouts to employees, which are currently distributed by check every two weeks. And, of course, the hardware is being improved to make it a scalable solution. The team is also gearing up to be ready when the shift to EMV takes place, or if Apple Pay helps push NFC adoption into the mainstream, says Kessler. “We already own the trademark for ‘TapJar,'” he notes regarding the latter. Kessler won’t detail the cost to produce the jar today, or how much it will sell for, explaining that the company has been exploring several business models, including monthly pricing, upfront pricing, and pricing by volume. Similarly, it’s too early to disclose metrics of the DipJar’s impact on increasing tips, he says, since those can vary wildly by business and the DipJar only has a handful of customers today. However, he would tell us that the DipJar hasn’t cannibalized cash tips, from what they’ve seen. “The DipJar brings in new money for the recipients,” he says. Plus, he adds, though the team was planning to run short 3 to 6 month tests, “no one wanted to give it back…that speaks to the success of the product.” |
Why Facebook Is Deleting Drag Queen Profile Pages | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | founder and drag queen woke up this morning to discover her page had been completely erased from existence. She’d heard of this happening to other queens in her community last week. Then Facebook sent her a personal message last Thursday that asked her to revert to her birth name, as well. She says she tried to comply with that request by keeping her drag name and then adding her last name, Grygelko. However, adding her last name as a compromise didn’t seem to be enough for the social network giant. Her entire profile is now gone. And she says she has no way of reaching out to her other drag queen friends because she doesn’t even know what their birth names are. “I’ve had this name for 20 years now,” she says. “I walk down the street and people say ‘Hi Heklina.’ People know me by my drag name.” She says asking her to revert to her birth name is akin to not acknowledging her as a person. When asked just how many drag queens this may have affected, Heklina says she knows has been asked to revert to a name Facebook believes is more suitable. Well-known drag queens such as Sister Roma from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Peaches Christ and Pollo Del Mar are only able to be found on their fan pages at the moment. “As part of our overall standards, we ask that people who use Facebook provide their real name on their profile,” stated an email from a Facebook spokesperson. The real-names policy has been in place for a while, but it’s not entirely clear why drag queens have been suddenly targeted en masse. Heklina was told by Facebook reps that it was just an algorithm that discovered the drag queens and started asking them to change their names. Facebook’s states, “We require everyone to provide their real names, so you always know who you’re connecting with. This helps keep our community safe.” This is problematic for the drag community. Heklina says queens often don’t want their family or others to find them by their real names in order to protect themselves from bigotry and harm. “This is like in the 1950’s when drag queens would perform at the club and then had to quickly change into their boy clothes after to keep from getting harassed,” she says. Scott Wiener, LGBT advocate and member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors for District 8, which covers the heavily gay populated Castro/Upper Market neighborhoods, addressed the issue in an open Facebook post this morning: Preventing drag queens from using the names that actually define who they are also puts a number of people in the untenable position of having to choose between telling the world that they’re drag queens and abandoning Facebook for their drag personas. While many drag queens are “out” about who they are, not all drag queens have that luxury. Plenty of discrimination, hate, and violence toward the LGBT community still exists in many parts of the world, and various people have drag personas that they feel the need to keep separate from the rest of their lives. People who disclose their non-drag identity – and who, conversely, announce to the world that they are drag queens – should do so because they want to, not because Facebook is forcing them to do so in order to continue using their profiles. Facebook’s answer to this so far is, “If people want to use an alternative name on Facebook, they have several different options available to them, including providing an alias under their name on their profile, or creating a Page specifically for that alternative persona.” However, asking people to use a fan Page or providing an alias is not a good enough solution to Wiener. “You can’t send or receive messages on a Page or get invitations,” he points out. Wiener also says this doesn’t do a good job of recognizing drag queens as people. He plans on meeting with Facebook representatives this afternoon to talk this out. Heklina also plans to meet with Facebook this afternoon. She posted about a planned protest at Facebook headquarters before her profile was deleted this morning. She believes this may be why her profile was taken down completely. My was suspended the day after I posted about the protest. Coincidence? — Heklina (@Heklina) “All I know is I posted about the protest and then my profile and other people’s profiles were deleted and so was the Page,” she says. The Page, at least, . The drag queen community has also launched a social media campaign, using the hashtag #mynameis on , and to rally others and draw attention to the issue. Heklina and about 100 other queens plan to carry through with the protest at Facebook headquarters tomorrow morning if representatives can’t address the naming issues with the drag queen community this afternoon. “It just seems like they are very tone deaf about this one issue. You’re not recognizing me and it’s infuriating,” says Heklina. |
Swatch Group Head Nicolas Hayek Jr. Is Putting Smartwatches In The “No Fly Zone” | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | A source said that Swatch Group head Nicolas Hayek Jr., son of the late SG CEO , is adamant that the company would not be pursuing smartwatches inside Swatch itself or within any of the many Swatch brands. The source said that Hayek Jr. felt “burned” by a 2004-2005 MSN SPOT watch partnership that fizzled and is avoiding mention of smart watches in general. “He commented that he saw no future in these smart watches and that Swatch Group would stay out of it,” the source said. Swatch has attempted many interesting – if under-appreciated – smartwatches including LCD watches featuring something called , a wonky system for unifying the timezones worldwide- and the aforementioned SPOT watches. was an FM-based transmission system that pushed data to a series of large LCD watches, offering up short messages, sports scores, and weather to the few customers who joined the service early on. This decision also means that other Swatch group companies like Omega, Mido, Longines, and (which does make ) would avoid talking about smartwatches for the time being, unlike, obviously, the who is already hinting at a watch that experts say could take as long as a year to get to market. The group’s storied “historical” brands like Breguet and Jaquet Droz are also out of the smartwatch race. As a reminder that watchmaking is still an art more than a science – at least in Switzerland – my source noted that “market dynamics and whims” often overtake Hayek which is a nice way of saying that things can still change with very little warning. The Swatch Group has not yet offered a comment. |
null | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 9 | 23 | null |
Phhhoto Is An Addictive, Albeit Poorly Named, Gif-Style Photo App | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | Phhhoto is a new app that launched in late July that lets users capture moving images and share them across social networks. But the app you see today, with over one million photos shared, started as something very different. The creators, Omar Elsayed, Champ Bennett, and Russell Armand, come from a digital agency called , which they still run (working on projects like the recent Playboy.com redesign). At an office party back in 2012, they decided to build a sort of gif-like photo booth as an iPad app. For fun. Turns out, people at the party loved it, so they built out a contraption that actually holds up the iPad and provides some lighting to create a portable photo booth. They called it and the company quickly started renting the product out to parties and venues. Pricing is based on the particular event, but ranges around a few thousand. Again, people seemed to love it, with 200,000 people using them at various events, etc. But there was one resounding complaint: Why isn’t this an app? And so the team went to work building out Phhhoto, an app that lets you take moving photos to share out on social networks. It’s super minimalist tech, simply grabbing four photos in direct succession and stringing them together to form a gif. But with quick app-switching to Instagram and integration with other social media, the app seems like one of many natural successors to our ingrained Instagram behavior. If you want to check out some , or simply download the app, head over . |
JibJab Acquires Make Believe Studios, Makers Of Video Calling App Hello Santa | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | JibJab Bros. Studios, which is the parent company to JibJab.com and the StoryBots apps, has made its first major purchase in its 15-year history, with the announcement that it’s acquiring a startup called , whose product “Hello Santa” we reviewed last year. The company’s three founders will now join JibJab and continue to run their service from Venice, Calif. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we do know that it was all-cash, and Make Believe Labs had not raised any additional funding before the acquisition. Hello Santa, for those who missed it last year, is an adorable , up in the North Pole. Yes, really! I swear! Having given it a spin in December, I found the experience to be on par or even better than many competing products that let you call or text Santa, given its use of a real-life character – that is, a legit-looking Kris Kringle type, not a virtual rendering. The service also includes a video recording of your child’s call which you can keep for memory’s sake or post to social media. At $14.99, it’s pricier than a free trip to have your kid sit on Santa’s lap, but if you include the photo package you’re usually pitched through these traditional “meetings,” it’s more competitively priced. (JibJab is now looking to reduce this cost, and says a pre-recorded call with Santa will be around $10 and a live video call will be under $30. The $14.99 price point was from 2013 and was discounted from the official price at $24.99.) For JibJab, the acquisition makes sense as the company is trying to grow its portfolio of children-focused apps and services, as it has evolved from its earlier roots which saw it focusing more on political satire and e-cards to be a more well-rounded digital entertainment studio. The Hello Santa app will go live again in the Apple App Store on November 1, 2014, allowing families to schedule kids’ calls with Santa beginning on Nov. 28 and continuing through Christmas Eve. Parents can prep Santa with info on their child’s interests, activities and wishes, or ask him to coach the kid on improving their behavior before Christmas. Going forward, Hello Santa’s co-founders, Dorian Collier, Jordan Lyall and Sam Dassanayake will continue with JibJab, which sees the service as a potential revenue opportunity for its business. The founders had previously spoken of expanding the service to include meetings with more characters, like the Easter Bunny, so that’s an obvious next step. |
Apple Lets You Preserve Your Musical Taste With A U2 Album Removal Tool | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | Apple listens to user feedback, which is evident by the introduction of a new tool that lets users remove the U2 album from their iTunes library entirely (via ). The album was given away to all of the over 500 million iTunes registered users as part of Apple’s new iPhone 6 launch last week. But some users (like ) weren’t thrilled to find that the U2 album was instantly made part of their collections, whether they were fans of the Irish super pop band or not. The free album was arguably nothing but a nice bonus offered up by Apple and the Bono-led music troupe, but its presence in your collection means that if you’re streaming from your cloud-based iTunes purchases, it’s bound to come up sooner or later. It also means that anyone browsing through your collection will inevitably form opinions about your character and role in the greater picture of humanity – justified or not. Removing the album is as easy as following a link, and then logging in to your iTunes store account. Once you’ve completed those two steps, a message lets you know it’s gone, though you’ll have to delete the actual tracks from your devices if you managed to download them. If you would like U2’s removed from your iTunes music library and iTunes purchases, you can choose to have it removed. Once the album has been removed from your account, it will no longer be available for you to redownload as a previous purchase. If you later decide you want the album, you will need to get it again. The album is free to everyone until October 13, 2014 and will be available for purchase after that date. It honestly didn’t really affect my life either way, but I appreciate the gesture by Apple in offering this tool. U2 may be one of the biggest pop acts on the planet, but this is a concession that has Apple basically saying ‘Oops, that’s collection, and we should respect that.’ If you have a change of heart about the album, you can always re-download it from iTunes for free, so long as you do so before October 13, after which time it’ll be a standard paid purchase. |
With API Calls Up 443% In Last 12 Months, Nexmo Looks To Accelerate Its Revenue Growth | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | Nexmo, a telecom API-focused firm that provides both voice and SMS services, saw its revenue rise 177 percent in the first half of 2014 when compared to the first half of 2013, it told TechCrunch. The company had top line of $29.4 million in the period, up from $10.6 million in the preceding half year. Over the course of its life, Nexmo has long been open with its growth numbers. Unlike most private companies, it has kept the public mostly abreast of its revenue expansion, and hiring patterns. The cynical response to that fact is that Nexmo has grown quickly, and so its sharing of usually hidden data isn’t too surprising. A simple rejoinder is that most companies, even firms that are doing well, still won’t share much in the way of hard metrics. I met with Nexmo’s CEO Tony Jamous and another executive recently, digging into the company’s 2014 performance. Nexmo was, until 2014, profitable. The company ran lean in its early days — I first met Jamous when his company was operating out of shared space in San Francisco, despite having raised more than $3 million at that point, and recording revenues of around $4 million per month — but has since raised an $18 million Series C round of capital, and has increased its marketing spend as it chases growth. The road to today: According to Jamous, Nexmo’s run rate is now $72 million, up from $66 million in July. A $72 million run rate is $6 million per month, or around 50 percent higher than its previously disclosed $4 million rate recorded in August of 2013, and up a slimmer 20 percent from March. Slower growth than you expected? Check the following chart of Nexmo’s SMS traffic: As you’ll note, around August of last year, Nexmo’s volume slipped for a period, though it more than recovered. The short-term revenue impact of the decline in SMS volume was by the company’s expansion of its voice services. Nexmo told TechCrunch that it expects its full-year revenue to be $70 million, which it also claims on a document is a 100 percent increase from its 2013 figure. That would imply that Nexmo had full-year 2013 revenue of $35 million, slightly less than its August 2013 prediction. The above chart likely explains the difference. In its current form, Nexmo looks healthy — a 50 percent growth rate in calendar 2015 would put its full-year revenue over $100 million, and its run rate would be higher than that figure. The company’s year-over-year API traffic growth is north of 400 percent. Also, Nexmo told TechCrunch that it is currently accreting 5,000 new customers each month, around 7 percent month-over-month growth when compared to its current customer count. It has also rapidly staffed, with its year-end employee tally expected to reach 100. Nexmo grew quickly, and then hit a several month speed bump in its SMS traffic. That period of weakness has passed, it seems. (It isn’t surprising that Nexmo was willing to share new data now, given that it is growing quickly again.) Provided that its SMS sales growth continues, Nexmo’s expansion shouldn’t struggle. It’s worth noting the company’s SMS volume, as Nexmo’s revenue is mostly sourced from it. The company derived 12 percent of its revenue from voice services in the first half of 2014, and expects that figure to rise to 15 percent for the full year. So, SMS remains the majority of its income. Nexmo grew by providing SMS services to the growing OTT market — Line, Viber and KaKaoTalk, etc. — something that has been a key strength for the company, and also a potential weakness: If consumers shift from OTT apps, it could turn down Nexmo’s volume and slow its growth. The company told TechCrunch that it has 12 months of capital at current burn rates. When 2014 ends, I’ll check back with the firm to see what its final revenue tally for the year ends up being. For now, Nexmo is leaving a trail of information behind it that might make for a decent case study when all is said and done. |
Netflix Is Available In France, But It Still Needs Work | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | French readers, is here! But don’t get too excited; it’s an imperfect launch. After an astute media campaign to put Netflix under the spotlight, the unlimited movie and TV show streaming service is available for everyone to see. And with a limited catalog, a limited availability on set-top boxes and a limited set of features compared to its competitors, it’s going to be a tough sell for many households… at least for now. Netflix’s media campaign was impossible to miss. For the last month, many published an article every other day on Netflix’s launch in France. There was very little to say except that it was coming. I wanted to wait for the actual launch before writing anything on Netflix. In other words, I didn’t want to fall for the hype. After all, I wasn’t able to judge before its launch whether the company was going to provide a compelling offering in France. Now you can subscribe for €7.99 per month ($9), €8.99 per month with HD streaming and 2 simultaneous streams ($10), and €11.99 ($15.50) for 4K streaming and four simultaneous streams. Let’s start with the most important part of the puzzle — the movie and TV catalog. Netflix stated multiple times that it was launching a TV show service in France more than a movie service. While you can stream Downton Abbey or Suits in France and not in the U.S., it’s disappointing to notice many missing shows compared to Netflix’s American catalog. As listed on Twitter, you won’t find Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, Friday Night Lights, The West Wing, The Office, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Rectify and many other hit shows on Netflix France. The list goes on. You won’t even find House of Cards on Netflix France, even though it was produced by Netflix. The American company already sold the TV rights to Canal+, which also happens to be a direct competitor with its service. This is disturbing. When it comes to movies, Netflix has a good catalog, or at least as good as it can be. In France, unlimited movie streaming services such as Netflix, CanalPlay and can only provide movies that were released at least . For example, while I’m definitely not a Transformers fan, the first and second Transformers movies are available, but you won’t find the third and fourth movies anytime soon. This way, you won’t be tempted to wait for the release on Netflix when a film is available in the cinema, or even in the iTunes Store a few months after its release. But three years is excessive. That’s why members of the National Assembly want this rule to be lowered to two years. It’s probably still too long, but it’s a step in the right direction. But when it comes to the law, everyone is in the same boat. CanalPlay doesn’t have recent titles either. And when you compare the two services side by side, Netflix seems to be competitive with CanalPlay on the movie front. Then, there is France’s infamous . TV channels and other distributors finance France’s movie industry. For example, Canal+ must spend at least 9 percent of its annual revenue on French movie production. But Netflix France’s headquarters are based in Luxembourg so that the company doesn’t have to comply with France’s tough requirements. The company also confirmed that it would contribute to the French film industry in some way. Netflix ordered a TV show called Marseille. The pitch sounds like a House of Cards-style TV show in the South of France. Finally, Netflix couldn’t sign deals with three of the four main Internet service providers. Only Bouygues Telecom added Netflix to its Android-based set-top box and on its existing one. Others want more money from Netflix. In France, most people watch TV through these set-top boxes. All Internet service providers give customers a set-top box to watch IPTV and use as a media center, and you will find CanalPlay on every set-top box. Most people will have to use their video game consoles to access Netflix for now. Similarly, other streaming services like provide interesting features like offline viewing. This feature is very reminiscent of Spotify. You can download movies on your tablet or phone so that you can view them offline. Everything is encrypted and stays in the OCS app, but it’s convenient. Netflix still relies heavily on Silverlight on the desktop and needs an Internet connection on a tablet. So let’s review: Netflix is available in France with a decent movie catalog and powerful branding. But original TV shows like Marseille are not yet available, France’s law prevents the service from having recent movies, and the TV show catalog is more limited than expected. Welcome to France, Netflix. Now get back to work. |
Ridesharing Service Sidecar Raises Another $15 Million, Adds Sir Richard Branson As Investor | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | San Francisco-headquartered ridesharing startup , which competes with on-demand car services like Uber and Lyft, this morning it has raised an additional $15 million in funding. The new round comes from existing investors Avalon Ventures and Union Square Ventures, and includes participation from new investor and Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson. Previously, Sidecar had raised $20 million through A and B rounds, the latest of which was in February. At the time of its last close, Sidecar had pivoted to offering a ride-sharing marketplace in order to differentiate itself from competitors. The new version of the service, which also debuted in February, gave drivers more flexibility in pricing for drivers, while also providing passengers with more choice as to which drivers or cars they would choose. More recently, the company rolled out in San Francisco, allowing customers to save on the cost of their trips by getting matched with other nearby riders who then share the car and the price of the ride with you. To date, Sidecar says it has offered Shared Rides to 13,000 people since its launch four months ago, and is now planning to grow the service by expanding it locally and “beyond,” with the goal of hitting 500,000 rides in one year. USV’s Fred Wilson, also a board member at Sidecar, shared his thoughts this morning about why he’s “doubling down” on ride-sharing, saying basically that Sidecar is a true ride-sharing service where others are a “new form of limo service powered through technology.” “The tech industry has grouped many different apps under the label ridesharing. The name comes from the idea that anyone can be a transportation provider by taking out their car and giving rides via an Internet network powered by mobile apps in both the driver’s and rider’s hands,” writes Wilson . “That isn’t really ridesharing.” Sidecar, he explains, is about really reducing the number of vehicles on the road through its model, which allows anyone to drive and allows drivers to fill cars with as many people as is safely possible. It’s a model that’s inspired by the shared taxi services found in , but only recently have been translated to make sense for various first-world markets, like the U.S. and parts of Europe. “I am very excited by the potential of Shared Rides,” Wilson adds. “I don’t really see any other way that regular people who can spend a few dollars, but not tens of dollars, every day to get to work, can take advantage of ridesharing.” Meanwhile, new investor Branson says he invested in Sidecar because he doesn’t believe that ride sharing is a “winner takes all market.” (Uber and Lyft’s price wars and would lead many to believe otherwise, of course.) “These are early days and, like a lot of other commodity businesses, there is room for innovators on great customer experiences,” says Branson. “Sunil and Jahan and the team have the potential to make a real difference in the market.” |
The Surface 2 Slow Fade | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | The 64GB SKU of the Surface 2 is sold out on Microsoft’s website, and, , it likely won’t be restocked. The sales rep said the company is looking to get rid of inventory of the older device and “focus on the newer version of Surfaces.” Remember the Surface 2? Microsoft , along with the Surface Pro 2. The device was a large step past the original Surface device. Akin to the RT, it was aimed at students and other groups that needed mobility over power. Lost in the and the is Surface 2 — it isn’t clear how well it has sold, and the future of its operating system, Windows RT, is somewhat occluded at the moment, as Microsoft . Microsoft recently . In a statement asking for comment on the lack of SKU inventory, Microsoft demurred to say anything of substance, instead mirroring its past message that it wants to get Surface into the hands of as many people as possible. Cutting its price is a way to do that. You can still buy a 32GB Surface 2, or the most expensive 64GB SKU that also includes LTE capability. It seems that Microsoft is leaving the Surface 2 behind. RT-based Windows tablets haven’t done well since inception, and the Pro 3 is likely Microsoft’s main bet for the Surface line this year. I haven’t uncovered chatter regarding an immediate successor to the Surface 2. It might have been the Surface Mini. If that’s the case, there might not be one. |
Seed Is Creating A Truly Idiot-Proof Internet Of Things | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | In the vast panoply of potential home networking protocols, there are only a few worth worrying about. Wi-Fi works well but it can go down and ZigBee and the like are sparsely supported. But Bluetooth Smart is local, secure, and easy to use. And that’s what is using to connect our lamps, our blinds, and even our tea kettles. This Polish startup has built a small chip – about as big as a postage stamp and twice as thick as one – that can go into any appliance. Chip-enabled devices will then show up automatically on phones that are compatible with Bluetooth Smart, allowing you to control lights, put the kettle on for tea, or drop the shutters. It’s a B2B play that could revolutionize how we think about home networking and control. “We truly believe that in the near future things around us will be defined by software. Right now we are surrounded by lots of iot gadgets. However, all of everyday products – like light bulbs, kettles, switches, shades, etc. – are still not connected. We don’t want the IoT world to be owned by geeks. We want ordinary people to feel comfortable using connected devices,” said Marek Wierzbicki, CMO of Seed Labs. The company is now based in San Francisco. The company will license the chip to appliance makers and creates their software in Krakow, Poland. “We are placing a strategic bet on bluetooth smart, considering it a game changer in iot world. We build our software on top of that to make it extremly simple to use. Our competitors are based on other communication protocols which are not intuitive and not so easy,” said Wierzbicki. The company’s demo was quite compelling. To use the system you simply plug in a compatible appliance and it shows up in the app with the necessary interface elements. For example, you can set the length of time you want to boil water or even tell lights to go on and off remotely. It is completely plug and play – there is little initial setup and the system remembers devices that have been added to the network permanently. The company is working on some unique interface systems as well, including a unique Nest-like knob that can sense proximity and motion. The devices also include iBeacon compatibility and can interact with iPhones in real time. The company announced availability of its chip line as well as a $1 million angel investment that closed today. |
Microsoft Promises More Surface Pro 3 Inventory Amid Tight International Supply | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | . Today , Microsoft’s Brian Hall promised that Microsoft will get more Surface Pro 3 inventory to the parts of the world where supply of the device is hard to find. The company noted Germany, China, Australia, and Korea as places where it might be difficult to snag one of the devices. What is going on? Microsoft didn’t ship enough of its new computer. Here is how the company describes the situation: Due to the response, Surface Pro 3 is in limited supply in some markets. Given the interest that we saw as part of our US launch, retailers ordered what we thought was a healthy amount of Surface Pro 3s for these new markets. It turns out that we didn’t ship enough. At some retailers in Australia, Surface sold out by lunchtime on launch day. In China, retailers are sold out of the Core™ i5 and i7 models. And devices are hard to come by in Germany, New Zealand, Korea, and at one of the largest retailers in the United Kingdom. You can read that in a number of ways. First, that Microsoft is being more conservative with its Surface shipments, in the wake of its $900 million Surface RT write down. Second, that response to the Surface Pro 3 has been greater abroad than at home. And finally that there is real demand for the device across the globe. Microsoft is likely somewhat conflicted about its limited supply. Selling out, in a sense, is quite nice when you are selling goods. At the same time, the company is losing revenue by not having enough devices in stores. What I think we can take from the situation is that the company won’t be facing a massive writedown over its new devices, and that the Surface project isn’t in danger of near-term cancellation. . |
The Gold Apple Watch Could Cost As Much As $1,200 | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | A jewelry contact familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the gold, 18-karat version of the Apple Watch could cost around $1,200 retail when it launches in January. This has been corroborated, based on size and weight, by jewelers familiar with the material is using to make its Apple Watch Edition pieces. It should be noted that this is an estimate and the piece could come in well below that price. Although there is still some confusion as to whether the watch will be gold plated or actually made of gold, the jeweler suggested that it would be sub-optimal not to make the watch out of solid gold alloy, a decision that will drive up the price. The estimate is based on the that appeared this weak. Chad Rickicki, a watch expert in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania said that a case the size and shape of the Apple Watch in 18 carat gold would cost about $600 to make. The rest – the electronics and markup could double that price. That doesn’t mean that all of the Apple Watches will rest in the rarified air of haute horlogerie. The lower end sport versions will start at $349 and presumably the standard versions, simply called Apple Watch, will receive a premium over that. The Edition watches, however, are expensive because gold is expensive, even at 18K and intermixed with Apple’s alloys. What does this mean? It suggests an interesting move by the company to turn Apple Stores into luxury destinations. While I’m sure Prada and Louis Vuitton are clamoring to be given access to Apple’s unique band connectors, the upside for a more fashionable, luxury-leaning Apple Watch display in stores means the company will control quality and, more important, control profits on band upgrades. Apple is entering a fascinating new world of potential partnerships as is, to some degree, the makers of Android Wear devices. Now consumers are going to have to get used to armed guards standing over cases of (tastefully) blinged-out Apple Watches. |
AT&T To Get iPhone 6-Friendly Wi-Fi Calling In 2015 | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | The iPhone 6 supports Wi-Fi calling. But does your support it? If you’re in the U.S., the answer to that is probably “not yet.” Wi-Fi Calling essentially turns any Wi-Fi router you’ve got access to a private extension of your carrier’s cell network. As long as you’re on Wi-Fi, you’ll be able to make standard voice calls and send texts regardless of whether your carrier’s signal is up to snuff in that spot. For now, the only U.S. carrier that can officially say it’ll support iOS 8’s new Voice Over Wi-Fi functionality is T-Mobile — hence its big event about it But fear not, AT&T customers! You’ll be getting in on the Wi-Fi fun too … eventually. Speaking at an event in New York this afternoon, AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega mentioned it almost in passing: AT&T will support Voice over Wi-Fi sometime in 2015. So, why the hold-up? The short version: for Wi-Fi calling to work properly, your carrier’s network also needs to support Voice Over LTE (VoLTE). This is what allows for a seamless handoff — that is, it’s what allows you to start a call on your Wi-Fi network, leave your house, and seamlessly continue the call on the cellular network without having to redial.
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Come To The TechCrunch Virtual Reality Meetup In LA On Sept 18th | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | The night before the Oculus Connect conference, TechCrunch is bringing together the virtual reality community for an evening of cool demos, free drinks, and a chance to meet TechCrunch’s writers and VR startups in the space. . From 6:30pm to 9:30pm at the in West Hollywood, come mingle poolside by the stunning views and try out some of the latest virtual reality hardware. TechCrunch writers Josh Constine and Kyle Russel will be there, so you can tell us about your company. We’ll have a short fireside chat with James Iliff, the inspiring co-founder of full-motion body-tracking VR startup Survios. And you’ll have a chance to play Survios’ game Zombies On The Holodeck. If you’re startup that wants to show off a live hardware or virtual reality content demo, contact at us at tips@beta.techcrunch.com. We’ll have a big tab at the bar, but if any company wants help us make the experience even better and get the attention of the VR community, we’re looking for a few more sponsors, who can also contact us at sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com. Attending the TechCrunch Virtual Reality Meetup is . : TechCrunch VR Meetup In LA 6:30pm to 9:30pm, Thursday September 18th The Mondrian Hotel Skybar 8440 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA 90069 Demos, Drinks, TechCrunch’s Writers, A Fireside Chat, And The VR Community |
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