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iOS 8 Won’t Be Able To Forward Texts To Your Computer For A Few Weeks After Launch | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | iOS 8 is coming! iOS 8 is coming! As announced during this week’s iPhone 6 event, iOS 8 will ship to everyone with a compatible handset come September 17th. of iOS 8 will ship then, anyway. According to a newly discovered footnote , one of its key features still needs to cook for a few more weeks. As spotted by , iOS 8’s SMS Continuity feature (which lets you use your laptop/iPad to receive and respond to texts sent to your phone, including standard, non-iMessage texts) won’t be going live until October. It was always fair to assume that the Continuity features would come a bit after the rest of iOS 8, given that everything Apple has mentioned so far seemed to imply much of it relied on OS X Yosemite. Yosemite hasn’t been given an official launch date yet beyond “Fall”. Curiously, SMS Forwarding is currently the part of the Continuity feature set with the “Coming in October” note. Features like Handoff (which lets you do things like start an email on your Mac and continue it on your iPhone with the tap of a button), automatic tethering whenever there’s no WiFi, and forwarding calls from your iPhone to your Mac are left dateless. |
Before $100 Million Raise, Square Was In Talks With Apple | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | According to a , has . The company authorized 6.4 million Series E shares, according to the document, at a per-share price of $15.46. Square has raised incredible amounts of money. The company has , has a nine-figure credit line and, now, a fresh $100 million traunch to use. The company , and it isn’t clear how much cash the firm had on hand before the new capital injection. Square was reported to have $155 million in cash at the end of 2013, a figure that was recorded, of course, before its debt event that took place earlier this year. Square declined to comment on how it intended to use its new funds, specifically whether the monies were earmarked for acquisitions, or operational expenses. The new share price values Square at $6 billion, up from its that was set during a secondary offering of its shares earlier this year. As TechCrunch , Square’s valuation has grown as its payment volume has increased. As time has passed, Square’s valuation has fallen behind its payment processing rate: In June of 2011, Square was processing payments at a rate of around $1.46 billion per annum. Its valuation was $1.6 billion. Recently, Square was expected to process $30 billion in calendar 2014 while being valued at $5 billion. In recent months Square has shown an appetite for acquisitions. The company recently on a $90 million deal to buy Caviar, a food delivery service. The deal was executed with Square stock. Square could be linking up new cash to help it lock down other purchases. The company’s core business, processing credit card payments, has difficult margins, and increasing competition. Square wants to diversify its revenue supply. Presuming that Square doesn’t need the $100 million to eat, it could deploy the funds across several purchases that would also include a stock component. Equity is great, but the short-term allure of cash is impossible to deny. Separately, TechCrunch has heard from multiple sources that Square and Apple were recently in acquisition talks, but that Square walked away. Apple wanted the company to come aboard, according to one source, but the discussed price was a sticking point: The tipster held that Apple wanted to buy Square for less than half of the $6 billion valuation it eventually would raise at (around $3 billion). Square, valued at the time at a firm 66 percent delta to that price point, declined to accept. Apple also showed Square a software register, restaurant and spa booking services and a payment system for iPhones said the same source. This did not sit well with Square execs, who felt like the products would compete with their own offerings. Apple , a way to execute in-person payments with your phone. Square has long been rumored to be heading for an IPO. That offering hasn’t happened due to, it’s usually said, revenue growth concerns at Square, and the same adverse market conditions that have sidelined other offerings. |
California Regulator Sends Warning Letter To Uber, Lyft And Sidecar Over Shared Ride Feature | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | Shared rides are the new “it feature” among on-demand transportation services, with Uber, Lyft and Sidecar all releasing their own versions to users over the last few weeks and months. But the California regulator which oversees the industry isn’t so keen on the idea. Earlier this week the California Public Utilities Commission issued warnings to all three companies, stating that their implementation of shared rides isn’t allowable under the legal framework it established to regulate the nascent industry. In particular, the CPUC argues that the services violate Public Utilities (PU) Code Section 5401, which “prohibits a charter party carrier from charging passengers on an ‘individual-fare basis.'” With each of these transportation services, shared rides were designed to offer lower prices for passengers that were all going in the same direction. A side benefit to that is that more passengers means fewer individual rides happening simultaneously, which if it scales can actually reduce the amount of traffic on the road. However, that type of service wasn’t originally a part of the framework the CPUC came up with, and, in fact, is prohibited by it. The warning letter states that “charter party carriers cannot charge an individual fare when carrying multiple persons in a vehicle” and whoever books the car must have individual use of it. The warning letter also makes clear that the companies had not approached the regulator before opening up those services to consumers or petition it to revise the framework. Uber issued the following statement about the warning letter: We welcome the opportunity to share with the CPUC the significant benefits of uberPOOL and how it really works so that we can continue to bring its unmatched convenience and affordability to communities and traffic jams across the Golden State. Later in the day, Uber changed its tune and issued a less touchy-feely statement: We thought we had seen it all, and then the California PUC decided they would try to shut down app-based carpooling. The only conclusion we can come to is that the PUC doesn’t like technology, environmental progress, or anything that might make California a better place to live. Here is Lyft’s version: San Francisco residents have embraced Lyft Line as an affordable, efficient way to get around their city. By connecting shared rides along shared routes, Lyft Line is helping to improve daily commutes and reduce traffic – ultimately contributing to carbon reduction and improved air quality in the process. We welcome the opportunity to discuss this new form of shared transit with President Peevey and the CPUC to ensure that residents continue to have access to this innovative and sustainable transportation option. And Sidecar’s: Sidecar received a warning letter from the CPUC that effectively said Shared Rides are a violation of the law. Shared Rides are good for our cities because they reduce congestion and pollution and they offer a safe and very affordable way to get around. San Francisco was quick to embrace Shared Rides because they are so convenient and well-priced you can get across town for a just a little more than you would pay for the bus. We hope to work with the CPUC to create a new framework that will support continued operation and allow us to expand Shared Rides and its benefits across the state. |
The Apple Watch Is Most Interesting At The High-End | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | While we got to see a number of features and a of variations of the at this week’s event in Cupertino, there was also quite a bit of info Apple chose not to divulge despite the presence of hundreds of interested techies. The most important was probably pricing: , but we have no idea how high prices will go for the higher-end models. The , the oddly-named high-end of the line-up, includes both yellow and rose 18-karat gold variations of Apple’s new wearable. The screen is coated with sapphire crystal. When I hear specs like those, I don’t think of a $500 or $750 watch. These are the watches that come to mind: The Apple Watch is competing for the same wrist space as watches that go for thousands of dollars. While Apple sells computers in that price range — try maxing out the specs of a Mac Pro on the Apple Store site — that’s not how Apple really brings home the bacon. With the iPhone, Apple’s best-selling device, the company makes a huge profit by targeting the lower-volume, high-margin end of the market. As Andreessen Horowitz analyst Benedict Evans recently tweeted, it most certainly looks like the watch market is a good fit for that strategy: The watch market today — Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) It also seems that Apple isn’t just cranking out a pretty-looking model coated with expensive materials and assuming that rich people will buy them: it’s differentiating the experience of owning an Apple Watch Edition device. As on the day of Apple’s event, those willing to splurge on a premium model won’t just be plugging their watch into a MagSafe adapter on their nightstand like the rest of us: The fanciest model, the gold Apple Watch Edition, comes in a gorgeous jewelry box — which doubles as a charger. The back of the box has a Lightning connector, and the inside of the box has the watch’s magnetic round charger pad, standing vertically. So as you retire each night, you can just lay your gold watch into its case and let it charge. To be clear, the watch market is an entirely different game than gadgets most techies are familiar with. For a long time, we’re going to hear complaints that the Apple Watch is expensive “for what you get,” as if specs are going to matter at all in this space. While I hate to make predictions about products that haven’t launched yet, my gut feeling is that there will be a big divide on spending on the Apple Watch between the low- and high-end based purely on aesthetics. People buying the $349 Apple Watch will tend to stick to the band that comes with their entry-level watch and mock those who “fall for” the high prices attached to the more expensive bands (as happens with iPhone cases today). Meanwhile, those willing to buy the more expensive models will pony up for several bands for different looks and situations. by “watch guy” (an understatement, as you will see if you click through to the post) Benjamin Clymer gives you an idea of the thought Apple put into making the Apple Watch a competitive luxury accessory: And that leads me to my next point. Apple absolutely, positively, indisputably NAILED its straps and bracelets. In addition to offering a bevy of options from leather to fluoroelastomer to link bracelets to Milanese, it is here that you really see how much attention Apple was paying to the way people wear watches, and the how bad existing options were. […] The Apple Watch can take an integrated strap or bracelet, or one with wire lugs. It totally changes the look of the watch, and swapping them couldn’t be any easier. Changing straps is one thing, but the attention to detail on the straps and bracelets themselves is downright incredible, and when I mentioned above that nothing comes close in this price range, it is very visible when talking about straps. […] Again, Apple has paid excruciating attention to detail in the design and wearability of the Apple Watch. In many cases, its offerings make what is coming out of Switzerland (or Asia) look amateurish. But, let me remind you that I am looking at this object as just that, the physical form, not in the interface. If this was simply a digital watch, I could say it’s a well designed, well-executed one. But it’s not a watch, and that’s where I think it missed the mark. The potential upside to the high-end Apple Watch models will be the most exciting thing to watch for in 2015. And I’m not even talking about international markets! As you may recall, the talking point was brought up incessantly last year, even before we had official confirmation that a gold iPhone was even happening. As Taiwan-based former Appler Ben Thompson succinctly put it: 1. Asia has huge inequality 2. There are a ton of people = Lots of rich people. (And who do you think the gold is targeted at?) — Ben Thompson (@benthompson) While in the wake of Apple’s announcement, the fact of the matter is that no watchmaker in history has ever had so much hype behind their entire line-up, let alone a single model. With , one has to wonder: what’s the ceiling on how much Apple can charge for an Apple Watch? I spent a lot of time talking about aesthetics in this post. For a better idea of how the Apple Watch will actually work, check out our hands-on in the video below: |
TechCrunch Giveaway: Free Tickets To The 2014 Future Stack Conference | Anna Escher | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | The team at New Relic is excited to send 10 of our TechCrunch readers to the , taking place on October 8th-9th at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Enter our giveaway below, and you could join 1,000+ of your fellow data lovers next month for this 2 day event. FutureStack14 is a conference to share the inspirational and the practical sides to modern software. Whether you’re from a company big or small, startup or enterprise, this is a gathering for developers, IT operations folks, and digital business leaders who are interested building a brighter future with software and data. To enter, click the image at the bottom of this post. You can also enter by . The 10 winners of this ticket giveaway will each receive: Tickets are valued at $599, and any reader can get 10% off the ticket price by buying their ticket using and entering the promo code: Techcrunch You have until Friday, September 19th at 12:00 PM PT to enter. Good luck, data lovers! |
A Better Look At What’s Next For Windows | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | Two important things happened this week in Windows: It that the Windows Phone branding that Microsoft has pressed for years is likely set to fade, and thanks to a large leak. The two events are linked, given that Microsoft is widely expected to better unite Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone. There won’t be three operating systems, the company has said. To see Microsoft start to call Windows Phone just Windows is further evidence of the company’s strategy to bring Phone into the larger Windows world. Separately, the Threshold leaks are nearly precisely what you would expect of them: The fusion of some Metro elements into a bolstered desktop. In the new images of what we presume will be called Windows 9, it’s evident that much of what has been discussed and rumored will make it into the operating system. The decline of phone, evinced by internal material, was also recently telegraphed by HTC branding material. Windows Phone is being brought under the auspices of just ‘Windows.’ This is reasonable, given that if Microsoft intended to bring Windows RT — its tablet operating system — in unity with its Phone operating system, it couldn’t well call the thing Windows Phone in any capacity, as it would run on non-phone devices. QED, basically. Fair enough, but what will the new Windows look like? The irony is that the recent leaks of the next Windows build focus on its desktop capabilities, which is precisely what the forthcoming touch-focused version of Windows that RT and Phone will become may not include at all. But still, two images, for flavor ( ): And: What you see in the images above is the return of the Start Menu, and the inclusion of virtual desktops. All together we can infer a few things that matter: Microsoft continues to blend its operating systems, and that the coming technical preview that should touch down in just a few weeks includes enough desktop tools for power users that it could undue some of the damage that Windows 8 did to the larger Windows brand. Can it ignite PC sales? That’s for the market to decide. |
null | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 15 | null |
Leave “Sticky Notes” On Websites With Zurf Mobile Browser | Jay Donovan | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | I’ve seen attempts before to make online shopping “social.” There have been Chrome plugins, Firefox plugins, browser overlays…I’m not sure it ever worked out. A startup called that presented from the floor at thinks differently though. I find somewhat interesting and it solves a few problems. First of all, there are many tools for categorizing and sharing retail items on the web. Where should I start: Pinterst, Wanelo, Fancy, Fab, Polyvore…the list goes on and on. But one thing Zurf has noticed is that there are many users out there that still share links to online merchandise the old-fashioned way by just copying links and texting them back and forth to each other on Smartphones (oh the irony that texting is old fashioned). This method is cumbersome and hard to manage, so Zurf is trying to remedy this problem by offering yet another tool to make social shopping easier on mobile devices. Zurf created a stand-alone web browser for Android and iOS that makes it fairly easy to mark items with a sticky-note-like mechanism it calls zNotes. Using Zurf browser (instead of Safari or other mobile browsers), customers can press and hold items they like on any website and mark that image with a zNote (a small icon shows up on the image). They can then attach a message to that zNote and send friends a link to the page to see the item they marked for them. If the recipient has Zurf installed on their device too, the link is sent directly to the app as a push notification that opens that particular page with the marked item on it, directly in Zurf. The recipient sees the webpage, just as it is, but the item that has been marked for them is visible with the zNote on it. They can tap the zNote to see the message attached to the item and reply directly via that zNote. If the recipient does not have Zurf installed, they receive a link instead via SMS or email. When they follow that link, it is opened in their regular default browser, and they can see the zNote in read only view. They have the option via Smartbanners and/or mobile overlays, to install Zurf, so they can interact via the zNote. No account creation is necessary to use Zurf, and while it is always a hurdle to get people to install a new app or change their browsing methods the company at least tried to make the install process as frictionless as possible. The reason I think Zurf is interesting is because it marks items “inline”. It attempts to preserve the web pages as they are and just put notes on the items, yet keep users on the actual page where the product resides instead of sending them off to some other curated site. Co-founder Shahin Shadfar is betting that brands will also like that feature — the act of keeping users on the actual brand’s website to view items instead of jumping out to a different website like Pinterest or Wanelo. No doubt the company will have a big challenge ahead of them to get people to install a new app. Many mobile browsers have died on the vine, despite compelling and unique toolsets. Zurf will need to do a good job of educating their target segment of users about how this is easier than their current cut and paste text method in order to break through. If they can get across the benefits, maybe this could be useful to habitual mobile shoppers out there. But it is very important to note that Zurf’s research indicates that users don’t really see Zurf as a browser, per se (even though it can be used as a regular old Webkit browser). Instead, users in their focus groups tended to view Zurf as more of a messaging app because they were communicating back and forth through the zNotes. From this standpoint, the hurdle of getting users to adopt a new messaging app seems a little lower than getting people to change their browsing habits. But to me, the real opportunity for Zurf could be white labeling the service and getting brands to use it within their own retail apps, as an integrated service for mobile commerce sharing. That seems like a big win to me because many consumers will already have brand apps installed on their devices and they are using those apps to view and buy products. I asked Shahin if this was part of their strategic road map and he said that it was and that they are already in talks with certain retailers. But for now they launch the standalone version too in order to build a user base and also a new way for those users to share messages about retail items. The app soft launched for their focus groups (with one minor update launching any day now) and the . |
Kevin Rose Launches Tiiny To Take The Anxiety And Megapixels Out Of Photo Sharing | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | “If you made photos tiny and kept them tiny so they can’t be enlarged, would it reduce the anxiety around taking a photo and get people to take more photos?” Kevin Rose asks me. He’s not quite sure, but he’s going to find out with , the from his mobile laboratory North that . It lets you take a thumbnail-sized photo or GIF and share it to 3×4 grid on the Tiiny homescreen of people who follow you, but it disappears after 24 hours. Rose tells me beta testers shared 5X more photos with Tiiny than on their other photo apps. But if Tiiny never takes off, Rose doesn’t care. It only took , and the small team plans to release a new app at least every three months unless one really blows up. “it’s about having as many shots on goal as possible,” Rose explains. This strategy puts North at the forefront of a movement to experiment with building whimsical mobile apps without the crushing pressure to succeed and make money right away. Afforded by Rose’s past successes with Digg, Revision3, Milk, and his gig at Google Ventures he just left, he says “I don’t have to have an exact business plan, but I can explore the more crazy parts of my head.” . That’s the point. Tap the camera button to take a photo or tap and hold to take a silent animated GIF up to five seconds long, and they’re all just 212 pixels x 212 pixels. Tiiny lets you import your social graph from the Twitter, and uses the same asymmetrical social model. Your photo gets slid into the first slot on the grids of people who follow you, pushing the rest of their photos down. 24 hours later, it disappears, so you have no profile page. Followers can tap photos to see who they’re from, double tap to Like, and browse a Popular page of the best Tiiny moments. What’s special is that the photos and GIFS can’t be expanded full-screen, so you don’t have to look perfect. While Snapchat pioneered this ‘shoot from the hip’ style with 10-second self-destructing photos, they’re still full-screen so you’re inclined to agonize over your appearance and framing. Tiiny takes casualness to another level because no one will see that pimple or poor focus. You also don’t have to worry about annoying your friends by posting too much. While Instagram’s full-screen feed can be overwhelmed by someone shooting non-stop, and you can pester someone with Snapchat direct messages, if you post four Tiinys in a row, it will only take up 1/3 of a friend’s screen. That opens up fun opportunities for photo sequences. Rose tells me Tiiny is “a two-fold experiment in minimalism, both in how we interact with each other — less choice, less friction, less megapixels — and how we build products at North — how could we build a product quickly?” He played with both this morning. Rose vowed to himself not to shave until the entire Tiiny development process and launch were done. So today he shared a series of Tiiny photos as he carved his facial hair into different configurations on his way to a clean mug. “It will be funny and ridiculous and stupid but it’s a moment I would not think of sharing on another social network.” Rose actually dug up the idea for Tiiny while browsing Instagram. “I was consuming a lot of content through the popular pages and tag pages, and I noticed that with the three-across grid you can consume a lot more content faster than a normal stream” he recounts. “With one big picture after one big picture, going down 10 or 20 pictures takes a lot of time.” So he built Tiiny to let you get a feel for what’s up with all your friends instantly. Of course, many people will say we don’t need any more photo apps. Especially more ephemeral ones trying to coin off of Snapchat’s success. Luckily, Rose doesn’t care. He tells me that if Tiiny doesn’t find millions of users, North will simply open source it or cease development, and move on. Rose tells me “we can continue to try some wild and crazy stuff. Some will be slightly better takes on stuff.” I likened North to an app magazine with regular issues released, and he replied “Every page turn is going to be something completely different. We’re not gong to do photo apps for ever. We’ve got ideas in the cryptocurrency space and there’s no common theme.” Rose doesn’t really need any more money, which frees him to swing for the fences rather than chase middling success. “We’re looking for those big home runs. We’re not one of those companies or incubators with 6 things going on at the same time. If we have that nice single or double hit that were excited about and it looks good, but it’s surely not going to be a big product we’re not going to hire around it. We’re going to constantly churn out stuff. When you spread yourself too thin, nobody wins.” Already, tech’s power players are feverishly posting to Tiiny, though we’ll see if that lasts. You can call the app frivolous or even useless, but Rose reminds us how we first reacted to Twitter, Snapchat, and more to today’s top social app. “They all seemed, at least initially, funny and cute” but not real businesses. Time proved us wrong. |
Y Combinator Wants You (To Solve Big Problems) | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | In its last Demo Day, Y Combinator . As in, nuclear energy, health, and quantum computing–all things that are (arguably) more important than how to get food using the most . And Y Combinator isn’t done looking for companies that can have a wide social and economic impact. The incubator program just today that breaks down what it’s looking for in future cohorts of startups. “There are a lot of startup ideas we’ve been waiting for people to apply with, sometimes for years,” Y Combinator said. “Our hope is that someone already working on a company in one of these areas will consider applying to YC.” Y Combinator has already shown it’s keen to invest in companies that are working on “breakthrough technologies.” Its last bunch of startups included: two companies ( and ) that are to ; , which wants to develop a free vaccine that could potentially eliminate HIV and AIDS; two of its first biotech companies, and , which are creating genetically modified plants that can or ; , which is that make it easier to spot cancer; , a company that can help researchers combat infectious diseases; and , which is . Are you looking to build a better battery, develop vaccines, make a better Skype that doesn’t “get worse with each passing year,” get more people in emerging markets online, or create one million jobs? There are 22 areas within which Y Combinator says it is especially keen to find startups. The ones Y Combinator went into the most specific detail about what they are looking for include: Afraid that the problem you want to solve isn’t lofty enough for Y Combinator? Don’t lose faith just yet. Y Combinator’s RFS added that it’ll still be looking for the kind of Internet and mobile startups that have been the program’s mainstays: “The great majority of the startups we fund will continue to be the sort of Internet and mobile companies we’ve funded in the past, so if that’s what you wanted to do before this post, keep doing it. Traditional-looking startups like Google and Facebook are obviously as important as any company one could imagine, and clearly are breakthrough technologies themselves.” |
Zynga, Scopely Exec Leaves To Start Mobile Studio MobLabs | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | Andy Kleinman, at Los Angeles-based gaming company Scopely and a general manager at Zynga, left the company to start a mobile products-focused studio called . Kleinman previously co-founded Vostu, a Latin American social gaming company, and later joined Three Melons, a studio that was acquired by Playdom (which was later acquired by Disney). Then he later went onto serve as a general manager at Zynga, before jumping into Scopely, which publishes and distributes mobile games. “What I wanted to do was get out of games,” Kleinman said. “It’s been too many years of games.” This is funny Kleinman said he wasn’t able to share too many specifics about what MobLabs is working on. It’s a studio that’s intended to build and launch mobile products for massive audiences. That conceptually doesn’t sound too different from the kinds of incubators that others like Kevin Rose are building with North. MobLabs has 14 people total on the team and they’re spread out from the U.S. to China. There are three other co-founders, but Kleinman said they’re still finalizing their paperwork. The team has experience at companies like Zynga, Scopely, Disney and Yahoo. “I was thinking about how to leverage all the stuff I learned from games,” he said. “I thought, why don’t we put a team together with competencies around these areas in mobile.” |
Sesame Lets You Order Themed Gift Sets From Your iPad | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | Web and mobile gifting service , which lets you browse and order themed gift sets online or from your iPhone, has now rolled out to iPad. The updated application lets you get a better feel for the gifts you’re ordering, by including “unboxing” videos that show how the gifts were packaged and what they look like in real life. In addition, “hot spots” now appear on gift set images, allowing you to click and learn more about the hand-picked items in each gift set. On iPad, Sesame takes advantage of the larger screen size to show a featured image of a gift set it’s promoting, followed by images of 9 other gift sets. You can then browse for more sets and categories using the app’s navigation. Alongside the news of the updated app, the company says it’s now going to be adding one new gift set per week leading up to the holidays, including new pampering gift sets, holiday travel gift sets, new baby gift sets, and those specific to the upcoming holidays, like Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas gift sets. Currently, Sesame offers 75 gift sets – a big jump from the dozen-plus Sesame offered when it back in November 2012. Each gift set also comes with a personalized greeting card, individual item tags that identify the gifts, and an “enjoyment guide,” which explains what the items are and how they’re to be used in more detail. Also new is the Address Book screen in Sesame, which has been revamped to be easier to use. You can also write out your personal message, and see how it will appear in the card, thanks to a virtual rendering above the form where you enter your text. All the gifts ship in a blue-colored Sesame cardboard box, which makes them seem more “gift-like” than something you send via Amazon or traditional e-commerce websites. Sesame is one of a handful of gifting applications that are attempting to ride the e-commerce wave where more users are shopping from their mobile devices, rather from their PCs. Though the overall customer numbers today may still be small – Sesame is just out of the top 50 in the “Catalogs” category on the App Store – the big bet here is that it will grow its business over time as online shoppers continue to make the shift to mobile. Not all its competitors have fared so well, however. , for instance, recently pivoted away from mobile gifting to focus solely on its instead. Meanwhile, the Sesame app is one of many from mobile gifting company Sincerely, which also lets you order greeting cards, photo postcards and even flowers from your phone, through its suite of applications. The company was Provide Commerce last November, in an all-cash deal. Now Provide Commerce, which is the e-commerce business behind a number of big-name brands, including ProFlowers, Shari’s Berries, Red Envelope, and Personal Creations, , by flower industry giant FTD Companies for $430 million in stock and cash. Being owned by an even larger company will have its own challenges of course, but it also means that Sincerely’s suite of applications can continue to grow and scale as long as FTD wants to fund their existence, even if it takes time for the services to become independently profitable. The new Sesame iPad app is . [vimeo 105784598 w=500 h=500] |
Want To Talk About Your Startup On The Radio? Apply To The TC Radio Pitch Off On Sirius XM | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | is a thing, in case you didn’t know. And in usual TechCrunch fashion, a part of our show is dedicated exclusively to a call-in Pitch Off. Which means we need your help. If you’re an early stage startup looking to get a few more users or share your wares with the world, we’d love to have you join us. Similar to what we do with our regional meetups, a few companies will have the chance to give a short, words-only pitch to a panel of judges, including myself, John Biggs, and a guest VC. We’ll then decide live, on the air, who should win a ticket to the next Disrupt conference. But before you start searching this post for a link to the application, there are a few rules: 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. If ^ that sounds like you, you can head for our pitch-off. We’re looking for companies for every show, but we encourage you to sign up now as spots are open for our next show, on Tuesday, September 16. This week at TC Disrupt in San Francisco, we launched our first episode live from the Startup Alley floor. In it, John Biggs and I discussed the launch of the new big-ass iPhones, the Apple Watch, and Apple Pay, and crowned Oscar as the inaugural winner of the TC Radio Pitch-Off. You can listen to a few clips and . |
Eucalyptus CEO Sudden OpenStack Conversion Makes More Sense In Light of HP Purchase | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | Last month Eucalyptus CEO . Yesterday , a company that itself embraced OpenStack this year in a big way. Hard to imagine the timing of Mickos’ OpenStack epiphany was a coincidence. He wrote a blog post on his company website last month, . He joked he had been an OpenStack contributor all along by be pushing it as a competitor (although he was actually an early code contributor before moving on). That could be true, but Mickos announced he will be a keynoter at an OpenStack Silicon Valley event next week before dropping the real bombshell. He was going to do more than compete, he was going to start contributing the project in earnest. “OpenStack, in my view, is the all-embracing cloud project that various large and small vendors package for complex and highly customized deployments. These are deployments where AWS compatibility is not a vital requirement,” Mickos wrote in his blog post. As Steven J Vaughan-Nichols wrote in a blog post of his own at the time, , and as a long-time open source observer, Vaughan-Nichols described himself as “gobsmacked” by the announcement. Mickos’ company was actually sleeping with OpenStack’s main enemy, AWS. How could these two unlikely parties live together. Mickos wanted to find a way to make it work. For those of you not familiar with OpenStack, it’s an open source alternative to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, the big public cloud providers with lots of market clout. These companies tend not to be terribly transparent about how they do things and that’s been a problem for some customers. Four years ago, Rackspace and NASA led the start of the OpenStack project to act as a check against the growing power of the major public cloud providers, particularly AWS. By being open source, it gave IT and developers direct access to the code base to customize it and build it as they see fit, something that you can’t do with a proprietary platform. Mickos’ company offered an alternative vision and built bridges from public and private clouds to the AWS cloud, but in spite of Mickos’ own financial clout, he had trouble denting a market, caught between a variety of competitive forces including OpenStack. Meanwhile, throughout this year, , pivoting from its Cloud OS initiative to HP Helion and OpenStack. And interestingly enough, when they moved to Helion, the company Unbeknownst to us, these two companies were about to come together in spite of originally coming at the cloud from opposite directions. These deals tend to take some time, so it’s not hard to imagine that right about the time, Mickos was suddenly finding his OpenStack religion, he very well could have been having a conversation with HP about being acquired. Regardless, HP decided to do it and in the process, they named Mikos as their new senior vice president in charge of the cloud division, basically handing him the keys to their cloud strategy. That means he will have a big influence on the future direction of the company’s cloud business. One of the complaints around OpenStack in spite of its growing popularity in the enterprise is that it requires a high level of technical expertise to deploy. To answer this, just last week designed to help ease the pain of OpenStack implementation, but it’s conceivable says Sravish Sridhar, CEO of Kinvey, a mobile development platform, that HP will leverage this purchase to create an appliance to simplify OpenStack implementations. “With the Eucalyptus acquisition, HP has a product-focused team that knows how to develop a cloud appliance that is really easy to deploy and manage — something that OpenStack software is known to be very weak in.” HP isn’t alone in this market though as rivals VMware, IBM, Red Hat and others are also trying similar strategies. to give customers an easier way to test OpenStack, and this could be the first step toward other appliances to ease implementation issues around OpenStack. While this might seem a strange matchup on its face, it could also be a simple case of HP covering its market bases, or it could be using its pocketbook to make its cloud offerings more attractive in an increasingly competitive marketplace. |
Chromebook Lending Library Offers Students At 12 U.S. Colleges A Free Laptop To Borrow | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | Google is teaming up with a dozen college campuses across the U.S. to to any student who wants one, in a system that lets them temporarily check out the laptops for late-night cram sessions or just finding the best animal GIFs on Imgur. The Google program features fun-colored café-style installations like the one pictured above, which will tour the 12 campuses this school year. The Lending Library has the fairly clear intent of getting students some hands-on time with Chromebooks and Chrome OS, which Google clearly sees as a smart fit for the college set, but which could also undeniably use a grassroots student body-led adoption movement to pick up steam. The Lending Library will make a beginning in September, and running through October, and Google promises more dates to come. It’s operating on a first-come, first-serve basis, and checkout periods can span the entire stay of Google on that particular campus, but not longer – anyone who exceeds the time limit will be charged for the device, but Google also says there are “no hard feelings” if that ends up happening. A trial period could spark interest in lightweight, inexpensive notebooks running on Google’s curious desktop OS, but it will take a lot of legwork to make these more popular than the MacBook, which is present in higher ed to a degree that helps explaining the Mac’s continued growth even in the face of a slumping PC market. |
CStorePro Is Google Analytics For Convenience Stores | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | One of the more interesting startups spotted in this year’s Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 was . The company, which likens its product to a “Google Analytics” for convenience stores, was a runner-up for the Audience’s Choice award – that is, the startup picked from the crowded tables filling the Alley, voted up as a favorite by the public. CStorePro offers a web and mobile service that provides business intelligence for convenience store customers at more affordable price points than many of the larger competitors in the space. The founding team behind CStorePro has a history in working with convenience stores, having come from a family that spent 20 years in the business. Previously, those building CStorePro launched a successful check cashing business for convenience stores that has helped to cash $3.2 billion worth of checks to date. With CStorePro, the online software system will integrate with convenience stores point-of-sale (POS) systems in order to access data that is, today, “trapped in the cash registers,” the company explains to TechCrunch. This transaction data is then uploaded to CStore’s cloud, where businesses can then log in to run reports, view charts and graphs, and make adjustments to pricing in real-time. The software lets store owners keep an eye on their store’s overall margins, inventory levels, sales reports and more, including breakdowns between things like lottery, gas, purchases, money orders and other categories. Using this data, the system also suggests changes based on current trends, and can send out alerts allowing business owners to make immediate decisions that can impact their store’s bottom line – even when they’re away from their store, thanks CStorePro’s mobile support. For instance, if it’s raining that day, the software would recognize that the store’s merchandise sales will go down. So it might suggest that the store lower its gas prices in order to temporarily increase the number of vehicles that visit the gas station. With a click of a “Do” button within the web or mobile application, a store owner can act on a suggestion like this, or any other pricing changes. Currently, the system operates with top POS makers including Gilbarco Veeder-Root, VeriFone, and Dresser-Wayne. Although the POS business overall is very fragmented, the company tells us that in the convenience store industry, 75% of convenience stores are using one of four POS solutions, making integrations easier. Based in Houston, the company currently has 1,000+ users on its platform, the majority of which are free users with the remaining customers on a paid tier. CStorePro also offers a variety of low-cost pricing options, ranging from $39-$59 per month, depending on the number of stores. An on-premise solution is also available, at $89/month. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOMqMPyNuM] |
Mobile Payments Are Finally A Reality Thanks To Apple | Robert McCarthy | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | A song lyric from “All That Jazz” comes to mind following Apple’s big announcement about mobile payments on Tuesday: “Everything old is new again.” Amid rumors and leaks surrounding the new Apple phone, operating system and peripherals, Apple clearly saw – – the looming perfect storm in mobile payments that’s been swirling and growling on the horizon for the last few years. It is now clear: Apple is taking advantage of partnerships more than technology in order to innovate in this burgeoning space. Apple has been focused on delivering some intriguing solutions to problems on the periphery of mobile payments for the last few years, but none (until now) that has captured a major portion of the in-store mobile payments experience. iTunes, of course, is at the center of it all as the main portal for Apple users to pay for digital content from any preferred platform. Passbook, released in 2012, has capabilities that support non-payment activities – managing tickets, coupons, events and code scanning – but never truly came through as the hoped-for “Apple mobile wallet” for payments. The iBeacon ecosystem is enabling brick-and-mortar retailers to have more insightful digital conversations with their customers, but has yet to prove its value as a vehicle for higher revenues per consumer. Even Apple’s latest security measure, the Touch ID fingerprint scanner with wide-sweeping possibilities, had proven most practical only for device unlocking and little else. Now with iPhone 6 and Apple Pay, these pieces come together. As Apple rolls out the iPhone 6 with iOS 8 and , users will have a whole new world of NFC-enabled secure payment capabilities open to them. The iPhone leverages a secure element (SE) inside the chip to store sensitive data, can on-board new credit cards via the device’s camera, and uses tokenization to protect real credit card data when it is “in flight,” traversing the various networks within the payment ecosystem. But the true innovation here for Apple was in recognizing that the eco-system – technology, partners, merchants and consumers – was nearly in place and simply needed a leader to bring it all together. Coupled with this announcement is the timing of the EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) mandates set forth by card brands that requires retailers to switch their existing payment devices for new hardware capable of supporting EMV payments. EMV, the standard in almost all other countries, is a more secure standard for processing credit card payments that makes use of an embedded chip on the credit card to securely encrypt transactions. All retailers must swap their hardware for EMV-capable hardware by the end of 2015 or suffer a huge leap in fraud liability, a burden the card brands are no longer willing to bear. This, of course, is why Apple has partnered with major card brands (AMEX, Visa and Mastercard); in addition, they have partnered with eight of the top eight credit issuers and over 200,000 merchants. For these payment entities, a partnership like this ensures an increased opportunity for customer acquisition directly through Apple while staving off encroachment by other payment devices (such as crypto-currency). For Apple, these partnerships ensure that they can readily connect the traditional retail payment rails to the iTunes backend, thus locking in their user base to ensure its more than 800+ million registered customers can securely and seamlessly allow the retailer to process a payment using the iPhone 6 credentials and an Apple iTunes account. Over the next 1-3 years, you can expect: |
Product Hunt Raises $6 Million From A16Z | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | , the aggregation site that many people consider a direct competitor to TechCrunch and other tech blogs due to its ability to surface new tech products and startups, has raised a hefty series A, we’re hearing. We’ve heard that Andreessen Horowitz led the round, and that Product Hunt picked up $6 million at a $22 million valuation (our tipsters were unclear on whether that was post or pre money). It seems as though A16z has been doubling down on content startups, with RapGenius, Buzzfeed, Imgur and now Product Hunt in its stables. And joining the bundle. “Product Hunt has some advantages when it comes to fundraising,” Product Hunt CEO Ryan Hoover told TechCrunch in August, . “Because investors use it, we don’t have as much of a hard time getting in front of investors.” (Hoover declined to comment on this story.) In addition to A16z, the company counts , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and as existing investors. So is Product Hunt the next Michael Arrington? While many startups, like Danny Trinh’s , have bypassed the traditional tech blog launch in favor of soft launching on the site, others continue to court press as an effective way of gaining new users. In an independent test this past July, the startup compared us, Product Hunt and Hacker News as a vehicle for sign ups. TechCrunch We are huge fans of Product Hunt at TC, and view it more as a supplementary product to what we publish, a startup platform versus a journalistic enterprise. Like Reddit versus the WSJ. Product Hunt strips each product launch of the context, so users have to be very active about browsing and asking their own questions as opposed to having a journalist do the work for them. Product Hunt provides a pull versus push experience, with the advantage of being personalized to each user. Product launches are only a piece of what we do here at TechCrunch, but we too use Product Hunt in order to find cool products to cover. Do I consider it a competitor? No, I think we should be much more afraid of , for example. After all, Product Hunt can’t scoop its own funding news. ;) |
A Cambrian Explosion In AI Is Coming | Dag Kittlaus | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | You can call it a Virtual Personal Assistant, an Intelligent Agent, an Intelligent Interface or whatever you wish. We call it inevitable. The era of the assistant that began with Siri will eventually dominate the way people interact with mobile devices, computers, cars, wearables, appliances and every other piece of technology that requires complex human-machine interaction. Nearly all of the large Internet players have now launched or are working on some effort to win this next-generation paradigm and it’s the earliest of days. Despite the massive uptake of assistants spurred by Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana, the market and technologies for this paradigm remain in their adolescence. Siri was the first chapter in a much longer, larger story that reminds me of the original iPhone launch in 2007. Both Siri’s launch and the original iPhone launch featured slick and intuitive new interfaces that improved upon the basic form and function of an already ubiquitous personal technology. Both set new bars for simplicity, and enhanced the way hundreds of millions of people interact with technology. But only one of them quickly made the move to catalyze the creativity of the world and create an entirely new, multibillion-dollar ecosystem that continues to grow over half a decade later. The move of course was the opening up — the democratization of mobile applications to third parties, and the creation of the App Store. That dynamic is precisely the missing piece of the puzzle that will transform today’s useful but limited versions of AI into a ubiquitous and everyday presence in our lives. A cambrian explosion is coming. Hollywood has been inspired by the simplicity of this paradigm for decades. However, today’s Web and app ecosystems haven’t changed substantially since their inception, offering too many options and too much manual work for a user to achieve a given task. However, done properly, this emerging conversational paradigm enables a new fluidity for achieving tasks in the digital realm. Such an interface requires no user manual, makes short work of complex tasks via simple conversational commands and, once it gets to know you, makes obsolete many of the most tedious aspects of using the apps, sites and services of today. What if you didn’t have to: register and form-fill; continuously express your preferences; navigate new interfaces with every new app; and the biggest one of them all, discover and navigate each single-purpose app or service at a time? Let me repeat the last one. When you can use AI as a conduit, as an orchestrating mechanism to the world of information and services, you find yourself in a place where services don’t need to be discovered by an app store or search engine. It’s a new space where users will no longer be required to navigate each individual application or service to find and do what they want. Rather they move effortlessly from one need to the next with thousands of services competing and cooperating to accomplish their desires and tasks simply by expressing their desires. Just by asking. Need a babysitter tomorrow night in a jam? Just ask your assistant to find one and it will immediately present you with a near complete set of personalized options: it already knows where you live, knows how many kids you have and their ages, knows which of the babysitting services has the highest reputation and which ones cover your geographic area. You didn’t need to search and discover a babysitting app, download it, register for it, enter your location and dates you are requesting and so on. This is a far simpler world where your desires drive the ecosystem of services to action on your behalf. This paradigm becomes even more useful when you start to think about the emerging market for the Internet of Things, where many devices you will interact with require a completely eyes-free or hands-free interface. Commands replace controls and an entirely new OS for integrating disparate devices, services and experiences emerges. So as this described world of an “open” intelligent interface scales what does it ultimately manifest itself as? A massive marketplace. Remember, this is a system that is orchestrating and serving up your goals and sub-tasks to thousands of services that compete and cooperate to accomplish things for you. And as a platform emerges that is capable of utilizing contextual signals, personal preferences and the simplest of interaction models, this becomes a magical combination that unlocks entirely new opportunities for participating services and applications. A hereto-unrealized commerce space I call the “referral economy.” A great example of this is to imagine the opportunity presented to a whole range of services at the moment a user on a matchmaking service confirms a date. According to my friend and CEO of Match.com Sam Yagan, this happens roughly 50,000 times per day on his service alone. In today’s Internet, upon completing your date reservation, you may find a link that says, “send a gift” or some other relevant follow-on action. This immediately punches you out to a different service that shares a small cut of any business acquired via that link. Of course, from a user’s perspective, this is not seamless because they need to start over and enter all of the contextual information still locked in the dating site. Such is todays typical affiliate program model… and it’s a sliver of what could have been from a revenue and usefulness standpoint. At this contextual “just arranged a date” moment lies an opportunity to intelligently prompt if the user would like to see what is going on on friday night in the area, get tickets, book dinner reservations, send an Uber to pick them up or send flowers to the table. Incremental revenue nirvana. Some improvements in this realm are coming in the form of things like “deep linking” and potentially Apple’s forthcoming “App extensions” which act like an IFTTT-like mechanism for linking a few simple capabilities or passing on some basic user credentials. These help but remain incremental scaffolding built on top of an aging infrastructure. As AI reaches scale as a utility-like cloud service empowering developers and enterprises to create magical experiences, we may see a seismic shift of online advertising revenue away from search engine discovery marketplaces such as AdWords. This could lead to more of a consumption-based transaction model where certain types of brands big and small fight to be the best sources of full-service, programmatic data and services where the customer only pays when a user consumes their service. The programmable web finally arrives and the long rumored CPA (Cost Per Action) model goes mainstream. The unlocking of AI ultimately allows this Cambrian Explosion to finally find the light of day and enables a dynamic new world to emerge. As your trusted assistant becomes more and more capable as thousands of developers join the marketplace, it brings scale and breadth to something that AI has aspired to for decades. It scales usefulness. |
Here Are Clips From The First SiriusXM TechCrunch Radio Show | Travis Bernard | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | On Tuesday we launched our SiriusXM radio show, , from Disrupt SF. Jordan Crook and John Biggs discussed the Apple Watch and did a startup pitch-off. A few audio clips from the show can be found below. Catch next week’s show on the Indie 102 channel, airing Tuesday September 16 at 6 p.m. ET. The show also replays Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET, Fridays at 6 p.m. and Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/167295825″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /] |
Hey Microsoft, Acquiring A Hit Game Is Stupid | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | Buying a game company is like buying an aging baseball player. You’ll need a miracle to get another hit. And while they might have plenty of fans, they probably aren’t making a lot of new ones. Mojang hit a grand slam home run with Minecraft, but that doesn’t mean , as it’s reportedly going to announce this week. There’s no guarantee it will produce another blockbuster; players will eventually move on from Minecraft, and I doubt anyone is going to buy a dopey Windows Phone just to play a slightly different version of the pixelated sandbox game. Have we learned nothing from Zynga, Rovio, King and Dong? Zynga and King IPO’d on the strength of their hits FarmVille and Candy Crush Saga. Both have sank hard since, as gamers inevitably get bored and look for new titles to play. Zynga’s share price has steadily sank to $2.92 from its $10 IPO, and King’s share price has plummeted to $13.19 from its $22.50 debut. Rovio had the world in its pocket, or more accurately, it was in the world’s pockets, thanks to Angry Birds. But there are only so many pigeons you can chuck at pigs, and now its . If someone had acquired Rovio at the height of its success, they’d be kicking themselves with steel-toed boots right now. Supercell brought massively multiplayer online gaming to the masses with Clash Of Clans. But after raising a dumbfounding $272 million, it’s steadily and out of the top 50 apps over the course of 2014. Clash Of Clans and Candy Crush are still at the top of the top grossing charts, but the other signs say their time there is fleeting. And then there was Flappy Bird. If ever there was proof that the modern gaming industry is an unpredictable beast as likely to buck you off and kick you in the face as take you for a ride, it was Dong Nguyen’s creation. While other gaming companies with hundreds of employees and tens or hundreds of millions in funding desperately tried to build an addictive game, a single man with no funding from Vietnam captured the hearts and expletives of the whole world. No viral loops. No fancy graphics. No smarmy in-app purchases to squeeze money out of users. Just a game so frustrating it was fun. Naturally, Dong Nguyen’s next game could never live up to Flappy Bird. Less than a month after launch, Swing Copters is on a rapid decline, down to No. 220 in the App Store now. But at least Dong taught us you can’t always brute-force your way to popularity. Sure, Call Of Duty and Grand Theft Auto produce best-sellers by just throwing talent at a console franchise, but both of those started over a decade ago and are decidedly not mobile-ready. Microsoft did score a win by acquiring Bungie in 2000, just before it released Halo. But the studio had already proven its ability to produce good games in different genres (first-person shooter Marathon, strategy game Myth). And it didn’t have to pay nearly as much because Bungie wasn’t riding high on a hit game at the time. Minecraft has some characteristics that make it a slightly less risky acquisition than some hit games. It’s like a digital Lego set rather than a game with a linear narrative, so it has more opportunity for experimentation and replay value. It began as a desktop game, so it has considerably more depth built in than most mobile-first games. It’s spawned a community of creators that keep kids tuned in. And its iconic pixelated aesthetic powers a strong physical merchandise business. It has opportunities for growth, too, especially if Mojang can morph Minecraft into more of a massively multiplayer game. A built-in Twitch-style video sharing feature could also extend its shelf life and keep players engaged longer. But just like in Minecraft, eventually the sun sets and living things give way to zombies. Minecraft can only get so much bigger, but it could certainly implode. People will crave something new. The way no one saw Minecraft coming, we probably won’t see the game that usurps it coming, either. The synergies for Microsoft are thin at best. The game is already on Xbox, but its cross-platform presence has elevated it to the state of cultural phenomenon. Unless Microsoft pulls it from other platforms, which seems unlikely, Minecraft will go on making money for Apple and Google through their respective app stores’ taxes. Perhaps a souped-up edition for Xbox could drive some extra sales, but that could further fracture the game’s community. There’s simply much smarter things Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella could be focusing on to get the company back on track. [Postscript: Minecraft is definitely more than a game. It has a deeply interwoven of community of virtual architects that will help sustain it. There’s the potential for it to become a more lasting platform for creativity like Legos. At Microsoft, Minecraft could be heavily tied in with Xbox, and work alongside the Project Spark video game maker. Success for the acquisition depends deeply on the sentiments Mojang co-founder Markus ‘Notch’ Persson and his team. Keeping them inspired and on-board will be a serious test of Nadella’s management skills.] And I’m sorry, Microsoft, but no one is going to ditch all their other apps and Androids or iPhones for a laughable Windows Phone just to play some special version of Minecraft. If you’re telling yourself that’s why the deal makes sense, your blood-Kool Aid content has surpassed legal levels. Stop drinking it. Kids don’t want Windows Phones. They’re not cool. You know what is cool? Minecraft. You know what’s an easy way to change that? Have one of the lamest, old-man corporations buy it. And that might be the saddest part of this deal. Compared to the crack-cocaine of Candy Crush and painkillers shaped like reality TV, Minecraft is downright intellectually stimulating. A “game” that’s evolved into a platform for creative expression could have its community snuffed out because its creator sold out for a few billion dollars. So I hope this deal doesn’t happen. Not just because it could be dumb for Microsoft, but for the sake of the children. |
Venture Capital Is Prime For A Reverse Gold Rush | Jack Studer | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | Considering how important proprietary deal flow has become as a tool for differentiation within venture capital, it’s surprising that more VCs aren’t shopping in the South. They simply aren’t looking at the concepts and companies coming out of Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, Chattanooga, and other Southern startup hubs. At best, VCs might have a token startup on their roster from outside the Valley, mainly for bragging rights about geographic diversity and risks taken. It hardly counts as truly investing in the region, much less diversifying a portfolio. I recently got back from Y Combinator’s summer Demo Day, where I caught up with old friends, fellow venture capitalists, PE fund managers, and those from a more traditional corp dev background. One thing they all had in common was that they are flat out ignoring Southeastern deal flow. At the same time, they all want to see a fresh idea that doesn’t feel as over-shopped as many of the deals currently cooking in Silicon Valley. The first would resolve the second. The startup world outside Silicon Valley is still largely an untapped frontier. There’s a huge potential for a reverse gold rush if West Coast VCs would seek to mine Southeastern startups that are rapidly growing in a rich, pro business, distraction free entrepreneurial environment. A variety of industries are flocking to the South, from healthcare to tech to manufacturing, creating a variety of fresh opportunities to innovate and disrupt. That’s not to mention how capital-efficient (aka cheap) this place is. The salaries are lower, the overhead costs less, the real estate costs less, the cost of living is less. Two million dollars invested into a startup outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber can move it well beyond a MVP and a handful of beta customers. As we’re seeing firsthand with startups like , and , an investment of a few million dollars in a Southeastern startup can allow a company to scale rapidly and deepen its relationship with an expanding customer base. Even better, it might pay off with an exit like enjoyed when it was picked up by for $11.5 million in cash in 2013. And yes, an $11.5 million exit can be a 5x return in 18 months when your entry point is appropriate. The Southeast has a handful of its own VC firms, of course. Nashville and Atlanta each have a few good funds. Even Chattanooga, (Tennessee’s fourth largest city) has seen a number of new funds appear in the past three years, including , (a female-focused Angel fund), , and Lamp Post Group. Still, there is plenty of room at the table for larger venture firms to leverage their own expertise and extract massive value from the Southeast. Especially at the rate the Southeastern economy is growing – thanks to the expansion of more traditional industries, such as healthcare and manufacturing, as well as innovative new municipal internet solutions like EPB’s fiber network in Chattanooga – for investment in the Southeast to generate outsized returns for smart investors. The regional early stage VCs have invested in many promising young homegrown startups. Yet Silicon Valley continues to look inward rather than outward while simultaneously offering huge prizes to anyone who can offer them something they haven’t seen before. When Ambition went to Y Combinator last winter they were one of the new kids on the block. They were fresh, and it worked to their advantage when they were repeatedly included on lists of the most promising startups in the class. There is a line of more fresh young startups right behind them, too. Every day I get new pitches in my email box and requests for meetings from eager young entrepreneurs who don’t want to go west, but want to bring their vision to life in their hometowns. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone. Southerners are rather hard headed about things and we’ve taken a liking to this startup thing. The surprise is going to come when your junior associate sources a 40x deal from a ZIP code you didn’t know had electricity (much less ). Don’t be worried when that same associate ends up your boss. Twenty year olds already run the world. Millennials are famous for the “think outside the box” mentality that has pushed startups and tech into innovative new directions. So why aren’t VCs thinking outside the box of Silicon Valley? As much as startups and the future of the web are compared to the Wild West, few VCs are willing to join them on the new frontier– the mid-sized cities in the South, Midwest, and even back east in New York City where many startups are flocking, and thriving. Where VCs invest comes down to a lot more than just proprietary deal flow. It ultimately comes down to the ever-present question of innovation. How far are VCs willing to go (literally) for the next big idea? And what is preventing them from going that distance? Right now it looks like the fringes of Santa Clara are their limit, though Mark Cuban’s recent comments at TechCrunch Disrupt suggest that things may be about to change. To find what they’re looking for, VCs will have to follow the advice given to so many founders in the industry: they’ll have to take a risk, push past their comfort zones, and explore the unfamiliar. If they do, the reverse goldrush could change the startup industry. |
PopKey’s iOS 8 Launch Will Replace Written Language With The Expressive Art Of The GIF | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | We’re on the verge of a linguistic revolution, made possible by the fact that Apple has opened up its iOS operating system to allow third-party keyboards. One of the first entrants will be , a project out of the creative studio based in Ottawa, which has created on-demand social photo printing service CanvasPop, among others. The Betaworks-style operation’s new project came together because founder Adrian Salamunovic got in the habit of sending animated ‘reaction’ GIFs in conversations with friends, and wanted an easier way to do that then opening Safari, searching for the appropriate image, copying that, and then pasting it in Messages or Mail. Apple’s keyboard development tools allow a significant amount of leeway, making it possible to create an embedded search widget that lets users browse and find animated GIFs for anything they hope to express. PopKey curates a growing collection of GIFs to choose from, including ones that cover every basic reaction a user could want, according to Salamunovic, and then they stamp the image with a watermark to hopefully create a viral feedback loop that draws others to the keyboard software. [gallery ids="1057639,1057640,1057641,1057642,1057643,1057644,1057645,1057646,1057647"] That’s a key ingredient, because despite the convenience of using the keyboard, installing it is far from easy – Apple has essentially buried the third-party keyboard options deep in Settings, meaning only users who really want them will be able to get access. Salamunovic still thinks plenty of people will embrace PopKey, which does indeed liven up otherwise boring text conversations, as you can see from the sample screens in this post. The founder was using the software and taking screens from his end, while I responded on my own device using my stone age tools, as I don’t yet have access to the PopKey software. PopKey is aiming to launch in time for iOS 8, which arrives on September 17, just a couple of days before the launch of the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. It’ll be a completely free app, and the revenue potential later on will come from offering special content packs and perhaps looking at co-branded opportunities, where GIFs from upcoming movies could be paid for by studios, for instance. In the short-term, it’ll be free and full-featured right away, with the aim of spreading it as far as possible, and users will even be able to upload their own GIFs to include in the collection and share around. I’m already preparing for a time when what I need to say can’t be expressed in clumsy words alone – and PopKey has anticipated that need. All that remains to be seen is how many other forms of unique new self-expression come along with the custom keyboard craze, and how many of these stick around for the long haul. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 12 | null |
Sailo Is A Marketplace Connecting Boats, Captains And Renters | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | If you think boating sounds vaguely appealing but you’ve never actually made it out on the water, a New York City startup called aims to help. It’s not the first company to allow you to rent boats from their owners. Early last year, for example, we wrote about , a . Meanwhile, , a service that takes a similar approach to fishing trips specifically, . However, Boatbound and similar services are really focused on renting the boat. Co-founder Delphine Braas argued that for many potential users, this approach leaves out a key part of the equation — someone who actually knows what they’re doing. Maybe you’ve never sailed before, or maybe you want to throw a party without worrying about actually running the vessel. That’s why Sailo helps users hire captains, too. Braas said this approach makes boating “accessible and affordable for an inexperienced boater,” because you don’t just get the boat, you also get an experienced captain, licensed by the US Coast Guard. Basically, when you visit , you can specify the date, the location and the type of boat you’re looking for. Once you’ve chosen a vessel, Sailo will allow you to pick from available captains who are qualified to operate it. Those captains, meanwhile, get an additional source of income, and the boat owners get to make money when their vessels would normally be sitting idle at the dock. (Sailo also offers insurance for up to $1 million on each trip.) The challenge will be building a three-sided marketplace, i.e. making sure that there are enough boats, captains renters. Braas pointed out that the response from captains and boat owners has been enthusiastic so far, but I’m guessing it’s a little early to say for sure — the site currently touts a selection of 18 boats and six captains, and it’s only starting to bring on renters now. The team is currently working out of in Manhattan, and two of its founders, Braas and Adrian Gradinaru, recently graduated from Columbia Business School. (The third founder, Magda Marcu, has an MBA from Santa Clara University.) Apparently Gradinaru came up with the idea after sailing to Greece with the Columbia sailing club, then trying to hire a boat and captain back in New York and finding the experience overly complicated. Sailo is currently available in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, with plans to launch in Florida during the fall. |
Gillmor Gang: AppleJacked | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Benedict Evans, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Tuesday, September 9, 2014. It’s three days later and I’m still going back and forth over which iPhone to buy. The preorders are sold out for 6+, tipping the scale toward the smaller bigger one. What may tip it back is the Watch, which suggests a new paradigm of interlinked devices that, when starting with the wrist, make a good case for more pixels for transit time, and a new iPad Air as the intermediate to the TV. Not much buy in from the Gang, but think Watch as the controller, iPhone 6+ in the middle, and the Air as the gateway to the desk and set top box. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @BenedictEvans, @dbfarber, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Colorado High Schooler Invents Smart Gun That Unlocks With Your Fingerprint | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | Colorado has a history with gun violence so it’s only appropriate that 17-year-old Kai Kloepfer, a high school student from Boulder, would want to apply biometric user authentication to firearms. Kloepfer just won the $50,000 for his smart gun prototype. Angel investor and gun reform advocate Ron Conway became the main backer of the $1 million Smart Tech prize to spur gun safety solutions earlier this year. “Let’s use innovation to bring about gun safety. Let’s not rely on Washington,” Conway in January. According to the Smart Tech Foundation, a total of 15 innovators will receive a part of that million dollar prize. Kloepfer is the first to get the award. The gun works by creating a user ID and locking in the fingerprint of each user allowed to use the gun. The gun will only unlock with the unique fingerprint of those who have already permission to access the gun. The clearly brainy teen tells me he has an interest in information security. According to him, all user data is kept right on the gun and nothing is uploaded anywhere else so it would be pretty hard to hack. This potentially makes it ideal for military use as well. Kloepfer came up with the idea two years ago when he needed something for his high school science project. “The idea came to me right as I was falling asleep. It was kinda in the back of my mind because of the shooting,” said Kloepfer, alluding to the that had been on everyone’s mind at the time. The shooting was just an hour’s drive from his home. “I scribbled it down before I went to bed and fell asleep and then in the morning I began my research,” He explained. Kloepfer’s parents helped him in monetary increments to get the parts needed for each improvement. It would eventually cost $3000 for the whole thing to come together. “At first it was just a concept on paper,” he tells me. The gun went from phase to phase with each science fair. “Right now it’s a prototype on a plastic model. Its not entirely there but it works,” he says. Some of the $50,000 has already been used to purchase a 3D printer to create new parts for his prototype. Kloepfer, who will graduate from Fairview High School this year, plans to use the rest of it toward the integration of a fingerprint scanner. “Every 30 minutes in the U.S. a kid dies from a gun. I want my gun to help reduce accidental deaths and injuries, and to prevent tragedies,” said Kloepfer He spoke about his biometric smart gun tech at the this week in Denver, Colorado. |
Technologists’ Duty Can Go Beyond For-Profit Industries | Joe Lonsdale | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | , I wrote an article explaining how our team views the concept of duty for leaders in the technology ecosystem. We believe that this duty involves looking beyond conventional startups to study complex industries and using technology to tackle the biggest problems we can find. Our belief is based on an observation that many of the large industries in the U.S. are in some form of crisis, but few top technologists — and few investors — set their sights on fixing the parts of our economy that could have the greatest impact on overall prosperity and well-being (financial services, healthcare systems, government, education, agriculture, logistics, etc.). Not so long ago only a few of us in Silicon Valley were building companies in these areas, but now we’re happy to see more and more entrepreneurs applying technology to hard problems in huge industries that will have lasting effects for people across the globe. We think that Silicon Valley is at the very beginning of this important wave of innovation, and at Formation 8 we have partnered with dozens of these companies because we believe that improving these industries will enable general prosperity while also providing for the highest returns. Our philosophy is that many companies that present the greatest economic opportunity are also those that create the most value for society. However, there are clear exceptions to this rule. In certain cases, market incentives fail to align, or even exacerbate an issue – and mission-driven non-profit organizations are needed to solve the problem. Technology is playing an increasingly critical role in these organizations and they are badly in need of our help. The problem of child exploitation is a glaring example of such a scenario. Economic motivation has created a perverse and underground marketplace where children are bought and sold as slaves. It’s a harsh reality that exists in our own backyards, with thousands of children in the US alone – many from the foster care system or from broken families – being commercially exploited every year. Many of these individuals are coerced into prostitution as teenagers, long before they are legally old enough to consent to sex. The average age at which girls are forced into this exploitation is 13, and this illicit market is growing and is now second only to drug trafficking, according to research from the Ashton Kutcher-backed non-profit, Thorn. So far, the US government has been just as successful in stopping exploitation as they’ve been with drugs, and they need our help. As with every other market, the proliferation of the Internet has driven activity online. Today these children are bought and sold on many of the same sites where you can source a roommate, sell your bike or find a job. Further, connectivity has also spurred an explosion in the online trade of child sexual abuse imagery. Peer-to-peer platforms and anonymous networks like Tor allow images and videos of the most egregious types of abuse to be traded globally, continuously re-victimizing these children and creating networks of people who connect with one another to share content and justify their behavior to one another. There’s no economic incentive in trying to stop the spread of this content or to use the digital trail to identify more victims and stop the abuse, but there’s definitely a moral one. The team at Thorn has extremely passionate and talented individuals who partner with government organizations and leading software and new media companies, and work with child exploitation experts to save children and attack the problem from multiple angles. Thorn’s partners include Facebook, Palantir, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Salesforce, Tumblr, Twilio, SV Angel, Formation 8, and others. While the financial support of Ashton and these allies is valuable, their technological expertise is invaluable. From machine learning to detect patterns in perpetrator behavior to complex data integration to the design of simple and useful UX, backed by tools such as semantic classifiers, for law enforcers to prioritize cases on online escort boards that may involve minors, it’s technology that’s providing new tools to fight back against these predators. Joe Lonsdale (Formation 8) and Ashton Kutcher (Thorn) are interviewed by Pierre Arys (Formation 8) in front of the 25 teams at the anti-child-sex-trafficking hackathon at Twilio in San Francisco on August 23. Formation 8 recently helped Thorn organize a hackathon, gathering nearly a hundred talented computer scientists at Twilio’s offices in San Francisco to participate in fighting child exploitation. Joining Ashton and myself other judges included: Del Harvey (VP Trust & Safety at Twitter); Ellen Levy (Managing Director, Silicon Valley Connect); Megan Smith (recently named incoming CTO of the United States); and Ilya Grigorik (Web Performance at Google). Engineers worked hand-in-hand with Thorn’s subject matter experts to develop a variety of tools that could be potentially used by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), law enforcement agencies, and other non-profit or government organizations tasked with working on these sorts of issues. While there has been some public criticism of faulty statistics around child exploitation and trafficking, after interacting with the experts and others at Thorn and viewing the log data about U.S.-based searches for child-exploitation for context, it was clear to everybody how serious and widespread of an issue this is. The event was hugely successful, with winning projects including visualization layers of perpetrator activity, databases of ontologies specific to child exploitation, and discovery methods for potential predators using bitcoin to pay for child sexual exploitation content. These projects, along with many others, can be put to use almost immediately and the energy and creativity we saw these teams bring to bear on this serious issue was inspiring to all of us. Traditional hackathons are fun and focused on skill and competition, but we believe that events which focus on the positive social impact of technology engage a wider and more diverse set of participants. Lilli Oetting, who won second place with her partner Bowen Lu said this was the first hackathon she has ever competed in. “Hacking for the sake of hacking isn’t at all motivational to me, but hacking to diagnose a disease or catch terrorists or save a child from sexual exploitation is a great honor as well as an exciting technical challenge. In my experience, many women share the mindset that technology is most interesting in its application to social problems.” Oetting, who is a rising senior at Stanford studying computer science, noted that this further substantiated earlier observations she had while teaching a class titled Code the Change: Learn Web Development Through Nonprofit Projects. “It was by far the most gender-balanced computer science class I’ve been a part of,” she said. “Over half the students were female.” We hope we can continue to highlight additional amazing role models in our community who are not only very respected technologists and leaders, but are engaged in great social causes. We want to inspire everyone to recognize the positive social impact they can have if they choose to become technologists. Ashton’s leadership on this issue continues to be inspiring – at the end of the hackathon he announced that he’s sponsoring three $100,000 fellowships for data scientists and software engineers who want to continue working with Thorn. We’re excited to see what can be accomplished with that kind of team, given how much progress was made in just a weekend. The reality is technologists hold great power in the world, and not only does big industry need our help right now, but so do a lot of the most important causes. My first company, Palantir, has also engaged in anti-child exploitation technology work pro bono with NCMEC, a variety of anti-human trafficking work, as well as other pro bono technology-enabled causes such as sophisticated disaster relief in Haiti, Philippines, and elsewhere with the Clinton Global Initiative. I’ve also been inspired by the philanthropy work at Salesforce, Google, and other companies. While it can be overwhelming to realize how many problems there are to solve in the world, it’s always inspiring to see so many talented people willing to spend their time and energy in hopes of making a difference. We are tremendously appreciative of the work our hackathon participants did in hopes of potentially rescuing even just one child from exploitation; we believe the work that was done will save many. We urge any technologists who might be reading this – and the leaders in our community – to think about what you are working on, and how that is impacting those around you. There are few other communities who have ever had similar potential to create widespread and scalable progress, or to positively impact so many lives. We might remember an important quote from our civilization’s past: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” We sit at a very unique place in history, and I hope that our peers in Silicon Valley will continue to remind and inspire each other about the role we can play in the world. |
11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Anna Escher | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | It’s been an exciting week for us here at TechCrunch with the Hackathon, Disrupt SF and Apple’s product launch all taking place within a few days. Here are 11 of our best stories from the past week (9/6-9/12). 1. Apple had a number of new product releases this week. We , the company’s highly anticipated first foray into the world of wearable tech. We were blown away by the , and gave you a . Apple , and it will be interesting to see how the . 2. Darrell Etherington and Matthew Panzarino attended the Apple release event in Cupertino on Tuesday, and brought you on our live blog as the . We gave you a hands on, in depth . Matthew Panzarino poses the question of what will happen to existing iPhone models, now that the new models have been released. Read his piece called 3. . As many expected, it featured NFC and Touch ID. and some insight on what this could mean for the future of how we make purchases. 4. We learned more about the convergence of the sports and tech when industry leaders Dan Gilbert and Mark Cuban took the stage at Disrupt SF. . Later on, . Both NBA team owners had . 5. , discussing the future of Silicon Valley. He even tweeted for the first time! In a backstage interview, Thiel . 6. in which he discusses Aaron Levie and Mark Benioff’s perspectives about drones and wearables and their place in practical consumer use. Miller suggests that despite practical and regulatory issues, the potential for certain industries to use drones is growing – citing the views of our Disrupt panelists. 7. We announced the grand prize winner of the Disrupt SF 2014 Hackathon. , a hardware hack that helps you manage your water consumption by monitoring your shower’s flow rate. Accompanying the hardware hack is a mobile app that lets you compete against your friends as to who can take the shortest shower. , the first service layer on the shared economy that manages your routine across multiple on-demand and local services (like Handybook, Instacart, and the local dry cleaner). Members build a subscription to make their routine automatic, letting Alfred coordinate services in their home. 8. . The company authorized 6.4 million Series E shares, according to the document, at a per-share price of $15.46. The new share price values Square at $6 billion, up from its recent $5 billion valuation that was set during a secondary offering of its shares earlier this year. 9. After more than a year of legal troubles, . Jordan Crook gives you the details. 10. . 11. , a gadget that launched at this years’ Disrupt SF. The product will cook almost any food perfectly based on weight, composition, and desired done-ness and can be controlled via your mobile device. On stage at Disrupt, . Other big stories that were published this week include , , an explanation of , and the . For a full list of speakers at Disrupt SF 2014, . We also put together a . |
The #Gamergate Answer | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 9 | 14 | It’s not about women. This is the most consistent answer that supporters give me in response to my article last week ( ) asking what gamergate is actually about. Much of what I receive back is angry, sure, about how wrong I am, how much TechCrunch is clearly in league with oppressors, and various insults to my professionalism as a journalist despite not being one. But always, consistently, the women point. “Ok fine, FINE,” I think. “They say it’s not about women. Let’s see.” And yet as more of the movement’s research and uncovering activities continue, they focus on women. Fresh targets like Kris Ligman and Adrienne Shaw replace Zoe Quinn. In discussing it on Facebook with several industry friends who’ve taken a stance, there is a clear distinction between how the women are being treated versus the men. Some women repost mind-boggling tweets, links, images and so on for us all to stare at agog. Us men? We just get told we’re wrong a lot, and probably corrupt. The second most consistent answer is that gamergate is about journalistic integrity. explains that it’s about collusion, about games not being judged fairly on their mechanical and structural merits, and about being suppressed because they don’t match reviewer politics. It’s a call for a journalistic style. It’s to say that games reviews (and by extension, games) shouldn’t be about content or tone. They should be about whether the shotgun physics feel right and how many modes there are. Games should be reviewed like cars or smartphones, all about what they do rather than what they are. The key terms here are mechanics and structure. They’re an advocacy, what gamergaters want. That is to say they want games to go back to being products rather than aspiring to be artworks. That they want games to only be those things. That is gamergate’s answer. The tension between games-as-culture and games-as-product has existed forever, between sexiness and worthiness. For example all through the years of social and mobile, casual and many other kinds of game there’s been a simmering resentment from those who considered themselves “real gamers”. They look at such games and think they’re a product of press hype, not merited and therefore not deserving of success. This is why the press is gamergate’s most direct target, but really it’s about why “worthy” games don’t get their “just reward”. Why this is so is hard to answer. I could theorize that it has something to do with roots in outsider culture maybe (certainly more than once I’ve heard the phrase “cool kids table” in this whole argument). It may have something to do with a kind of inverse snobbery about the games scene versus other media. Whatever the source it’s long been a thing, particularly as some (and it’s only some) journalists started to follow the music-industry style New Games Journalism. To some that always felt imposed. Regardless, it’s there. But many TechCrunch readers might be wondering so what? What does any of this war among the gamers have to do with how games monetize in Asia? What does it have to do with how well has sold and Activision’s future in mega-AAA gaming? What tangential relationship does it have with the Apple Watch and what gaming applications it might enable? What does it have to do with the structure of mobile gaming and its one-hit-wonder problem? Does gamergate relate to that big screen iPhone? And the answer is both nothing and everything. In terms of platforms and money, who invests in who and who’s making how many ludicrous millions per day from a mobile game, gamergate is a burp from a corner of the Internet that’s slowly being disrupted and not liking it. But it’s also about how games are changing, or at least trying to change. It’s about what products you might be making in the future. In many venues games are trying to deepen along all lines, not just mechanics or economics, and it’s important. On many newer platforms we’ve seen a rush to novelty and pure fun of course, but as those platforms grow more established content starts to become more important. Tone, issues, character representation and so on all factor into audience building. They matter independent of gameplay. Games become cultural phenomena, not just business models. But what happens if the culture is not there? What happens if the enthusiast community becomes so culturally polarized that it essentially becomes anti-content-innovation? What happens if it demands that games only be escapist fantasies? As I see it that’s what the fight over gamergate is really about. Whether games are more, or less. Gamergate may want mechanical purity free of the sullying of media, but personally I feel that that is the wrong answer. Any answer that starts or ends with demands for games only to be looked at as products is a demand for a smaller rather than a larger universe. It’s a demand to be pleased at the expense of everyone else who might like to play a game but not engaged with the Gamer nation. It’s a demand that flies in the face of where all the rest of our culture is going and will continue to go. Their answer is reversion, but it can’t work. For game makers the question is whether to buy into that Little Gaming view, or whether to reject it. If gamers are determined to become a smaller and ideological tribe than they already are, at some point the economics of buying them simply won’t make sense. Indeed they may already not. The medium already started to move and its media began to notice. Asking it to change back is no answer at all. |
The Music Industry Is About To Change, And Apple And U2 Are Just The Beginning | Philip Inghelbrecht | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | Of all industry roller coasters, the music industry must be the wildest. The last 30 years reshaped the business in a way we never could have imagined. Music as a product changed dramatically (e.g. from LPs to MP3s) and the ups and downs in worldwide sales would make the most hardened theme park visitor queasy. Nonetheless, we have yet to experience the biggest switchback on this rollercoaster ride. The clues for what’s around the next turn lie in a sister industry — movies. Let’s start by taking a look at the music industry. According to the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) revenue peaked at $38bn worldwide in 1999, collapsed down to $16 billion (2011), edged up somewhat the year after, only to fall back down again to $15 billion last year (2013). The transition from analogue to digital played an important role in all of this: it made music piracy easy for the casual music fan. Piracy is real and doesn’t need further explanation. The industry, however, makes it the scapegoat, conveniently forgetting some other (often self-inflicted) wounds. For starters, the $38 billion peak was artificial, and not a reflection of “steady or ongoing” music purchases. In the run-up to 1999, a lot of people replaced their LPs with CDs, often buying the same album twice. What goes up (higher) must come down (faster/further). Secondly, packaging changed. We used to buy albums, or a bundle of songs. That means that the casual fan typically ended up paying 3x to 4x more to get the few songs they really wanted. Today, we can buy tracks piecemeal, spending minimal dollars. And thirdly, record labels (still) get it wrong on pricing. Recording executives have the tendency to target diehard fans with steep prices; they misjudge the pricing elasticity of music (as David Pakman explained in a ). It’s not inconceivable that Spotify would land 5x more paying subscribers if the price-point were $3/mo (currently set at $10/mo). A lower price point beats the inconvenience of piracy, makes it more appealing to casual fans, and potentially opens up developing countries. I’m probably missing a few causes — and some that I mentioned could be argued. That’s not the point here. The fact is that the music industry has been suffering for 15 years, and remains fragile as it is today. Meanwhile, the movie market blossomed from $80bn to $88bn in 2013 (source: PWC). The industry is projecting this figure to reach $100bn in the next few years to come, with growth across countries worldwide. What’s going on? Movies have gone (mostly) digital, too. And piracy is no less of an option through services like XBMC (Xbox Media Center), Popcorn Time and the plethora of Torrent services. The key difference lies in what’s called “windowing”, i.e. the creation of exclusivities (for the exact same movie or TV show) around format, time, geography, etc., with each sold to the highest paying customer. For example, when a movie is first released, it’s typically only available in theaters. Avid movie buffs will pay $10-$15, just to see it once. After that it becomes available on DVD (again $10, this time to own and view multiple times), then Video-On-Demand (think $4 to view over 48-hours), then pay-TV (e.g. HBO at $10/mo, with limited scheduling) and streaming (e.g. Neftlix at $8/mo, easy scheduling), eventually ending up for free (e.g. TNT, assuming you forget about the ads). I skipped and rounded a few release windows here, but it gives you the gist. The same piece of content is sold over and over again, each time maximizing the end-user’s willingness to pay. Windows of exclusivity can last for decades and be cut across anything that allows for differentiation: format, geography, quality, etc. Movie and TV content owners are masters at this game. In many ways, it’s a superior form of packaging and pricing, the very two things the music industry fumbled on. But this is about to change, because on-demand music subscription services (such as Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, etc.) will unlock the opportunity for windowing in music. Today, when a music track or album is released, it’s pretty much available anywhere, at the same time. There have been the occasional exceptions — for the longest time, Kid Rock would not sell on iTunes; instead he (smartly) sold bundled CDs only. In general, however, record labels fail to charge a little (or a lot) more for the artists that fans really care about. Windowing is where they will start taking a page out of the movie/TV book. Windowing in music has become easy through the inherent streaming nature of subscription services. This means that on-demand services can buy (temporary) exclusive access to a certain artists, tracks or albums. For example, Beyonce’s next album might be available on Spotify exclusively for the first month (Spotify would pay millions of dollars for this exclusivity). The same first-month exclusivity right can be further sliced and diced by market (for instance, Spotify in the US, Rdio in Europe and Google Play everywhere else), by format (if Deezer has the worldwide exclusive on uncompressed tracks), and so on. As content gets “older,” it becomes more widely available, possibly at a lower cost or completely free. Continuing with the same example, after the first month, Beyonce’s album could be streamed pretty much anywhere for paying subscribers (only); free on-demand users, however, may have to wait another year or so before they get to stream it, too. In a world where music is distributed through release windows, casual music fans will find all the music they want in a single on-demand service. They are happy to wait until the music becomes available. Avid music fans, however, may find themselves paying for two (or more) on-demand providers. For example, while Beyonce might be available on Spotify, Jay-Z could only available on Beats. They have no choice but to pay for Spotify and Beats in order to get immediate access to both. Ironically enough, windowing in music also plays in the hands of the subscription services, especially as it comes to acquiring customers. For one, they can’t compete on price because labels won’t let them (if you ever want to read a hysterical, albeit exaggerated, story on this, then read this ). Second, competing around (unique) technical features is pretty short-lived; they are either insufficiently differentiating to the consumer and/or get copied in your competitor’s next release. Exclusive access to music, however, is the most compelling consumer argument to onboarding a new subscriber. Beats (or Apple) is rumored to have paid a whopping $100 million to be the exclusive first-month distributor of U2’s new Songs of Innocence. It’s Apple’s marketing cost for drumming up more Beats subscribers (or stealing them away from Spotify). Jimmy Iovine, a top recording executive who recently joined the Apple ranks, taught them well. So windowing seems to be the answer to many. Paying for multiple streaming services at the same time is no more absurd than people paying for both Netflix and HBO (and a few VODs every month, on top of that). It re-establishes something that the Silicon Valley has always found hard to acknowledge: content is king. That’s great news for the recording industry, potentially good news for the streaming services (i.e. multiple can survive and thrive at the same time), but questionable for the avid music fan. Their number one hobby is possibly getting a whole lot more expensive. However, since people are willing to part from $100+ to attend a concert, it’s probably the least of all issues. The user experience, however, is more problematic. I simply can’t see myself switching around multiple apps and services to access my entire catalogue or music library. In the same way that Sonos let’s me “mix” multiple music services in a unified playlist, I expect new companies to address this particular issue. Bop.fm is one of those seemingly on the right track. The only unknown in this for me are the artists themselves. Under the system of windowing, it’s most likely that only the bigger bands will get to partake, and even then, it’s not clear if record labels will share the surplus dollars. Let’s hope for the people who create all these beautiful sounds it’s less gloom and more bloom or boom. |
Twitter’s Huge Mistake | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 9 | 13 | The worst tech news I read last week was: “ .” The horrified firestorm of condemnation that erupted in response was the first time I’ve ever seen anything like unanimity on my Twitter feed. Fortunately, it seems it’s . (At least not any time soon.) But for all the entirely justified of that , , no-good, very bad idea– Algorithms will inevitably optimize for engagement, which always degrades other functions of the network. So will a filtered Twitter feed. — zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) When Twitter starts using an algorithm and no longer displays tweets in real time, in order, IT WILL CEASE TO BE RELEVANT FOR USE IN NEWS. — Nina L. Diamond (@ninatypewriter) — there is one place where Twitter really could use some algorithmic cavalry to ride to the rescue. I mean the much-maligned Discover tab, the ugly-duckling stepson of the Twitter interface, which, so far as I can tell, no serious Twitter user has ever navigated to except by mistake. I mean, I could be wrong, only Twitter knows for sure; maybe half of its audience is glued to Discover like it invented sliced bread and emoji, and they can’t wait to see what comes next; but I kind of doubt it. To date Discover has seemed a mismanaged mistake. I don’t mean to be harsh. I’m a huge fan of Twitter. Hell, I wrote last year. But over the last year it seems like its managers keep casting envious looks down the Valley towards Facebook’s jaw-dropping user-engagement numbers and mobile-ad revenue, like gazing up with hero-worship at the beach bully kicking sand in their face. But the more Twitter tries to be like Facebook, the less relevant they become, and the more they risk trading short-term gain for long-term irrelevance. Nobody needs Facebook Two. https://twitter.com/seriouspony/status/380199781588418560 I’m prepared to believe that Twitter do something interesting with algorithmic filtering and prioritization, as long as they don’t use them to butcher our primary feeds. But that’s what Discover is meant to be for, and it’s a total mess. I fat-finger my way there from time to time, and I have never found a single item of interest there. There’s no Discover tab on Facebook. What would it even do? Twitter’s feels like a weird waste of real estate, an unwanted pet, a player to be named later… …which is exactly what makes it interesting. It’s a forgotten zone, a blank area on a map, an option overlooked by literally hundreds of millions of people a day. Surely there’s some potential to do something innovative there. Something possibly awesome. Something–whisper it– what Facebook does. (Yes, yes, it was originally Facebook who copied Twitter’s feed, lo these many years ago. That was then, this is now, let us not dwell on the barren glories of the past.) Suppose they actually did crack it; suppose they found a way to surface, say, a Best Of of tweets you missed from the feeds you follow, and compelling highlights from those you don’t but should. I believe the assembled Twitter masses would be more accepting of a very occasional entry in their main feed highlighting something of particular interest in Discover, which would shuttle them over there if tapped, than with hijacking and filtering their main feed. I think they might even welcome the chance to rediscover Discover–if there was anything worthwhile there. Discover could be to Twitter what Twitter is to Facebook: weird; quirky; an acquired taste; kind of hard to get right, at first; but absolutely addictive when you do. Right now it’s little more than a waste of space. But when you measure your audience in the hundreds of millions, any such worm has the potential to transform into an extremely valuable butterfly– –as long as you give your users what they want, not what you want them to want. |
Yo Still Kicking With More Than 100M Yos Sent, Roughly 15 Per Second | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 9 | 14 | The end is nigh for the tech industry? Yo? The funding round that launched about the merits or idiocy of an app that lets you send just a single word over and over via push notification is still supporting a living, breathing and perhaps even, thriving, startup. “It’s amazing if I compare it to other companies,” said , Yo’s co-founder. “Every second, there are 14 or 15 Yos sent. That’s three months after all the big hype.” While that rate is down from a peak over the summer when as many as 100 were sent per second, it doesn’t feel like a . Hogeg said the app has about 1.5 million monthly active users, which appears to be slightly up from a month or so ago. Hogeg, who also co-founded a photo-sharing app Mobli, has proven to be extremely talented at going around traditional Silicon Valley venture capital funding sources and for financing. Hogeg continued to defend the concept behind the app, which was designed when he originally wanted a way to easily “Sometimes it’s enough to look at someone and know exactly what they mean,” he said. “Yo is also a word that means nothing. The context brings the meaning. Because ‘Yo’ means nothing, it could mean anything. It’s stupid but it’s beautiful at the same time.” He was also very excited about the possibilities of Yo on Apple’s new watch. “That could be a whole a new way to communicate,” he said. “That’s Yo. We created it.” |
TrustedCompany.com, An E-Commerce Review Site For Emerging Markets, Raises $1M Series A | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 9 | 14 | , a review platform for e-commerce businesses in emerging markets like Southeast Asia and India, announced today that it has raised a Series A round of $1 million led by Tengelmann Ventures, with participation from 500 Startups and returning investor Asia Venture Group. The company, which launched in November 2013 and is based in Malaysia and Hong Kong, claims to be the first review platform for e-commerce in emerging markets. In the first half of 2014, TrustedCompany.com has grown to 20 employees, and plans to use its Series A financing to continue expanding in Southeast Asia, and enter Africa and Brazil. Since launching, the company says that it has seen month-over-month usage growth of more than 40 percent and now has over 500,00 company profiles on the site that consumers can contribute reviews to. The site’s indirect competitors include forums and platforms such as Mouthshut, Complaintboard, and Facebook groups, says TrustedCompany.com’s co-founder and managing director Frederik Krass. TrustedCompany.com wants to differentiate by localizing for each market that it enters. “The current state of emerging e-commerce holds tremendous opportunities for solutions that tackle scam, fraud, and other types of abuse, and we strongly believe that creating trust through third-party verified reviews do help overcome these issues,” Krass told TechCrunch. “On the other hand, we believe that localizing our service for each market is a must.” He added that while other online forums often serve as a repository for complaints, TrustedCompany.com wants to provide a more thorough picture of a company’s customer service by serving as an open platform so that “online businesses can invite all their users, so both satisfied and dissatisfied customers write about their experiences, leaving an authentic picture.” TrustedCompany.com’s clients include Lenskart in India, Malaysia’s iMoney.my, 8share, and myiMart, and Pricearea in Indonesia, and Printi and HTS Latarias in Brazil. One noteworthy aspect of TrustedCompany.com’s Series A is that lead investor Tengelmann Ventures is also a major investor in several businesses launched by Rocket Internet, the . Rocket Internet’s properties include Global Fashion Group, which consolidates five fashion brands (Dafiti, Jabong, Lamoda, Namshi, and Zalora) that it operates in some of the same markets as TrustedCompany.com, including Latin America, India, and Southeast Asia. Krass said that TrustedCompany.com plans to handle any potential conflicts of interest by being a third-party platform with “openness and transparency” that anyone can contribute to. “In our view, an open approach is the only way you can win consumers’ trust in the long run, as it allows everyone to get a good picture of the reality for themselves. This is our vision and strongest goal and at the same time prevents any conflict of interest for us, not only with regards to Tengelmann and Rocket Internet, but also to any online company that makes use of our product.” |
Leaked Clips Show Windows 9 In Action | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 14 | Around two weeks out from the of the technical preview of Windows 9, videos of the upcoming operating system have hit the Internet. German has released a mess of screenshots and videos of the upcoming code over the past few days, to our benefit. A number of clips are up for watching, detailing how Windows 9 will handle multiple desktops, the return of the Start Menu, and more. Presuming that you have missed at least one, I’ve included each in this post. The videos are worth considering as they demonstrate what Microsoft views as a proper remediation — and fusion — of its tablet-facing efforts included in Windows 8, and support of desktop features that echo the popular Windows 7. Microsoft declined to comment on the video showing off the new Start Menu. I haven’t seen pushback from the external media that the clips are fake. Of course, we can’t know for sure, but it seems that Windows 9 — what is called Threshold inside of Microsoft — is dripping into the public eye as its formal release is prepped for the general market. Given that the below videos are of a pre-preview build, keep in mind that much could still change. The user interface elements could be updated, functionality stripped, or added, and so forth. Still, here’s where we are: |
A Random Walk Down Hardware Alley | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 14 | Last week at TC Disrupt I took to the aisles of Hardware Alley armed with a microphone and a full glass of cold brew, highly potent Jittery Joe’s coffee. The result is a series of pratfalls, horrible jokes, and lots and lots of interviews. I welcome you to watch as I make an absolute fool of my self while some amazing entrepreneurs show off their very cool things. |
Up Close With The Tissot T-Touch Solar Expert, The Perennial Hiking Watch For Geeks | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 14 | For years the line has been Switzerland’s unique answer to the quartz hiking watch. While other manufacturers offered analog quartz pieces, Tissot has been the only company that has tried to take on the altimeter-barometer-thermometer uber watches made by Casio, Seiko and Citizen. And they’ve done a great job so far. The latest model is the Tissot T-Touch Solar Expert. It is a direct successor to the T-Touch expert except that it has a rechargeable battery and a solar face that creates a trickle of electricity that will keep the watch running without a change for years. As the name suggests, the T-Touch has a touch sensitive face that allows you to activate various features by tapping near the labels around the bezel. This model has a compass, timer, altimeter, and barometer which includes a fairly accurate external thermometer. When you tap the function both hands immediately swing into action at a surprising speed. The coolest feature is undoubtedly the compass which whirrs into place and then begins showing your orientation.
The T-Touch has long been a great trekking watch but, at $1,150 for the model with a rubber band and $1,250 for the metal band, it’s a pricey proposition. The most expensive Casio Pro Trek, for example, costs for similar features and makers like and Citizen have been building excellent pieces with similar pieces – including GPS time setting – for far below $1,000.
As a watch snob, however, I still prefer the T-Touch’s understated face and unique interface. Tapping the screen activates the little hands quickly and accurately and the watch is easy to set because the hands move in minute increments for the first 60 minutes and then advances one hour per second for setting international time zones. It’s a lot of fun. The solar feature is admittedly nice but Tissot doesn’t offer much of a discount on the non-solar versions. Sadly, the vagaries of Swiss pricing means that even the non-solar version of the watch costs $1,200, which means your only recourse in getting this cheaper is to look for a used model online. At 45mm this new model is also a bit bigger than the previous 43mm watches and may not be right for smaller wrists (although my wife wears my previous gen model). I also miss the orange strap in this series, a feature that . These are small things but overall I’m impressed by the size, the light weight, and the durability of this line. If you’re planning on doing some real hiking you’ll probably want to get something a bit more complex than this watch and it is decidedly not a good running watch. Think of it as a Casio that you can wear with a suit. Tissot hasn’t advanced the state of the art with this watch but as a simple alti-baro-compass watch this is well worth the investment, especially if you’re directionally challenged and enjoy seeing the spinning hands make their merry way across the watch’s honeycombed solar face. [gallery ids="1057827,1057826,1057825,1057824"] |
A Tale Of Two Apps | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 14 | adopt similar ideas and designs as part of some peculiar cultural zeitgeist. But things get murkier when ideas become shared and adopted by long-time friends riffing on similar concepts. That appears to be what happened to Kevin Rose and Danny Trinh, who built separate photo-sharing apps that ended up looking eerily similar. On September 4, former Digg and Path designer Trinh called , which featured a three-tiled grid of small photos that disappeared after 24 hours. A week later, serial entrepreneur and investor Rose launched the first app in what he believed would be a series of projects from his new company North. Called , its defining characteristic was a that are broadcast to one’s followers. It didn’t take long for some to notice the similarities. And as one would guess, the fact that those apps shared some common elements was not entirely a coincidence. Rose and Trinh have known each other for years, after all. After being a huge fan of Digg during high school, Trinh moved to San Francisco and joined Rose’s startup as an intern at the age of 17. And when Trinh decided to found his own company, Rose became not just a mentor, but also an investor and adviser. According to multiple people familiar with the situation, it was Rose’s advice that led Trinh to integrate the grid interface into Cap. And while Rose didn’t know it at the time, the feature was added before he embarked on building it into his own app Tiiny. We’ve spoken with both Rose and Trinh about the evolution of their apps, as well as a few other people familiar with their development. None of those people wanted to be directly quoted for this article, but in talking with them we’ve been able to piece together how the two apps came to be, and also how they came to be so similar. After six years spent working with people like Rose at Digg and Dave Morin at Path, last fall Trinh decided to start a company of his own. He was interested in building a location-sharing app called Free that would make it easier for people to alert friends when they were open to hang out. He from a group of investors that included Rose and set out to work on the first version of his app. Trinh and his co-founders traveled to Austin to work on the app without the distractions of San Francisco, and after a few months they had an initial prototype built. Unfortunately, feedback from the small number of users who saw it in March showed that the app needed a lot of work. At the same time, there were some elements from that build which got people excited, Rose included. One of those features was a small, always-on thumbnail of what appeared in the front-facing camera, along with a mechanism that enabled users to hold the capture button down to create a short looping video. Taking that kernel of an idea, Trinh set Free aside for a bit and began building what would later become Cap. In early July, Rose saw a version of the new photo- and video-sharing app and advised Trinh to work on it instead of Free. He suggested adding a follower model to the app so users could broadcast their images and looping videos out to friends, an idea Trinh later adopted. About a week after that, Rose and Trinh were at a bar with several other friends and riffing on ideas about how to improve the product. Rose suggested the addition of a grid display of Cap’s images and looping videos, which Trinh incorporated into Cap. It would also be an element that Rose would incorporate into his first project for North. In mid-August, Rose announced he was to focus on his own startup, North. While it wasn’t until then that he made the move official, Rose had been thinking about what he wanted to build for months beforehand. The concept behind North was to rapidly prototype and build a series of projects with help from friends and people he knew in the industry. They would release an app, see if it stuck, and then move onto the next project. Rose had originally called Tiny for his first project, but decided to build a new type of photo-sharing app instead. The idea behind it came from several months earlier, and being able to skim through multiple images quickly. Early mockups of Tiiny icons, courtesy of It had the same grid design element he had suggested for Cap, but Trinh wasn’t the only one to get that advice. Rose had also suggested the feature to other founders he worked with, including Cluster founder Brendan Mulligan. At the time Rose started working on Tiiny, however, he hadn’t seen anyone successfully implement it, and so decided to build it himself. Tiiny would also come to incorporate the “hold to create a silent looping video” mechanism that had been a part of the earliest version of Free, and the core piece Trinh had broken out from that app to build Cap. Soon after announcing his departure from Google Ventures, Rose told Trinh he was working on a photo-sharing app. Rose said he realized the two would have some overlap, and told Trinh he didn’t want him to think he was looking at his ideas. Trinh said not to worry, that he hadn’t hit the mark yet with Cap or Free so there wasn’t much to be protective of. That said, Rose didn’t know Trinh had implemented the grid element he was working on with Tiiny until after he and North co-founder Marc Hemeon had finished their design sprint. And Trinh didn’t realize Tiiny would have a video-capture feature that was similar to what he had built into Cap and Free. Neither had known just how much overlap there would be between the apps. Cap and Tiiny were like two very similar-looking ships passing in the night. At that point, Rose and Trinh had figured out they were building apps with some very similar design elements. Both Cap and Tiiny contained the same “hold to record video” gesture that was in the earliest version of Free, and each had a similar grid display of small images that disappeared after 24 hours. They also contained the same asymmetrical, Twitter-like model for broadcasting media out to followers. But that is where the apps diverge. Tiiny’s preview screen for images and videos users send is, well, tiny — while Cap displays a full-size preview of what it will capture. While Tiiny keeps all images and videos in the grid, media on Cap can be tapped into to see more details. Cap enables users overlay filters and emoji over its images, while Tiiny focuses specifically on the content users capture with their camera. Fundamentally, the two apps also differ on the importance of how like counts are taken into account for media shared. Rose’s Tiiny has a sort of leaderboard showing the most popular images and videos shared at any given time. For Trinh, however, it was important to keep like counts private. He wanted individual users to know when their followers had liked a “Cap,” but didn’t want that number to be shared. That was important because he didn’t want the app to devolve into the same type of “ ” that had taken over apps like Instagram or Path. Despite those differences, it was difficult not to look at both apps at a glance and see common elements that defined them. As early builds of Cap and Tiiny began to be distributed to beta users, mutual friends of Rose and Trinh noted the similarities between the two. After some early beta users of Tiiny asked about it, Rose sent a message to all acknowledging the similarities. He wrote, “Danny and I have been brainstorming ideas for months, we’re trying more or less two different takes on a similar idea. No drama, just ideas in the same playground. I hope you’ll try them both. :)” That was mostly true, but behind the scenes there was some discussion between the two about how to move forward. Neither wanted to be seen as having copied the other’s idea, but both were planning to move on with launch. In some ways that commitment was due more to future product plans than to the apps each were currently working on. It’s North’s model to build and launch a new product each quarter, so Rose wasn’t betting the farm on this particular app. And while Trinh wanted to create a version of Cap that was as complete as possible, he had also been reworking his original idea for Free. That’s one of the reasons Trinh chose to quietly release Cap in beta by rather than launching with the press. Trinh’s goal, like the goal of some other startups that soft launch there, was mostly to get more initial users signed up and work out the kinks before releasing it more broadly through the Apple App Store. That day, Rose even , along with another of his Google Ventures investments. Rose, by contrast, launched Tiiny with a and . His goal was clearly to try to get as many users signed up as possible for Tiiny’s first version and to iterate on additional features over time. At the end of the day, no one truly owns the grid design element. After all, both Rose and Trinh ultimately ended up borrowing it from Instagram and it’s been used in other apps, . The same might be said for the “hold to record video” feature, which has been featured in apps like SnapChat. Or, really, the ephemeral nature of both Cap and Tiiny’s images, which disappear after 24 hours. Each element has its roots in previously released apps. Everything is derivative, nothing is truly original. It’s in how those elements are pieced together that makes an application unique, however, and it’s the design and user experience that largely define how popular apps may turn out. On that front, it’s too early to tell how each will fare, although Rose’s broader release certainly has helped gain some early popularity. Both Rose and Trinh have plans for other products beyond what each have introduced thus far, so neither is counting on this take on photo-sharing as their so-called killer app. But in the meantime, it will be interesting to see how users respond to each take on sharing and viewing a grid of tiny, ephemeral photos and videos. After all, you never know what design tweak or UI flow will end up being the difference between an Instagram and a PicPlz. After publishing this post, some people have suggested the larger issue is not that the apps ended up being so similar, but that Kevin Rose has built a product which competes against a company he invested in as a VC at Google Ventures. Cap wasn’t Trinh’s focus at the time Rose invested, but as he knew that it was in the works when he began working on Tiiny, it could represent a possible conflict of interest for Rose and for Google Ventures itself. As Cap shareholders, that conflict would violate a fiduciary responsibility, which is the strictest standard in U.S. law. |
Putting Smartphone Zombies In Their Place | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 9 | 14 | City planners are charged with designing cities for residents, from developing spaces for popular activities to balancing the needs of different constituencies. For planners in Chongqing, China, one of those constituencies are people absorbed in their smartphones, who have come into conflict with another group, often called human beings. So the city has done the obvious thing when two groups clash: you build special sidewalks to separate them from each other. Chongqing City has set up China’s 1st “exclusive sidewalk for mobile phone users ” to avoid possible crashes on Fri — People’s Daily,China (@PDChina) Whether funny or sad, it’s certainly a statement on where we are as a society. It’s thankfully the first of its kind, but I doubt it is the the last time we will see this urban “innovation.” Today, the smartphone-addict sidewalk is merely a space demarcated with white spray paint for bumbling humans who are so busy, they can’t find the time to look up and see where they are going. But if we know anything about innovation, it is that it never stops at the spray-paint level of development, the urban-equivalent MVP if you will. Future iterations of this product will no doubt take the technology of its users into account and simply send notifications to let them know when they have moved too far outside the center of the sidewalk. Much later, once all of the residents of Chongqing have purchased their gold Apple Watch Editions, they can get active haptic feedback as they walk down the sidewalk, much like the backup camera on cars gives beeps when you are about to run over someone. It’s the disruptive technology that prevents disruptions. I have never really understood the obsession with using a smartphone every single second of every single day. I get reading news a few times a day, and maybe playing Candy Crush for a few minutes. But what does it say when we can’t take a collective break for ten minutes while walking down the street? That we are in fact so attached to our virtual worlds, the real world has to provide a special space so that we don’t slam into one another? Here is perhaps the best evidence for the existence of a psychological disease I call Desiring Notifications Syndrome (DNS, for short). Our collective beeps, buzzes, and screen pops have reached such a cacophonous crescendo that we no longer can simply wait a few minutes in solitude without feeling serious withdrawal symptoms. I recently learned that people actually allow their games to send them push notifications. Their games! When you are being distracted from your distractions, there has to be a broader societal problem at work. Seriously, we can’t just allow these notifications to appear in our pocket and get them 15 minutes later. What would we do if something happens, like a new level has been released for our favorite game? We need to make sure that we are getting such valuable data ASAP, and we are willing to wear whatever devices are required, Glass or Watch as the case may be, to make that a reality. I don’t have much faith in the argument that the internet is making us dumber and more shallow, but I do think that we are certainly to be more shallow. Fundamentally, there is nothing in the design of our devices that prevents us from removing these continuous distractions. On iPhone, it took me all of five minutes in Notifications Center to remove most of the egregious apps, and I imagine Android users would find it equally easy. Since it is so easy to change, the only remaining explanation we have left is that people actually want these notifications. The solitude that comes from a quiet and distraction-free phone is apparently almost frightening to many people. Even if we have no friends and relationships to speak of, at least the notifications algorithm remembers that we’re there and can assuage our loneliness. But loneliness is only one facet of today’s smartphone user. You can be lonely at home with your device, which is why a smartphone sidewalk seems strange until you realize that what people actually fear is the appearance of loneliness. When you really think about what these sidewalks are, its much more about seeming important and above the crowd than it is about efficient movement of pedestrians. Much like movie stars being guided down the red carpet, we don’t have to pay attention to where we are walking on our special sidewalk. Our notifications lather us in attention, and for a little while, we can feel that the whole world thinks that we are much more important than we actually are. I am not a big proponent of the tech stagnation hypothesis heralded by Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel, which states that we haven’t made many gains in technology over the past few decades. But these days one has to start to wonder when we see such “innovation” as distraction sidewalks. I’m sure we’ll hear even more of this as , Thiel’s distillation of his Stanford computer science lectures, is published this week. I know I am harping on this sidewalk thing a lot (one might say I am as obsessed with smartphone sidewalks as much as others are obsessed with their phones!) But the part that angers me the most is that we are reaching the point where this technology-driven lifestyle is now forming the basis of our public policy. City planners are not just supposed to make a city more efficient, but also to make it more livable as well. That means creating landscapes that allow for — dare I say it — engagement between people. The width of sidewalks is a perfect example of this. Narrower sidewalks force people to get closer to one another, slowing people down and increasing opportunities for interaction. Wider sidewalks provide each of us with a more private space, with less opportunity to meet our neighbors and fellow city dwellers. Dedicated bike lanes are sensible, since bikers aren’t likely to strike up a conversation while riding anyway. But now we are providing people with essentially a distraction-free environment for distractions, a place where they aren’t interrupted while doing their important app business. That may make the online world more livable, but it certainly won’t have the same effect for our local community. We are all more connected, and yet feel more lonely and empty inside. It’s a strange collective-action problem, but solving it starts by reaching out to your friends in real life, and building actual social bonds. It starts by enjoying public spaces and being more social. And it starts by walking down the sidewalk and giving your brain a break from all the notifications it is constantly bombarded with. Human agency is a wonderful thing. We have more power today to shape our world than at any time in the past. We can choose to live lives that are more engaged, and use technology as a tool to build our friendships and seek out companionship. Or we can be distracted and notified every five minutes. The choice is now just a sidewalk away. |
Places Is A Sharing Platform That Puts Privacy First | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 9 | 14 | is a privacy-centric startup that’s building a secure Dropbox-style platform for file sharing and messaging — but one that has end-to-end, client-side encryption built in. It’s currently launched in early alpha and is inviting people to sign up for a forthcoming beta at . (The to Windows and Mac OS users.) Dropbox does not do encryption locally, so can’t offer end-to-end encryption, although it’s worth noting that it’s possible to add a third-party service to your Dropbox account to gain that extra layer of security. Still, most people aren’t going to bother taking the extra step since it requires effort to do so. Places, by contrast, begins from a secure base, with PGP end-to-end encryption, using RSA 2048 and AES 256. Another twist is it’s also seeking to disrupt the server-client architecture of existing sharing platforms by enabling users to host their own content. With Places, the user’s content can be stored and served from their own Mac, PC or Linux machine. Places does have centralized servers, too, to serve encrypted content when a user’s own machine is off or otherwise unreachable. But it does not hold the encryption keys so can’t access that content. The Places software also synchronizes content across Places’ desktop and mobile apps (currently it has a standalone iOS app). “The idea for us is that it’s not only an app. It’s a server that runs on your client side,” says co-founder Vigile Hoareau, demoing the software at TechCrunch Disrupt SF’s startup alley last week. “Today if you have important files to share and don’t use this is better than PGP if you have multiple people and multiple files.” Important files, or indeed , to reference a topical issue. Aka the nude celebrity photos stolen from Apple’s iCloud cloud storage facility and . “If you have to be naked you should be on Places. Because everything will be encrypted. If someone take the file on the cloud side this file will be encrypted. Nobody has the keys. Only the [users] have the keys,” adds Hoareau. He describes Places as a “share everything application” — noting that the team also has VoIP working in the lab, to be added as a future update. It will also be adding a Dropbox-style cloud system interaction in the near term, so users can interact directly with the file system. That feature is due “within weeks”. Existing features are file-sharing and an IM style messaging interface. The thread that will link every feature offered on Places is robust privacy. The philosophy underpinning the business is that web users should be able to share content with specific people without being forced to give strangers access to that content. “It’s not fair to say give me your content if you want to share,” says Hoareau. “The challenge is, as Snowden said, to ‘implement end-to-end encryption in a simple, cheap, effective way that is invisible to users’. This is Places. End to end encryption. Making it cheap and easy. “If you can send an email, you can use it. You just create your Place… you drag and drop people, you drag and drop content. That’s it. Everything’s so easy. Even if it wasn’t private it would be a good way to interact on projects.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz3FIWHYEiA&w=640&h=360] Hoareau argues that another structural shift is coming — akin to the shift from web 1.0 to web 2.0 — a shift that responds to the fact web users are now content producers yet aren’t in control of the very same content they produce. That’s the current wrong that Places seeks to right. “Intimacy is the concept that is missing today on the web, and it’s in the heart of everyone. It’s all about that. Taking control of the data,” he says. “If you want to share publicly Facebook is good for you but if you want to share your wedding picture, all the wedding pictures, all the Saturday night party pictures, it’s nothing you have to be ashamed of, you drank with your friends, so this is all good. But how to share that? You don’t today. If you’re not crazy you don’t, you just don’t. And we thought, ok what do we do?” “The whole industry has been organized technically and economically on the client-server paradigm. You are the client and you ask for something. But we thought all of the devices we have today are stronger than the beginning of the Internet… You can be the provider of your services,” he adds. As you’d expect, Places intends to open source its software to allow outside developers to sniff around the code to check they are living up to their privacy promises. Outsiders will also be invited to contribute code of their own to move the project along. “This is all about web 2.0. We[b users] are content providers. So now we understand we are the content provider but we don’t own the content we provide. So what will be the next move? … We are the next move. This is a disruption. Why? Because the user becomes the hardware provider, the software provider and the content provider,” he says. “It’s not ‘give me your content and I give you the service’. This is a big change.” Thus far the Places co-founders — who have backgrounds in networks, security, distributed systems, psychology, AI, data mining and text mining — have been bootstrapping Places. The startup was founded in the Réunion Island, a French territory in the middle of the Indian Ocean. “It’s a good place to think, not to do business,” adds Hoareau. “What we need today is support. We think we are on a good path… People can support the project on , , join us for the iPhone app and every week they will release a new version of the software… We really need this energy today.” It’s also seeking outside funding to keep building Places, and is planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo later this year. In terms of business model, there will obviously not be any adverts on Places since the whole point is to avoid invasive data-mining of personal information. Rather the startup’s monetization focus will be on offering Dropbox-style secure cloud storage, according to Hoareau. Places is part of a growing online decentralization movement fueled by last year’s revelations which pulled back the curtain on the extent of government dragnet online surveillance programs. Places was actually founded just prior to Snowdengate but the startup’s timing is excellent, coinciding with a growing sense of unease and unfairness at the current structural organization of Internet content. With government agencies revealed to be capturing the digital communications of everyone — not just specific signals intelligence targets — privacy has become an issue that affects every web user. Since Snowden’s big reveal momentum has gathered behind a swathe of privacy focused startups, from consumer focused hardware and software such as the , to others seeking to reconfigure the power structure of the existing server client model, like Places is. Other startups in this area include P2P Internet , and “personal cloud platform” . Expect more to follow. |
Ray Ozzie’s New Venture Talko Launches An App For Collaborative Voice Communications | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | After two-and-a-half years, former Microsoft chief architect Ray Ozzie and his team are finally ready to reveal what they’ve been working on. Called , their new mobile app is designed to change the way consumers and enterprises collaborate with each other through a mix of live and asynchronous voice communications. While there are any number of new messaging apps that have emerged to make it easier to share via text while sharing images and videos, Talko is taking the decidedly retro approach of bringing back voice communications. But in doing so, the app hopes to give users tools that will help them and their teams keep better track of what’s been discussed and decided, whether that happened during a live call or added to the discussion later. Talko, which has been , replaces your usual conference line with VOIP, cloud-based calls between team members. The app records the entire live conversation to make it accessible to those who can’t tune in while it’s going on. It also enables users to create bookmarks within the conversation and tag other users with action items. Perhaps most importantly, the conversation doesn’t end when a particular call is over. Any member of the team can start a new call or add voice-based follow ups to the conversation, and they will be shared asynchronously with the rest of the participants. By doing so, it makes certain that everyone is on the same page, whether they were able to call in or not. Users in a group can also add text and photos in line with the conversation, which get shared with all participants. All the data is stored on Talko’s servers and cached to the device in a smart way to ensure that the app isn’t overrun with audio recordings or media that a user isn’t going to access. Talko is aimed at the enterprise market, but it follows the trend toward consumerization of apps that people end up using for work. Like other user-centric enterprise apps, it’s targeting a bottom-up approach to user acquisition — that is, it’s hoping to get a few users hooked, who will invite their coworkers and team members to use the same group of features in an effort to get their whole organization hooked. Along those lines, the company is planning a business model where the Talko app will be free to use, but users will have to pay a monthly subscription fee to access any calls or data that was recorded a certain number of days earlier. It has yet to decide on how long data will be accessible before the company charges for it, or how much it will charge per month for the service. However, it’s likely that Talko’s premium set will cost less than $10 a month for access to any data older than a week or 10 days. Talko was founded by Ozzie, who is joined by some folks he worked with while at Microsoft and before that Groove Networks (which was bought by Microsoft in 2005). The other co-founders include Pope, who heads up product, and Eric Patey, who heads up engineering. The company has a total of ten employees. Funding was provided by Ozzie and other investors that include Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, and Kapor Capital. The company won’t disclose how much has been raised to date, but an SEC filing from late 2012 pegged its . |
ZEFR Has Acquired Social Advertising Startup Engodo | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | Video monetization platform could be looking to extend its advertising reach beyond YouTube with its acquisition of social advertising startup . Last week ZEFR entered into a purchase agreement with the Salt Lake City, Utah-based startup in what appears to be a cash-and-stock deal, according to an . A person with knowledge of the situation has confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch but wouldn’t provide details about terms of the deal. ZEFR as MovieClips, a site that was founded on the idea of licensing short video clips from movie studios and monetizing them online. As time went on, the company shifted its focus to and user-submitted content on behalf of content producers and brands. It bolstered that brand focus last year with the , which is designed to help advertisers identify videos of fans talking about their products and to engage with them. By doing so, advertisers are able to reach whole new audiences they didn’t have access to previously, simply by letting their fans speak for them. So far, though, that has all been done on YouTube. With the acquisition of Engodo, ZEFR could provide access to audiences on a wide range of other social platforms. Engodo markets itself as a “social influencer advertising platform” that connects brands, agencies, and media buyers with publishers who produce content for a wide range of different networks. That includes traditional blogs, as well as social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Vine and of course, YouTube. The company was founded in 2011 by Salt Lake City techies Trygve Jensen and Brock Luker to provide tools for publishers to more easily share on social networks, and for advertisers to connect with them. In 2013 they were joined by CTO , who had previously run a company called Corda Technologies that was . (Fun fact: Domo is the brainchild of Omniture founder Josh James, who also happens to be the brother of ZEFR co-founder Zach James.) By combining Engodo with its existing platform and sales team, ZEFR could offer media buyers a huge new network of influencers to create and promote native advertising across their channels. By doing so, ZEFR won’t be quite as reliant on YouTube as a platform for monetization, and it also opens things up for a whole new group of fast-growing markets. ZEFR has raised a total of $53 million since being founded, including a big, . Other investors include U.S. Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital and Richmond Park Partners. |
Lyft Acquires Shared Ride Startup Hitch To Bolster Its Lyft Line Service | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | Shared rides are becoming all the rage, with new transportation companies all offering their users a way to lower fares while splitting their commute with a stranger. One of the first services to focus on that capability was a startup called , which before Lyft Line, before UberPool and before Sidecar Shared Rides. The Hitch founders today will be joining one-time competitor Lyft in order to boost that company’s own shared ride offering. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Hitch will be shutting down and its founders will be working to bring some of what they had built into the Lyft Line product. This isn’t the first talent acquisition Lyft has made to support its shared rides initiative. Earlier this year, the company brought on board the team behind Rover to . Like the Rover guys, Hitch’s founders Snir Kodesh and Noam Szpiro got their start by building a San Francisco-based . The idea was that it would bring together access to services like Uber, Lyft, and SideCar, as well as public transportation times, all on a single app. But it didn’t take long before competing companies shut down access to their services. So they went back to the drawing board and came up with Hitch. Using some of the data they collected while building Corral, they were able to implement with Hitch. However, the small team knew it would have difficulty in taking its route-matching technology and rolling it out in new cities. “One thing we realized was that we would need to get to other markets very quickly,” Kodesh said in a phone interview. “We’re deeply passionate, but the operational intensity of doing that is really challenging and capital intensive.” One of the other things Lyft has is a lot of users. Having a critical mass of passengers is necessary when trying to match up multiple users for a shared ride. Hitch co-founder Szpiro noted on the call that the more users its service had, the more likely passengers were to be matched up with others heading in the same direction. “At the beginning, a lot of our rides were solo rides,” he said. “We got better at this over time, and at scale this works really well.” |
The Reinvention Of Medicine: Dr. Algorithm V0-7 And Beyond | Vinod Khosla | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | The “practice of medicine” developed through tradition, and the experiential evolution of best practices with small-scale medical research studies can be substantially improved through the “science of medicine” with statistically better-validated data and conclusions. Much of the current practice is driven by conclusions derived from partial information about a patient’s history and symptoms, incomplete medical understanding based as much on opinions as validated science, and interacting subjectively with known and unknown biases of the physician, hospital and healthcare system. Technology will reinvent healthcare. Healthcare will become more scientific, holistic and consistent; delivering better-quality care with inexpensive data-gathering techniques and devices; continual monitoring and ubiquitous information leading to personalized, precise and consistent insights. New medical discoveries will be commonplace, and the practices we follow will be validated by more rigorous scientific methods. Although medical textbooks won’t be “wrong,” the current knowledge in them will be replaced by more precise and advanced methods, techniques and understandings. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of data points will go into diagnosing a condition and, equally important, the continual monitoring of a therapy or prescription. Companies like are proposing 10,000 vital sign readings per hour, not to mention , which already gets 300,000 biomarkers from a blood sample, in addition to thousands of genes, their epigenome, microbiome and more. During the next decade, we will see systems providing “bionic assistance” to physicians and other healthcare professionals, allowing them to perform at substantially improved levels of expertise like the very best specialists in multiple domains. Inevitably, over 20 years, the majority of physicians’ diagnostic, prescription and monitoring functions will be replaced by smart hardware, software and testing. With bionic assistance, in addition to handling more patients, a physician or nurse practitioner will operate at the level of six specialists managing six areas of care for one patient with multiple comorbidities in a more coordinated, holistic and comprehensive manner. Nurses, enabled by technology, will replace many of the functions doctors perform today. Patients will act as the CEO of their own health: they will be better informed and able to make more educated choices to select a course of therapy. Care will become cheaper, faster, more optimal, accessible and consistent across practitioners. Early versions of these systems will appear underwhelming and clumsy. By comparison, my first cell phone was the size of a sewing machine and floor mounted to a car with a cumbersome handset cord but has since evolved into today’s iPhone. Similarly, in 15 or 20 years, changes to healthcare will seem obvious, inevitable and well beyond what we envision compared to the somewhat crude digital health technologies we see today. The role healthcare professionals will play is hard to define, but I suspect it will change dramatically and involve the empathetic and ethical elements of medicine. A more cooperative system leveraging humans and technological systems may evolve, but the core functions necessary for complex diagnoses, treatments and monitoring will be driven by machine judgment instead of human judgment. As notes, studies show “our attempt to acknowledge and deal with human complexity [in human ways] causes more mistakes than it prevents.” In a review of more than a hundred studies, researchers found that “in virtually all tests, statistical thinking equaled or surpassed human judgment.” The inconsistency and biases of humans, coupled with the inability to accurately consider many factors simultaneously, leads to statistical methods outperforming humans. According to Gawande, “the machine, oddly enough, may be holistic medicine’s best friend….As expert systems begin to take on more of the technical and cognitive work of medicine, generalist physicians will be in a position to embrace the humanistic dimension of care.” Already, many early versions of these systems have been developed. ’ ECG iPhone case enables cardiac patients to take hundreds of ECG’s at virtually no cost and is FDA-approved to diagnose atrial fibrillation, which it can detect as efficiently as a cardiologist looking at the same tests. Continuous and convenient at-home monitoring of atrial fibrillation becomes economically feasible with this low-cost device, possibly avoiding many strokes. Similarly, iPhone case imager will soon be able to diagnose a child’s ear infection and suggest a prescription. may be able to help decide when to see a doctor and ensure they do not miss a symptom that may affect a diagnosis. monitors mental health patients and can reduce suicides, depression and bipolar episodes by working with a psychiatrists’ nurse. The app can characterize a patient’s behavior more accurately and effectively when the patient is outside of the psychiatrist’s office than a human could. Medical literature is rife with about how the practice of medicine does not meet expectations for acceptable care. Physicians often will make different diagnoses and recommend different therapies for the same patient (according to a study of the Cleveland Clinic’s second opinion line, more than 50-percent of the time!). Purported experts in their respective fields frequently disagree on the effects of basic procedures. For example, a study involving colon cancer experts showed that there was no consensus on the value of colon cancer screening. In another study, cardiologist were given the same patient information and half recommended cardiac surgery whereas the other half did not. Two years later with the same data, 40 percent of cardiologists reversed their recommendations. Medical fact often ends up being wrong yet continues to persist. For instance, prescriptions for antipyretics such as aspirin are typically given to individuals with a fever as is the “practice of medicine.” Yet recent studies show prescribing antipyretics for fever reduction is riskier than allowing the fever to run its course. Stanford researcher, Dr. John Ioannidis, has the phenomenon of medical research studies extensively and found that, shockingly, it’s “more likely for a research claim to be false than true.” Today, misdiagnosis, conflicting diagnoses and general diagnostic error are common: ICU misdiagnoses cause as many deaths as breast cancer and adverse drug interactions cause as many deaths as automobile accidents. Preventable medical errors, often with clinical findings already in the medical record, are common. Biases frequently affect patient care: “premature closure” or coming to a diagnosis too quickly and “recency bias,” where a doctor is influenced by a recent case or article, just to name a few, are common. Conflicting recommendations are even less surprising if you consider that the average U.S. Medicare patient sees seven specialists, and the prescriptions of each specialist are seldom coordinated with the others. Today’s diagnostic error rate is the equivalent of Google’s driverless car having one accident per week; while this would be unacceptable for self-driving cars; this failure rate is permissible in healthcare. The use of data science will add meaning, and over time, there will be many distinct improvements: The transition will start incrementally and develop slowly in sophistication, much like an MD who starts with seven years of medical school and then spends a decade training with practitioners by watching, learning and experiencing. Expect many laughing-stock attempts by “toddler computer systems” early in their evolution. A three-year-old child makes laughable errors, but this does not imply they will make the same errors as a 21 or 40 year old. We won’t let initial toddler systems make decisions while they are developing. Their mode will be assist, learn and amplify with new generations of systems every two or three years with radical improvements over five to seven generations. To equate early “toddler digital health systems” to what may be possible is naïve. Innovation will occur swiftly, more like a tsunami than a linear change, but each version — from v0 to v7 and maybe more — will feel incremental and logical, much like how the first mobile phone that was floor mounted to a car looks nothing like the iPhone today. The accumulation of data will accelerate these improvements. The transition to the automated science of medicine will likely occur as an organic process of trial and error, starting with initial technologies and ideas that go through multiple iterations. In 15 to 20 years, data will transform diagnostics to the point where automated systems may displace up to 80 percent of physicians’ medical work. Computers are much better than people at organizing, recalling and synthesizing complex information and keeping up with the latest research. Tasks previously thought to be very difficult such as facial recognition on Facebook can be done by systems just as well as humans. Other examples include self-driving cars, which require more complex and rapid intelligence than medical decision-making does. Within a decade, we will have doctors making data-based decisions using the personalized medical equivalent of a Bloomberg financial terminal for each patient. While many will opine on these possibilities, today’s doctors are not qualified to judge what surprising software technologies may emerge in the future even though they understand the “problem of patient care” better than most of us. Just because a technology does not exist today does not mean it won’t exist in the future. My optimistic view is that we are on a path to create digital health innovations that will exceed human judgment in medical competency. If I am right, consumers will become the CEO of their own health because of such systems. Over time, mobile sensors, devices and apps will increase data collection and data science sophistication to offer insights to outperform the average physician, although not in every case. While many will choose this path, consumer choice should always be a priority for those who want to use traditional doctors and the current healthcare system. Not all doctors will change how they practice medicine, but the thought leaders will. The direction of medicine will be self-evident and advantages to patient outcomes will be well-documented. Already, we see this shift with people on the fringes of medicine and a growing number are taking steps to facilitate the future. Doctors and nurses will be devoted to the human element of care, while “Dr. Algorithm” systems will assist with diagnostic and prescription work. Systems will improve by learning from the best doctors and becoming increasingly more competent. Doctors at the forefront of medicine and technology will provide better care and show markedly better treatment results; over time, the rest of the world will accept the “science of medicine”. Sadly, the major problems in healthcare are systemic and do not involve doctors, many of whom are accomplished, caring, honest and compassionate. In the U.S., there is a misalignment of incentives, where organizations maximize revenue at the expense of care (extra surgeries anyone? a hospital inpatient who develops an ulcer increases revenue by $40,000!). Further, the incredible increase in the amount and complexity of newly enabled data, vast amounts of research, longitudinal health records and medical histories are well beyond what humans can reasonably understand. Add to that the incoming deluge of 10,000 vital sign reads per hour, thousands of genomic data points and expression data, microbiome, proteomic and other data. New sensors and testing will allow for more integrative analysis. Utilizing this data will enable much better and more holistic care that will get progressively better with time. Because this will go against established thought and practice, I believe deep innovation will most likely come from outside the system. This often occurs with innovators acting naïvely, failing and then realizing they need more knowledge and collaboration within the system. Entrepreneurial teams often add domain expertise to their naïve “fresh piece of paper” reinvention ideas. Further, the media and society broadly try to assign power to larger entities, like governmental institutions and Fortune 500 behemoths; however, radical innovation seldom comes from them. Did Walmart reinvent retail or Amazon? Did General Motors reinvent electric cars or Tesla? Did SpaceX reinvent space launches or NASA and Lockheed Martin? Most importantly, did big pharmaceutical companies reinvent biotechnology pharmaceuticals or Genentech? The biggest risks to slowing medical innovation are policies from government agencies, too large a belief in traditional institutions, in addition to resistance from those who may be hurt by these positive social disruptions. In the worst cases, it can substantially slow technology-driven medical innovation, which will force innovation to less developed geographies where traditional medical resources are limited. There will be many improbable attempts and possibilities for how data and consumer-driven systems will transform healthcare. Although many of these attempts will fail, the few that succeed will determine the future of healthcare as it is driven and transformed by digital health technologies. Improbable does not mean unimportant: we just don’t know which improbable outcome is important. Some improbable scenario today will become tomorrow’s reality. Biological sciences will continue to be significant, as fundamental scientific research will improve our understanding of biological systems and support complex data science systems. That said I expect innovation cycles to be much longer than those for the digital sciences, which will improve every two to three years. I do believe that digital technologies may do more for medicine in the next decade or two than all the biological sciences combined. Over time, we will see a 5×5 improvement across healthcare: 5x reduction in doctors’ work (shifted to data-driven systems), 5x increase in research (due to the transformation to the “science of medicine”), 5x lower error rate (particularly in diagnostics), 5x faster diagnosis (through software apps) and 5x cost reduction. I want to emphasize that my hypotheses and forecasts are only meant as directional guesses rather than precise predictions. These are not absolutes, but rather “truer than not” speculations. Although many disciplines will contribute to innovations in medicine like biological research or new device development, I am primarily focused on the contributions of digital health technologies to medical innovation. They are the most variable and impactful and therefore the hardest to predict in direction, timelines and scope. We have to imagine what might be possible: Then, we must have the courage to try and make the possibilities a reality. |
Draper Nexus Holds $30 Million First Close For Its Latest U.S.-Japan Fund | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | The cross-border Japanese-U.S. venture capital fund has raised $30 million for its $100 million second fund in the latest sign that the former affiliate funds in the DFJ Global Network are growing up. A little over a year ago, changing the payment scheme and flattening the management structure so that the main DFJ fund did not exercise control over the rest of the funds in the network. Sixteen outside funds had joined the network over the years. And 11 of those (including Draper Nexus) were outside the U.S. The firms were always independent when it came to fundraising, LPs, and decision-making on when to fund startups, but initially, the firms gave DFJ some carry in exchange for branding and access while also paying dues to DFJ for access to facilities. As part of the restructuring, DFJ created a governing board to oversee the entire network, which includes DFJ’s own funds, DFJ and DFJ Growth. The board is composed of a DFJ partner and includes representation from other network partners. Along with the board, the partner networks dropped the DFJ branding from their names. For example, DFJ Nexus Fund became Draper Nexus. All of this was done in an effort to make the partner network more collaborative and decentralized with less of a command-and-control structure, according to Gabe Turner, a director of the DFJ Global Network. “What you get as part of the DFJ Global network, instead of operating as a four-person team, you get a 100 plus brainpower CPU,” says Turner (although maybe Steve Jurvetson counts as a 100 plus brainpower CPU on his own?). The firms can co-invest and do with some regularity. For instance five out of the 18 investments in the Draper Nexus portfolio involve co-investments with other DFJ Global Network funds, according to Draper Nexus managing partner Quaeed Motiwala. At Draper Nexus, the changes to the network hasn’t affected the firm’s strategy, which remains focused on cross-border deals between the U.S. and Japan. “We’ll go in with a one-third, one-third, one-third allocation,” says Motiwala. “We will probably be a little more focused on Japan. Before it was hard to do deals in industrial energy, robotics, industrial materials, agriculture and food [in Japan]. We’re starting to see more of those companies coming out of Japan.” Draper Nexus (previously known as DFJ Nexus) had raised $50 million for its first fund. Now well on its way to its $100 million target, with commitments from large Japanese corporations, the firm is able to write larger checks, and has felt the momentum for investment begin to shift in its favor, according to Motiwala. “A good portion of our money comes from large Japanese corporates and we can use those relationships to pilot startups’ technologies with these limited partners,” Motiwala says. According to the Draper Nexus managing partner, the firm will invest between $4 million to $8 million in total in the companies in its portfolio. Before those numbers were closer to $1 million to $5 million. And while the market has improved, there are still risks to investing in Asian markets these days, Motiwala says. “Services get copied much faster, and before your competitors put their roots into other markets, you’ve got to move fast,” he says. While Draper Nexus is the latest fund from the network to get back on the fundraising trail, it’s far from the only one. Draper Triangle, another affiliate fund, for its new fund earlier this year, and the network has picked up a new member with the Singaporean investment firm , which has raised $30 million to invest across Southeast Asia. |
Mobile Rewards Startup Lootsie Hires Steve Cho As Its First COO | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | , a startup that allows advertisers to present mobile app users with special rewards, announced today that it has hired its first chief operating officer, . Cho previously worked in sales at IBM, and he was most recently vice president of business development at Kiip — which is pretty much in the same business as Lootsie. He said it was “a difficult decision” to join the competition, because he has “a profound amount of respect for Kiip.” What made the decision easier, however, was what he described as the “philosophical” difference between the two companies: “Fundamentally, the way they treat rewards is different.” Specifically, Cho pointed to the degree of choice that Lootsie gives its users, who can save Lootsie Points and then spend them on the reward of their choice, rather than giving them a specific reward or points that can only be used in the app. That might sound like a minor distinction, but Cho repeatedly touted “the power of choice” that the platform offers, and he noted that this means advertisers are rewarding the users who are most interested in them. Founded in 2012, Lootsie currently has 18 employees, with clients including Sole Bicycles and ShoeDazzle. Cho said his role at the company will be to “look at the biz ops side of things and just scale that bad boy.” |
AppNexus Raises $25M From Ad Giant WPP | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | Ad tech company announced today that it has raised an additional $25 million in funding from ad holding company WPP. As part of the deal, AppNexus is also acquiring Open AdStream, the ad-serving technology from WPP’s Xaxis. “Open AdStream has been one of the most effective and trusted ad serving platforms in the world for years,” said AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelly (pictured above) in . “We’re going to make it #1 in programmatic.” Back in August, at a $1.2 billion valuation. |
This Robot Tastes Better Than A Wine Critic | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | Robots might be unseating the cherry job of wine critics soon. Researchers in Denmark have created an artificial tongue to find out whether expensive wine actually tastes any better than the cheap stuff. The research, first published in , claims that an optical nanosensor based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) can discern how you experience the sensation of dryness in wine. And they say this nanosensor can judge the way the tannins will hit your flavor sensors better than the finest wine critic can. Some may argue that it takes a human, not a robot, to discover what is worth a sip. However, the researchers at Arhaus University argue that the nanosensor is free from the human critic’s personal prejudice. They may have a point. There’s a lot that goes into making wine taste a certain way. Everything from the variety of the grape to the minerals in the soil to what kind of sunlight the grapes received chemically affects the taste and smell of the wine from season to season – in even the same grape. According to MarketWatch, . While some standard ratings have been placed on wine and there’s a decent following in and what they recommend, everyone has different tastes in what they like. This makes it particularly hard to decide which wine will do at the local grocery store. PhD student Joana Guerreiro has taken part in developing a sensor, which – by using nanoscience – can measure how we experience the feeling of dryness in wine. Photo: Lars Kruse, Aarhus University. Instead of telling you that this wine tastes of leather bound books and mahogany, the nanosensor lets you know just how astringent the wine is. It does this by measuring the molecules in your mouth instead. “The sensation arises because of the interaction between small organic molecules in the wine and proteins in your mouth. This interaction gets the proteins to change their structure and clump together. Until now, the focus has been on the clumping together that takes place fairly late in the process. With the sensor, we’ve developed a method that mimics the binding and change in the structure of the proteins, i.e. the early part of the process. It’s a more sensitive method, and it reproduces the effect of the astringency better,” says researcher Joana Guerreiro. The researchers point out that this technique is not new, but that using it to create a sensor that can measure an effect rather than just a number of molecules is. And the technique can be applied to much more than just wine. Arhaus University that the science behind this machine can also be applied on a molecular level to develop targeted medicine. “The sensor can be used for diagnostic purposes. It could possibly be helpful for discovering and even preventing diseases,” says Duncan Sutherland, research director for the study. |
Amazon Looking To The Wisdom Of Crowds To Find New Authors | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | According to a Kindle Direct Publishing forum user, Amazon is quietly rolling out a way to find diamonds in the proverbial publishing rough. The unnamed project would bring a crowd approach to the acquisition of new titles using a voting system that ranks new books based on crowd favorites. The have received an email describing the following program: to sign up. It’s a fascinating proposition: social media and web-savvy authors will get top billing in these contests, to be sure, but it will also surface books with underground or unformed followings as well as potentially improve the quality of indie writing as a whole. Given the low advance numbers – and those are low advances – it’s not a particularly large investment by Amazon however I suspect the royalty clause will encourage the company to put some of its marketing might behind these books. According to , this would be a “new program” unaffiliated with KDP. “This program will be neither KDP nor Amazon Publishing, but something new. Unfortunately the program is so new that she was unable to provide much additional information,” he wrote. It’s interesting to note that these are ebooks only and it is similar in the way . But literary purists take note: the question of whether or not these books rise to meteoric critical success might be moot when the crowds start speaking. I’ve reached out to Amazon for more details. |
Adobe Acquires Photo-Editing Platform Aviary | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | Aviary just announced that it has been acquired by Adobe. Aviary offers a software development kit to developers who want to add photo-editing capabilities to their apps. Aviary has also created apps of its own, which it says have been downloaded 100 million times, as well as . At the beginning of this year, Aviary announced that the platform had been used to — partners include Yahoo/Flickr, MailChimp and Walgreens. According to from CEO Tobias Peggs (who ), there should be no interruption of service to Aviary’s tools. However, the two companies are working on ways to offer integrated versions of Adobe products to Aviary developers, “such as the ability to save creations to Creative Cloud in Adobe file formats, access Photoshop technology, and connect creativity across devices using the Creative SDK.” Peggs also said that the deal had its origins in 18 months ago. Apparently the Behance office is close to Aviary’s, and as Aviary’s team starting talking to Adobe, “It became even more obvious that we should join forces, accelerate combined efforts and better serve even more app developers and even more people wanting to be creative on mobile.” The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Peggs confirmed via email that the entire Aviary team will be joining Adobe. Since its founding in 2007, Aviary raised a total of $19 million in funding, including . The company’s investors include Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions (which manages the venture investments of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos), Vision Ventures, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Joi Ito, Thomas Lehrman and Payman Pouladdej. Update: And , Adobe’s vice president of products-community and head of Behance. |
Apple Plans To Shut Down Beats Music | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | Apple will discontinue the streaming music service Beats Music it acquired in May, according to five sources, including several prominent employees at Apple and Beats. Many engineers from Beats Music have already been moved off the product and onto other projects at Apple, including iTunes. It’s not clear when exactly Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre’s music service will be shut down or what Apple will do with streaming, but every source with knowledge of the situation that we talked to agreed Apple plans to sunset the Beats Music brand. [ : Apple has told TechCrunch that our report of Beats being shut down “is not true”, but sources familiar with the situation tell that Apple “may, however, modify [Beats Music] over time, and one of those changes could involved changing the Beats Music brand.” This aligns with what my sources said, which is that the Beats Music brand will be shut down, but that it’s unclear what Apple wants to do in streaming music. It seems quite possible that the Beats Music product could be rolled into iTunes rather than being ‘shuttered’, but that’s semantics. Apple’s response really depends on the interpretation of “shut down”. If Apple rolls Beats Music into iTunes and removes the dedicated Beats Music app from the App Store, I would call that being shut down. Beats Music itself came from a “rebranding” aka shutdown of the MOG music streaming service it acquired. We’ll see what happens if and when Apple adds streaming to iTunes, but its doubtful that Apple will maintain Beats Music as its own brand and independent product.] The fact that the new iPhones did not come pre-installed with Beats Music, while several other Apple apps on the 6 and 6 Plus, should have been a red flag. There was also nothing said about Beats Music during the Apple Watch reveal, even though the service’s radio and fire-and-forget playlists could work well on a wearable. In August, Beats Music was on iOS 7, yet the only time Beats Music got an off-hand mention at the September launch event was when Apple CEO Tim Cook said the new U2 album would be available there. Instead of Beats Music, the Apple Watch features a [Update: Remote app] with a blue play button (top right in the photo below) that instantly started playing songs when tapped during a demo. Considering Apple’s penchant for simple, unified brands, and how it despises fragmentation, shutting down Beats Music makes a lot of sense. Running a second music service in parallel with iTunes that forces people to learn a whole new interface might have confused customers. Beats Music’s CEO , meaning he’s already splitting his time rather than just focusing on Beats Music. Shutting down Beats Music also meshes with reports that the Beats acquisition was getting Jimmy Iovine and talent on board, and picking up the headphone business, not about streaming music. Having Beats as a side brand in music accessories flows naturally, but seems clumsy when it comes to software. We’ve contacted Apple with a request for comment on its plans for Beat Music. [Update: Response in update above.] Beats has recently launched an and released a , but both seem like they could have been in the pipeline directly. One Beats Music employee told me some teams on the non-technical side have been told to keep up “business as usual.” The move will let Apple focus on its flagship music product with its enormous 800 million user base and treasure trove of over 400 million stored credit cards. Beats Music’s growth has likely been hampered by its late start compared to competitors like Spotify, Rdio, Google Music, and Pandora. Though its strategy was to differentiate itself through curated playlists and mood-based radio, those failed to capture the attention of mainstream listeners. Thanks to seven-day free trials and multi-month demos through AT&T, 5 million people had tried Beats by May, but only 250,000 had signed up for a paid subscription. That’s pretty small compared to the 10 million paid subscribers and 40 million total listeners on Spotify, and active listeners on Pandora. Yet stacked up against the iTunes userbase, Beats Music is just a drop in the bucket for Apple. Apple certainly didn’t hesitate to shut down music streaming service Lala after acquiring it. The big question is what will Apple do with streaming music. Buying Beats Music may still assist Apple hear through talent, technology, and industry relationships even without the Beats Music brand. One source said Apple may roll streaming into iTunes. This could be the most logical strategy for Apple if it can find a way to keep its traditional music file download customers happy while opening its catalogue to streaming for early adopters who want to listen from the cloud. Perhaps rather than just buy buttons, there could be play buttons in iTunes, too. Another source said Apple plans to make some significant music announcement in the first half of next year. Apple is in the tricky position of trying to from the download to the streaming era. Digital music sales fell 13.3 percent in 2013, while U.S. streaming grew 32 percent. With , Apple will have to make a shift or at least accomodate streaming. But it doesn’t just want to ditch sales overnight. 1.26 billion songs and 117.6 million albums were sold online in 2013, providing . Forcing users across the chasm from iTunes to Beats Music seems precarious, especially with on-demand streaming competitors like Spotify and Google Music looking to pounce on potential customers. It’s doubtful that Apple would abandon its iTunes brand after 13 years of success just because Beats joined the family. Evolving a unified Apple music service sounds a lot better than having two playing out of sync. |
Tiggly, An iPad Learning Toy For Babies And Toddlers, Raises Series A | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | , an educational app designed for iPad’s youngest users – babies! (oh, and toddlers, too) – has raised a Series A round of funding led by Habermaass GmbH, a Germany-based early play and learning company, and owners of the toy brand , which is now entering the U.S. edtech market. Though the startup won’t disclose the size of the round, it had previously raised $1 million in seed funding from May 2013 to January 2014, and the additional funding now brings its total raised to $5 million. So you can do the math. As a parent myself, I know from personal experience the draw that mobile apps have for ever-younger users. Though I worked to limit technology’s use when my daughter was small (no were in my home!), I did let her “fingerpaint” on iPad before she turned one, and introduced a small selection of educationally focused toddler apps as she grew older. Tiggly was one of these. The app is part of a $29.95 kit that includes four brightly colored geometric shapes (a square, circle, triangle, and star) which, when placed on the screen in position, transform into cute characters, like jungle animals, for example, or can be used in a variety of other games as stamps or drawing tools. The games are meant to encourage language development, creativity, spatial thinking and motor skills. They are like the iGeneration’s version of wooden blocks, perhaps. Since launching in October 2013, Tiggly’s apps have been played over 400,000 times, and its “Tiggly Shapes” are now available in over 20 countries, across five continents and come in eight languages. The company says feedback has been positive so far, citing a 4.5 out of 5 rating on Amazon.com after 50 reviews. (The company declined to detail user numbers, sales or revenue.) Explains founder Phyl Georgiou, Tiggly’s products are resonating with customers who are looking for “more wholesome” experiences on tablets for their children. “This funding will help us expand our product line and provide more learning opportunities for preschoolers and kindergarteners who love apps,” he tells TechCrunch. “We decided to raise money from Habermaass because they have a 75-year track record of making learning toys that children cherish. Having a strategic partner like Habermaass will greatly enhance our distribution network and give us access to industry knowledge and contacts that will help us scale rapidly.” Georgiou notes that the company had interest from traditional VCs, but chose Habermaas because of their experience in the toy and learning market. Habermaass GmbH, which makes €365 million annually, is based in Bad Rodach, Germany, and includes the brands HABA, Wehfritz and Jako-O. Its toys and games focus on high educational value and high quality design, but HABA brand is the most relevant to Tiggly, as it’s the toymaker for kids 0 to 6. The additional capital will help the small startup grow its team from 6 to 12 people, expanding mainly its app and design team. “In particular, we are investing heavily in building an engaging world where children can learn while having fun,” the founder says. The longer-term goal, he adds, is to offer educational products for those aged 18 months to six years old, including an expanded curriculum that covers other areas like numeracy and literacy. “We believe there are a number of important early childhood development milestones that are best reached through the engaging gameplay we are pioneering, and this funding will help us fast track these products to the market,” says Georgiou. |
When The Funding Bubble Bursts It Doesn’t Have To Mean Disaster | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 22 |
~Talking Heads, One law of economic physics always holds true: what goes up must come down. Last week, my pal , not in the form of snow of course, but metaphorically. He was reacting to that many startups were burning through cash at an alarming rate and it’s not sustainable. They’re both right of course, the bubble’s got to burst sooner or later, and all signs point to it happening sooner, but I’m here to suggest, that the impact will be strongest on existing companies, while the startup cycle of life will begin anew, and it won’t take long this time. If you think about when the bubble burst in 2000 and 2008, we had a vastly different technology landscape. In 2000, cloud services, especially cloud infrastructure for all intents and purposes didn’t exist. If you had a brilliant idea, you needed a ton of capital to get started because you had to build out your own datacenter –and if you grew, you needed to go hat in hand and ask for millions more. Even when the economy went into a tailspin in 2008, the cloud market was still very much in its infancy. Today, you don’t need millions in capital to get off the ground or to keep growing. In fact, if you have an idea these days, at least for a software product, all you need is a laptop, a credit card and some programming skills and you can launch a company –and if it’s successful, the cloud infrastructure will scale as you grow. The outlook is entirely different in that regard. In theory, a person with a decent job or some cash in the bank (or simply modest living requirements) could hunker down, get started and get the product off the ground with almost no capital, something that would have been nearly impossible when bubbles burst in the past. When the oxygen got sucked out of the balloon back in the day, we went into a dark, slow period. This time, it doesn’t have to be like that. When the winter Wilhelm describes comes, chances are it won’t be as cold or as long as in the past due to a number of factors beyond access to cheap cloud services. For one thing, there’s too much capital and too much momentum for it to come to a dead stop, but surely we still need to pay attention to Gurley’s red flag because it can’t go on forever like it is now. In fact, one Silicon Valley insider told me that Gurley was just expressing what everyone else has been thinking for some time, and because he’s so influential it finally got everyone’s attention. This person believes that something is going to pop the bubble, whether a macro event like an economic or political crisis or more likely in his view, a trigger event like one of those companies burning through cash finally running out of luck. Once a high-profile company goes belly up, the dominoes will start to fall. First of all, he believes the public market companies like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, which have been showing up as investors with increasing frequency in recent funding deals will exit the business. That will have the most serious impact on later stage startups in Series C and D which hope to IPO sooner than later. They will find it harder to get funding and build that bridge to the stock market the public market companies provided for them. Meanwhile he believes at the other end of the funding spectrum, Series A and B will be fine, although companies will see smaller amounts than they have up until now. But let’s face it, when when they aren’t even asking for it, it’s fair to say we have probably reached a tipping point. The question is how do you fill that gap between early stage and later stage money to grow between the phase where you want to move out of your parents’ basement and maybe hire some people, and the point where you need serious cash to take the company to a higher level. Unfortunately, this is where it’s likely to get most tricky for companies. The capital will probably still be there, but it’s not going to be as plentiful as it is now and that’s going to present a challenge for those companies trying to make that transition from early stage to mid- and late-stage status. The foreign capital markets could start to fill in some of these funding gaps. I’ve heard there are foreign investment funds with money to spend, but to this point they have been mostly shut out of the US startup market because there is so much money right now. A downturn could be an in for these funders and a saving grace for the mid-to-later stage startups. It’s also important to keep in mind that even if this trigger event happens, and the capital markets begin to tighten, U.S. VC firms and others with riches from deals past will still have money to spend, no matter what happens. It’s just they are probably going to get smarter and much pickier about their choices. Right now, from what I’ve been told, firms are all but tripping over themselves to get companies in their portfolios, even when it doesn’t make any economic sense whatsoever. One VC told me they were walking away from good companies because the numbers couldn’t possibly work, not when the competition was so fierce competitors were funding projects as much as 30 percent over value. Look around at the multi-billion dollar valuations out there, several at more than $10+ billion, and it’s not hard to see why Gurley is so concerned. Surely, not all these companies can possibly continue to justify these kinds of valuations, especially companies that don’t have a well-defined business model or are at risk of commoditization. It’s worth noting that one possible positive outcome of thinning the start-up herd is the talent market could loosen up. One industry veteran told me that when the dot-com bubble burst back in 2000, it freed up a lot of talent that had been locked into the late 90s dot-com companies, and that helped Google in its early days assemble a top-notch engineering team. A similar dynamic could happen here for the companies that survive. I remember talking to an electrician who was doing work on my house during an earlier economic downturn. I asked him if it was difficult to get work because of the economy, and he scoffed telling me an economic crisis simply weeded out the hacks. Maybe it’s time for us to weed out some of those hacks too, but it’s also worth remembering that when the bubble bursts this time, it doesn’t have to be as bad in the past because you don’t need a ton of capital to start a business anymore, and those that are further along could have access to a variety of alternative funding sources they just don’t need to tap right now. |
Up Close With The Biggest Joystick In The World (That We Know Of) | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | A member of the , Michelangelo Guarise, was at the Maker Faire in New York this weekend with a special treat: something that appears to be one of the biggest working joysticks in the world. Built by the Udoo team, the massive stick and two Frisbee buttons allowed children of all ages to play emulated games on a little LCD screen connected to Guarise’s creation. , is a single-board computer with a number of digital and analog I/Os as well as a built-in Arduino system. This means you can control lots of electronic gadgets via an easy-to-use interface. While you don’t necessary need and Udoo to build the aforementioned joystick, being able to add relays directly to the board helped out considerably. This is one of the first times Udoo has exhibited in the States and it looks like the team is planning to update the board and the software over the next few months, adding some interesting new features. It is, in short, a hardware hackers boon and a lot of fun to build with and use, as evidenced by the jolly kidlings lined up to play at Udoo’s booth. |
MakerBot’s Bre Pettis Launches Bold Machines, A Workshop For 3D-Printed Stuff | John Biggs | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | After a slightly surprising move away from a managerial role at MakerBot, former CEO Bre Pettis has finally announced what he’s working on: Bold Machines, an “Innovation Workshop” for MakerBot parent company Stratasys. Designed to be a creative skunkworks for the 3D printing company, Bold Machines will design cool 3D prints, work with artists and inventors, and even make movies. Their first project, a film called Margo, looks to be a corker. “Our mission is to explore the frontier of 3D printing and partner with innovators to showcase Stratasys, MakerBot, and Solidscape 3D printers,” said Pettis. “We are still at the beginning of the next industrial revolution and I want to push it along by collaborating and creating inspiring projects that will break into new industries.” The workshop is headquartered at MakerBot’s original Dean Street offices in Brooklyn and contains dozens of 3D printers that are busy churning out characters and objects for the film. Pettis said he is still involved with MakerBot and Stratasys from a business side. “I’m still involved, but I’ll be innovating with the other technologies in Stratasys. For example, I’m really excited to work with Solidscape wax 3D printers,” he said. What is Margo? It’s a feature-length film featuring Bold Machine characters. You can if you’re so inclined or keep your eye on Pettis’ beard and look for . The team will release new models weekly as they run up to the completion of the film. |
Goat Simulator Is A Gloriously Weird Tribute To The Old ‘Tony Hawk’ Games | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | While the free section of Apple’s App Store can sometimes , some weird stuff occasionally finds a way to take off on the paid charts, as well. The latest such oddity is , a game that gives you a small town to wreak havoc in as the titular farm animal. While it generally takes a lot of great content (or an emotional treadmill) to get people to pay for games on their phones nowadays, Goat Simulator has done well at $4.99 even though there’s not that much in the way of content — there’s only one town to mess around in and one set of achievements to complete. Despite all that, Goat Simulator has managed to hold the No. 5 slot of the top paid apps on the App Store for several days, and is also available on the and (where it is $9.99, as it has enhanced content for PCs). How does the game keep you hooked? As with or , Goat Simulator keeps you interested by providing opportunities to perform increasingly stuff in the same world that you only figure out how to take advantage of after toying around with each part for a while. Starting off, you realize you can bounce around the pen with other goats. Then you head-butt one and it collapses in a ragdoll animation that’s too absurd to call violent. You lick it (I am not kidding, this is one of the biggest on-screen controls) and you realize that it attaches the other goat to yours with a long, elastic cord. Moving around, the other goat is flung around as if your goat has super strength. While flailing this other goat around, you decide to attack a parked car, and it explodes. Blown halfway across the game’s small town, your goat stands up, undamaged. Suddenly, you start to realize that this goat can do whatever the heck it wants. There are achievements and quests in Goat Simulator, though you’re never explicitly told what to do. Instead, most of them are like the goals in the old Tony Hawk games — you’re told something vague, like “Become the Queen of the Goats,” and you just have to explore around until you figure out what the game actually wants you to do. That’s not a criticism — the exploration is where all the fun stuff happens. But when you do figure it out, you’re rewarded with more absurd humor. In between completing those goals, you rack up points for basically everything you do — jumping on a trampoline, smashing boxes, and such — with higher numbers given out for crazier antics. Together, the mechanics incentivize getting your goat into as much trouble as possible. Thankfully, the game’s controls don’t seem to get in the way of that too much, even though you have to rely on the touch screen when playing on a phone or tablet. That’s partially because of the overall insanity happening on screen. Every time I thought, “Why can’t I control my goat very well when it’s wearing a jetpack?” I realized that I had answered my own question. |
The FCC Hasn’t Decided How It Will Enforce Net Neutrality | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | This morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) indicated in a that it is “reviewing” a number of legal methods concerning how to enforce new net neutrality rules. The implication is plain: No choice has been made. The FCC claims that it is “looking ahead” to more round tables that could help shed light on which method is best. The agency noted several proposals, including AOL’s (AOL owns TechCrunch, ), the Tim Wu proposal, and Mozilla’s ideas. I’ve been asking around the past week to try to turn up information on which direction the FCC is leaning, be it 706, Title II, or a blend of the two. I’ve gotten back a tidal wave of shrugs. Now we know why: No one knows what the FCC wants to do, because the FCC doesn’t know what the FCC wants to do. I am not saying that the FCC is late or anything like that. It’s instead merely important to note that in the immediate wake of the public comment period, the agency is still in fact-finding mode. Here’s the government group’s dismount: A cross-bureau group of staff are reviewing these options as well as others in the record. The robust discussion will continue in the weeks ahead, including in our last Open Internet Roundtable on October 7 that will specifically focus on theories of legal authority and the legal basis for the construction of Open Internet rules. A quick decision this will not be. Thinking positively, that fact might help the FCC make the proper choice. Or, it could allow time for the FCC to talk itself into a weaker set of regulations. In related news, the National Journal arguing that the current split of opinion among the FCC’s commissioners could lead to a stronger final net neutrality result. In short, because the two Republican commissioners are steadfastly opposed to net neutrality as a concept, Chairman Wheeler has to win the votes of the two Democratic commissioners or he can’t pass the damn thing. If net neutrality passes, it will be on a 3-2 vote. This gives the two Democratic commissioners leverage over Wheeler. If you are philosophically aligned with sterner regulations on the matter, smile. |
New $15M Global XPrize Focuses On Bringing Basic Literacy to 250M Children Globally | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | , a nonprofit that runs competitions to stimulate technologists toward building products that improve humankind, is dipping its toes into basic education. They’re launching that is looking for a free, open-source and scalable software solution that will enable children to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic. There are 250 million children globally who lack basic literacy, which stifles their social and professional development for the rest of their lives. Matt Keller, who is overseeing the program, previously worked at the United Nations and One Laptop Per Child. “You spend enough time in these schools around the world and not a lot is happening,” Keller said. “There are 100 kids in a class, spending a few hours a day in this bricks and mortar teaching model, which is fine and should continue. But it doesn’t cut it. Why hasn’t technology disrupted that?” XPRIZE is launching a six-month registration period where teams will then get 18 months to develop a solution. After that year-and-a-half, a panel of third-party judges will pick the top five teams, which will each win a $1 million award. Their solutions will get tested across at least 100 villages, reaching thousands of children in the developing world. After that a $10 million top prize will get awarded to the team that built the solution with the highest levels of proficiency gains in reading, writing and arithmetic. Paired with this competition is an online crowdfunding campaign that could help expand field testing for the leading teams. Keller said that while there are many other confounding problems like poverty and poor governance that hinder primary education, a basic technological tool could really help. “Poverty plays a gigantic role in underperformance. You throw all these solutions at the problem and none of them seem to stick. When you talk to teachers in New Haven, which is near where I’m from, they’ll tell you they need. If something could be produced that could help kids learn at their own pace, that would be hugely helpful.” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dnn7NFQPbQ&w=863&h=485] |
Launcher Adds Shortcuts To Favorite Apps And Common Actions To iOS 8’s Notification Center | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | A new iOS application called is taking advantage of iOS 8’s expanded feature set in a unique way. With the updated version of Apple’s mobile operating system, developers can now create interactive widgets that sit in iOS 8’s Notifications Center. But currently, most apps that have rolled out widget support are offering support for their own applications alone. Launcher is different – it lets you create one-touch shortcuts to a variety of apps and common actions, like placing a phone call, sending a text, viewing a website and more. We first got a taste of an app like this at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014’s hackathon earlier this month, when a team created , which is similar to Launcher. But Blitz was built in a weekend, and still needs further work before it would be ready for the App Store, of course. Launcher, meanwhile, has been in development for couple of months prior to iOS 8’s release. The idea is to offer a customizable widget where you can create shortcuts to your most-used applications and the other sorts of things you have to do on a regular basis (e.g., call your significant other, post a tweet, drive home, etc.). After you install the app, you’re prompted to customize the apps and actions the widget contains through a simple configuration screen. Here you can configure shortcuts for calling, messaging, emailing or FaceTiming your favorite contacts, plus shortcuts for directions to your most frequented routes, shortcuts for regularly viewed websites, and more. Launcher also connects with a number of applications, allowing you to add shortcuts for anything you have installed on your phone, including Apple’s pre-installed apps like Photos or iTunes, for example. A few apps also offer multiple actions to choose from – on Facebook, you can create a shortcut to launch the app, go to your profile, go to another’s profile, go to a Facebook page or go to a Facebook group. Twitter users can add a shortcut that either launches the app or lets you compose a tweet. On Whatsapp, you can create shortcuts for launching the app or sending a message. Yelp and Yo also have multiple shortcuts available. A Pro version is available for $2.99 which removes the “Sponsored Launcher” that adds a sponsored app to your list of shortcuts. It’s worth the upgrade. Founder Greg Gardner, a software developer working in San Francisco, says he first learned about custom URLs and deep linking (the technology that powers the app shortcuts in Launcher) when he worked on mobile analytics firm Flurry’s advertising team. Last year, he decided to leave Flurry and found his own company, Cromulent Labs, to build apps for mainstream users. The first was a crossword puzzle (he and his wife are fans), but soon realized an app would need to offer something new to really stand out and gain traction in today’s crowded app market. “So I went back to my list of a dozen or so app ideas I’ve collected over the years and thought that a new iOS 8 Today Widget that could deep link into other apps would be extremely useful,” he says. “I started working on it that day and the plan was to have something ready on the day iOS 8 went live. So I’ve been working on it tirelessly ever since.” Cromulent Labs is bootstrapped, as Gardner earns a little on the side through consulting, and he says he plans on keeping it that way. “From the time I started my company, the plan hasn’t been trying to get rich; I was just hoping I could make apps that would make enough money to keep me employed. So far it’s been an awesome experience and I love everything about it except I haven’t yet made enough money to live off of yet,” Gardner notes. “I’m really hoping to change that with Launcher.” The app is a free download (with in-app purchases) . |
Apple CEO Tim Cook Says Tech Companies Should Accept No Compromises On Climate Change Issues | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down with UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres today at to discuss Apple’s concerns when it comes to climate change, and what the company is doing to address the situation. Cook summed up his company’s efforts by saying that Apple needs to be “one of the pebbles in the pond that creates the ripple,” refer to inspiring a broader effort to improve environmental practice among tech industry leaders. “You look at what are the root causes, and you’re not accepting that there’s a trade-off between the economy and the environment,” he said in the interview. “If you innovate and you set the bar high, you will find a way to do both. and that you must do both, because the long-term consequences of not addressing the environment are huge.” Cook said that this attitude of not compromising is something that Apple has already had plenty of practice with when it comes to their product design and development process, which is why it makes sense to apply it here, too. “That’s the reason that everyone at Apple […] is not accepting that you have to pick this or this,” If we took that kind of approach to our product, we would never make a great compromise. the truth is that you can’t compromise.” As an example of Apple’s environmental policy leadership, he cited the new headquarters currently under construction in Cupertino, which Cook said he expects to be one of the greenest buildings on the planet. He also pointed to its data centers, which use renewable energy for power, and to their efforts all the way down the supply chain in keeping their partners in line. Cook said that this requires real, hands-on work. It’s dirty and it’s detailed work,” he said of their supply chain audits and partner responsibility programs. “It’s rolling your sleeves up. it’s not esoteric and theory, it’s real work and real projects.” Cook’s general advice for how to improve the state of the tech industry and its overall contribution to climate change situation improvements are best summed up as a call for greater transparency. Without calling anyone out directly, Cook still managed to challenge Apple’s competitors to do more in terms of making their environmental effects part of the public record. “I think companies have to communicate, to consumers, about what they’re selling, and they have to do it in a way that communicates the whole of their footprint, and not just the one part they’re looking good on, but all of it,” he said. “And I think that if you do, I’m an optimist, I think that if you do that consumers are smart and the vast majority of the world wants to do the right thing, so I think [transparency] will drive desired consumer behavior. if you have enough companies that begin to do that, I think consumers will vote with their dollars.” Apple’s own environmental efforts have earned it a significant amount of praise from Greenpeace lately, where it currently ranks as a top performer among major tech companies, especially regarding use of renewable energy. |
Apple Apologizes For iPhone Update Bug And Releases New iOS 8.0.2 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | Apple has moved quickly to release iOS 8.0.2, the update of zapping cellular reception on iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices. It also includes all the , including a fix for the HealthKit bug that held up release of compatible Health apps in iOS 8. It also addresses a problem whereby third-party keyboards wouldn’t stick when activated in apps, meaning it would default back to Apple’s stock keyboard. Apple released the following statement alongside the update: iOS 8.0.2 is now available for users, it fixes an issue that affected iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users who downloaded iOS 8.0.1, and includes improvements and bug fixes originally in iOS 8.0.1. We apologize for inconveniencing the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users who were impacted by the bug in iOS 8.0.1. Apple says that fewer than 40,000 iPhone and iPhone 6 Plus devices were affected by the bad release, which was up for just over an hour until the company pulled it to investigate. To get the update, simply plug your phone in and check for updates in iTunes or navigate to Settings>General and tap Software Update. |
MasteryConnect Collects $15.2 Million So Teachers Can Teach To Students And Not To Tests | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | has raised $15.2 million to further market its software that it hopes will help enable educators to teach to their students, and not teach their students how to take tests. “We’ve created a platform that lets teachers identify a student’s level of understanding against any set of standards, in real-time,” says chief executive Cory Reid. “It’s a backlash against high stakes testing or standardized testing,” Reid continues. “Our DNA is belief in the teacher and the classroom.” The Salt Lake City-based company’s software was developed by a serial entrepreneur and a former teacher and principal to ensure that students in a classroom were all understanding the material they were being taught. The software prompts teachers to administer quick checks for understanding that can be distributed on a mobile device, as a quiz, or through a browser. Already, using its “freemium” model, the company’s software has users in 85 percent of school districts in the country, has been downloaded in 170 countries, and has been used to teach roughly 22 million students. “We’ve been working on it since 2009,” says Reid. “We grew from a team of three to a team of over 75.” The software costs $7 per student per year for a rollout across a school, or school district, but teachers can use aspects of the app for free. “Instead of a credit card payment, we want them to become evangelizers. Roughly 33% of our sales have teachers involved,” says Reid. So far, the company’s mobile apps have been downloaded 5 million times. The core offering is an assessment suite that helps teachers build lesson plans around various standards, using resources that have been selected by teachers around the world. Teachers then have the ability to test student understanding on a yearly, monthly or daily basis (and can re-teach lessons that particular students didn’t comprehend). The company’s curricula and software also offers a more holistic assessment of a student’s results by emphasizing areas where the student excelled and areas that still need work. International schools use the applications and software to follow the International Baccalaureate curriculum, while in the U.S. the adoption of common core standards have driven adoption. In June, MasteryConnect bought Cambridge, Mass.-based Socrative, an in-class software program for increasing student engagement, for $5 million in cash and stock. In a explaining his firm’s investment in MasteryConnect, general partner Larry Orr wrote: Education is a top priority in this country. Teachers and administrators are desperate to improve students’ learning in an efficient way, and are looking to technology to help them. So far, the approach to deploying devices and educational software in our schools has been haphazard and inconsistent, challenging entrepreneurs to build products useful to a large subset of teachers and learning environments. At Trinity, we’ve looked hard to find a solution that has the potential to massively improve student outcomes while reaching as many teachers and students as possible; something that will bring teachers, students and parents closer together, and that will support the growth of next-gen teaching methods such as formative assessment. We believe we’ve found that in MasteryConnect… |
Andreessen Goes On Tweet Storm About Burn Rates, Says To Worry | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | In one of his famous “tweet storms,” from Andreessen Horowitz went to town on . He was reacting to from last week –and Andreessen is worried too. He sees companies overspending, especially on fancy buildings and big staffs that make them look successful, but are just basically paper facades. And Andreessen expects some of these companies –he didn’t name names –to “vaporize.”
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The Oatmeal Launches Another Crowdfunding Campaign To Build The Tesla Museum, One Brick At A Time | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | The Oatmeal (aka Matthew Inman, aka “that artist who makes web comics that take over your Facebook feed every few weeks”) is at it again. He to build a museum for the late inventor. He sweet talked Elon Musk into kicking in . Now he needs to build the thing. To raise the remaining funds for the actual construction, Inman has And he’s off to a damned good start. This time he’s put a clever twist on things: make a big enough contribution, and you’ll get a brick permanently installed into the property with your name on it. Or a bunch of names. Or an etching of a ham sandwich. The more money you put in the pot, the crazier you get to be with your brick(s). And to make things all the more interesting, Inman has introduced some urgency into the mix. “The sooner you purchase a brick,” he writes, “the more likely your brick will receive a preferred placement such as near Tesla’s statue and the tower base.” The campaign launched just a few hours ago, and is already set to smash through its $200,000 goal. All of the ultra-prime spots may very well be gone… but really, is there a bad spot for your name to be in Tesla’s museum? So what’s the money for? Besides the actual brick-laying, they still need a bit more money to remove hazardous waste (surprise! Mad science labs sometimes have hazardous waste laying around) and to renovate the parts of Tesla’s lab that are still standing. Can’t afford $125+ for a brick? That’s okay! Inman is also , the profits of which ($15) go to the museum. They’ve currently sold roughly 3,000 shirts, which works out to another $45,000 for the museum’s coffers. |
Komoot Launches In The U.S. So You Can Enjoy A Guided Trip Through The Great Outdoors | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | For about four years now, Europeans trekking in the wilderness have had access to an app that ensured they would always be able to find their way in the woods as long as they had a mobile phone… and had downloaded . Now those of us in the U.S. can get the same benefits; the company has just launched its app for iOS and Android for North America. It’s exhaustive in its coverage. You can find a weekend trek or bike path (with maps and supported by GPS) for pretty much any location anywhere in the U.S., according to Komoot’s founder Markus Hallerman. “We integrate data from users and open source data,” says Hallerman. “With our solutions you get recommendations wherever you are. Because we have mapping technologies, we have turn by turn navigation. We are also available on wearables now.” So the Komoot app slices, dices, and… well… does the things you’d expect from an app. The company started in 2010 and launched its first iPhone app in Germany. During the last year the company began incorporating open-source mapping technology, and integrated its data from its user base with the maps it had created. And Hallerman isn’t just a founder; he’s also a customer, using the app on his hikes through the Austrian alps with his children. The Berlin-based Komoot is different from fitness tracking apps, or editorial apps for hiking, because it delivers both mapping and editorial recommendations for every skill level. Instead of tracking movement, the company’s guides can actually recommend hikes. It sells its packages under a freemium model. You can get the first map and itinerary for free, but subsequent packages will cost you. So far, the company has raised $1.6 million from investors, including German regional funds and KRW Schindler Private Ventures, a fund whose anchor investor is Philipp Schindler, a vice president at Google. “We own a huge stack of technology [and] with wearables and with the Apple watch we have a huge opportunity to disrupt an industry,” says Hallerman. “According to an outdoor study, there are $500 billion spent on travel and trips with outdoor activities.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJN_QFh4QJQ |
Media Veteran Fred Seibert Ties Up With Betaworks To Create Video Technology Incubator Thirty Labs | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | Fred Seibert just won’t slow down. After living what he counts as , the 63-year old veteran of cable and online programming is working on a new project to incubate ideas and products that he hopes will — once again — change the way people think about and consume video content. Seibert’s new company is called , and was formed with help from Betaworks’ John Borthwick and backing from digital media veteran Jon Miller. Like Betaworks, Thirty Labs will serve as an incubator to build interesting new products and applications, with a focus specifically on new technologies and ways of thinking about the video industry. If you’re looking for someone to upend that industry, Seibert probably isn’t a bad person to pick. Over the last 30-plus years, he has worked to revolutionize the way video is programmed and distributed, first in the cable world and later online. In the early 80s Seibert helped launch MTV, where he served as creative director of the revolutionary cable channel. After that he worked to revive children’s network Nickelodeon while running ad agency/consulting firm Fred/Alan with partner Alan Goodman. In the 1990s he took over as president of ailing cartoon producer and turned it around with a number of memorable shows that included The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, and Cow & Chicken. Fred Seibert at Vidcon And in the 2000s he built two digital media brands to distribute video content online: The first was , which he dubbed as the ‘Cartoon Network of the Internet,’ and the second was . Next New Networks was what you might consider the “original multi-channel network” online, aggregating a group of creators and video channels under one production and sales organization to improve the quality and monetization of shows being produced. The company was acquired by YouTube in 2011, and became the basis for the video giant’s YouTube Next Lab and Audience Development Group. In each of those cases, Seibert likes to point out, people thought what he was doing was crazy. But for the most part it worked out, and in the end the projects he took on got a lot of other smart people thinking about how they could emulate those successes. With Thirty Labs, Seibert will be moving away from the programming side of things and working more on the technologies people use to consume digital video and how they can be better used. The stems in part from what he sees as a lack of innovation around video over the last several decades. “Over the years, we’ve seen not as much innovation in the video space as we had hoped for,” Seibert said. While it is much too early to talk about specific projects Thirty Labs is working on, he provided some examples of interesting areas that the incubator is exploring. That includes everything from platforms to content programming to “developing different ways for people to find and see content,” Seibert said. Seibert pointed to live video as one area that has a lot of room for innovation, especially when one considers the success of Twitch and how it changed how people watch in-the-moment programming. He also sees an opportunity in changing the way viewers interact with videos and creators beyond today’s commenting platforms. The idea to start Thirty Labs came about after Seibert visited Borthwick at Betaworks and saw how it used a lean studio model to incubate new applications and ideas, Seibert told me in a phone interview. He said what Betaworks is doing with social technology isn’t that different from how his team approached programming at Frederator. “My company’s physical setup is almost exactly the same [as Betaworks],” he said. For Seibert, that meant surrounding himself with people who would toss around ideas that the group would end up working together on. Betaworks founder John Borthwick Not being an engineer, he lacked the common language that Borthwick used at Betaworks on the technology side. At the same time, he says Betaworks had worked on some video projects but it “wasn’t in their DNA.” Together, they’re hoping to bring the same studio model to video tech in a significant way. Like Betaworks, Thirty Labs is starting with a very lean team. The company currently has six employees brainstorming different ideas and models for what could be built. “That’s how I end up solving problems… I surround myself with stunningly talented people and let them tell me what to do,” Seibert said. “We’ve assembled a group of like-minded people who are excited to work together and we’re just going to let the cauldron boil.” Along for the ride is another digital media veteran: , who invested in the company as a partner at early-stage firm Advancit Capital. Miller has held a number of high-profile digital roles over the years, including once serving as the and as the head of News Corp’s digital division. Seibert noted that between the three of them, there was a lot of overlap over decades of working in tech and media. Miller and Borthwick worked together at AOL, while Seibert knew Miller from his time at Viacom. By working together, he says he believes they can create a result where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. “We realized that with the three of us together, we could have a situation where one plus one plus one adds up to more than five,” Seibert said. So far they’ve only been working together for a few months, but would you bet against them? |
#GamerGate – An Issue With Two Sides | Allum Bokhari | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | Nearly a month after it began, GamerGate is a fire that refuses to go out. The hashtag campaign has opened up a chasm between the gaming press and their audience. Currently standing at close to a million tweets ( ), shows no signs of stopping. A related tag, , has cleared 120,000. But what lies behind it? Why did it come about? And why are people so If you were to believe , it’s a reactionary, right-wing movement of white, male gamers trying to protect their hobby from an invasion of women and minorities. On the other hand, the games editor of claims it is a multi-gender, multi-ethnic uprising against corruption and nepotism. Meanwhile, David Auerbach of suggests that it is simply a response to a press that regularly professes to hate its own readership. These competing opinions are hard to unravel, because they are a symptom of something that has up till now been blissfully absent from the world of gaming. It’s politics. I should know. I work in politics for a living. Gaming was once my escape, but unfortunately, this no longer seems to be the case. Here’s how politics works. There are always two sides. Let’s call them the “reds” and the “blues.” If you’re a red, the goal is to make the blues look as bad as possible. If you’re a blue, the goal is to make the reds look as bad as possible. If they do something good, you ignore it. If they do something bad, you let as many people know as possible. Have they raised money for a mental health charity? Don’t report that! Did they kickstart a project to help young women get ahead in game development? don’t report that! Did one of them send someone a death threat? The psychology behind this is interesting. Bias isn’t something that people are consciously aware of. It happens automatically. One of the only ways to become aware of it is through exposure to someone with a competing bias. This is often a very uncomfortable experience, but it it is also one of the few ways to expose yourself to new information. Political biases are more resistant to this process than most. In politics, bias isn’t a bug – it’s a feature. Advocates for one side or the other do not tend to see their bias as a simple prejudice to certain types of information over others – instead, it’s a matter of People who share the Red bias are good. People who share the Blue bias are evil. Eliezer Yudkowsky was not exaggerating when he said ‘ . However, most ordinary people are not political. They dislike agendas. In an age of unlimited information, it’s relatively easy for readers of an article to find out when a story they’ve been told is one-sided, or omits information. It’s also relatively easy for them to complain about it. This is why “don’t read the comments” has become such a popular slogan among those bastions of bias, political op-ed writers. If journalists drift too far towards the reds or the blues, their accounts will come to represent a smaller and smaller minority of viewpoints. Confirmation bias will become increasingly severe. Non-political readers will notice. Try and suppress their criticism, and they will rebel, forming their own biases in the process. That is #GamerGate. To better understand the political (or, more accurately, anti-political) attitudes of gamers, we have to rewind the clock to 2005. In 2005, gamers and gaming journalists stood united against a common foe. His name was Jack Thompson. Thompson was an old-school, ‘family values’ conservative. He didn’t like video games, he didn’t like rap music, and if truth be told he didn’t like much about modern pop culture at all. Despite being a lunatic, he used his considerable legal skills to provide no end of grief to the gaming community. According to him, games like and were ‘murder fantasies’ that were the prime reason behind America’s problems with violent youth. He accused rap music of promoting sexual assault. He filed endless lawsuits against the music and video games companies who he accused of promoting violence. Thompson’s overall argument was that video games — like music and film — all too often promoted a “culture of violence” that led to real-world crime. Naturally, his views attracted widespread ridicule. In some cases, this turned into hate. Thompson received , and all manner of unpleasantness. The gaming press did not seek to excuse these attacks. But they did not seek to make Thompson a martyr either. Some of them reported the threats in . Others urged a stop to the harassment, because they were Once news of the threats had subsided, the gaming press to ridicule him. While it was possible to sympathize with Thompson over the way he was treated, it didn’t make his views any less ridiculous. So, alongside gamers, they carried on the mockery. But imagine if they hadn’t. Imagine, instead, that prominent game journalists embraced Thompson’s core argument – the one about games . Imagine, furthermore, that they began to rally mobs of activists on social media to pressure other websites into censoring . Then imagine that the moderators of gaming communities and comment sections declined to allow any critical discussion of Thompson and his work. If that had happened, #GamerGate would have arrived several years early. Critics of GamerGate argue that the revolt is nothing more than a pushback against a ‘broader’ audience. They say it’s anti-diversity, anti-inclusive. Most often, we hear it’s ‘toxic’. Dozens of articles have been published in this vein. They have been a long time coming. For years, politicized games journalists have harbored a simmering mix of of the current gaming audience. The problem with this narrative is that it mistakes opposition to culture warriors with opposition to diversity. It mistakes a disdain for ideology with a disdain for inclusivity. Odd behaviour for a movement that is allegedly hostile to women and minorities. Another community that frequently faces similar allegations is , a community so hateful and reactionary that it has its own thriving . These awful, anonymous misogynists have ploughed close to $23,000 into , a charity project to help women design video games. Not only that, but they created an entirely ordinary, non-idealized female to be used as a character in their videogames. Those bastards! Anti-gamers would like to characterize the current divide as one between inclusivity and exclusivity, but reality will always confound this narrative. Men, women, minorities, left-wingers, right-wingers, and even feminists have taken the side of GamerGate in recent weeks. It’s hard to find a movement that is more open to diversity – both of opinion and background. This is in stark contrast to the intolerant lock-step of their opponents, who have sought to developers and other journalists into accepting their worldview. One of the reasons why TFYC’s popularity continues to grow among gamers (and decline among their opponents) is precisely because they do not use these methods. Despite holding almost identical views to the ‘Social Justice Warriors’, they find themselves excluded from the activist clique due to their relatively tolerant attitudes. They are against attacking gamers’ current choices, preferring to create new ones alongside them. They do not seek to ferment fear and panic, or shame existing developers into altering their design process. They don’t want to ‘change the world’ – they just want to add to it. Gamers will always welcome new people and new ideas with open arms. What they will not welcome is a Thompson-like war for cultural hegemony, regardless of whether it comes from the left or the right. In a way, gamers of all races, genders and orientations like to exclude a minority. That minority is the culture warriors, who thrive in an atmosphere of fear and moral condemnation. They are an ill wind that blows no man or woman of any ethnicity any good. I am keenly aware that many critics will protest that they do not wish to create moral panics; they merely want to observe and analyse. I sympathize with these arguments. However, when art is accused of perpetuating violence, sexism, or racism, it has strayed beyond artistic critique and into the realm of political argument. “Subjective analysis” cannot be used as an excuse when historical and sociological arguments are being presented. Furthermore, when the is attacked as a pack of bigoted savages corrupted by gaming tropes, it is not even an argument. It’s a panic. And as the examples of #NotYourShield and The Fine Young Capitalists show, it’s also wrong. There has been an awful lot of hate on both sides of this divide. As with the allegations that gamers are “anti-inclusive,” there is more than one side to the story. Gamers are according to one journalist. Another implies she will of anyone who brings up the topic. “F*ck you, you self-hating b*tch,” says activist. “Toxic parasites,” says . . . . And . These are just a small selection of the spewed over social media during the past few weeks – often by professionals who should know better. This was accompanied by a in the gaming press declaring (in a stunning example of wishful thinking) that “gamers are dead.” The most notorious example of culture warrior attacks, however, was the and of the Fine Young Capitalists.The allegations of its founder, which he , are also quite shocking. The attacks on TFYC lodged particularly strongly in the minds of GamerGaters due to the double standard at work. Double standards are of course a natural symptom of political bias, but that doesn’t stop them being infuriating. On the face of it, TFYC were doing everything a social justice movement should be doing – except attacking the other side. They sought to build bridges rather than burn them. They believed in social justice, but they did not want to wage a culture war. And so, in a typically brutal and unforgiving fashion, the culture warriors turned on them. Most media accounts of GamerGate have assumed that abuse and attacks were only coming from a single direction. A more sensible analysis of the situation would point out the obvious: that this is an issue with two mutually hostile sides. Both sides will inevitably produce hatred. Insinuating, as critics of GamerGate do, that side is responsible for all the vitriol is a classic consequence of political bias. Our side good. Their side evil. Any information to the contrary is filtered out. If there is an imbalance, it does not lie in the levels of hatred, but in the levels of reporting. Given the large number of journalists and PR professionals in the anti-GamerGate camp, it is fairly predictable that they would be better at getting their side of the story into the mainstream press. And that’s why gamers are still shouting. Because they have yet to be heard. When I began writing this article, I was pretty sure that GamerGate was a serious and multifaceted enough issue to write about. Enter Julian Assange, answering a question on GamerGate-related shadowbans on Reddit, confirmed it beyond all doubt. It’s pathetic. But censorship by companies control privatized political space is now almost a norm. Facebook is implementing its own “laws” for social behaviour and politics. Even Twitter has now folded; censoring for example, leaks about the New Zealand prime minister just this week and some time ago banning Anonymous Sweden after a request from that country. High volume publication + control of publication by powerful organisations = censorship, all the time. We have to fight to create new networks of freedom. The old and powerful always become corrupt. This was followed up with tweets on the #GamerGate hashtag by the official WikiLeaks account: "shadowbans" user for asking a question about censorship on Reddit. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 'ers should know that the pattern of censorship & cronyism they see is mirrored at the very top. Level up: — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) Unsurprisingly, Twitter went mental. GamerGate is a warning of the perils of unaccountable and secretive moderation systems. The initial days of the controversy saw false DCMA notices, a culling of 25,000 user comments on Reddit, and a mass-banning of users on neoGAF. Users continue to be shadowbanned on Reddit. Even 4chan’s /v/ board initially prohibited threads on the topic. Once it became clear that the story could not be suppressed, some communities relaxed their policies. But it was too late – censorship of the story became central to the story itself. Critics will argue that someone banned on Reddit or neoGAF can simply go elsewhere on the Internet rather miss the point. Censorship is about denying certain views of an audience. Giving someone the freedom to speak in a deserted forest (or an unvisited website) doesn’t actually mean a great deal. Like GamerGate, the issue of online censorship has been simmering for a while. The balance between moderator power and user power in online communities is entirely one-sided. Users have no power to hold their moderators to account, and there is typically no user oversight regarding whose content gets removed and who gets banned. It’s unclear whether communities like Reddit censor out of a desire for a quiet life, or whether it is the simple product of a moderator’s whims. Either way, it is clear that the system is entirely unaccountable to users. As David Auerbach put it: https://twitter.com/AuerbachKeller/status/511675737171300352 If you hand power to a small group of people with zero transparency and oversight, mistakes will go un-corrected. People rarely acknowledge mistakes unless there is a mechanism for others to correct them. In many online communities, users have no way of raising issues about moderation without the risk of being banned themselves. The system is not sustainable. As the actions of moderators become increasingly driven by personal biases, more and more information will accumulate in unmoderated spaces. Meanwhile, those who confine themselves to moderated spaces will become increasingly unaware of the wider picture. The ultimate result is heavily biased groups of people who essentially live in different and mutually opposed realities. Conflict and hatred is inevitable. One site that appears to have realized the danger is . As well as the bias of the prevailing media narrative, the magazine’s editor recognized the danger of shutting down dialogue between competing sides. There’s nothing wrong with ensuring civility in a discussion. Too often, however, this is used as an excuse to exclude people who simply disagree with the prevailing opinion. “Troll” has become synonymous with “person I disagree with.” This is a problem that goes far beyond gaming. It is a problem faced by any website that has a system of banning and moderating. In tackling the problem, website owners would be wise to look to as a guide. Gaming has become pretty serious over the past few weeks. Two sides have emerged, which believe in completely different realities. If you are to listen to the extreme of one side, you will hear that gamers are reactionary right-wingers who excuse harassment. If you listen to the extreme of the other side, every critic of GamerGate is a brainwashed activist who thinks liking or makes you worse than Hitler. Holding up the extremes of both sides is a great way to avoid dialogue. It’s politics – not, as Tadhg Kelly suggests, in the sense of liberals versus conservatives, but in the more fundamental sense of “my side” versus “your side.” In this article, I’ve attempted to dispel some of the myths that one side has been able to successfully promote in the media, and outline some of the more moderate complaints of GamerGate. To briefly summarize, they are: at least, can escape that last charge. But many publications can’t. If there is any way out of this mess, the gaming press has to acknowledge its mistakes. Gaming shouldn’t be about politics. But so long as it is, be aware that there will always be two stories, not one. At its core, politics is about competing narratives. If you want a full understanding of GamerGate, be sure to hear both of them. |
Y Combinator-Backed Clara Labs Getting Funding From Sequoia Capital | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | Y Combinator-backed virtual assistant startup might be getting an infusion of cash, rumored to be in the $3-4 million range from Sequoia Capital. Co-founder of Clara Labs, Maran Nelson, doesn’t want to talk about that just yet and neither does Sequoia. However, a tweet sent from the Information’s Eric Newcomer on September 18 urged the Twittersphere to keep an eye on Nelson and suggested Clara Labs had already raised a round with the VC firm. Founder to watch: . Hear -backed Clara Labs raised from — Eric Newcomer (@EricNewcomer) While Nelson has confirmed a funding round is in the works, she says that it is not $3 million or $4 million. Our source says that the raise is around that range. Separately, a source inside Sequoia has said they couldn’t confirm if there was a deal, but if there was that there would be no talk of it on Sequoia’s end for awhile. Clara automates meeting coordination over email and manages your calendar for you. Maran indicated there were big plans for the company beyond just that. For now it’s a contextually based AI software layer that promises to save you time in your scheduling and emails free of human error. Prices range from $200 – $600 per month, with the first month free. Other virtual personal assistants in the space such as and work via smartphone to schedule meetings and keep your calendar up-to-date. This is not to be confused with a separate Jarvis that also acts as a siri-like personal assistant but Clara Labs participated in the summer 2014 Y Combinator batch. We’ll keep you posted if we hear more. |
3D Printing With Sand Using The Power Of The Sun | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | “So what are you doing this weekend, Markus?” “Oh, you know. Heading out to the desert and harnessing the to make a 3D printer that can print objects . You?” “… catching up on Breaking Bad.” You know the kid in your old neighborhood that spent his spare time frying ants with a magnifying glass? This is like that — except instead of a magnifying glass, he’s using an big ol’ fresnel lens. And instead of roasting insects, he’s . Built by artist Markus Kayser, the “SolarSinter” concept isn’t too disimmilar from laser sintering printers to print otherwise impossible objects out of metal. A focused sun beam is a whole lot less precise than a finely-honed laser, of course — but the core concepts are the same. I bet this guy could make a mean sand castle. [via ] |
Amazon’s Goodreads App Finally Gets A Makeover | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | , the social network for book lovers, has at last seen its first major update since . This week, Goodreads rolled out a significant redesign on iOS (coming soon to Android) – something regular Goodreads users have wanted for some time. Now, instead of having you land on an outdated, grid-like homescreen when the app is first launched, it immediately displays a “news feed” filled with your friends’ recent updates on the network, including books they’ve read, rated, reviewed and more. Here, you can like and comment on the posts from friends with ease, delivering on Goodreads’ promise to function as more of a social network for book readers, and not just a utility where you independently catalog your own progress. Overall, the look-and-feel of the app has been vastly improved to look like something that fits in on Apple’s new operating iOS 8…or iOS 7, for that matter. While it may not be the most beautiful app on your iPhone or iPad, it’s such a dramatic improvement over the old interface that it’s hard not to be giddy about the changes. (Well, if you’re the kind of person who gets giddy over app updates, I guess. *) Finding your way around the app has also been improved, as it includes now includes a bottom navigation bar for accessing the Home feed, a “My Books” section, a search option for finding books on Goodreads,, a barcode scanner for adding books to your “To Read” shelf, and a “More” tab that shows you the remaining sections, like recommendations, challenges, groups, events and more. These are not new features, to be clear, but they have been better placed for the most part. The Recommendations section is especially nice to use, allowing you to tap filter your suggestions by genre or shelf, and then flip through book thumbnails using your finger. Oddly, though, certain sections remain empty despite the app having enough information to generate some title suggestions. (Is there really no fiction it can recommend for me?) However, the picks based on what’s on my “To-Read” shelf look interesting enough, and include fiction, so I’ll manage. In addition, you can now quickly create new custom bookshelves to complement your “To-Read,” “Currently Reading,” and “Read” shelves – another welcome option that will allow Goodreads users to better curate lists of recommended books, like “best business books,” “great new fiction,” “favorite memoirs,” or anything else you want to share with your book-reading friends and fans. Meanwhile, under the “My Books” tab, it’s easy to update your current progress by tapping a button and entering in a page number. (Though it’s still frustrating the app can’t just pull this information from your Kindle or the mobile Kindle app for iOS or Android. But at least the Goodreads website now lets you quickly add your Amazon books to Goodreads with just a click.) Best of all, the update gives longtime Goodreads users hope that Amazon is not abandoning the property as many big companies often do following an acquisition. And with the changes, there’s even a chance that Amazon will be able to revitalize to Goodreads audience, who may have stopped regularly engaging with the service as lagged to keep up with modern user interface trends, and failed to deliver more usable features over time. Amazon says that there are over 20 million Goodreads users, who have added more than 570 million books to their shelves. That’s already a bit of an improvement in their figures since the March acquisition when Goodreads reportedly had 16 million users. Goodreads is . |
Ballmer To Purge His Sportsball Team Of Those Evil Apple Things | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, and new owner of some sort of sports team, is still pretty serious about hardware. In an , Ballmer indicated that his team, the one he paid $2 billion for, won’t use Apple tech. Nope. It’s Microsoft all the way down: “Most of the Clippers on are Windows, some of the players and coaches are not,” Ballmer said. “And Doc kind of knows that’s a project. It’s one of the first things he said to me: ‘We are probably going to get rid of these iPads, aren’t we?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we probably are.’ But I promised we would do it during the off season.” Sorry. Your iPad will have to go. It isn’t immediately clear what impact the change will have on the performance of the team. |
Ello, Ello? New ‘No Ads’ Social Network Ello Is Blowing Up Right Now | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | In March a new social network launched promising the opposite business model to Facebook, i.e. not selling ads based on user data and instead relying on, perhaps, paid premium features to keep going. then sunk without a trace until, in the last 24-48 hours or so, activity on the site completely blew up. And this is a pretty basic social network with the bare minimum of features. Why? A combination of factors. Perhaps it was Facebook’s trenchant stance against LGBT users having both a real name and ‘persona’ name. Ello got traction with the LGBT community after Facebook disabled the accounts of some drag artists who used their performance names instead of their “real” names. Musicians with stage names have also complained. Or perhaps it was famous drag queen Ru Paul tweeting about it? No one quite knows. But as of today, most of your friends will be asking their other friends how to get an invite to the invite-only network to secure their coveted user name. On Ello, as on Twitter, real names are not required. But there are downsides to the network. There is a lack of privacy controls. It’s not possible to block someone who is abusive. But Ello has already e-mailed users saying these features are coming. We’ve seen Facebook alternatives, like Diaspora, come and go. Or ones like Google+ come then fall flat. Ello might be onto something more organic. Diaspora was certainly too geeky and probably way too early. Perhaps it’s Ello’s time? Today co-founder Paul Budnitz said they will remain . This does of course mean they are unlikely to attract formal, institutional venture capital. But what the heck. It may end up going places. (UPDATE: It turns out funding from Vermont based venture firm FreshTracks Capital back in March). Budnitz, the former founder of , says the idea is that this is a “simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network.” They build Ello as a private network by a group of seven artists and programmers, but after using it privately for about a year they decided to rebuild Ello from scratch, and open it by invitation to the public. He says the site is doubling in size every 3-4 days. “Most of the excitement we’re experiencing comes from a combination of Ello’s simple & elegant interface, and the fact that the network will never have ads. Without ads, we are free to design features for users first, without advertisers in mind. We also don’t sell data, and even offer our users the option to opt-out of analytic tracking of their sessions when they use the network,” he told us via email. Aiming at designers, artists, and creators first, Ello’s native mobile apps are “coming later”. Right now the jury is out on whether it has a future. But getting this much traction in such a short time means it’s about to get somewhere, even if taking on the mighty Facebook and Twitter is a losing game at this point. You can follow / friend / ello . |
Apple Says iPhone 6 And 6 Plus Bending Complaints Number Less Than 10 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | Apple has responded to the various reports of , saying that it’s “extremely rare,” and that in fact, only nine people out of all the customers that bought devices thus far have complained. That would presumably mean nine out of the well over 10 million that have sold thus far. Apple noted to TechCrunch that under normal use, the problem rarely occurs, which is in contrast to the demonstration videos hitting YouTube showing users deliberately trying to deform their devices in extremely artificial circumstances. Since the first reports had emerged, mostly in forum posts on Apple enthusiast sites, others including Wired contributor Mat Honan have also come forward noting that their devices had warped somewhat. Apple also added that the newest iPhones are built with “steel/titanium inserts” to “reinforce stress locations,” and that they use “the strongest glass in the industry” in order to prevent any problems like those described. In addition to the use of high-quality materials, iPhone 6 and 6 Plus also underwent ample testing to ensure they can endure bending, sitting, torsion and other kinds of stress, even over prolonged periods, throughout their design and development. These kinds of tests are standard in the industry, and can be seen directly in in 2008. The echo chamber that is the tech blogosphere has perhaps contributed to blowing this problem out of proportion, which often happens when new hardware ships and a small but noteworthy issue comes to light. Apple has faced similar uproar in the past, particularly around bending with its devices since they switched to metal cases, but this time the amplification was especially loud. |
Instagram Lets You #Selfielapse By Adding Front-Facing Camera Option To Hyperlapse | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | Instagram’s first update to its timelapse app will let you create mini-travelogues of your face hurtling through the world. Hyperlapse now lets you capture timelapses with the front-facing camera to create what Instagram calls a #Selfielapse. The app also now supports iPhone 6 and 6 Plus screen sizes. Instagram tells TechCrunch that since Hyperlapse’s it has been used by and even the . “So far, the most liked Hyperlapse shared to Instagram is by photographer David Guttenfelder for National Geographic.” Here’s my first shot at a #Selfielapse, taken while riding my electric skateboard through SF.
Shooting a #Selfielapse was easy, though it’s tempting to shift your eyes back and forth from the camera at the top of the phone to the screen where you can see yourself and frame your video. The new option could make Hyperlapses more exciting than the landscape time-lapses people often post. Some wish the selfie craze would die off, but in lieu of a facepocalpyse, at least self-portraiture is evolving. |
Sendwithus Raises $2.3M To Help Marketers Optimize Their Emails | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | Email marketing startup is announcing that it has raised $2.3 million in additional seed funding. This is one of those funding announcements that comes months after the deal itself. Co-founder Matt Harris told me that the company, which was incubated by Y Combinator, raised its initial seed funding “right before Y Combinator started”, then raised additional funding in March. The Sendwithus team wanted to announce the funding now, in part, to highlight its new features and the success it has seen so far. When earlier this year, it offered tools like A/B testing to optimize transactional emails — i.e., emails for specific purposes and tied to specific events, such as “reset your password” and “thanks for signing up!” (The service integrates with email delivery services like SendGrid and Mailgun.) Harris admitted that focusing on transactional emails sounds “super boring.” However, every company sends them, customers are more likely to open them, and they’re messages that “most marketers don’t get access to and don’t even think about.” Sendwithus allows marketers to test different variations of those messages without having to go through a developer. He also said that at larger companies, sending these emails “becomes a real pain to manage, produce, and automate … so what we’re effectively doing is productizing those systems better than these companies would ever do themselves.” More recently, Sendwithus has added segmentation capabilities, allowing businesses to drill down on specific groups in their customer database — for example users who received an activation email but didn’t activate. “The end result is that with very little effort, this company is able to send really personalized email to a specific segment of customers,” Harris said. Apparently the company has been seeing 30 percent monthly revenue growth for the past eight months, and the product has been used to optimize 250 million emails. The funding, meanwhile, was led by Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures, with participation from SV Angel, Maiden Lane, Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, Paul Buchheit, Kevin Hale (Tan, Ohanian, Buchheit, and Hale are all partners at YC), Scott Banister, and others. Sendiwthus has now raised a total of $2.6 million. |
SurveyMonkey Makes Its First Investment, Leads Mobile App CRM Solution Provider Apptentive’s $5.3M Series A | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | , a company that allow developers to engage an app’s users, communicate directly, request reviews and more, has now closed on $5.3 million in Series A funding. In an unusual turn, the new funding round was led in part by SurveyMonkey, and will see Damon Cronkey,VP of Corporate Development and Strategy for SurveyMonkey, joining Apptentive’s board. The funding was a strategic move for SurveyMonkey it seems, as the company will now partner with Apptentive in order to provide “technical and product interactions” for both companies’ customers, including Fortune 500 Enterprise brands. “What’s unique about this is that SurveyMonkey is leading the round and this is the first time they’re making an investment in a company,” notes Apptentive co-founder and CEO Robi Ganguly. “We think it speaks to what we’ve accomplished so far in helping companies communicate and hear from their mobile customers. This is a pretty exciting milestone for our company,” he notes. He tells us SurveyMonkey’s funding came about as the two teams had been chatting for a while about how they could deliver better products. Apptentive’s expertise on mobile is a good complement to what SurveyMonkey does on the web, says Ganguly. “The SurveyMonkey leadership team is fantastic and has built a company that we really admire,” he adds. Also participating in the round were previous investors, Founders Co-op and Golden Venture Partners, as well as Apptentive’s founders. In addition, Chicago-based Origin Ventures also led, alongside SurveyMonkey. Apptentive is one of several businesses capitalizing on developers’ needs for a mobile app CRM solution that allows them to better interact with their apps’ users, before those customers turn to the App Store or Google Play and leave messages there, possibly in the form of bad reviews. With a mobile app CRM solution, developers can instead pre-empt users’ concerns about bugs, feature requests and other complaints, by messaging them directly within the app itself, or even redirecting those preparing to leave a one- or two-star review to another channel, instead of the app store. Solutions like these can also be used to learn more about what users like about an app, and what features they’d like to see in a future release. The end goal with Apptentive and similar products is to increase customer retention, while turning users into engaged fans of the product in question. Apptentive competes with a host solutions on the market, including those from Appsfire, Appboy, Helpshift, Mixpanel, Localytics, and more. It counts among its customers several well-known names, including Concur, AllRecipes, Overstock.com, UrbanSpoon, RealNetworks, Big Fish Games, Glympse, Gamehouse, and others. Today, Apptentive’s tools are integrated into “thousands” of mobile applications on iOS and Android, 100 of which are “key accounts.” Combined, it reaches over 150 million end users. According to Ganguly, the company now powers over 5 million customer conversations per month, but he declined to provide revenue details only saying growth is “very healthy and accelerating on a monthly basis.” One of Apptentive’s differentiating features it a proprietary measurement it calls “ ” which allows app developers to see how well their own app is loved, as compared with the rest of the app ecosystem. Love Score reports offer a variety of customer insights, including how popular an app is versus others, analysis of app store reviews, reviewer quality and bias, and more. Ganguly says the company also excels in helping companies really converse with their customers on mobile – it’s not about one-way marketing tools that broadcast messages to customers, but is instead about companies actually to an app’s users. In addition, Apptentive doesn’t wait to engage customers after they have a problem (it’s not a “support” channel) but helps its developers find the right time to engage with their app’s users to gather opinions and feedback. The additional funding is being put toward further product development to expand its suite of in-app tools, plus sales and marketing. Apptentive will also be growing its team on both the engineering and sales sides. |
SK Planet Launches Wayfare In App Stores To Take Penpalling To Your Mobile Device | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | If you’re looking for something more from your online or mobile social media than hot-or-not left and right swiping, the SK Planet, the media and messaging subsidiary of Korea’s telecom giant SK Telecom, has just launched a new app called in and app stores to bring penpalling to social media. Developed by a young Korean programming wunderkind, Jiho Kang, Wayfare is the second act for a startup idea Kang had initially pursued in the U.S. Originally called Wander, the Wayfare app has you input basic information like the country ad city you’re living in, and it then prompts you to book a ticket to either a random destination or to choose from a pre-selected group of countries. The app then matches a user with someone who’s on the app in that location, prompting both to share photos, messages, and information about their lives. “Unlike other apps that are instant, our app is different in that it actually asks you to wait,” says Kang. Responses — given the differences in time zones, are almost assured to not be immediate, which Kang says allows for more thoughtful messaging and deeper connections. “This isn’t like Tinder where you flip through 50 different women. This person is really a special person living in a place that you probably haven’t heard of and you wouldn’t have been able to meet up with this person.” Kang noted that while it’s difficult for beta users to find the right match initially, once people do start connecting, they’re hooked. Along with two co-founders, Kang initially embarked on the journey to create Wayfare while working at 500 Startups in 2010 and 2011. The team wasn’t able to raise a Series A, because of “circumstances”, but they kept the servers running to keep up with their 10,000 strong user-base. The team parted company and Kang returned to Korea, eventually landing a job at SK Planet. The idea for Wayfare was still with him, and the users were still on the app, so he pitched the company’s internal incubator and the company agreed to put some resources behind it. As with any social media and photo-sharing app these days, Wayfare has tried to come up with ways to deal with what Kang calls the “junk” problem. “Lots of apps that you hook you up with random strangers (meet new friends) have a problem with too many people sharing penis photos,” writes Kang. “We have a reporting system in place where users that have been flagged three times will automatically be banned by the system. We also review reports from users to actually check what the offending content was.” Kang says that dick pics have popped up in less than 0.5% of the 40,000 photos that have been shared through the service. Another feature of the app is that it doesn’t match based on gender. “We don’t provide the option to filter matches by gender,” he writes. Of the 10,000 people on the site now, roughly 28% are in the U.S., another 14% are in Japan, 10% are in the UK, 7% are based in Korea, Germany represents 7%, and there are 108 other countries who represent 34% of the app’s user base. What about the language barrier? You don’t need to be fluent in another language to chat with someone thanks to a machine translation feature that’s part of the Wayfare app, which has allowed 30% of interactions to happen between people who don’t share a language. And while the pace of the app may disappoint–you have to wait at least 20 minutes before you receive a reply–Kang says it’s intentional. “I believe our system creates more genuine interactions and relationships in the end.” |
Niantic Labs Announces User-Generated Missions In Ingress | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | Niantic Labs’ latest update to , its augmented reality game, to the game on Android and iOS and lets players create quests for their friends or strangers using a browser-based mission creator. Not everybody will be allowed to create content right away with the new update. Niantic Labs is rolling the feature out slowly, reaching out to high-level players to gauge their interest in creating missions for others. Niantic Labs VP of Product John Hanke says that the feature will gradually be rolled out to players above a certain level threshold within the game itself and then be opened up to others over time. The actual tool for creating missions is rather simple. You’re presented with a version of Google Maps that’s been skinned with Ingress’ interface aesthetic, and can place markers anywhere you’d like players to go when in your mission. You can be explicit with the locations, drawing in data from Niantic Labs’ , or incredibly vague, leaving hints about where they should go next. When going from point-to-point in the real world, players complete their objectives by “scanning” the location, a passive action that’s mostly meant to give a sense of accomplishment to reaching each destination. Players trying out Missions can find them within the Android and iOS (soon) apps when they are located in the city they’d like to play in. That means I couldn’t look for cool missions in San Francisco while planning my day from the comfort of my apartment in Oakland for instance. But missions themselves can be made from anywhere, so if you came back from an awesome vacation and wanted others to see the cool sites you did, you could create a mission stopping at all of your favorite landmarks. |
Disrupt In London To Showcase New Google Ventures Europe Partners | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | The second and will see the outing of the Google Ventures team in Europe. There’s still time to grab a ticket . Earlier this year Google announced it was launching a branch of its venture capital investment arm in London. Google Ventures Europe will have an initial fund of $100 million to invest in “the best ideas from the best European entrepreneurs.” The news is big for the European tech ecosystem. But although the names associated with it are well known in Europe, we have not yet seen them all together to explain how they will operate this new fund in Europe. But at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe we will see the whole team on stage at once. The new European branch has five general partners: Eze Vidra, who set up Google Campus in London; serial entrepreneur Tom Hulme; long-time UK angel investor and adviser Peter Read; Avid Larizadeh, the head of the UK arm of code.org and co-founder of Bottica.com. Google Ventures has also brought over MG Siegler.
Eze is a general partner at Google Ventures. Previously, Eze was the European head of Google for Entrepreneurs, where he helped forge partnerships to strengthen the European startup ecosystem. He also led Campus London, a collaborative environment for startups created by Google For Entrepreneurs. While at Google, Eze spearheaded strategic commerce partnerships in EMEA, and helped launch Google Shopping, Google Shopping Express, and Google Wallet. Before joining Google, Eze held product management leadership roles at Shopping.com in Israel, Gerson Lehrman Group in New York, Ask.com in Silicon Valley, and AOL Europe in London, where he was the principal product manager for search in EMEA. In 2003, Eze co-founded a startup in Israel, developing text-input technology for mobile phones. He is the author of two patents on web search and online advertising. In 2012, Eze founded Techbikers, a not-for-profit cycling community that collaborates with Room to Read to build schools and libraries in India and Nepal. Eze is a trustee of Up Europe and an advisory board member of BBC Worldwide Labs. Eze received his B.A. in business and IT management cum laude from IDC in Israel and an MBA from London Business School. A native Argentinean raised in Israel, Eze is fluent in Spanish, Hebrew, and English, and lives in London with his family.
Tom is a general partner at Google Ventures. Previously, Tom was a design director at IDEO Europe, where he founded OpenIDEO, an open innovation platform that has over 60,000 users from more than 170 countries. Tom also launched OIEngine, an online platform for IDEO clients, including Harvard Business School and the Knight Foundation.
Before IDEO, Tom was managing director of Marcos, a British sports car manufacturer. As a serial entrepreneur, Tom also founded Magnom, a magnetic filter startup. Tom’s filter designs have been widely used in Formula One, Superbikes, JCB loaders, and central heating systems. Tom has been recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and has been featured in WIRED UK’s Top 100 Digital Power Brokers list every year since the list has been published. He has also been included in the Evening Standard list of London’s 1000 Most Influential People. Tom earned a first class bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Bristol, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he received the Baker Scholar Award of high distinction. Tom has also received an honorary doctorate from University Arts London.
Avid is a general partner at Google Ventures. Prior to Google Ventures, Avid co-founded Boticca, a global marketplace for independent brands of fashion accessories. Avid has been involved in the startup ecosystem as a developer, product manager, founder, investor, and advisor since 1998. Avid started investing at Accel Partners in London in 2006, where she focused on software and Internet investments. She also held product management roles at Tellme Networks, eBay, and Skype, and began programming in college. While at eBay, Avid was granted a patent for her work on a suite of selling tools. In addition to her role with Google Ventures, Avid is an advisor to Founders4Schools and the Breteau Foundation. She serves on the Harvard Business School European Advisory Board. She also leads Code.org and the Hour of Code in the UK. Avid earned her B.S. and M.S. in engineering at Stanford University, where she was a Mayfield Fellow. She also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and is a Kauffman Fellow. She currently serves on the Harvard Business School European Advisory Board. She speaks French, English, Farsi, and German.
Peter is a general partner at Google Ventures. Before joining Google Ventures, Peter was the managing director of Entertainment Insights, providing strategy and corporate development advice to media and communications clients.
Peter has been an active angel investor and advisor for more than 15 years in London, Berlin, Stockholm, and the U.S. Prior to Entertainment Insights, he was president of Nielsen Entertainment in Los Angeles. Peter was also a special partner at Vitruvian, director of GP Bullhound, Governor at Beaconsfield High School, and digital advisor to Oxfam, Sport England, and The Roundhouse. He was an associate producer on Rabbit Fever and an (uncredited) actor in Flyin’ Ryan, which both received some of the worst reviews in movie history. Peter received his B.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from University of Oxford and his MBA from INSEAD.
MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on seed and early-stage investments. He has been deeply involved in the startup space since 2005, first as a web developer, then as a writer, and most recently as an investor and advisor. He’s currently spending time in London to help get the Google Ventures Europe organization up and running. He remains active, looking at new investments in the U.S. as well. Before joining Google Ventures, MG was a founding partner of CrunchFund, an early-stage investment fund. Prior to that, he reported on the startup world as a writer for both TechCrunch and VentureBeat. MG still writes a weekly column for TechCrunch on top of writing on his own sites and from time-to-time doing movie reviews in haiku. Originally from Ohio, MG graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving out west to work in Hollywood. One day, he will write that killer screenplay. The Disrupt conference in London kicks off with the , followed by two days of on-stage interviews and panels with some of the biggest names in technology. TechCrunch Disrupt Europe will also bring the and to London. Startup Battlefield competitors pitch their companies live and on stage 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 and Fitbit. 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 . To request media accreditation, email tcdisruptlondon [ @ ] balloupr.com . |
Price-Tracking Service Nifti Switches Gears, Launches Social Polling App Cinch | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | Pricing tracking and alerts service is testing the waters with a new application called (no, not Klout’s , but very close.) In fact, Nifti’s new app is practically a variation on Klout’s earlier arrival, as Klout’s Cinch is about asking for recommendations and Nifti’s Cinch is about asking for opinions. That is, it’s meant to be a quick way to poll your friends and get their feedback by posting photos and asking friends to choose which is best. The company envisions it being used for a range of quick questions, like which selfie looks better, where to have dinner, what to wear, and more. Explains Nifti co-founder Nathan Sharp, the idea to spin out the new app actually came from observations of how people were using the company’s alerts service. But the move was mainly prompted by a general slowing-down in the broader “price tracking” space itself, which had seen rivals like , and Decide.com having an un-bragworthy to eBay. Meanwhile, though Nifti was performing well, Sharp admits growth was “promising, but linear.” Nifti’s direct competitor Wantworthy was going through struggles of its own, too. Following Nifti’s raise of $1.2 million in additional seed funding in December, the company brought on the CTO and the Creative Director of Wantworthy, Ryan Fitzgerald and Julian Zarate, to rethink Nifti’s approach to the price-tracking space. After examining Nifti’s analytics and talking with its users, the team found that much of Nifti’s organic growth occurred when users received a price alert then sent it to friends to get their opinions. “The more we talked to people, the more we realized that this wasn’t social sharing – it was private polling,” says Sharp. “Neither Nifti, nor other messaging apps, were doing a great job of allowing people to quickly gather opinions around a photo-based decision. So we set out to build a visual polling service to drive Nifti’s organic growth to the next level.” Initially, the polling feature was tested within Nifti’s main application, leading some to believe the company had entirely pivoted away from price tracking. But Sharp says that’s not entirely true – Nifti’s move to social polling was a test. Shortly afterwards, the team decided to spin polling out into a new app called Cinch. Today, , but the company’s mobile presence is represented by . The new app is simple to use – you just snap a few photos and send them to anyone in your phone’s contacts. Recipients can then vote in just a tap, and they don’t even need to download the app to do so. Friends can’t see others’ votes until they vote themselves, allowing you to receive unbiased feedback. The polls can also be shared on social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp. [vimeo 96155519 w=500 h=226] In addition to personal or casual use, Sharp notes that Cinch could be handy for those in creative professions, too. “It’s also an ideal app for professionals in visual-oriented fields like designers and interior decorators that are in constant need of feedback,” he says. Nifti’s $1.2 million round of funding included Otto Capital, Dan Edelman (recently retired CEO of Macy’s West), and Timothy Kasbe (COO Gloria Jeans; former CIO of Sears). With this additional investment, the 6-person team at Nifti now has more than a year before it will need to pursue its Series A. However, even a successful polling app can’t necessarily find enough sustainable growth to make it on its own either, especially after VC investment – as popular social polling app recently found. ( this month in what appears to be largely a talent acquisition.) The new Cinch app is , as a free download. |
null | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 22 | null |
Mohiomap Turns Evernote, Google Drive, And Dropbox Accounts Into Mind Maps | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 8 | 3 | Like many other people, I use as an information dump. Despite my best efforts to keep things organized with multiple notebooks and tags, my account has become almost as unwieldy as an overstuffed filing cabinet, with stacks of PDFs, web clippings, and notes going back years. That’s why I was intrigued by , a web app that turns your Evernote into mind maps. Mohiomap also recently added support for and accounts. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aivmnk9iQ_U] , which has received seed funding from investors in New Zealand, where it is based, currently uses a freemium model. In the free version, users can look at, navigate, and search their mind maps. With the premium feature, which costs $5 a month, you can choose from custom themes and create connections between different nodes on your map; access an analytics dashboard; and add comments to notes or files. Mohiomap wants to solve the problem of information overload and help people organize their content in a visual form. In addition to Evernote, Google Drive, and Dropbox, Mohiomap has also rolled out an early prototype of their , which started as an experiment to see if they could apply their technology to other data sources. The startup was founded by Christian Hirsch, who got the idea for Mohiomap while doing PhD research in computer science at the University of Auckland. “I was looking into visual languages and visualizations and how they can help with language management. While doing that, I found that there might be some very interesting commercial applications,” says Hirsch. Then he participated in Evernote’s annual development challenge. “We wanted to apply this technology to Evernote because we saw the issue of having a lot of content and how to get a visual overview of what’s in there, to comprehend all this information and knowledge stored in the platform, and make it more accessible,” he says. At that time, Mohiomap was an experiment, but after getting good feedback at the development challenge and being asked to make Mohiomap available in Evernote’s app marketplace, Hirsch decided there was potential for the startup. Mohiomap officially launched a year ago. Mind maps are “simply an alternative way of exploring and interacting with your information,” says Hirsch. “We are used to interacting with data using a list-based approach, a very flat structure of a long list of documents or folders or so on. We offer an alternative way of looking at and interacting with that. By giving more context, it’s naturally a better way of seeing the context of different information, how your documents or certain projects look like, and how these patterns compare to other projects.” Uses cases include utilizing Mohiomap as a visual alternative to the search tools in Evernote, Dropbox, and Google Drive; rediscovering and organizing older files and documents; or simply getting a grasp on all the information you have stored in each platform. Mohiomap’s future plans include working on its Twitter visualization tool and expanding to other data sources and cloud storage platforms. In addition to consumer-facing products, Hirsch says he also wants to start expanding Mohiomap to enterprise cloud platforms so employees can create mind maps to share with their workplace. The startup is also working on a native mobile app for iPad. Mohiomap currently monetizes through its premium subscriptions and is planning to roll out custom products for enterprise customers, such as visualization databases or other document repositories. |
The Seven Constants Of Game Design, Part Three | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 8 | 3 | This is the third in a three-part series of posts about the fundamentals of game design, in particular the seven immutable factors (I term them “constants”) that both limit and empower gameplay. The constants are universal and transcend factors such as platform, and they contribute to how games manage to be fun, to impart story, to seem believable, to engender states of flow and so on. In I discussed fascination, imperfection and urgency, while I covered naturalism and the ever-present difficulties of time. Now let’s dig into the final two. A popular analogy which floats around video games is that of the player becoming a character. “Here,” the game seems to say, “step into my amazing world and be the star.” Certainly many games are sold in that way, and a good deal are written with the premise that the player takes on a role and becomes the person she’s playing. But this is only half right. The player does indeed step into your world and wear the mask you assign to her, but she doesn’t actually become Mario, Lara Croft, the Master Chief, Cloud or any of the cast of thousands of video game heroes. The player does not become the hero, the hero becomes the player. At face value this seems a little counterintuitive. There are, for example, active cosplay communities around many games. There are clear franchise loyalties to characters like Link or Solid Snake that sell games by the truckload. There is the genre of roleplaying games whose entire premise is built around making a character, building a character, having a story experience with a character and so on. How is it possible that players are not becoming characters? The key is to understand the role of the self. All gameplay is fundamentally creative. To score a soccer goal is creative, as is to build a world. It’s to make something from within, something personally pleasing and meaningful. So one aspect of the self at work through play is self expression. Players construct digital body images based on idealized versions of who they are, or believe they should be, and they act according to those self-derived rules rather than imposed “in-character” actions. Self expression is why the issue of gender and representation has become so important. New communities of players don’t really see themselves as muscular white American-Imperialist dudes. They don’t want to wear that mask while they play. Another aspect of self in play is self determination. This is the “why we tend to hate cut scenes” rule or the “why we hate being given false choices” rule. A player may be wearing the mask that you’ve provided as their in-game presence, but they still want to play. They still want to make agented choices that feel vital, to be taken seriously as a component of the overall game rather than an observer. They react negatively to didacticism by trying to rebel, to find their own way and to rephrase presented choices in ways that are more interesting to them. As a result players often behave like petulant psychopaths, and accommodating them can feel disappointing to the game designer. Many are the designers who wish that gaming would “grow up” and that players would be a bit more noble than they tend to be. There are many designers who wish that the players focused on the themes of rather than bursting out laughing . Or that they’d play a game like and get into its mood rather than questioning whether it’s really a game at all. The frustrated designer wonders why players can’t seem to play in the spirit they intended. However consider the indie hit . The game initially places the player in the role of a hero looking for his princess, but over the course of the game something much darker emerges. The hero is slowly revealed to be something of a stalker, leading to a wonderfully uncomfortable sensation of unwilling yet compelling play. Consider another indie hit, . In this game you play the role of a customs agent in a fictional Soviet-style republic – which seems simple enough – until you find yourself in the awkward position of clearing or rejecting people with harrowing life stories, often counter to your functional goals. Then the question becomes do you play into your selfishness. The self is a very difficult constant to deal with but also a very powerful tool. Players prefer tabula rasa characters that allow them to be themselves, but this doesn’t mean the game maker is solely relegated to “fun provider”. Artistically successful game design usually plays into the idea that the player is permitted to do as she chooses without overt judgement, but sets up scenarios that lead her to make empathic choices on her own. Thus she engenders some personal connection in the game that goes beyond its nuts and bolts and becomes a deep fan, a cosplayer, a devotee. That is, if that’s the kind of game you want to make. Success. Winning. Mastery. Achievement. Optimizing. Strategizing. Closure. Addiction. Engagement. Rush. Flow. Fiero. Progression… There’s something about the play of games that demands not only that we can take action, that there are rules, dynamism, thrills and spills but also that the play goes somewhere. That after playing there will be a final state, a thing done, seen, overcome or completed. That it won’t be an endless treadmill, a vacuous simulation or a stateless toy. One way to say that is to say that . In the wider sense they are, but it requires a pretty loose definition of the term “win”. Some people get hung up on whether games like can be ultimately won, for example, which leads to complex explanations of levels of winning. Some point to games like that lack formal goals and ask how can they be won? This too leads to contortions and redefinitions of language. Finally there’s the political aspect. “Win” sounds very bro-gamer, very sporty and competitive, and leads players of games like to say it doesn’t fit with why they play. A less contentious way is to say that all games are bounded by the constant of purpose, that players will only stay with a game as long as they believe their play actively pushes it forward to somewhere else. Whether we’re talking about the player dumping quarters into slots, the athlete working on her sprinting, the adventure gamer solving riddles or the fan searching for that triple word score, the belief in purpose defines the appeal of any game to any player. And conversely without faith a game breaks its spell and is no longer really a game. The sense of purpose can be lost in many ways. One is when the game becomes opaque, such as I discussed when talking about naturalism. If a game just seems arbitrary or unfair then it’s purposeless. Another is if the game is too hard or too easy, falling out of Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” state. Another is if it is already mastered, if it feels that there’s nothing else to learn, no new mystery to see, no new veil to be uncovered. Another is if the player perceives cheating. Another is if the game’s mechanics don’t lead to a sufficiently fascinating dynamic. Another is if the win conditions of the game seem flaky. Another is if the game becomes repetitive. Another (more recent, and especially in the West) is if the game seems overly gated, cynical and essentially about the money. And – like that moment that most of us experience when we realize that lacks any element of skill – once the sense of purpose is gone it tends to stay gone. Purpose is a time bomb of boredom. It will eventually go off, but it does so under different conditions for a variety of players. It’s rare that games truly stand the test of time, with many of the biggest and splashiest games dying off more quickly than we realize. However the manner in which they decline often resembles a long tail. Sure, maybe you only get a week’s play time from 50% of players, but equally you might get a year or longer from 5%. As long as those players keep finding something that satisfies their sense of purpose, they stay. So it’s up to you how you structure your game around purpose. Do you front-load it with all the cool stuff or keep its secrets back? Do you aim for a short play time in the knowledge that 80% of the players will get to the end before they disconnect, but thus only give yourself a limited window in which to work. Or do you accept the fall off and design for those who’ll commit? Does the business model around your game work better if you attempt a smash-and-grab (all trailer, all entice) or opt for something more freemium/subscriber-ish? Should you make the game hard but worth mastering or easy but worth watching through once? The choices are yours. It’s in the nature of all schemas to be incomplete, to miss some exception or set of conditions that don’t quite fit. Similarly it’s in the nature of all schemas (especially in the games industry) to be roundly rejected by a portion of readers because they don’t fit their beliefs. I fully expect that some readers will do the same ( ). So it goes. Personally I find schemas such as constants to be great tools for framing how I create, a checklist of things to validate against but also a set of spanners that I might deploy. Knowing that all avenues of exploration don’t yield equal results shouldn’t be a downer. There’s no shame in musicians acknowledging that audiences need rhythm, nor should there be one in accepting that the perfect hero player isn’t real. As I said in my , future-addiction gets depressing. So does the notion that games are in their infancy or that their design is indescribable. The fact that we can talk about them in increasingly concrete terms helps us to push them forward by avoiding common pitfalls and avoiding waste. Hopefully you’ll find these articles useful in that vein. |
Thai Fashion Site WearYouWant Scoops Up $1.5M Series A | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 8 | 3 | Thailand should be a e-commerce company’s dream—it has a high mobile penetration rate ( ) and social media networks are particularly popular there. But e-commerce companies in Thailand still face the challenges like low credit card usage and limited logistics networks. , a fashion retail site, has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding to tackle those problems. The round was lead by Digital Media Partners (DMP), a venture firm that specializes in emerging markets, as well as Japanese e-marketing firm OPT SEA. Other investors include IMG Investment Partners and WearYouWant co-founder Julien Chalte. Founded by Chalte and Martin Toft Sorensen in 2011, currently carries 450 brands and 12,500 items, and claims “tens of thousands” of active customers. WearYouWant serves as a marketplace, alllowing offline vendors to set up a shop and manage customer orders. Despite , WearYouWant says it has seen a triple-digit growh rate over the last six months. Since credit card penetration in Thailand is low, WearYouWant allows customers to pay cash on delivery and works with two logistics companies, CJ Korea and KWC Logistics, to ship its orders. Deliveries within two to five days are currently available and the company plans to offer next-day deliveries soon in order to compete with the . Other WearYouWant competitors include and , both of which are backed by Rocket Internet. |
Tinder Is Going To The Dogs With NYC Puppy Rescue Project | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 8 | 3 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAgy1vATA7w&w=560&h=315] There are a lot of dogs on lately. Like, actual dogs. East Village-based animal rescue organization , long with creative agency internship program at have whipped up a few doggy dating profiles for rescue dogs in the New York City area. One pup ‘looking for love’ BBH’s The Barn received award-winning recognition for awareness initiative . Now it’s hijacking the love match app to find these dogs a home. The puppy profiles read just like other potential matches, but with their ages skewed so the dogs will show up under the filtered searches of those in desired age ranges and genders. Vilma, for instance, is listed as 26 and “Single and ready to mingle!” but her profile notes this pup is only 9 weeks old. Every year, approximately throughout the US, according to the . Social Tees and BBH’s The Barn began populating Tinder with 10 puppy profiles two days ago in order to reach the 10 million or so users of the app. A lot of people have already been posting about the suggested dog matches on Twitter. While seem to understand the project and support it. There are still a few who are left scratching their heads on why Tinder sent them to the dogs:
The initiative has received over 1,500 matches in less than 24 hours and BBH’s Mario Garza says one of the dogs has already found a home. |
This Extension Gives You A New GIF Every Single Time You Open A Tab | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 8 | 3 | Hey, you! Don’t you wish you had distractions in your day? Wouldn’t it be great if you could get distracted by something literally every time you opened a new browser tab? No? Oh. Well. Uh. Check this out anyway. is a Chrome browser extension that brings more GIFs into your life. Every time you open a new browser tab, a GIF will be waiting. I installed it more or less accidentally a few days ago, and… well, I’m hooked. Is it pointless? Absolutely! Is it going to raise a zillion dollars at a trillion dollar valuation? Probably not! But it’s consistently made me laugh at unexpected times throughout my work day, and we all need that. While the extension’s author doesn’t mention a source, a bit of digging suggests that at least a good chunk of them (and their captions) are from reddit’s . Perhaps because of this, most of the GIFs it pulls are pretty current; I’ve had a few pop up that were pulled from , which was just released at Comic-Con last week.You know that guy who always seems to have way too many GIFs at his disposal? YOU CAN BE THAT GUY. Also note: while all of what I’ve seen pop up so far has been more or less safe-for-work, some of them have been a questionable — so maybe don’t install this on your work laptop. |
Video Claims To Show Off The Live Folders Feature Coming In Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 3 | Component to first update — Update 1, of course — are Live Folders, which will allow users of Microsoft’s smartphone platform to group applications on the main screen of their handsets, saving space. It’s part of a . Microsoft has only released screenshots to date. A , uploaded by Windows Phone Lovers, shows off a purported demo of the feature that appears to mostly agree with own supplied images of the capability. The demo is in a different language than the provided images, so there is some discrepancy. However, the larger Windows Phone community is treating the leak as genuine. I wouldn’t be surprised if the video was real, but as with all potentially-specious leaks, consume the below video with incredulity. |
Gillmor Gang Live 08.03.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 8 | 3 | – Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang on Facebook |
Meet HelloWorld, An Easier Way To Share Your Location With Friends | Billy Gallagher | 2,014 | 8 | 3 | Three years ago, was sitting at the iconic Philz coffee shop in Palo Alto studying for her Stanford exams. She tweeted about it, wondering if any of her friends were studying nearby. A few minutes later a stranger who had seen the tweet interrupted her to pitch his company. Talking about it years later, it’s clear this interruption was a turning point for Fu, as she explains how it changed her perceptions of social media from fun and personal to a public forum. Today, Fu and her team have launched as the first product out of Y Combinator’s hackathon, . The core idea of the app is a very simple way of answering “Where are you? What are you doing?” with text, maybe a picture, and your location. Posts stick around for 24 hours so your friends can see where you are and where you’ve been recently, then they disappear. “It’s both the very first program you write when you learn a new language,” Fu says, describing HelloWorld. “As well as a direct description of what the product does—it let’s you say hello to the world, your own personal world of friends.” Below, you can see a feed of your friends’ latest updates filtered by location on the left; on the right, you can see one friends’ updates in reverse chronological order. Friends can see how far away you are, but not your exact location, making the location aspect more similar to than . Users can ping each other with a push notification if they want a specific friend to know they’re close by, or at their favorite brunch spot. The team behind HelloWorld talks a lot about location as a way to pleasantly surprise your friends, and they’re on to something there. It feels a bit like an early Twitter, where people are just quickly sharing what they’re doing and what they’re up to with a small group of friends. With ephemeral posts and posts that show how far your friends are but not their precise location, the team hopes HelloWorld can create an environment in which people are more willing to share their location. But perhaps the most compelling aspect of HelloWorld is the team behind it. Fu, who leads the team, three years ago under the headline, “All Star Student Entrepreneurs.” She has worked as an associate for since her sophomore year at Stanford, where she has earned two degrees and is currently a PhD candidate in engineering. She also co-authored a public service book with the former dean of the Stanford law school. “If she decides to become an entrepreneur,” said Tom Kosnik, an engineering and entrepreneurship professor at Stanford in Forbes’ 2011 story on Fu, “she’s going to come up with something that will astonish us all.” Joining her are , and David Li. Carter was recognized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for designing the first WebSocket protocol. Goodman got a CS degree in his teens and wrote Reddit’s first browser plugin. Himmelman is a former artist at Warner Brother Games, where he worked on titles like Wizards of the Cost, Dominion, and Fantasy Flight. Li worked on the framework for several teams within Google, including Google+. The team hasn’t raised any funding yet, noting they want to get the product out to users first. HelloWorld is on iOS and Android now. Use the password “techcrunch” to download the iOS version. |
Sensors And Sensitivity | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 8 | 3 | There’s only so much practical real estate on the human body for wearables — unless you’re willing to revive the . So what if everyday objects that we interact with — whether it’s by resting against them or holding onto them — were to house the sensors that keep tabs on us? Anti-wearables, if you like, given that the technology becomes invisibly embedded into everyday objects. This is the sensible trajectory of connected sensor technology. The world around us gains the ability to perceive us, rather than wearable sensors trying to figure out what’s going on in our environment by taking a continuous measure of us. In one example currently being worked on, , the makers of a low cost, modular bio-sensor kit called , are embedding sensors into car seats, to offer a non-wearable way for human health signals to be quantified while a person is driving a car. The project, called (which stands for Heart And Respiration in-Car Embedded Nonintrusive sensors), is specifically focused on safety, with the ultimate aim of preventing fatigue-induced car accidents by monitoring the driver’s physiological activity for specific signs of fatigue based on the fact that the human heart rate and respiration changes when people are getting sleepy. The Harken project involves a of companies — with funding coming from the various partners and also partially from the European Union, via a grant attached to the , which funds technology R&D. The core concept is to embed a heart rate monitor into the driver’s seat belt, and breath and vibration sensors into their seat, along with a signal processing unit that can separate the human physiological signals from the background noise/vibrations going on in the moving vehicle. The safety system then combines the human signals with an algorithmic fatigue detector — so it could, for instance, warn the driver to stop driving and take a rest to avoid the risk of having an accident. Hugo Silva tells TechCrunch the consortium has created a working prototype of its embedded fatigue-detecting in-car safety system, which will undergo extensive testing in controlled scenarios — so it’s some years out before this sort of sensor-powered safety system could start being embedded into car seats. “The automotive industry is heavily regulated and Harken involves partners such as FICO MIRRORS S.A., which are Tier-1 suppliers to the automotive industry,” he notes. “As you can imagine all of this introduces a high overhead to a deployment, which can be roughly between 3 to 5 years.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weD1-YA-7kM&w=640&h=360] The vibration sensors are required by the system to help filter out the background noise which could contaminant the physiological signals, according to Silva. “Within the consortium the focus was to develop algorithms and methods capable of filtering and cancelling the noise and artifacts expected in a moving vehicle (vibration and body movements),” he says. “The sensors on the seat and seatbelt are linked to a signal processing unit, which can then either provide direct feedback to the driver (by means of vibration or sound) [to warn them they are getting dangerously sleepy], communicate with the onboard computers to warn the user through the infotainment systems, or even in a later future take corrective actions; as you know, cars are getting smarter by the day with technologies for collision avoidance, lane assistance, among others.” While this tech sounds very smart indeed, what’s even more interesting — from a tech trends perspective — is the growing potential of this anti-wearables approach of invisibly embedding sensors into objects with which humans interact. So instead of having our bodies cluttered with electronic bangles that continuously quantify our existence, there’s an opportunity for more targeted applications of sensor technology, based on locating it in proximity to us — within objects we use, handle and interact with for specific purposes. We’re seeing some of this happening already of course, but we’re also currently seeing a procession of sensor-containing wearables fired into the market — taking aim at our bodies. The vast majority of these devices are junk. Aka not really worth the wearing — unless you consider a not-very-accurate measure of heart rate or a ballpark number of daily steps something worth keeping tabs on. The fact that the makers’ of these devices are focusing on a wearable use-case is arguably one of the reasons these early devices are not especially compelling. This wearable tech wave feels very much like version 1.0 of the Internet of Things. Putting sensors elsewhere, into objects we come into contact with at certain times or in certain situations, contextualizes them — allowing use-cases to be more targeted and, as a result, more purposeful — and potentially more powerful. Another example of an embedded sensor that Silva points to as an anti-wearable is the below prototype bicycle handlebars systems — built using sensors — to quantify the rider as they ride. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ3BUBV-BBM&w=640&h=360] “The same concept can be extended to everything ranging from a computer keyboard, to the steering wheel of a car, the remote control of a Playstation, etc,” he adds. Another more polished example, that’s not related to PLUX or BITalino, is , a child-focused medical device being created by a UK-based startup. On the surface the teddy bear looks like a normal stuffed toy. But it’s actually also stuffed with sensors that measure a child’s heart rate, oxygen saturation and body temperature — offering a more child-friendly way for hospital nurses to capture kids’ physiological signals. What’s even more interesting is that the physiological signals captured when a child is playing with an object they perceive as a toy may well differ to those captured using standard medical equipment — which might unsettle or stress them out. In other words, once sensors become invisible, the signals they capture may well tell a different — more accurate — story about us. There will doubtless always be some people who do want to quantify their every conscious (and ) moment — and who do want dashboards of their personal bodily data pumping day and night to reassure them that yes, they are still alive. Those people will probably want to co-exist with countless wearables. But the idea that every (well) individual is continuously fascinated by the fact their heart is still pumping and their lungs still bellowing seems rather overblown. And so the proliferation of wellness-related wearables feels like an overly naive application of clever sensor technology. What’s more likely is that people will see benefits in highly targeted applications for sensor devices that can help them in specific ways — whether that’s a warning system for dangerous fatigue when driving, an ill child’s toy that gathers underlying health data in a stress-free way, a toaster that pops up your toast before it burns, a toothbrush that detects the early signs of gum disease or tooth decay, or — going a little more off-the-wall — a keyboard that warns you when you’re drunk and locks out the buy button on eBay. If you don’t have a sick kid, you’re never going to need to come into contact with Teddy the Guardian. And that’s the point really. The more exciting uses of sensors are about creating smart, targeted objects that help when necessary, not wearables that continuously harvest bio-data just for the sake of amassing 1s and 0s. Data is cheap. It’s how you capture it and what you do with it that counts. So let’s hope the tedium of the current generation of step/breath quantifying wearables gives way to a smarter generation of embedded sensors that offer genuine utility for specific problems — and do so without drawing attention to their own existence, or making us over-obsessed with our own. [ by ] |
null | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 9 | 25 | null |
Microsoft, Samsung, And Expensive Free Software | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 4 | In a world where Windows is cheaper than free software, things get weird. and are currently locked in a public pissing match over royalties. Samsung previously agreed to pay Microsoft for use of the software company’s intellectual property relating to the South Korean firm’s sale of Android-based devices. Samsung, like a host of other Android OEMs, pays Microsoft dollars for what the software company views as stepping on its intellectual properties’ toes. However, unlike other Android OEMs, Samsung stopped sending checks. According , Samsung decided that it didn’t have to follow the contract it after Microsoft announced its intention to buy Nokia’s hardware assets. It vigorously pushes back against the idea in its suit, going on to claim that Samsung is “attempting to convert a commercial contract dispute governed by U.S. law into a Korean regulatory issue.” Samsung, according to Microsoft, has asked “Korean competition authorities to change the parties’ private contract by reducing or eliminating Samsung’s contractually-mandated Android patent royalty payments for Microsoft’s patents.” Microsoft claims that “almost all” the patents in question were “granted by countries other than Korea,” making Samsung’s appeal to Korean authorities off-kilter to Microsoft. Since we can’t read the contract in question, and , it’s hard to parse who is right in the case, but it does seem to be a case in which there will be a clear winner: If Microsoft broke the terms of the agreement with its large purchase of Nokia assets, Samsung will likely win. If it didn’t, Samsung likely won’t. (There is obviously more to this than Microsoft’s own accounting. I reached out to Samsung with a few questions relating to the lawsuit, but the company didn’t provide comment further than saying that it “will review the complaint in detail and determine appropriate measures in response.”) This was all brought around for me today that if Samsung manages to win the suit, it could unlock other OEMs — perhaps — from their deals. There’s a lot of nuance to that point, but it remains an interesting potentiality. It isn’t clear, for example, if other Android OEM contracts that Microsoft has signed contain what the terms that Samsung feels grant it freedom from its agreement — if they do, and Samsung wins, the response could be swift and uniform. Component to the above muddle is the fact that for smaller devices — including Windows Phone units — the relevant Microsoft operating system is now free. As it’s been pointed out again and again, for OEMs, Windows is now the cheaper platform than Android: Mobile OEMs pay Microsoft to use Android, but they don’t pay Microsoft to use Windows. Silly stuff, really. The other side of that coin is the simple argument that Microsoft’s cost advantage over Android has hardly led to a stampede of OEMs coming to its corner, or lots of new market share. Both remain theoretical future events. All of that is merely part of Microsoft’s larger fears. The loss of Android revenue would sting, and the loss of a booster seat for Windows Phone would be difficult, but Microsoft frames its argument in broader terms, looping in its full IP stack as under assault: 6. Microsoft’s continued success depends in substantial part on its ability to maintain and protect the proprietary technology it creates through its investments in research and development. It has developed innovative licensing programs whereby competitors and others may license Microsoft’s patent-protected technology in return for royalty payments, other consideration, or both. 7. One such program is the Android patent licensing program. Android, which is operating system software designed for mobile devices, infringes many Microsoft patents that were obtained by Microsoft in the United States and elsewhere well before Android was launched. Rather than exercise its legal right to exclude Android-based devices from practicing that technology, Microsoft licenses its patent portfolio to companies that utilize Android, including Samsung — the world’s largest producer of Android-based smartphones and tablets. The crux is simple: Microsoft’s contention that its larger intellectual property business is at risk only makes sense if it is not at fault in the case, which is to say that it didn’t break the terms of the Samsung deal by buying Nokia’s hardware assets, and that Samsung’s actions will be upheld by the court. Only under those circumstances is Microsoft’s ability to derive revenue from its expensively accumulated intellectual property under threat. Either way, the case matters and there are more eyes on it than just those of Samsung and Microsoft. |
Fitle Will Let You Try Clothes On A 3D Avatar Of Yourself | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 8 | 4 | was in business school, he found he had little time to shop during regular store hours. But shopping online proved to be hard. “It’s difficult to find exactly what you want to buy,” Nouboue said. “It’s very complicated to find the right size.” That’s why he and his partner, Gaetan Rougevin-Baville, , a virtual fitting room that allows you to try clothes on a customized 3D avatar of yourself. The pair’s goal is to raise $50,000 by this Saturday, and as of Monday, they had already passed the $40,000 mark. To use , you enter your height and take four iPhone pictures of yourself at different angles. In 30 seconds, Fitle creates a customized 3D avatar that its founders say is accurate 99 percent of the time. Nouboue and Rougevin-Baville are currently developing technology that will allow them to render the merchandise from partner brands in 3D based on dimensions and size. Most of their initial partners are in France, where the company is based, but they include brands like Levi’s, Ralph Lauren jeans and H&M. The Kickstarter funding will allow Fitle to industrialize this process.
As its name implies, Fitle is about both fit and style. The website will also help you find styles based on past preferences and your size. “Right now, the world of online shopping looks like the Internet without Google,” Nouboue said. “That’s where Fitle comes in.” Fitle also will let you save clothes in your “virtual closet” and then try them on your avatar when looking for a new piece. Basically if you buy a shirt from H&M, you can try it on with a pair of Levi’s next month. But Fitle isn’t the first company that has allowed you to create a 3D avatar to try on clothes. In the past, making a customized avatar has not been as accurate or fast, requiring users to measure themselves and enter in the dimensions. Other options like , , required shoppers to go to the store and get their body scanned. With Fitle, you can do all of that directly from your iPhone. In today’s world of one-day shipping and free returns, does a virtual fitting room even make a difference for shoppers? The big advantage of Fitle is saving on shipping costs for both shoppers and retailers. Fitle also could be a major timesaver for shoppers. Imagine how much easier shopping could be if you could try on an outfit with a click rather than waiting in line for a fitting room or if you never had to make a trip to the store to return something because it didn’t fit. I’m cautiously excited about Fitle. As a college student in the suburbs of Chicago without a car, it’s often difficult for me to find time to take a bus to the mall while juggling school, work and extra-curriculars. Online shopping should be a given for me. But even though I’ve ordered everything from mouthwash to granola bars from online retailers with free shipping deals like and Prime, I’m more hesitant when it comes to clothes. I’m tall, have wide hips and find I’m never quite the same size in different styles, even at the same store. With my limited budget for shopping, I tend to wait until I can make it to the store and try things on. If Fitle’s avatar is as accurate as its founders say, it really could change the way I shop. Right now the company is able to digitize human avatars, and it is working on finalizing the process for clothes. Nouboue and Rougevin-Baville expect shoppers will be able to use Fitle by February 2015. |
Epic Reddit Prank “Cat Facts” Is Now An App That Lets You Text Troll Your Friends | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 8 | 4 | What do you get when you combine cats and epic-level trolling? Only one of the most popular posts of all time: the hilarious “Cat Facts” prank from Reddit user “frackyou” is the eighth-most popular post on Reddit, and now it’s a mobile app you can use to automate cat facts-style pranking on your unsuspecting friends. Cat Facts? What’s Cat Facts, you say? In case you somehow missed it, Cat Facts refers to a couple of years ago. According to the original poster, his little cousin had shared his new phone number on Facebook, and was soon the recipient of unwanted texts which purported to be from some automated service called “Cat Facts,” but were really from his older cousin. In , you can see the prank’s victim go from confused to frustrated to downright angry as he can’t seem to figure out how to get the texts to stop, despite following the prompts to unsubscribe, sometimes involving typing in long strings of numbers. In the meantime, Cat Facts like this stream in: Welcome to Cat Facts! Did you know that the first cat show was held in 1871 at the Crystal Palace in London? Mee-wow! Recently, this classic prank has re-emerged as a mobile app you can use to send Cat Facts to your friends. (Because surely by now there’s an entirely new crop of mobile tweens who have yet to encounter the – or text trolling in general.) Cat Facts creator Kyle Venn says he’s not the original Reddit user “frackyou,” and didn’t reach out to him before creating this because that user was no longer active, and also, because it seems by the on the original post that “frackyou” actually got the idea from another Redditor who liked that his idea was being used. Venn, a web developer by background, says he began building the app two years ago as a way to teach himself Android development. “I never had any intention of actually releasing it to the App Store and did it mostly to get better as a developer. It seemed like a fun idea that would leverage a bunch of sweet technologies that I wasn’t too familiar with — like SMS APIs, Android design standards, [and] automation,” he explains. Later, after a few mobile development internships, Venn realized how poorly the app was built so he decided to revisit it. “After rewriting it a few times and making it look a little prettier, I figured it could be something that other people on the internet might enjoy,” he says. Oh yes, the Internet would enjoy this. We sorta have this thing for cats here. Unfortunately, in this “official version” of Cat Facts, the app has to remain legally compliant, so it includes the way to in the first message. (Bummer.) The app currently sustains itself through in-app purchases that let you send more than the first five facts, which are free. A few of the comments on reference a problem with texts not going through, which could have you thinking that the person being epic-trolled this time is you, but Venn says he tracked the issue down. It was related to him hitting the limit on the number of text messages the app could send per second: “An issue I’d never thought I’d have,” he says. “[The] Server hit 100% multiple times during first two days…I’ve since fixed it by distributing the load of the sending to several different phone numbers.” Believe it or not, this isn’t actually the first time Cat Facts has been . But it’s the . Alright who’s the person who put my number to get cat facts everyday. — Travis Christensen (@travischrist208) |
Facebook For Windows Phone Now Supports Video Uploads, Integrates With Messenger | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 4 | Today Microsoft announced it published a new version of that adds video uploads and integration with Facebook Messenger, as well as new languages. will now link directly into the People Hub on Windows Phone for users running Windows Phone 8.1. That will bring Facebook deeper into the Windows Phone experience. According , on devices running Windows Phone 8.1, “Facebook contacts, events, and photo albums are now powered by the Facebook for Windows Phone app.” That places the app more at the core of a user’s social experience on Windows Phone. Windows Phone 8.1’s first update started to roll out today, in keeping with prior timing promises from Microsoft. Currently, Windows Phone 8.1’s market share remains constrained as carriers roll it out to their customers. New devices that are sold run the code, so it should quickly grow. Update 1 is on a similar, if later, timeframe. |
NFL Will Let Teams Use Microsoft Surface Tablets On The Sidelines During Games | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 8 | 3 | In the first instance of tablets and mobile computing devices being used on the sidelines of NFL games, will be used by coaches and players in the upcoming season as part of a reported $400 million . The Sideline Viewing System is meant to help coaches and players study their opponents in realtime from the sideline, which has traditionally been done with old school, black-and-white photos. Each team will have 13 Surface tablets on the sideline and 12 in the coaches’ box, according to . These tablets will be owned and operated by the and run on a closed wireless network, as well as locked in a temperature-controlled cart in between games to ensure no one is tampering or cheating with the data on the tablets. Plus, the Surface tablets will have no access to the internet, nor will they have the ability to play video. The Surface Sideline Viewing System will not only allow for faster relay of photographs to players and coaches, but will also allow them to enlarge those photos, draw on them to show plays, etc. Players and coaches won’t be required to use the technology, so the traditional Polaroid photo option will still be available to the ultra superstitious or tech-averse. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen tablets sprout up during football season — during half-time reports, pre-game shows, etc. However, this is the first time the deal has shown meaningful, technological progress for the game itself. |
Rhapsody Acquires SoundTracking And Exfm To Boost Music Sharing And Discovery | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 8 | 4 | , the stalwart music streaming service with 2 million paying subscribers, , makers of “Instagram for songs” app , and , a social music discovery service that had been shut down since May. ‘s app for sharing what song you’re currently listening to with a feed of friends won’t be shut down. Instead plans to equip it with “new features to take advantage of Rhapsody’s 30-million track global streaming catalog.” plans to bring a new music discovery utility to “iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and the web.” Rhapsody’s Chief Product Officer Paul Springer told TechCrunch in two statements that: “It’s true — the Schematic Labs team has joined Rhapsody. With Soundtracking, they created an entirely new way for people to express themselves by sharing their musical moments. We’re excited to incorporate that creativity and community focus within Rhapsody’s suite of music services. The Exfm team have done a great job of helping people discover more music to enjoy across the web. We’re thrilled to have them join Rhapsody, and put that product, design and technology expertise to work on the things we’re building here. Together, we’ll help music fans explore, play and love more music.” Schematic had dollars from , , and plus angels like Hunter Walk and Garrett Camp over several rounds. SoundTracking’s lack of native music streaming rights handicapped its app and stunted growth, but the backing of a parent company with licenses for streaming could change that. A check of the app shows it still has Spotify and Rdio integrated, hinting that while Rhapsody will surely be integrated, too, users of other services who want to pipe in their subscriptions to listen to full songs instead of previews won’t be cut off. Exfm’s service for turning any will apparently return eventually in some form, though it’s not clear if that’s as its own service or as a discovery experience within Rhapsody. over $2.8 million from , , and . SoundTracking and Exfm could help make Rhapsody more relevant in the current battle for ears. Over the past years it’s been eclipsed by services like Spotify, and boxed out by platform owners like Apple and Google. While the space is very crowded, it’s always nice to have another serious competitor trying to build the best music service, not just use music as a loss-leader to sell more search ads or smartphones. |
Leak Lets You Send Anonymous Emails | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 8 | 4 | It’s clear that anonymity, in one way or another, is . But the folks over at have looked to the past for inspiration in this weird new world. is a web service that lets you send anonymous emails to people. Just put in a recipients’ email, choose the type of relationship you have with that person (friend, coworker, etc.) and send off your message. It’s a type of one-to-one anonymity that feels necessary given the number of anonymous sharing networks focused on the broadcast. In fact, for just this purpose: to send an anonymous message to someone’s email. Here’s a screenshot of V1 (called Whisper before I knew about Whisper). — David Byttow (@davidbyttow) The Leak service is still pretty barebones, lacking the ability to send attachments, but it does have a built-in network effect through a newsletter, where users can receive the best Leaks of the week in their inboxes. It’s meets messaging, all in your inbox. The space around anonymity and privacy (and their intersection) is obviously heating up. But it goes beyond the big guys like Whisper and Secret — Mark Cuban’s is picking up steam alongside other one-to-one, ephemeral messaging apps like . Leak taps both sides of the coin to get you to speak directly and honestly to someone specific. Or totally mess with their head. Or flirt. Or actually leak information. You’re expressing the id without the public show of it all, but just because the message is anonymous doesn’t mean that won’t blow your cover. You can try out Leak for yourself . |
Inside Bitcovery, The App For Finding Your Next Favorite Book, Movie, Or Album | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,014 | 8 | 4 | This is exactly the experience that founder and his team set out to, for lack of a better word, disrupt. In this week’s episode of the series embedded above, we get a close look at the company and its experience taking part in the Startup Battlefield competition at last year’s Disrupt San Francisco conference. is a mobile app that quickly enables users to find movies, books, music and even TV content that suits their interest. Quick-sampling within the app enables a more seamless experience than hopping back and forth around the iTunes store, attempting to find something new that suits your taste. What’s perhaps most engaging is the subtle social features then enable you to track your own content and see what your phonebook buddies like as well. Although Lalwani is far from a first-time founder — Bitcovery is the fourth company he’s founded — he says that participating in Disrupt and the Battlefield competition still made a big difference for him and his company. “Very shortly after the event, we closed $775,000 in convertible notes from Plug and Play Ventures, Tandem Capital, and a few angel investors, including Bobby Yazdani of Signatures Capital Partners,” Lalwani tells me. “We got accepted into both Tandem Capital Mobile Accelerator and Plug and Play Retail Accelerator.” Currently the Bitcovery team is focusing the product on the easing purchasing of digital content, specifically digital music that is discovered in-app. Get to know Raj and his team in this week’s Episode of . |
Chegg Strikes Distribution Partnership With Ingram Books, Announces 15% Boost In Earnings From Digital Services | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 8 | 4 | Student textbook resale site Chegg has struck a strategic partnership with today. Said to be the world’s largest distributor of books, will acquire a significant share of Chegg’s textbook inventory in the next coming months. The partnership makes a lot of sense for . The site has been pushing more towards digital services in the last six months. is a well-known textbook sales and rental service among students but has rebranded in order to be considered more of a digital student hub. According to Chegg, only 30% of its users actually order physical textbooks. Two-thirds of students who log on to Chegg are ordering digital resources. It also for $30 million in June. This partnership is a significant change in direction for Chegg and will seriously reduce the overhead costs of handling storage and direct shipping. Ingram also offers a much faster way to ship textbooks with its much more plentiful distribution centers throughout the country. In return, the partnership gives Ingram a new area for growth in its distribution channels. Chegg currently distributes around 5-6 million textbooks to students per year. Chegg has already started to transfer ownership of both current and new inventory to Ingram, equaling approximately 10% of Chegg’s anticipated textbook volume for the upcoming fall semester. Chegg expects this will result in a reduction in net cash expenditures on textbooks by $10-15 million in the third quarter, and by as much as $25 million in the next six months. Chegg spokespeople say InstaEDU has already increased its digital sales by 15%. Chegg’s digital revenue is estimated to be about $315 million for the year. Approximately $100 million of that will be from digital revenue, according to Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig. Chegg will continue to market the books to students directly, as well as control pricing and catalog selection. Ingram will handle distribution, logistics and warehousing of the books. Chegg will get a commission for each rental or sale, which will be recorded as digital revenue. This means Chegg is going to see revenue go down materially, but profit margins and use of cash will reportedly become a lot more favorable. “This is a long-term strategic growth opportunity,” said John Ingram, CEO of Ingram Content Group. “Together we can improve service and delivery speed for Chegg’s students, while leveraging the combined force of Chegg’s consumer brand and reach, and our expertise in distribution and logistics.” Update: Chegg just released its earnings report. Key Highlights: |
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