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CrunchWeek: Amazon Takes On Square, Tech CEOs Get Dunked, BurritoCannon Comes True | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | Pour yourself a nice cold spiked lemonade, and join Sarah Buhr, Alex Wilhelm, and I at the big white table to talk about Amazon that competes with Square, as TechCrunch first reported (and Square’s of its business against naysayers), big tech personalities like and dousing themselves in ice water for charity, and Alex’s brilliant BurritoCannon idea . |
How People Are Filling In When AI Can’t Do The Job | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | Since Siri became a part of iOS in 2011, the idea of having a digital assistant that can help us get things done just by asking has been a central thrust of the big smartphone platform owners. Less than a year after Apple rolled out its AI companion, Google followed suit with Google Now, a service that preemptively sends notifications based on contextual clues like your location, your email inbox, and traffic data. , Microsoft also has a smart assistant: Cortana, named after the AI from the Halo franchise of games on the Xbox. Microsoft says Cortana is designed to act like like a secretary, reminding you about the things that you want to bring up when you call your wife on your way home. Despite the niftiness of having your phone tell you to leave work 15 minutes early to make it to your flight or Siri and Cortana cracking the occasional joke, the limitations to these assistants are clear. Siri can set a reminder, but she can’t help you schedule a meeting; Google Now can suggest some restaurants nearby, but it can’t book you a table at your favorite place. Enter premium digital assistants like and . For a monthly fee, these services can handle requests that make Siri and Cortana look like barely functioning alpha builds: [gallery ids="1044741,1044730,1044715"] How do these assistants accomplish such advanced tasks? Does Jarvis know what kind of food its users like? Can it tap into your schedule while looking for flights to see what might work for you? Can it actually interact with people via email without sounding like a processed form? Yes, but not because the startup has managed to create an advanced artificial intelligence that just happens to be flying under everyone’s radar. Instead, what they’ve done is create a for digital tasks: on the other end of every request is a college-educated worker sitting at a computer, searching for the best food around your office or using price-comparison tools to find flights. Even with the convenience that comes from modern apps, looking through Yelp for a decent place to take a business associate to dinner can still take quite a while, especially if you’re the indecisive type to begin with. I’ve spoken to a few users of these premium digital assistants, and one use case that kept coming up was getting three or four options to choose between to simplify decision-making processes. People just want someone to do the boring, trivial tasks for them. In a few years, many of these tasks will be accomplished by software. Apple, Google, and Microsoft aren’t standing still with their efforts, and new companies (including one ) are looking to create services that learn and tie in to all of your favorite apps to create digital assistants that are aware of your circumstances and the nuance of tasks that you want done. But until then, it’s interesting to see humans essentially slotted into these services like cogs in a machine. The interfaces are there for users in the form of apps (or text and email for Jarvis, which means you can use it via Siri’s messaging capabilities), the data is there, but the ability to parse complex requests (or to take simple requests and understand what they mean in context) is years away. And when that technology does arrive, I can’t help but wonder if these services will go away, or simply move further up the “experience stack.” Imagine it: People with too much on their plate could pay a company like Fancy Hands to manage aspects of their life that are just too tricky or awkward or just take a few seconds too long to handle with an AI assistant; and workers at that company could use AI in concert with traditional applications to become even more productive. |
Unseen, An Anonymous Photo Sharing App For Colleges, Raises $2.1 Million | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | An Austin-based company called has raised $2.1 million in seed funding for its anonymous photo-sharing app , which has been trending on college campuses. Investors in the round include Rackspace co-founder Dirk Elmendorf, Indeed.com CEO Rony Kahan, CEO of Woodbolt International Doss Cunningham, and several other angel investors. At first glance, Unseen looks similar to other anonymous networking apps that have become popular in recent months, including competitors like Secret or Whisper, for example. But co-founder Michael Schramm stresses, its intention is to ultimately build a different type of community for its users. Using both manual and outsourced moderation procedures, the idea with Unseen is to cut down on the bullying and other inappropriate behaviors that anonymous apps can contribute to without being heavy-handed. But Unseen isn’t there yet, from what I saw. A brief tour around one university’s photos in the app included spy shots of a girl commenters called “slut,” and suggestions of sexual activity that could later take place, to put it mildly. Many posts are sexual in nature, and there are quite a few of female body parts. Others are photos of joints or packed pipes, and a lot seem to be groups of guys discussing girls in photos or directly asking female users more general sexual questions. Of course, like other apps in this space, Unseen isn’t going to feature this sort of content. There have been a couple of threads about serious matters, like depression, says Schramm, where support was offered. But from what I saw, the app favors sexual content, drugs and spy shots. Some users are posting goofy photos, or text-only comments that you could imagine would come from a young college kid, like “What are the best places to buy alcohol with a fake [ID]..?” Kids will be kids, I guess. But if this is the future of social media, I’m glad I’m so darned old. Schramm, who created Unseen along with co-founder Munjal Budhabhatti, believes that anonymous apps are not just a flash in the pan, and they’ve entered this space because they want to figure out how to get things right. In fact, Unseen grew out of two pivots from previous attempts to connect users via mobile, one a -like local Q&A app and the other a place for group discussions. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HzsZpv0wPg] Unseen is the one that took off – or at least, the one that was able to attract investor attention. The company declined to share user numbers but says growth has been 93 percent week-over-week for the past five weeks. The app is only three months old, so that doesn’t really prove much of anything at this point. Going from zero to anything is going to yield big numbers. And on Android, there are only somewhere between 500-1,000 users according to Google Play’s install tracking. On iOS, there are likely more, but Unseen is not a runaway hit at this early stage so much as it is a calculated bet. The app is live now on 40 college campuses. Users don’t have to sign up or log in; they just pick their college campus feed from a search box to participate. “I hate anonymous apps, I think they’re garbage,” co-founder Schramm proclaimed at the beginning of our conversation, but then explained how anonymous apps are a great door for people to enter into things with. Traditional social media, he added, “is actually driving people further apart rather than bringing them together because you have to maintain this appearance to your friends, or professionally.” The younger generation – those who grew up being publicly exposed (and shamed) for their Facebook activity and photos – has certainly been drawn to anonymous platforms. They like Snapchat and other private and “ephemeral” messaging apps, and more “social” apps like Yik Yak or Whisper. Unseen is hoping to ride that trend, too, but set a different tone. Schramm says they quietly censor photos on Unseen. If someone posts a full nude, for example, they delete it. If the poster returns and posts a partial nude, they just keep deleting it until the photo fits in with the guidelines and rules of the community Unseen wants to establish. (It’s “no nipples” by the way.) There’s even a long user agreement up front when you first open up the app that tells you what you can and cannot do. In time, Unseen’s…well… censorship hopes to help set the community’s tone. Now the plan with the new funding is to moderately grow its install base. The wait list today includes 863 schools where users have signed up to join. Schramm says they need to be careful about their next steps. “Growth unchecked in the anonymous world is a very dangerous thing,” he says. So is the anonymous world itself. |
FCC Extends Net Neutrality Comment Period | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | (FCC) announced Friday it would extend the net neutrality reply comment period from September 10 to September 15. The commission has already received more than 1.1 million comments, . That is the largest number of comments the FCC has ever received, with the exception of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in 2004, which garnered 1.4 million comments. With three extra days, net neutrality commenters will likely beat that. The deadline for the reply comment period was pushed back to match the , which occurred in July after the FCC experienced issues with its website. Because the first comment period was extended three additional business days and the reply period then started later, the FCC extended the period for reply comments. “To ensure that members of the public have as much time as was initially anticipated to reply to initial comments in these proceedings, the Bureau today is extending the reply comment deadline by three business days,” the FCC said in a release. So keep your comments coming! |
Tesla Extends All 85kWh Model S Drivetrain Warranties To 8 Years And Infinite Miles | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk just announced via Twitter and the that the drivetrain warranty for the 85 kWh Model S has been extended, giving it an eight-year, infinite-mile warranty to match that of the battery pack. This new warranty arrangement applies retroactively to every Model S ever produced, too, meaning it benefits both existing and new owners. Model S drivetrain warranty increased to infinite miles, applies retroactively … — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Originally, the Model S carried a four-year, 50,000-mile limited warranty that could be extended to 8 years and 100,000 miles for an additional $4,000 fee. Musk says in his blog post detailing the move that “[i]n hindsight, this should have been [Tesla’s] policy from the beginning of the Model S program,” as the company’s warranty should reflect its belief in the improved reliability of its electric engines vs. their gasoline-powered equivalents. Musk also notes to investors in his company that this will have a (moderate) negative effect on its earnings in the short-term, but says the move is designed to benefit the company long-term, owing to how it reflects Tesla putting its customers first. The warranty extends to new owners upon resale of the Tesla S, too, so secondary markets also benefit. This is a huge goodwill gesture for Elon to make for its customers, and yet another shot across the bow of traditional fuel-injected gas engines. The fact that it applies retroactively makes it much more than a gesture, too, as they likely could’ve easily applied it going forward and still received praise from industry observers. |
The Guy Who Kickstarted Potato Salad Wasn’t Just Trolling Us All | John Biggs | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | It’s come to our attention that PotatoStock is a go. Zack “Danger” Brown, a Columbus, Ohio native, previously confirmed that he will put the proceeds raised from , namely founding PotatoStock, a philanthropic music festival featuring “gallons” of potato salad. The festival, which will be held on September 27 in Columbus, sounds like a hoot if you’re in Cowtown, but what’s really interesting is how Brown turned a joke into something real and truly noble. I thought I’d look at the campaign for the ongoing , my series on crowdfunding. First, it’s great to see that he’s garnered the support of the Columbus Clippers, C-Town’s local baseball team, as well as a number of high-profile sponsors. To wit: Potato salad guy throwing PotatoStock concert on 9/27 in Columbus to help homeless. Sponsored by and ! — Jennifer 8. Lee (@jenny8lee) And he’s rubbing shoulders with the stars: I want to make a funny video with you. There will be potato salad. — Zack Brown (@ztbrown) As a fellow Columbus native, it looks from my vantage like Brown is trying to give back to a community that gave him so much, namely a taste for good potato salad. Brown announced that he’s holding the event , an excellent spot. “It’s in Downtown Columbus, and this has been a Columbus thing from the beginning,” he told the Dispatch. Columbus’ downtown area is thriving and has changed considerably since I lived there 20 years ago. Whereas it once emptied out at night and over the weekend, it has become a vibrant scene, especially around the North Market and the convention center. Like most midwestern cities that avoided the rust-belt blight (Pittsburgh is another), Downtown Columbus has built itself up into a vibrant arts and entertainment scene in an environment that was sterile at best and forbidding at worst. PotatoStock itself will feature music and, naturally, potato salad (which costs money) but Brown is donating most of the proceeds to create a fund at the Columbus Foundation. “This will create a permanent fund to help Central Ohio’s non-profits end hunger and homelessness,” he wrote. “These types of funds gain interest every year and grow over time, so, while our little internet joke will one day be forgotten, the impact will be felt forever.” What can we learn from the Potato Salad King of the Midwest? And, more importantly, what can we learn as crowdfunders? First, . I, personally, think we’re about to hit peak crowdfunding, a dead zone caused by funding fatigue. The first to be hit by this will be the 3D printer racket and then it will slowly spread to other efforts, namely books, movies, and music. I think we’ve already reached maximum fatigue, for example, in the realm of fitness bands and bespoke clothing campaigns. The only thing for a crowdfunder to do is be genuine and hope things work out. Crowdfunding anything is a bet. It’s a bet that you, the creator, will gather enough funders and it’s a bet by the funders on you, the creator. This relationship is unique and the only good comparison I’ve found is in the relationships between patrons and artists of yore. Next, By making yourself approachable to your audience, you encourage donations for even the silliest projects. Brown’s project was, arguably, a fluke. But he engendered friendship in his followers. Too many tech crowdfunding projects err on the side of speeds and feeds and offer very little in the way of real personality. For excellent examples of this sort of friendliness, take a look at and . Personality goes a long way. Finally, we learn that we have to deliver. If you intend to build your crowdfunding project into a business, there has to be a great deal of follow-up and communication. It helps to think of a crowdfunding campaign as a sort of acqui-hire. Most backers aren’t backing a product, per se, but they are betting on you as a producer. Trust, in that case, is paramount. Follow-up communication via updates and email is key and doing something odd and wonderful with your product after funding is over is also important. Consider , for example. Instead of just making one watch and calling it a day, the company was successful and stayed “indie.” Then think of Ouya and Oculus Rift. Ouya seemed to do well but then sputtered out. Backers were not updated and the sense was that the company, and not the product, was to blame. Finally, consider the outcry when Oculus Rift “sold out.” This move, while important for the fledgling company, made the mass of backers feel as if they had lost the product after putting in so much attention and money. While this sense of entitlement is obviously flawed, it’s a real human reaction to what amounts to a business decision. While Brown originally seemed to be trolling all of us with his delicious potato salad, a lot of good has come from his project. He hasn’t lost his sense of humor and neither have his backers and, more importantly, he’s giving things back to the community. will be free and open to everybody. No need to deal with any ticket scallopers. — Zack Brown (@ztbrown) |
Gillmor Gang Live 08.15.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session has concluded for today. |
Kevin Rose Steps Into Part-Time Role At Google Ventures To Build A New Startup Called North | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | Serial entrepreneur, investor, and overall Internet good guy is stepping down from his role of general partner at . The Digg and Revision3 founder will be moving into a part-time role at the firm, and will be using all his spare time to embark on a whole new adventure building a mobile startup called . The return to entrepreneurship probably shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: After all, Rose has been all over the Internet for more than a decade building companies like Digg, Revision3, Pownce, and Milk. If anything, his two-and-a-half year stint as a venture capitalist at Google Ventures was more of an anomaly than these plans to found a new company. Rose came to Google, and later Google Ventures, through the search giant’s acquisition of his last venture, Milk. That company was mostly a mobile design firm that sought to build and launch a series of products to the world and see what worked. But it was acqui-hired by Google shortly after the , which was a location-based mobile app for rating things in the real world. The folks at Milk joined Google’s design team and Rose soon after . His newest venture will be called , and will be focused on building a series of mobile and social products. In an interview with Rose, he told me the plan is to start with a small team of about three and to create a new product each quarter. And if one of those products becomes a hit, Rose says he’ll recruit a team and try to build a company around it. If the model sounds familiar, that’s because it was kind of the idea behind Milk. But the world has changed since then, according to Rose. “The biggest thing that’s changed in the last three years is that back then we spent a lot of time spent building out the back end… But the scaling piece is a solved problem,” Rose told me. Nowadays he says, a lean startup can work specifically on product and design, and leave the infrastructure side of things to someone else. He envisions North as a team that has one product person, one design person, and a full-stack engineer to get products going, while outsourcing much of the actual development work to trusted friends and colleagues. Rose isn’t the only entrepreneur : Uber and StumbleUpon co-founder Garrett Camp has Expa, Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone have Obvious Corp., and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin has HVF. In each case, those founders are operating on a model of incubating a portfolio of interesting products and then building teams around them. As Rose heads back into the startup world, however, one might question his track record of success. After all, Digg grew fast and , Pownce was , and Milk… Well, Milk never really got a chance to get fully off the ground. Rose points out, however, that two of the ventures he founded returned money to investors and that Revision3, after spending a decade as a tech-based online video production outlet, was acquired by Discovery and is now the backbone of that company’s digital media business. “I just like creating products, and I’m used to building very large products at scale,” he said. There’s no doubt, however, about his track record as an investor. As an angel, he put money into companies like Twitter, Foursquare, OMGPOP, Square, and Facebook. Meanwhile, at Google Ventures, he led the firm’s investment in a number of portfolio companies, including Medium, Nextdoor, Blue Bottle Coffee, Clever, High Fidelity, and FitStar. From the investment standpoint, Rose and Google Ventures general partner Bill Maris says that not much will change. GV will still get exclusive access to Rose’s dealflow, and he will remain on the boards of and continue to work with companies that he’s invested in with the firm. In fact, Maris characterized the move as a win-win for all. After all, while Rose is advising portfolio companies for Google Ventures, he will also be facing many of the same struggles that they see in building their products. And, the idea of part-time VC and entrepreneur isn’t exactly a new one: Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, True Ventures’ Tony Conrad, and Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois have all shown that being a successful investor-operator can be done. For Rose, it’ll just be a more formal arrangement for what he’s mostly been doing all along. He notes that his investments in Twitter, Foursquare, and others as an angel came while he was busy building all those other companies he had been working on. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Amazon Register, Skully, And Summer Time-Sinks | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | This week, Amazon announced a Square competitor in the form of the , undercutting Square’s transaction fee. Meanwhile, the makers of the finally opened up the pre-order, for the fastest funded company to hit $1 million in pre-orders. But as August permits us a bit too much time for introspection, we also take a deeper look at some of the apps that keep us addicted to our smartphones. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
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A Q&A With SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson After Selling To Samsung For $200M | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | As you might have heard, Samsung loosened up the purse strings yesterday with a , a platform that sells starter kits for entirely personalized smart home customization. For a few hundred dollars, SmartThings can help pretty much anyone get started building out a smart, connected home, with more than 100,000 different devices (from light switches to door locks to water sensors) and 8,000 different developer apps integrated with the platform. SmartThings is open, asking developers and makers from all walks to build for the platform. Pairing that with Samsung’s variety of consumer electronics appliances and a massive distribution network takes SmartThings straight from the minors to the big leagues, so we took the opportunity chat with SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson about the merger: Why did you sell? In a word, scale. From the very beginning there has been a sense that the internet of things has an opportunity to touch every human being on the planet. Our vision is to make every home a smart home, but we’re only two years and three months old, so we’re only getting started. We’ve always taken the approach of being easy and open and we’ve been rewarded for that by our community. We have the best metrics of any smart home platform in terms of engagement. Samsung has a completely shared vision about the smart home, and we were able to talk about staying independent while still leveraging parts of Samsung to take this to hundreds of millions of consumers across the world. I mean, Samsung is the biggest consumer electronics company in the world, across mobile and appliances, selling products in 200 different countries. They can quickly make SmartThings the biggest open platform in the world. So what will change? Who will lead the company, how many people are staying on, and where will you be working from, etc.? Everybody is staying on. We’ve been in Washington D.C. with a developer center in Minneapolis. We recently opened a West Coast office in Palo Alto and we’re moving the headquarters there. As you know, it’s the core of the tech universe, so we had already made that decision independently of the deal with Samsung, but it was part of the financial enabler that allows us to quickly move the core team there. Legally ,we are literally an independent entity. We’re keeping the SmartThings brand, and I will be CEO. We’re taking over our own building in Palo Alto, and we have our own business model. Through the division of Samsung that we’re in, the Open Innovation Center led by David Eun, will give us access where and when we want to partner with Samsung. Samsung has all of the same tools as any of our developers, but obviously there is a mutual motivation to drive deeper integrations with mobile and appliances from Samsung. Nothing changes for our consumers, either. If there’s any concern over Apple, we’re massive Apple fans over here and we will demonstrate that through proof of execution. But we’re very excited about hyper-location awareness and iBeacons and HomeKit. There is so much more to be done there, as well as the innovation that is happening in other places. We’ve always been a champion of being open, and we have a robust developer platform in the space, so we will continue to build that up. That is the focus. What does the next year look like for SmartThings as a platform? It’s all about penetration. We’re still in the early stages, but right now it only costs a couple hundred dollars and fiften minutes to connect a home. It gives our customers more security and peace of mind to have a connection to their home. Even though it doesn’t sound sexy, the next year is just about distribution to reach a very big base of consumers with Samsung. What started as a handful of connected households across the country will become tens of thousands in the next 18 months. Beyond distribution, we’re also looking to go deeper with our devices. Right now we offer basic sensors for the most common things you want to control in your home like locks and lights and thermostats, but in the next few months we’ll move more deeply into the home. We’ll get into core appliances and look at things like ambient awareness for voice, etc. It’s fair to say that the Google/Nest merger represents some of your biggest competition. In what ways are SmartThings and Samsung ready to tackle that competition as the space heats up? There is a lot of room to compete in this space. I mean, I’m not building a thermostat. I’m a huge fan of what Nest has built, and we fully embrace anything with an open API. Our community depends on that. Obviously, we’re all looking to be the platform with the deepest data so that we can offer the richest experience for consumers, and there are only a few that have the resources to go after that quickly. There’s a long future ahead. We have our own plans and we’ll see what emerges from others. What is the greatest challenge ahead? Matching the scale of distribution with the scale of opportunity. We solve for universal problems. I like to say internally that everybody’s got a front door. The biggest challenge for whomever is going to be the leader in this space right now is how to scale large enough for all the users you could reach at this very moment. How fast can we grow to worldwide distribution. But even with the distribution of Samsung, isn’t the barrier to entry a bit higher than just the SmartThings platform itself? You need other, sometimes expensive, devices to connect to, as well. Well, the beauty of our platform is that not one size fits all. If what matters to you is flood protection you can get just that, or automated lighting, or health integration in your living environment. Due to the nature of the open platform, we have rich answers for consumers in all these different pockets. We offer robust device support, but the consumer can do everything on their own terms, and then buy devices or apps as they see fit. We’re very non-threatening in that respect, which is why we have some of the best metrics of any smart home platform. On average, our consumers start with about five devices connected, and the average household normally has more than ten devices on the platform. What did you do first when the deal was over? The first thing I did after the papers were signed and the deal was closed was…high fives all around and had champagne and strawberry cake with the team. Strawberry was the code name before the deal was finalized. |
What Studying Students Teaches Us About Great Apps | Noah Lichtenstein | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | With over a million apps each in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, there’s an app — or 10 — for practically everything a consumer needs. So why is it in an ever-growing sea of competing apps, some take off like rocket ships while most fade into obscurity? The answer is magic. Magic — much like — may not be real , but we use it to describe that intangible feeling of delight we get from our favorite apps when they ‘automagically’ just work. I push a button, and my ride appears. I snap a goofy picture and my friends get a good laugh before it disappears into the ether. I swipe right on a photo of a cute, smart girl, and I’m chatting with someone who also swiped right. This is what consumer apps feel like when they work. As mobile software continues on its march to , we at wondered, are there other untapped or undiscovered apps that have this similar magic? So, we recently sponsored a survey* of over 1,000 high school and college students, with the help of a team of Stanford undergrads to learn: 1. What apps are growing in popularity but currently “under the radar”? 2. What are the most wished-for apps that don’t yet seem to exist? With big caveats relating to the non-scientific nature of this survey and the methods used for filtering data, here is what we found: Sadly, our survey did not uncover any under-the-radar, rapidly growing magical new apps to invest in right before they hit an inflection point. Instead, we found beyond the established category leaders, students seem to be using a sea of disparate apps. In fact, of over 3,300 app responses collected, 1,500 unique apps were represented — and no lesser-known app was said to be used frequently by more than 2.7 percent of respondents. There are likely several factors behind this. First, many of the early mobile magic-makers — like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify and WhatsApp — now take up a big chunk of consumers’ active daily hours. A second reason is that with the declining cost of app development, it is now cheaper than ever to build new apps tailored to serve a particular function. This has created a massive long-tail of apps to serve practically any consumer need. And for those apps that have succeeded in delighting users on one platform, many then struggle to translate the experience cross-platform, such as to mobile phones and tablets. While we didn’t discover any breakout under-the-radar apps, a common wish did emerge from our survey. “If you had a magic wand to create an app that you would use every day, what would the app do?�� In response to this question, over 20 percent requested some form of a comprehensive to-do + calendaring + life management app that helps them better organize their lives. It seems the greatest wish was for a magical “Productivity 2.0” app that pulls in all of the information stored on a user’s mobile phone, intuitively understands their life and working style, and “just works.” This sentiment might be best captured in the following survey response: Other examples of requests for an experience that magically weaves together the info on our phones and our digitally connected environments included: While there were no clear rocket ships uncovered by our survey, the most popular app listed (2.7 percent) by students was an education-focused productivity app, Notability. combines note-taking, lecture recording, document annotations, sketches, worksheets and more into a unified app, and combines this functionality with collaboration and cloud storage features. So in some ways, Notability delivers what our respondents were requesting: an app that combines multiple features into one app to deliver higher productivity and more magic. The launch of the iPhone in 2007 was nothing short of magic. And combined with the commercial launch of the Android platform in 2008, it ushered in a wave of rapid app development, so there is now an app for nearly everything. But it’s time for a second wave. If the first wave was all about dedicated apps to do specific things and leverage specific mobile phone features, we think the next wave will be made of new apps that seamlessly pull together disparate information on our phones, and that use multiple capabilities of our devices to deliver new, synthesized mobile experiences that feel like magic. As early-stage investors, we are in the “searching for magic” business—and we look forward to meeting the entrepreneurs building this next wave of magical apps. —— |
Uber To Test Moving Services In Atlanta, Nashville | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | Earlier this summer, we saw Uber experiment with . The car service seems to be testing the waters for another service, announcing and . , UberMovers will provide free and professional moving services for up to a half hour for students in Atlanta between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Saturday. The same moving services are available in Nashville on Saturday and Sunday. UberMovers are free for new Uber users, and for a charge by the half hour for existing users. Uber will send over two professional Bellhops movers and some free Uber gear to those using the service. The company says its movers can help students lift mattresses, move furniture across campus, unload moving pods and remove trash after unpacking. The service can’t help pick up large items off-site or help with electrical services like mounting TVs. To move an item across campus, you need to let Uber know up front the location because they’ll be scheduling due to distance. A spokesman for Uber told me there would be several moving teams in each location, but that there will likely be a high demand for these services. At first glance the free moving service seems like promotions Uber has tested in the past like ice cream trucks and . But moving could be an area Uber might explore in the future, . Other tech solutions for moving already exist. Yesterday, Julian Chokkattu covered Buddytruk, . Bellhops, the service Uber is teaming up with for its moving tests, in the South and on the West Coast. But especially on college campuses like mine where the service is already the preferred method to get to and from bars, Uber could have a strong moving business. Bellhops might be one of the largest names in college moving services right now, but Uber’s advantage is that most are already familiar with its driving services and have the app. By teaming up, Uber and Bellhops could profit from the many carless students in need of moving help. In my three years of college, the only times I have had to borrow a friend’s car is to move. On my campus several and , but they require advanced booking and can sometimes be pricey. The on-demand nature of Uber would ease moving for last-minute college students like me who fail to plan ahead. |
Which Apps Are Eating Your Battery? Normal Will Tell You. | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | Somewhere, somehow, maybe less than a year after I got the latest version of my iPhone, its battery would mysteriously deplete in about half a day. I wasn’t really sure why. But now I can find out. There’s a new app called out from a pair of Stanford Ph.Ds in computer science named and , who are turning some postdoctoral research into a company called . Their first project, Normal, is a battery diagnosis service that tracks and compares your app usage to other iOS device owners to see if there are any specific actions you can take to save battery life. The 99 cent app compares your phone’s battery usage over time with other people who have similar combinations of apps. Hence, the name ‘Normal’ — is your phone’s battery life normal compared to other devices that are the exact same model? “Battery is a pain point and there are not good solutions,” Oliner said. “The device doesn’t tell you everything you need to know. Why is it using so much energy? Is that normal or not? That’s what we’re trying to adjust.” When you go inside Normal, you’ll see active apps, inactive battery hogs and other apps. For each app, there is a ring chart that will show you how much battery life you’ll save if you close a specific app. So for instance, if I shut Facebook’s mobile app off, Normal estimates that I’ll save 26 minutes and 47 seconds of battery life. Or if I close inactive apps running in the background like Instagram, I’ll save an hour and seven minutes. Certain apps can be re-configured to use up less battery. Oliner says Pinterest, for example, is not normally a battery hog but there are a few configurations that make it more energy intensive. There’s a screen inside the app that will tell you if a specific app is behaving normally compared to other identical apps on other smartphones. The app is based on a project Oliner led at UC Berkeley that eventually became an app called . The concept seems almost identical. That older app would quietly take measurements from your device, combine that data it with other people’s anonymized usage metrics, and then send back tips on whether to update your OS or kill or restart apps. Now that Oliner is finished with postdoc work, he decided to start a new bootstrapped company with Leverich called Kuro Labs that may spin out more similar concepts. He hinted at looking at laptops or tablets. “The closest analogous company is something like Bugsense, which diagnoses crashes,” he said. “But we’re doing energy instead.” |
Yahoo Acquires Ad Startup ClarityRay | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | Israel-based ad startup announced on its website that it has been acquired by Yahoo. A Yahoo spokesperson sent me the following statement confirming the deal: We’ve been working on building up security capabilities and making Yahoo a safer place for users and partners. Advertising is an essential part of our business here at Yahoo, and we’re committed to getting it right. ClarityRay is a company with deep expertise in ad-malware detection and prevention. The bottom line for Yahoo is that search is going to get better and safer for users, and advertising will become more reliable and profitable for partners. I first after it raised $500,000 in funding from its chairman Saar Wilf. At the time, the company offered tools for online publishers to circumvent ad blockers — CEO Ido Yablonka told me that his goal was to help publishers make money without ignoring the concerns of the “ad intolerant.” Since then, however, as the Yahoo statement suggests, ClarityRay’s focus has moved away from ad blocking to ad security and fraud detection. (I’m trying to get more detail about what the company has been up to and will update if I find out.) The ClarityRay announcement doesn’t say anything about the terms of the deal or offer specifics about the extent to which Yahoo will be using the company’s technology. The startup writes: Joining Yahoo now will allow us to make use of that momentum and take the next steps (or rather, leaps) towards that vision, and we couldn’t be more excited. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity enables the mass scaling of our technology, impact and ideas to the absolute forefront of our field, while working with an amazing team who shares our passion. We’re proud to call Yahoo ‘home’. Yahoo has become notably acquisitive since Marissa Mayer became CEO two years ago, something that has been credited with reinvigorating the company while also . |
YC-Backed Neptune.io Wants To Help Network Admins Sleep By Fixing Common Issues Automatically | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | Nearly every network administrator has been on night duty when their pager buzzes or they get a smartphone alert of a network issue, one they’ve fixed a hundred times before, yet still forcing them to get out of bed to deal with it. YC backed startup, wants to change that by providing automated fixes for common networking problems, allowing those on-call admins to sleep just a bit better and only wake up for more serious issues. Co-founder Kiran Gollu reports he used to work at Amazon Web Services, and he knows a thing or two about being woken several times a night because he’s had to deal with this very issue. “If the disk is full or a process breaks, you have to get out of bed and take a half hour or 45 minutes to fix it,” Gollu explained. “I worked at Amazon for five years. I was waking up and fixing these problems, and it was frustrating to do these things.” It’s one of the big reasons he and his co-founder Satish Talluri, came up with this product, which he says slots nicely between monitoring tools like New Relic and AppDynamics and alerting tools like PagerDuty. NewRelic and AppDyamics are watching for problems. PagerDuty is compiling alerts and sending them to the appropriate administrator on call. Where Neptune.io comes in is it offers those administrators a couple of options for fixing the issue including scripts that automate fixing several common problems. For example, if the disk is full, it cleans out logs or archives old files. If memory utilization is too high, it would initiate a thread dump. Gollu says the script can be written in any language depending on the needs of the customer. “That way, we could run any shell command. If users are concerned about security, they could restrict the permissions on what commands neptune can run,” he explained Neptune can also provide an email alert with some suggested ways of resolving the problem. So for example, let’s say the disk is full. Your monitoring tool will let you know this, but won’t give you any context or help in fixing it, forcing you to dig into it and find some large files you could offload. Neptune.io offers suggestions to save you time. He pointed out that many of the bigger players like Netflix, Google and Facebook create these types of repair scripts themselves in-house, but don’t share them publicly. Meanwhile the monitoring tool companies offer some scripting, but he says it’s more basic than what Neptune.io is offering because it’s their total focus. For now, AWS is their primary market target and for starters they are looking at medium-sized businesses with 50-100 servers and one engineer working on the AWS installation. They eventually hope to expand that to other cloud infrastructure products and larger installations. They also plan to connect to the monitoring ecosystem so they are talking to monitoring and alerting tool companies, so IT pros can have a monitoring system that works smoothly together. Gollu reports that they have been around since November and became a part of the YC incubator this summer. They are live with their product and they have paying customers. He also says they are self-financing through savings. They hope to do more formal fundraising in the fall. They are live on the and he reports they have paying customers today as part of a pilot program. |
Bill Gates And Tim Cook Dump Ice On Their Heads For ALS Awareness, Challenge Elon Musk and Dr. Dre | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | Oh, you thought Bill Gates wouldn’t be up to to dump a bucket of icewater on his head for ALS awareness? You thought wrong. And because it’s Bill Gates, the video involves blowtorches and engineering. ALS, or Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that attacks the brain and spinal cord. You can find more information about ALS , and As is tradition, Gates gets to call out three people to go under the bucket next, so he named Elon Musk, TED conference curator Chris Anderson, and Ryan Seacrest. If Elon’s video doesn’t somehow involve rockets and ice from space, I’ll be sorely disappointed. ) And in case you missed it last night, here’s Apple CEO Tim Cook (who also donated to the cause) doin’ the challenge on the Apple Campus: And here’s Bezos dousing himself at Amazon’s all-hands meeting this afternoon. After considering passing the challenge onto a few people who almost certainly wouldn’t partake, he names Star Trek stars William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, and George Takei. Bezo’s ice dump goes down at the three minute mark in the video below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFVezzjAhFY |
Yo Guys, Postmates Built BurritoCannon For Me | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | BurritoCannon is real, and you can use it. At least for the next few hours. Hella. After I published my yesterday calling for a new burrito-delivery service that I tentatively named BurritoCannon, I trotted over to digs after its CEO asked if I could drop by. Our offices are next door, so I slipped over to say what for. Instead of merely exchanging hellos, a few Postmates executives sat me down in front of a computer and showed me what they had thrown together: A store built on top of their service called The Burrito Cannon. No shit. (It should be live in San Francisco as of about right now in the Postmates app.) What the company built was a fusion of the company’s platform and my vision. To cut down on delivery time, the service was constructed to have the delivery person hit up the closest burrito spot, so that they could snag you a burrito and get it over to your desk in a hurry. You couldn’t select a specific restaurant — you could only pick what sort of burrito you wanted. That was by design, as the store was set up to have your delivery person bring you a burrito from the closest nearby shop, cutting down on the total time required to get you the tortilla tube. On their end, Postmates instructed the delivery person to charge a set fee — $12 was picked — so that what it costs to have a burrito blasted over to you isn’t a mystery. (To build the service, Postmates used a platform that it has created, but hasn’t released yet. Once live, other businesses will be able to build on top of their delivery network.) I fired up Postmates on my phone, picked The Burrito Cannon, and ordered a burrito. It worked: Not knowing where your burrito will come from is an interesting component of what Postmates built. You could call the final product Burrito Roulette, if you will. Caveat: If you , and get Chipotle, you still have to tip the delivery guy. I had originally called for a SpoonRocket-like service, that would have cars out and about stuffed full of burritos at your beck and call, but The Burrito Cannon seemed like a pretty decent compromise. And, since it was thrown together incredibly quickly, I am enthused. In case you were wondering, Peak San Francisco is sitting in a well-appointed office blasted with SOMA sun discussing how to use a startup’s on-demand network to bring you burritos more quickly based off the idea you wrote in a blog post that morning. As the excellent @ notes, “Taco en Paz, Burrito en Guerra.” It’s a point well made. The only sad bit at play here is that The Burrito Cannon won’t last long. So, if anyone really does want to build a durable service that brings burritos to us lazy bastards in extra short order, ping me. Because I’m hungry. . Burp. |
BuzzFeed’s Future Depends On Convincing Us Ads Aren’t Ads | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | makes the majority of its money on ads that pretend to be content, but can it keep up this charade? Or, is the Starbucks-sponsored “10 Summer Emojis That Should Definitely Exist” no charade at all, but actually the future of media that we should just smile and accept? These are the questions that popped out to me from the news that invested at an $850 million valuation. A16Z partner and new member he’s behind the company because “BuzzFeed has technology at its core. Its 100+ person tech team has created world-class systems for analytics, advertising, and content management.” In a phone interview, he tells me that people are already consuming so much via smartphones and tablets that there’s an opportunity for a content empire to rise with the new medium. For a solid breakdown of the importance of the news, check out . Essentially, BuzzFeed is probably worth a lot more than $850 million (I agree), now has the money to make acquisitions, and will use its editorial content to prove to advertisers that it can reach lucrative young demographics. But the most interesting fact revealed with the news wasn’t that BuzzFeed has 550 employees, 150 million unique monthly visitors, or expects to make triple-digit millions in revenue in 2014. It’s the way it makes that money. Once upon a time, mediums like television hosted both content (tv shows) and ads (commercials) that looked similar but were made by different companies. Now, BuzzFeed makes the channel, the content, and the ads. writes: “Already, most of BuzzFeed’s revenue is derived from BuzzFeed Creative, the company’s 75-person unit dedicated to creating for brands custom video and list-style advertising content that looks similar to its own editorial content.” Here’s what that looks like. First, the BuzzFeed home page above. Wow, no annoying banner ads. But that doesn’t mean this is all organic content: The BuzzFeed Creative team built these ad/articles for Pepsi and Starbucks with the same design, headline format, and imagery people are used to from BuzzFeed so they blend in. Starbucks gets to promote its Frappuccino product at the beginning and end of the post and gets a giant Facebook Page Like button and timeline on BuzzFeed. This format performs much better for advertisers than traditional ads, and Dixon pronounces “Banner ads do not work on the desktop and will not work on mobile.” Apparently, BuzzFeed’s native ads are working, as it expects around $120 million in sales this year. People are in fact clicking these posts and . Some are even sharing them. But are they good for BuzzFeed’s readers, and by extension, the company in the long run? Thanks for the tip, Pepsi. This is what appears at the bottom of BuzzFeed’s Pepsi ad/post that flimsily masquerades as content. At their core, I believe these ads are . So does plenty of advertising, including some terrible pop-overs and poorly labeled banners inserted into the TechCrunch site (thanks AOL). BuzzFeed labels its native ads relatively clearly, so I’d certainly say it’s less deceptive than other sites, but that doesn’t make it innocent. [Update: Let’s look at some examples of the deception. BuzzFeed’s “ ” is an ad for Carls Jr burgers, not a list of workout tips. And while a “Promoted by Carls Jr” tag might appear on BuzzFeed’s home page river and the post, there’s no telling from a tweet or Facebook share that this is an ad and not organic content. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed features articles with the ambiguous label which actually link away from BuzzFeed to completely different websites, which certainly surprised me. These aren’t ads but instead a traffic exchange where BuzzFeed and other sites cross-promote each other, but it’s very tough for most people to tell what’s going on.] Whether or not people enjoy a piece of content, I think they should understand if it’s an ad, not just be warned. That doesn’t mean native advertising is so evil that we shouldn’t use it. Television commercials are native ads — they’re 30-second mini TV shows. Native ads have helped monetize otherwise free content mediums and could be critical to the future of journalism, even if they’re meant to fool people. Dixon has a very different perspective. He tells me “I think there’s a lot of confusion about this. I just don’t think it’s true that they’re tricking people. It’s very clearly labeled. More clearly labeled than Facebook or Twitter. It’s right at the top.” Ideally, content would be so good that we wouldn’t care if something was organic or an ad, yet right now I think a lot of people can’t tell the difference. And it could get worse if companies like BuzzFeed get more cavalier about camouflaging native ads, say, by minimizing or removing the warning labels. Personally, I’m pretty glad TechCrunch doesn’t publish articles like this: But this is not an indictment of native advertising. There are plenty of those already. People like comedian John Oliver (below) are happy to scream at you about why native ads are diluting journalism. Others like International Advertising Bureau President and CEO will tell you everyone from to Facebook does it and since its been around for decades we should just suck it up. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc] So the morality aside, what I want to know is whether native advertising will keep working for BuzzFeed and how? Try as it may, many of BuzzFeed’s native ad posts are drivel, and I don’t think this quality level will scale. Starbucks wants you to check out ‘ On The Ultimate American Summer Bucket List’ while ‘A Thank-You Letter To Summer’ sincerely announces “ wants to help you remember your .” Often, these are just a random smattering of animated GIFs with weak captions tying them to the headline theme. Sometimes, they’re facts from Wikipedia thinly veiled to make Arizonans buy car insurance, like ‘s “12 Reasons Why Phoenix Should Be Called The #NoFilter City”. Dixon thinks I’m too high brow, but this stuff is dreck compared to much of BuzzFeed’s organic content. I love me some , but silly doesn’t have to mean shallow BuzzFeed does create some great native advertising. This video for Tidy Cats kitty litter is hilarious and right on brand, as is a similarly narrated one for . [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJPJUaZZOss] Still, they could be drowned out by crappy native ads that permanently sour people on BuzzFeed’s sponsored content. Banner ads sure don’t work any more. The grim joke is that you’re more likely to survive a plane crash or complete Navy Seal training than click on one. The click-through rate on banner ads is said to be and falling. It took some time, but we as Internet users have trained ourselves to avoid them like bubonic QR codes. This could happen to native advertising too if BuzzFeed isn’t careful. Old school ad agencies have proven that creating custom marketing content does scale, , but our trust in clicking native ads won’t if we learn that they usually suck. While it seems inevitable that our native advertising detectors will get better over time and we’ll evolve to avoid native ads, Dixon disagrees. He contends that Google’s search keyword ads and Facebook’s News Feed ads are both native advertising and they’re still working, but I see BuzzFeed’s as different. Google keywords are responsive to your query and are utility focused. Facebook has consistently changed the design and format of its native ads, and which types are popular with advertisers has shifted too. The move from Sponsored Stories to Page Like ads to mobile app install ads may be offsetting fatigue and recognition of what stories are paid for. BuzzFeed could switch between formats like video, animated GIFs, photo listicles, and traditional articles, but as long as they’re under the BuzzFeed banner, they’ll be judged by their collective quality. To keep BuzzFeed’s business working, it has to do two things. First, raise the bar for its native advertising such that people can’t distinguish between ads and organic content. That might mean turning down advertisers if it can’t come up with a good native ad idea, or scrapping a campaign if the content produced feels lame or forced. Those are surely scary calls to make with millions of dollars and relationships with the world’s top brands on the line. But maintaining a quality standard is the only way to make native advertising a sustainable long-term business. Second, it needs to keep driving more traffic to its homepage where people stumble across its native advertising in order to counteract any drop in click-through rates as less savvy users begin to realize what “Promoted by” really means Currently 75% of BuzzFeed’s referral traffic comes from social media, which can be fickle. It may need to wean itself off the FaceTweet teat, or at least diversify its traffic sources as much as possible. As more publishers post more frequently to social media, . Meanwhile the gush of social traffic is highly volatile since the platform owners can close the spigot with quick tweak of their algorithms, like . That’s why I expect BuzzFeed to focus on becoming a homescreen-worthy app, a homepage, or a spot on your bookmark bar — to become less of a BuzzFeed and more of a BuzzHome. By forging direct relationships with its audience rather than depending on mitigated channels to reach them, its power could grow. “If BuzzFeed is creating great content then the platforms will want them”, rather than chopping down the adolescent media giant’s reach, say Dixon. Not all top 10 lists are created equal. Neither are all cat videos. BuzzFeed’s will have to be the very best if it wants us to see past the sponsorships. |
NSA Internet Metadata Program Collected More Than Was Allowed, Shared Data Too Broadly | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | A now-defunct National Security Agency (NSA) bulk collection program that collected information about online communications exceeded its authority, collected too much, and shared that information too freely, . The program collected, according to , “certain electronic communications metadata such as the ‘to,’ ‘from,’ and ‘cc’ lines of an email and the email’s time and date.” The compliance issues detailed below are generally self-reported, and thus cannot be treated as the full extent of the NSA’s overreaches of its authority during the life of the particular program. The government, the document indicates, “acknowledges that NSA exceeded the scope of authorized acquisition continuously during the more than [redacted] years of acquisition under [the] orders.” According to the document, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, which in this post is referred to as the FISA court) authorized the NSA to “engage in the bulk acquisition of specified categories of metadata about Internet communications.” Queries were to be executed through the use of “seed” accounts, which the material defines as “Internet accounts for which there was a reasonable articulable suspicion (‘RAS’) that they were associated with a targeted international terrorist group.” For United States persons, the FISA court document notes that RAS “could not be based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment.” The document also notes that the “NSA could disseminate U.S. person information to other agencies only upon determination by a designated NSA official that it is related to counterterrorism and is necessary to understand the counterterrorism information or to asses its importance.” Why did the NSA need to collect so much information? The document is at times heavily redacted, and so the reasoning here is choppy. The below screenshot contains the section that details the argument for the bulk collection in question: An initial episode of unauthorized collection — filed as a Notice of Compliance Incidents — stemmed from what the government described as a lack of knowledge among NSA employees who then miscommunicated with [redacted] parties, whom I suppose to be contractors. The court asked the government if information other than metadata had been collected. It was told that no other types of information had been. The document dryly notes that “this assurance turned out to be untrue.” In what appears to be a later incident — all numerical dates are redacted in the document — a “typographical error” also led to “unauthorized collection.” In the language of the document, the “next relevant compliance problems surfaced in [redacted] year” and touched on “accessing metadata,” the “disclosure of query results and information derived therefrom” and “overcollection.” In short, three separate ways that the NSA managed to exceed its authority in its operation of the program. After the government disclosed that the “NSA had regularly accessed the bulk telephone metadata using a form of automated querying based on phone numbers that had not been approved under the RAS standard,” the FISA court “ordered the government to verify that access to the bulk [Internet] metadata complied with comparable restrictions.” In short, because the government had overstepped in a similar program, it was pressed to show that with the Internet communications metadata, it had not. The government came back and said that a “discontinued” query practice that did not square with the RAS system had existed. The NSA promised to go through its Internet communications metadata program to stiffen compliance. A bit late, perhaps. Continuing the year’s compliance issues, NSA analysts who “were not authorized to access” the Internet communications metadata “directly nonetheless received unminimized query results,” according to the court. The NSA also admitted to “placing [query] results into a database accessible by other agencies’ personnel without the determination, required for any U.S. person information, that it related to counterterrorism information and was necessary to understand the counterterrorism information or assess its importance,” another breaking of the rules. The NSA, according to the court, also “made it a general practice to disseminate to other agencies NSA intelligence reports containing U.S. person information extracted from the [Internet] metadata program without obtaining the required determination.” So, the NSA was more than willing to share information about U.S. citizens with other agencies, not in keeping with the rules set down to government the program that collected the data, or its sharing. According to the FISA court, the government “simply ignored” the dissemination rules in place. And finally, regarding overcollection, the government filed “yet another form of substantial non-compliance ” relating to the collection of “information beyond the [redacted] authorized categories.” Apart from the other types of data that were collected, the government said that “[v]irtually ever [Internet] metadata record” that was collected — and here now according to the court — “included some data that had not been authorized for collection.” The FISA court document deadpans that the “government […] provided no comprehensive explanation of how so substantial an overcollection occurred.” The document also says that the government [said] nothing about how the systemic overcollection was permitted to continue.” Or, put another way, the government didn’t break down how it managed to get it so wrong, for so long. Citing the massive failure of the NSA to stay within its lanes, the court determines that “those responsible for conducting oversight at the NSA failed to do so effectively.” Call it the understatement of the year. In short, the NSA was given the capability to collect bulk Internet communications metadata, subject to restrictions on who could access the data, how it could be shared, and precisely what sort of information could be acquired. In each case it broke the rules, collecting too much, allowing unauthorized parties to search the pooled data, and sharing it too broadly without adequate protections. Bastards. |
Y Combinator Takes Public Stance Against Sexual Harassment | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | Ahead of its Demo Day next week, reminded that it has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment toward founders. “Don’t even think about doing it,” wrote. “I will find out. Y Combinator will not continue to work with you.” The post follows increasing publicity surrounding the sexual advances and discrimination that female founders often find when seeking investors for their startups. Wired published stories from female founders who experienced bias, reminding readers with the title Following that, of a female founder who said if women want to lean in, they better “armor up.” Some even took to Secret to discuss the problem, where which male venture capitalists make inappropriate sexual advances on female founders and “trick them into dates.” The Secret post has garnered multiple accusations of libel and defamation, with commenters arguing it was not the proper platform to disclose the names of the venture capitalists guilty of this behavior. Secret, Silicon Valley’s depository for anonymous gossip about blow jobs and the latest firings, should not be the place to make serious reports about such offensive and inappropriate behavior. But the fact that founders are reporting their highlights that women entrepreneurs have few other places to go without jeopardizing their own reputations. They have no human resources departments, and fears about backlash to such accusations make it incredibly difficult to even talk with business partners and other investors, especially considering the relative power investors have compared to fledgling entrepreneurs. A female founder with a young company runs directly into the deep, dark waters of moneyed (and largely male) gatekeepers and may be reliant on funding that comes from the same investment houses that continue to tolerate this kind of discriminatory behavior. Since the anonymous Forbes magazine piece and the post on Secret, some have argued this problem will be impossible to correct . But the onus should be on the investors who are behaving inappropriately to change their behavior and on their colleagues who stand by and let them to say something. Those who are harassed should not be blamed for wanting privacy. said it best at when she reminded the mostly male panel and audience it’s not just “up to the women to lean in or whatever the fuck they’re supposed to do.” Investors, particularly male investors, need to on this issue, too. Prior to the recent media attention, sexual harassment from investors to founders remained taboo. Y Combinator President the company had taken action in the past, not inviting allegedly offending investors to Demo Day and not sending them referrals. But by finally talking about the issue publicly, Y Combinator has paved the way for other accelerators and investors to adapt similar zero-tolerance policies. “Nearly all the investors we know are completely upstanding and professional, but even one inappropriate incident is too many,” Livingston wrote. Then let’s see those upstanding and professional investors create some change. |
OnePlus Cancels Its Dumb Contest Following Uproars Of Sexism | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | If you want to get more women involved in your community, throwing the equivalent of a sketchy online beauty contest and labeling it “chivalry” probably isn’t the way to do it. Fledgling smartphone maker learned that lesson this morning. Just hours after launching a contest that encouraged women to draw the company’s logo on themselves and snap a selfie so that others could vote on the “50 most well-liked ladies”, the company has shut it all down. As we close in on the 200K mark for the number of registered forum users, OnePlus wants to give a shout out to the few but beautiful female fans in our community with our Ladies First contest. In true gentlemen fashion and because chivalry is not dead, we are giving the lovely ladies of OnePlus a chance to skip the invite line and introduce themselves to us. Ladies (and only ladies, sorry guys, ladies first), the rules are simple:
Draw the OnePlus logo on a piece of paper or on your hand/face/wherever (so we know it’s really you)
Take a photo of yourself with the OnePlus logo clearly visible
Post the photo in this thread
The 50 most well-liked ladies will receive an invite and a Never Settle t-shirt. Additionally, we will be giving out another 100 invites at random to any lady who participates in the contest. The contest begins today and ends on Friday. We will announce the winners on Monday. Ladies, no nudity please. Shortly after the contest went live, complaints started flooding in across Twitter and the company’s own forum. Members of the media — including our own Jordan Crook — . Women make up half the world, and we want to help them be more involved in tech. We understand that our contest was in bad taste, and have therefore pulled it. All participants will be contacted for prizes. We apologize and we will course correct for the future. At the same time, we would love to hear your feedback on how we can better get women involved in tech. This isn’t the first time OnePlus has thrown a contest that clearly hadn’t been thought all the way through. Back in April, they threw to record themselves destroying their high-end smartphones in hopes of winning a OnePlus handset. Because smashing a perfectly usable phone filled with glass, rare earth, and a rechargeable battery (read: nasty chemicals that like to explode) is a totally sane thing to do instead of, you know, selling it. Or donating it. Or doing literally anything else with it. |
YC-Backed TicketLabs Helps Small Music Venues Get More Fans Through The Door | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | Over the last few years, technology has steadily worked its way into the concert-going experience. Apps make the ticket purchasing experience a simple affair, while the endless flood of social data gives promoters and bands the ability to target their marketing efforts at those most likely to enjoy their particular style. Y Combinator batch company wants to make that technology affordable and accessible for smaller artists and venues. So far, most of these improvements have gone to the high end of the market — companies like were able to use its lock on the space to invest in improving the experience while collecting social data through social check-ins. According to CEO , the company put down its first lines of code on January 1 and brought in its first revenue on January 16. From there, the company expanded with the help of promoters in the Toronto area. By building for smaller players, it became obvious how to expand their product. Unlike arenas filled by legions of Kanye and One Direction fans, smaller venues often have trouble selling out. TicketLabs’ approach to the problem is to make it as easy as possible to turn a band or venue’s social presence into a channel for selling more tickets. Its tool for creating event pages needs just one photo to generate a page with matching accent colors. With a few more links, you can connect it to a Facebook event and bring in relevant videos from YouTube. All told, Roberts says the process only takes about five minutes. As with , people can share a link to this page to quickly get the word out about an event. So far, 70 percent of users who buy tickets through these pages sign in using their Facebook accounts during the process, making it more likely that they’ll help to promote the event from their account and give TicketLabs data that it can package for its customers, like where fans live and which artists share fans. TicketLabs also simplifies how things work once the night of the concert arrives. Instead of requiring a standalone hardware scanner that ties into the ticketing backend, concert venues can scan tickets with an app for iOS or Android. Most of TicketLabs’ traction has come from the electronic music scene. The demographics line up well with what tech startups look for in a user base: EDM fans are generally young, tech-savvy early adopters enthusiastic about finding niche events to attend with their friends. It’s an audience that gets excited about spending money together. So far, the duo has processed almost $500,000 in ticket sales from more than 50 events, with an average audience of 750 people. While TicketLabs’ service appeals to those who aren’t afraid of tech, the team has collected some surprising findings so far. For instance, approximately half of its users still print out their tickets, while roughly a third actually buy their tickets on mobile. While neither of those is necessarily a bad thing, Ticket Labs is looking for ways to increase utilization of e-ticketing and the number of purchases happening when people are on the go. My free suggestion: give concert goers a native app rather than require them to bounce over to Mobile Safari or Chrome when they click on the link to buy tickets on a Facebook event page. While it may not affect the actual user experience all that much, services like Uber have trained us to expect a fast app with a big SPEND MONEY button front-and-center. For now, marginally improving their mobile experience isn’t TicketLabs’ biggest priority — getting new clients is. That’s easier said than done: The company’s two founders are still doing all the work, with Roberts spending his days reaching out to venues, promoters and artist management to find new prospects while co-founder focuses on the tech side of things. |
Candy Crush Maker King Drops 20% After Reporting Disappointing Earnings | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | Candy . , maker and purveyor of , and was whacked by investors after detailing revenue that disappointed, and lowering its top line guidance. The company also announced a $150 million dividend. The company earned $0.59 per share on a non-GAAP basis on revenue of $594 million. Investors had expected the company to report $0.59 per share in non-GAAP profit on revenue of $608 million, however. In addition to that revenue miss, King guided that its gross bookings for the current quarter will total between $500 million and $525 million — its gross bookings for the full year will tally up to between $2.25 billion and $2.35 billion. Investors are not pleased. A venture capitalist familiar with the public technology markets indicated to TechCrunch that King had been valued as a growth stock. Its lowered guidance belies that concept. The correction in its share price therefore isn’t surprising. The company’s $150 million dividend works out to $0.469 per share. That’s a decent chunk for a company whose shares sell for $14.24, but only goes so far to plug the gap in the value of the company’s stock . Finally, King’s “executive officers, directors, founders, and affiliated funds, including Bellaria Holding S.a.r.l of whom Apax WW Nominees Ltd is the sole shareholder, together representing 80% of outstanding shares, have agreed to a new lock up with the Company through the date following the Company’s announcement of fourth quarter and full year 2014 earnings.” That measure could ease pressure on the company’s shares. However, the announced lockup has done little so far to mitigate the beating its share price is taking. King had a big hit. Market that the company couldn’t grow abounded. It appears that the bears were more right than the bulls. The company is worth around $4.5 billion at current after-hours prices. |
With YC Backing, PersistIQ Hopes To Remove Excel From The Outbound Sales Process | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | As with many companies, the two founders of , a startup had a problem they saw needed fixing and they decided to build a product to take care of it. In this case, they found themselves coordinating their cold-call drip marketing campaigns in an Excel spreadsheet and they thought there had to be a better way. That’s how their new company was born — they hope to provide an automated solution focused solely on coordinating and automating outbound drip sales campaigns. Outbound sales refers to the process of finding customers yourself. This might be simply cold calling or emailing from lists you have bought or other sources that could be founts of potential business for your company. You’re doing the hard work of contacting people, and tracking those who respond, those who don’t and when to respond again. Co-founder says inbound marketing is clearly all the rage these days, but trying to get the customer to come to you by generating content to attract them to your site takes a lot of hard work. Once you get them there, you can assign each one a score based on their actions such as reading a blog post, downloading a white paper or visiting a pricing page. Ultimately, the best scores will be tossed to sales where again, you have to coordinate contact with them and get them to respond. Regardless of how you get the lead though, the challenge for every salesperson is getting to a first reply and that takes persistence and a little bit of help from technology. Salehi says sales statistics show that it often takes up to 7 interactions with a potential client before you get a response and most sales people don’t have that kind of patience. He says research suggests most give up after just two contacts without a positive response. Hard to blame them, but it would be a lot easier if you had a tool to do the reminding, follow ups and resending and then see the response in your inbox. That’s where PersistIQ comes in. As Salehi says, “Once we get leads into our systems, there’s an immediate pain point we face. I need to be doing outbound sales, but I’m not sure where to start, and the follow up part takes so long.” Salehi and his partner were simply trying to solve this pain point. While there are products like CRM tools, marketing automation platforms and other tools from companies like Salesforce.com, Marketo, Hubspot and many others that also provide a more automated way to track this kind of process, many busy salespeople ignore these because the tools are part of a much larger package. Salehi says instead of dealing with the complexity and trying to find it inside a larger tool (if they even know it’s there), they rely on the old-fashioned Excel spreadsheet, which as you can imagine can be pretty labor-intensive to keep updated. It gets to the point where the tracking tool, the administrative part of the job, begins to take over the sales part and PersistIQ wants to simplify that process by providing a tool to import a list of potential clients, eliminate duplicates and document leads who have been contacted already automatically, allow you to segment the list, and then create campaigns. If the person doesn’t respond at point in the process, you can send another ping a set number of days later automatically. If they do respond, the response lands in your inbox where you’re probably doing a lot of your work anyway and you can contact the lead in the usual fashion. For now, the company is concentrating on email, but Salehi says he can see adding other tools for phone and social media leads down the road. And there is direct integration with Salesforce today, which automatically records each attempt to contact the lead in PersistIQ. For now, the two-person company is being nurtured by Y Combinator and hopes to go into Beta in the fall and get some seed funding and continue their journey. You can go to and sign up if you wish. |
Bolt Vs. Bolt: A Speedy, New Photo Messenger Debuts Using A Familiar Name | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | There’s another Bolt on the App Store that isn’t , and it competes in the same photo messaging space. How will Instagram parent company Facebook react to this new Bolt? Even Bolt’s creator, Nick Bicanic, better known as the founder of mobile dating app , doesn’t quite know. He claims the team was just about to release their app when news of Instagram Bolt began to leak. They debated changing the name, but decided to just put it out there instead to see what would happen. So far, nothing yet. But that will likely change. It may help that Instagram views its Bolt app as . Today, the app is not available in the U.S. or Europe, where this new Bolt hopes to compete. Bicanic is in an interesting position with regard to Bolt, and not just because of its name. Earlier this month, FlikMedia his video dating app Flikdate, and following the merger, he’s now the CEO of the combined companies. But Bolt, he explains, is a side project that emerged from Bump Networks, a Hawaii-based incubator that he and business partner Arben Kryeziu use to test out new ideas. The team members who worked on Bolt (besides themselves) weren’t involved with L.A.-based Flikdate, he says. And Bolt wasn’t a part of the FlikMedia deal. That means Bolt’s future is something of an unknown for now. There are some “interested parties” who may choose to invest in the app, Bicanic hints. If that happens, it seems logical that the new investor(s) may want to bring in a new team, reducing Bicanic’s role to adviser, as he’s now a CEO elsewhere. But as for now, Bolt is live and ready for action. The idea for Bolt grew out of Bicanic’s own frustrations with modern-day photo sharing apps like Snapchat, he says. “Snapchat is optimized for quickly sending photos, but it’s fairly crappy at being able to consume photos – number one, because they suddenly disappear; number two, because you have to hold your finger on the screen; number three because there’s no history,” explains Bicanic. “I thought: Why isn’t there a simple app that does both of these things combined? And that’s what we came up with.” There are only three screens in Bolt: the homescreen where you just snap a photo and optionally add text before sending; the “Stack” for viewing images; and the inbox containing your message history. [slideshow ids=”1042845,1042844,1042843,1042842,1042841″] Explains Bicanic, what annoyed him about Snapchat’s “ephemeral” messages is that it allows the sender to decide how long a recipient should be interested in an image. “It seems really weird to force the sender to decide because it’s an extra burden on the sender. And how does the sender know how long I’m going to find this interesting?,” he says. Unlike Snapchat, photos in Bolt don’t immediately disappear. But users can exert some control over their shares. If you have regrets, you can choose to delete the image, which removes it from all the phones it’s been sent to. (Unless, of course, someone grabbed a screenshot.) The other interesting element is the photo stack, which lets you flip through the images your friends sent. A swipe to the left will delete the image, while a swipe right adds it to your photo history, which you can later browse through via the Inbox section. Responses to shared photos are just as quick as sending, with a one-tap gesture (a tap and hold) to reply. There are a number of similarities between this Bolt and Instagram’s Bolt…or or , the app that Facebook itself to make Slingshot, or seems “inspired by” with Instagram’s Bolt. It almost doesn’t matter which came first – what will matter, at the end of the day, is whether or not any of them can establish lasting traction. (Well, the lawyers may disagree on this point. We’ll see.) Bolt is . The Android version is about a week away. Given the competitive space, the company plans to encourage sign-ups with a $1,000 Amazon gift card given away to the most active user over the next 30 days, says Bicanic. |
Uber Strikes Back, Claiming Lyft Drivers And Employees Canceled Nearly 13,000 Rides | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | The war of words between and continues to escalate. Following allegations that its drivers and employees were that they booked on its competitor’s service, Uber issued a statement claiming Lyft is guilty of the same actions. Furthermore, Uber claims these actions were taken after Lyft’s investors urged Uber to buy the company. Yesterday Lyft alleged that it had identified what it believed to be 177 Uber employees who had in an effort to disrupt the operations of its ride-sharing service. Furthermore, Lyft reported many more instances in which Uber employees or drivers would book short rides in an attempt to recruit its drivers to the other side. For what it’s worth, Lyft isn’t the first company to make that claim against Uber. Earlier this year, a black car service called Gett that competes against Uber in New York accused Uber of systematically hailing and canceling rides in what it called a “ .” But it appears turnabout is fair play. Today Uber accused Lyft of the same “shady tactics,” alleging that Lyft drivers and employees, including a cofounder, had canceled nearly 13,000 trips on Uber. Furthermore, Uber provided some inside baseball about what’s happening behind the scenes between the two companies. It claims that Lyft investors have been urging Uber to buy its competitors, and that it had been warned Lyft would “go nuclear” if that didn’t happen. The allegations come as the competitive environment has heated up between the two companies, as each tries to grab market share in a number of cities around the country. That means getting both passengers and drivers on board as demand heats up for transportation you can hail with a mobile app. For instance, Lyft recently launched a new product in San Francisco called Lyft Line that a fare between them. But Uber announced its own the day before Lyft’s announcement. We’ve reached out to Uber to find out how it’s counting the number of rides that it claims have been canceled, and have also asked Lyft for a counter-statement to Uber’s statement. Uber’s full statement on Lyft’s claims is as follows: Lyft’s claims against Uber are baseless and simply untrue. Furthermore Lyft’s own drivers and employees, including one of Lyft’s founders, have canceled 12,900 trips on Uber. But instead of providing the long list of questionable tactics that Lyft has used over the years, we are focusing on building and maintaining the best platform for both consumers and drivers. These attacks from Lyft are unfortunate but somewhat expected. A number of Lyft investors have recently been pushing Uber to acquire Lyft. One of their largest shareholders recently warned that Lyft would “go nuclear” if we do not acquire them. We can only assume that the recent Lyft attacks are part of that strategy. Lyft’s full response to the above: Once again Uber is deceiving the public, now with false allegations and an attempt to deflect from their illegal cancel campaign. Lyft has more than 100 investors, all of whom are extremely excited that Lyft is approaching IPO-level revenue. Our “nuclear” strategy is continuing to take market share with 30% month-over-month growth, while building the strongest community of drivers and passengers. |
Microsoft Updates Windows 8.1 And Surface Tablets | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | It’s a big day in the Windows world, with rolling out a grip of security patches, updates for tablets, and new capabilities for Windows 8.1 as part of its August update. Nine security updates are part of the package, addressing what Microsoft calls “37 unique Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures.” The , impacting Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro and Surface RT devices. Expect a mix of stability improvements and hardware tweaks. Turning to Windows, the new stuff isn’t called Update 2, but it does bring some new stuff to the platform that matters more in the sense that Microsoft is delivering Windows updates on a monthly cycle, which is new. With Windows 8.1 Update 1, Microsoft pooled features, and then hit go on them as a group. Now it’s looking to more quickly get out new code. As : So what is coming in the non-Update 2 August release? Trackpad improvements, better SharePoint Online integration, and Wi-Fi API updates for external developers. Good stuff, but not on the same size-scale as Update 1. Taken together, it’s New Code Day if you are a Windows user. Get thee to Windows Update and, well, update Windows. |
null | Anne Seckinger | 2,014 | 8 | 15 | null |
Westboro Baptist Church Protesting SF Tech Workers This Afternoon | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | The Westboro Baptist Church, the group known for its hate-filled picketing outside the funerals of soldiers and those who died of AIDS, has found a new target – the tech industry. The group plans to picket pretty much every major tech company in Silicon Valley from Facebook to Reddit this afternoon. In what looks to be a press release created in Microsoft Paint, the WBC released a statement saying it would be condemning tech companies for supporting gay rights. The group specifically targets several tech leaders, including because he, “…uses every ounce of his ingenuity to find new ways to cram sodomite propaganda down everyone’s throats.” The group seems to have issues with Zuckerberg for supporting San Francisco’s Gay Pride festivities. The WBC says it will start with Instagram, move on to Facebook, Google and several other tech companies on the Peninsula and then head up to the city for more tech protests, starting with Twitter. Tech community members have put up a on Facebook, inviting all of SF to counter Westboro’s vitriol with love this afternoon. That all starts at the scheduled Twitter HQ protest on Market Street at 3:50 pm. Reddit wasn’t originally on the schedule but was added that went just as badly as one would expect it to. The Reddit community encouraged folks to ignore the AMA. The WBC says God gave and the power to create Reddit for his glory, not theirs. “[Alex Ohanian] should have used that opportunity to say “God ALONE is in charge of the Internet,” the site reads. The group now plans to picket Reddit HQ in San Francisco this evening at 5:35. The WBC also plans on half hour demonstrations at Pinterest, YouTube, Skype, Google and Apple headquarters today. |
I’ve Become The Embarrassing Parent With The Camcorder | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | Everyone had a dad, mom or uncle who was addicted to the VHS camcorder. Large and hoisted on a shoulder, it captured every birthday party and canoe trip on its massive tape. Our family’s official cameraman was Uncle Brian. Some 15 years and several rolls of duct tape later, he finally let the old machine rest and enlisted his BlackBerry to enshrine memories. For two decades, the VHS camcorder was the only way to record video. Then it fairly rapidly became a relic thanks to smartphones – for a while. But now, thanks to the birth of wearable and action cameras, we’re creating a new generation of overbearing and annoying parents hell-bent on capturing everything their child does, with hardware specifically dedicated to the task. I’m one of those parents now. I’m the new Uncle Brian – Uncle Matt, if you will. I strap a Chesty Junior on my kids and make them wear the camera while they’re at a dance or running around the neighborhood or swimming in the pool. Then I make embarrassing videos for them on YouTube. For you know, posterity. They love wearing the camera. They really do. Or they’re lying to me. The captured images are vivid. They bring tears to my eyes. To see the world through their eyes is a gift not available just a few short years ago. Before, parents had to look down at a child’s world through an LCD viewfinder, missing a lot of details and emotions in the process. A point-of-view angle lets me, as their loving and obsessive parent, record memories of an event and not mine. It’s the world captured from three feet up, something that my Uncle Brian could never record. Wearables are leading to a rebirth of the camcorder. Suddenly, with all the different mounts and use cases, events and happenings can be saved and relived from different vantage points. It just takes a touch of planning. Going to the beach? Grab a Chesty. Hitting the trail? Mount the camera on your bike. Kids racing a Pinewood Derby car? Mount a camera at the bottom of the track. GoPro CEO told me last year at Disrupt SF that GoPro doesn’t view smartphones as a threat to their growth. GoPro and the countless other action cameras are for events intended to be recorded. It takes foresight to use an action camera. And it’s not always available. Yet when used properly, the results are fantastic. This trend is only in its infancy too. More overbearing parents like myself will strap them on to their children as the cams shrink in size and drop in price. Our kids will thank us later. At least that’s what I tell myself. |
Uber Is About To Launch An API | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | wins when you hit the “Request A Ride” button, so shouldn’t it try to put that button everywhere? It seemed like a smart plan, so I did some digging and now sources confirm to me that Uber plans to launch an API soon. Google Maps was just the start. While it’s not clear what the exact functionality will be, the Uber API could potentially let partnered developers add the request button to their apps. It might even support creation of full-fledged Uber clients. Soon the methods to call Uber for a ride could become as ubiquitous as its cars themselves. Today, Uber has no public API. It’s got an option to set up corporate expense . And says Uber talked with Facebook about an integration into Messenger. The extent of its openness is appearing as a pedestrian and public transportation to people who’ve already downloaded Uber. The “Get An Uber” button shows the travel time and distance, and a single tap fast-switches you to Uber with your destination pre-loaded. This is smart of Uber, and a win-win since in the transportation startup. It subtly reminds people that walking and public transit are slower and more arduous than a private driver. Uber is an impulse purchase. A quick tap can cost you $20. Uber just needs you to surrender to luxury and tap the button. Hence, the more buttons, the more taps, the more money it makes and the stronger its coverage gets. That’s why an Uber API makes so much sense. When I asked about the API, Uber declined to comment. However, mutliple sources close to Travis Kalanick’s company say a new way for third-party apps to integrate Uber is coming in the next month, though they didn’t have more details on exactly how it will work. Here’s how Uber could potentially cooperate with developers. I’d imagine that at first it would likely only be open to a family of well-vetted partners, providing more of a semi-private API for a controlled platform than an openly available public API. Uber might just offer a “Get an Uber” button like in Google Maps, or let apps show how many minutes away the nearest driver is and if surge pricing is on. Maybe Yelp, Foursquare, or OpenTable could let you book a one-tap ride to a restaurant. Travel apps like HotelTonight could offer an instant Uber to your bed. Navigation apps like Waze, Bing Maps, and Yahoo Maps could get integrations just like Google Maps. Even social apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp could let you hail a ride to an address you’re discussing. If the partnerships go well, Uber could potentially open up the API to more publicly to developers. They might be able to build whole skins on top of Uber that are designed for specific purposes. There could be a cutesy version for kids that only lets them book rides home, or one for teenagers where a parent has to approve the fare quotes before a ride begins. A power user’s “uberUber” could offer faster fare quotes, let you draw the route you want to take, or let you set up rules like “alert me each weekday when there’s no surge pricing between ” to consistently get you the cheapest ride home from work. I’d bet the Uber API will come with strict rules about how the Uber brand can be portrayed and what functionality is available. The company doesn’t want to lose its veneer of sophistication thanks to some piss-poor hacks. an app called that let you compare different transportation options like Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, walking, and public transit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Uber didn’t allow this. As the market leader, it could demand exclusivity from partners. It doesn’t want you choosing between it and competitors, but instead between its different UberX, taxi black car, UberXL, and SUV price points. As for revenue sharing, Uber might be able to convince partners and developers that an Uber button makes their app better. Alternatively, it might dispense a cut like a $1 referral fee per ride initiated. Even if it has to dole out a revenue share, colonizing the mobile web with Uber buttons could pay big dividends. Facebook had great success with a similar plan to populate the Internet with Like buttons. They made sharing an impulse decision, sent the social network valuable content, and drove awareness even when they weren’t clicked. Uber’s buttons could help it sprint ahead of competitors like Lyft, and cement its name as the defacto on-demand car service the way “Google” became the word for web search. Uber has spent the last 5 years working to get as many cars on the road in as many cities as possible. The goal is to minimize the time between you wanting transportation and stepping into an Uber. The API might shave off a few seconds and get you to pull the trigger more often. If the API is a hit, Uber buttons could make every app a Manhattan street corner where you can hail a ride at any time. |
OnePlus Uses A Sexist Contest To Sell Its New Phone | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | In this week’s episode of totally batshit crazy things some brands do to get attention, (the maker of a new smartphone called ) is kindly offering a bump on the waiting list for women who are willing to enter . Because I literally can’t bring myself to describe a contest that is so demeaning towards women and generally ignorant, and because you can’t write this shit, I’m including the entire text of the contest (emphasis mine): As we close in on the 200K mark for the number of registered forum users, OnePlus wants to give a shout out to the few but beautiful female fans in our community with our Ladies First contest. , we are giving the lovely ladies of OnePlus a chance to skip the invite line and introduce themselves to us. Ladies (and only ladies, sorry guys, ladies first), the rules are simple:
Draw the OnePlus logo on a piece of paper or on your hand/face/wherever (so we know it’s really you)
Take a photo of yourself with the OnePlus logo clearly visible
Post the photo in this thread
will receive an invite and a Never Settle t-shirt. Additionally, we will be giving out another 100 invites at random to any lady who participates in the contest. The contest begins today and ends on Friday. We will announce the winners on Monday. Yes, please ladies, no nudity. If you can restrain yourselves from submitting pornography to the internet for the sake of winning an early invite to purchase this phone, the folks over at OnePlus would be mighty appreciative. After all, they’re a chivalrous bunch. , but how this went from a drunken idea at a backyard barbecue to the home page of the company’s official website is truly beyond me. It’s far worse than hiring or that one time . It’s so condescending and offensive to women, in fact, that I hope against hope that it’s sheer stupidity that brought this contest into existence. The OnePlus contest actually has a few real submissions, but those are wildly outmeasured by dudes waiting to look at girls and folks who are . There are also a few ladies who are protesting the contest within the thread itself, like the young woman above. To : No, OnePlus… Just, no. . [via ] |
The Das Keyboard 4 Is The Hacker’s Choice | John Biggs | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | One of the defining images of the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s and 90s was William Gibson’s cyberspace decks. Although never explicitly described, they seemed to be something like a self-contained keyboard with electrode leads hanging off and a sometimes unmarked keyboard that hackers used to jack into the Matrix. I remember running around in my parents’ basement with my unplugged Atari 800XL (which was about the size and shape of a thick Ono-Sendai) pretending to be a cyberhacker making a run on the House Of Blue Lights. I obviously didn’t have a lot of friends. That’s why the is so exciting. Created by the folks who brought us the original Das Keyboard, this new, ultra-thin, ultra-clicky keyboard is a cyberpunk’s best friend. First, what is a ? Founded in 2005 by , the company’s goal was to reproduce the old “clicky” keyboards of yesteryear. Beloved by programmers for the key travel and sound, these dense slabs of I/O power originally shipped with the original IBM PCs. Das Keyboard originally created clones of these keyboards and then went so far as to create a similar “noiseless” model as well as a completely unmarked model for true haX0rs. I about his company and he said he created the first unmarked Das Keyboard after realized he might be able to type faster with a better board. “So there was this cool factor I didn’t know about before people told me, that it really looked bad ass. And so I kept going, using my keyboard and after about a year, I had so many requests from people asking me, “Hey, where did you buy that keyboard? We want to buy one because it’s so cool,” he said. This new Das Keyboard is the fourth generation and connects to your computer via USB 3.0. It features built in volume and audio controls as well as a “Das” button that mimics either the Apple or the Windows key. It has a magnetic strip on the bottom that allows you to slap on a slight riser. The keys have excellent travel – the distance they move down when you tap them – and the clicky switches make it sound like you’re James Bond tapping in nuclear launch codes in the movie . It also weighs over two pounds and features a solid plastic case and aluminum face. It works with Windows or Macs and comes in an unmarked variant called the .
Why is this important? Well, some programmers and writers like to “feel” their keyboard. While I’m fine with a nice MacBook keyboard, I’ve always had a problem with the chiclet style wireless keyboards from Apple as well as the low-travel keyboard on many laptops. Having actual “keys,” like a piano keyboard, allows you to truly feel each press. I haven’t noticed any carpal tunnel issues with the new keyboard (although your results may vary) and the sheer physicality of the keys are very comforting. Because this keyboard has a full numeric keypad you’re going to have a nice time gaming on this thing and general typing is a dream. While I suspect the noise is an acquired taste for many – it was for me – once you start slappin’ da keys, mon, you can’t stop. Keyboards like this one are hard to stomach. In an era when you can get a keyboard for $10, shelling out $169 for this one is a tough call. However, personally, I’ve used Das Keyboards for the past three years and I only swapped out my older model for this one because it was available. After using lots of mushy Logitech gaming boards with lots of bells and whistles but little character the Das Keyboard 4 is a clacking keyboard of cool. Can you cut ICE with this keyboard? It depends on your skills and your status at the Gentleman Loser. However, if you’re looking to cook up some Perl or write your novel, this is a great tool. |
Sony Teases A Virtual Couch Mode For PS4 Multiplayer – Even If Your Friend Doesn’t Own The Game | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | announced some features of its upcoming system software 2.0 for update, and one of those called is definitely something to get excited about for console owners – especially those interested in trying out games without paying up for them, or in playing with friends with vastly different software libraries. The Share Play features include two new remote multiplayer modes, both of which give players the chance to experience playing with friends despite not actually owning their friends’ games. Pass The Controller lets two players alternate turns on a game, as if they’re sitting next to each other on a couch – passing the controller back and forth – in the same room. Play Together offers a similar experience, but allows users to actually play together in real-time head-to-head, instead of sequentially. This means you can play fighters or have collaborative gameplay . This is literally game changing. It greatly lowers the cost of entry for having great multiplayer experiences, and hopefully it gets picked up by a number of developers. Sony mentions NBA2K, Towerfall and Child of Light in its official announcement of the feature, but it isn’t yet clear how far-reaching into the catalogue it’ll go. System software update 2.0 for PS4 is scheduled to ship this fall, and also includes YouTube app support for sharing and more. |
Let’s Get Over Ourselfies | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | It just became even easier . is set to launch a new app just for selfies. Its key feature? It doesn’t make a shutter sound, so no one will notice when you’re surreptitiously snapping a closeup of yourself. The messaging company’s latest app, called B612, only uses the front-facing camera on your phone and “makes the process easier” by allowing you to capture your photo by touching anywhere on the screen — in case you . The app also offers 43 photo filters, which might be bad news for fans of the who were already struggling to choose one filter from the . says the new app is all about self-expression. But seriously, can’t we all just get over ourselfies yet? I don’t see my friends’ selfies — lately bragging about vacation destinations, usually complaining about midterms — as creative outlets. I have to admit I’m guilty of taking too many selfies. In 2007, the coolest feature on my first was a small camera that flipped so it would face you. Fast forward to today and selfies are viral and constantly shared. At first I loved the trend, as more and more friends added me on Snapchat, and we exchanged embarrassing selfies that would never make it on the same timeline as our meticulously chosen profile pictures. But the novelty wore off quickly. Instead of just texting, friends started to try to have entire conversations via selfies, pausing in the middle of public places to make inquisitive faces at their phones rather than just texting the word “why.” It started to feel narcissistic. Why do we think all of our hundreds or thousands of followers and “friends” care to constantly see portraits of ourselves from an arm’s length away? Lately I’m feeling alone in my selfie fatigue. Instagram and Snapchat among millennials. In addition to LINE’s B612, Facebook rolled out earlier this summer, which has been slow to take off, but allows for the same type of disappearing selfies I’ve come to expect every time I open Snapchat. Although it hasn’t yet launched in the U.S., will provide yet another platform for ephemeral photo messaging. , your selfies can replace the generic emjoi you send to your friends. Beyond apps, Microsoft is even reportedly . When I spoke with LINE’s John Park and San Beak, I asked them what they thought of critics who say taking a selfie is a conceited or vain act. “Life is always better if you’re having some fun,” Park said. “This is a good way to not only capture a cool moment in your life but also share it with people, and that is something that we have no problem being a part of.” And I agree with Park. There is a time and a place for selfies when people might care, like if or . But my concern with selfie products like B612 is that easy sharing too frequently equals over sharing. People have been taking selfies since they could take pictures. After all, the first photographic portrait by Robert Cornelius in 1839 was technically a selfie. Robert Cornelius – the first photographic portrait image of a human ever produced. (Source: ) But until a few years ago, it was much harder to pester dozens of people to meet you at happy hour with a picture of yourself holding a cocktail. It wasn’t so easy to inform your hundreds of Instagram followers that you had just finished your workout with a sweaty selfie. Maybe that process doesn’t need to be made any easier. |
The Glov Will Make You The Inspector Gadget Of Sex Toys | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | You know that part in the movie where they geeky librarian takes off their glasses, shakes out their hair, and instantly becomes super hot? I haven’t personally tried out the (as it just launched for pre-order on Indiegogo), but I can only assume that it’s a bit like that: It looks awkward at first, but it feels really good once you get down to it. is meant to solve the problem of putting any real effort into pleasuring yourself. Usually, to get any fun out of inserting foreign objects up (wherever that might be for you), one must reach and contort in a number of awkward ways. I can attest that it can get exhausting on the wrist. (And you thought a keyboard would give you carpel tunnel.) The Glov lets you attach a fun sex toy to the end of an admittedly awkward glove so that you can use much less energy to get things going, so to speak. Obviously, this thing may make you look like the Inspector Gadget of sex toys, but at the same time, it could make you the Inspector Gadget of sex toys. Think about it. The Glov also lets you control the vibration mode and power for the devices it attaches to, which include a rabbit and a traditional dildo. It’s not necessarily the most technologically advanced sex toy we’ve ever seen, but it might actually solve a “pain point.” You can learn more about the Glov on the company’s . [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8TIT0H-WEU&w=640&h=360] |
Imgur Joins Chorus Of Tech Companies Calling For Net Neutrality | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | , the popular photo-sharing service, today with the FCC concerning net neutrality, arguing against paid prioritization and in favor of Title II reclassification of ISPs as utilities. To see a non-ISP technology company speak in that manner isn’t surprising. But Imgur’s comments are worth noting for their candor, as well as discussion of the impact of paid prioritization on its birth its future operations. ‘s arguments regarding paid prioritization — those ‘fast lanes’ that you have heard about — and are what you might expect: When it had limited financial resources, the company would not have been able to compete fairly with incumbent players had fast lanes existed, given the ability of its wealthier competition to purchase faster access to customers. Here’s the relevant excerpt from the letter: “[N]et neutrality enabled Imgur to launch and to thrive. As a college student, Alan lacked the financial means to pay for fast lanes to provide his service to other users online. He was able to launch the service as a low-cost experiment, and build on its success as it grew organically. Net neutrality also enabled fair competition between Imgur and existing products in the space. Imgur was able to grow quickly because it was a fast, easily accessible, and simple option that competed on the same footing as other image uploading services. As an experimental side project, [Imgur’s founder] would not have been able to afford the speed of access necessary to compete with other established businesses in the space.” That story applies to any technology company that competes with large players that control the market. Or, put another way, net neutrality matters the where paid prioritization would have the most distorted impact — the powers that are ripest for disruption are the precise parties that would be able to use fast lanes most defensively. Fears about larger players abusing paid prioritization are in Imgur’s past, you might think, given that it has , and it is a top 25 website in the United States? It doesn’t think so. Imgur argues that two-tiered access to the Internet for technology companies would leave it with two options: “to pay for ‘fast lane’ access in order to compete on the same footing as competitors, or to opt not to do so.” In its estimation, either option would leave its business “significantly harmed.” Paying for fast lane access would be expensive enough to harm Imgur’s growth, it expects, while not paying would have non-cash costs that would be materially detrimental. More importantly, Imgur doesn’t think that it can fight ISPs over unfair treatment, due to its comparatively small size. It lacks the resources and legal team to do so. From the letter: As a preliminary matter, the Imgur team does not have the legal expertise to exercise these rights to challenge discrimination on the part of ISPs, and to do so would impose a heavy burden. At present, Imgur has no in-house counsel, and works with a small outside practitioner with no telecommunications experience. As a small startup, the company simply lacks the resources to expend on developing a sophisticated in-house team to negotiate with ISPs within the United States and abroad. Even if Imgur could build the needed legal team, there are practical limitations on the speed and cost of bringing challenges in the event that an agreement cannot be negotiated. Imgur relies on the ability to quickly deliver service to users everyday at the same speeds as its larger, more well-resourced competitors. It cannot afford to engage in a months or years-long challenge against considerably larger ISPs with legal teams experienced in telecommunications law to simply achieve equal access. Imgur could well go out of business before such a challenge could be resolved That’s an under-discussed side to paid prioritization. Companies with legitimate complaints, and therefore a good shot at winning in court, might lose given their comparatively limited resource pool. Even for companies that could afford a suit, the required time and expense could be an unreasonable expense. More have been filed with the FCC. Imgur’s notes will be added, therefore, to a large pile. But that doesn’t mean they won’t have an impact. We’ve heard from large companies on either side of the net neutrality divide, while Imgur’s comments come more from a tech firm trying to accelerate out of its adolescence. The FCC has a set up in the coming weeks to solicit more feedback on net neutrality. Strap in. |
Sony Has Sold 10M PlayStation 4 Consoles To Consumers | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 8 | 12 | just announced at Gamescom 2014 that its latest console, the has sold 10 million units since it launched last year. That’s 10 million PS4s sold through to consumers, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe CEO Jim Ryan explained on stage at the company’s keynote at Gamescom, not just 10 million units shipped the way hardware sales are sometimes reported. It’s an impressive total for a new device that has been on sale only since November last year. Sony’s chief executive Kaz Hirai said it expects to sell 10 million PS4s in total for the fiscal year back in May, which would mean moving that many devices between April 2014 and April 2015. If it has already moved three million since the end of its last fiscal quarter, that’s a good pace with holiday quarter still ahead. The PS4 was profitable for Sony only six months after its initial launch, while the PS3 took three years to make that milestone, so Sony’s success in moving this many consoles should help its bottom line directly, rather than just by encouraging software and accessory sales. It’s hard to estimate how many Xbox One consoles Microsoft has sold by contrast, but the PS4 outsold the latest Xbox by a ratio of around 3 to 1 in the most recent quarter, and optimistically MS has probably sold around half what Sony has managed thus far – though unbundling the Kinect and focusing on and console exclusives might help Microsoft make up some ground. |
Humin, The App That Organizes Phone Contacts By How You Know Them, Is Now In The App Store | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | , the app that aims to replace your iPhone contacts app is now in the App Store. Will.i.am, Richard Branson and creator Peter Vesterbacka were all part of the private beta launch a few months back. The app is now ready for everyone with an iPhone today. hooks into your phone, Facebook and LinkedIn contacts and combines them with your calendar, email and voicemail to provide context to all those people listed in your phone. It’s a similar concept to in that it tells you key information about each contact such as where you first met, where they work and how you’re connected. Like , it also alerts you to when you will next meet up and when one of your contacts has an update or is visiting your city. Humin gets a bit deeper into your contacts than does. Connected is designed to help you keep up with professional connections, whereas Humin is both personal and professional. It provides info on when you last hung out, which friends you have in common with your contacts, what city the person is currently in and even if they are available to hang. “Think of it like page rank for people,” explains Humin’s co-founder and CEO . Every set of search results is ordered to show relevant people based on the user, time of day, place, etc. Say you can’t remember someone’s name; you just type in the search bar “met today” or “met last week.” “It’s designed the way you think,” says Jain. Jain, by the way, is the son of . Intelius sells lists of public records. That is, public contact information. This might have been part of Jain’s inspiration for an app that combines all of your personal phone content to give it context. Jain established the Kairos Society, an annual conference that hooks up college-age entrepreneurs with corporate executives and public figures, like Bill Clinton. Jain also plucked Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Arielle away from Google to manage product at Humin last fall. Jain tells me the Humin team started out thinking they’d work on the clunky phone contacts system we currently deal with. It was about the contacts themselves. According to Jain, our current way of looking up phone contacts is archaic. “People forget but the entire Internet used to be organized in alphabetical lists and categories on sites like Yahoo and Alta Vista and Lycos,” Jain says. But new search engines like Google started putting search into context. He soon realized it wasn’t a contacts issue, but a contextual search issue. “I wanted to create a way to find your connections the way you actually think about them,” says Jain. While hooking up your phone’s contact info is a requirement, you have to be willing to divulge info from networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook to provide more social context to your friends. Privacy will most likely be a key concern for users of the app for this reason. “The app shouldn’t send out any messages to friends unless you ask it to,” says Jain. However, the app will ask you if you want to verify contacts. If you click that you do, it will send an email to all your contacts in your phone. Jain was quick to point out that you can stop the process by going back to the verify modal and clicking “stop” should that happen. Humin says it encrypts and anonymizes all info gathered about you and your contacts. So how well does it work? A simple search of my boyfriend’s contact info didn’t reveal much. He’s a private person and doesn’t post much. So then I typed in “bar dude.” No one. “OkCupid” search brought up two people. One of them, “Dylan from OkCupid” didn’t reveal much either. Did we even actually meet? I don’t remember this person. Other, much more social friends of mine revealed a lot more. Humin told me I last hung out with a friend at her half birthday party. All the info provided is taken from your calendar or already publicly displayed on one of the social networks the app pulls from.
Jain tells me Humin learns what’s most relevant to you over time and the more you use it. Add a new contact via the app and it will begin to provide relevance around that new contact such as the geo-location where you met and when that was and then scour through each of your contacts to reveal who you know in common to provide a deeper connection. I added Jain into contacts in the app just by his number. His name and info, including the 17 friends we happen to have in common, immediately popped up. His name and contact info are neatly stored within the regular iPhone contacts app as well. Humin will eventually make its way to Android and even Google Glass at some point. Jain also hints at further developments down the road such as adding Humin as an app in cars. “We would become an overlay to navigation,” he says. Jain believes Humin is fulfilling the same promise Steve Jobs made about the iPhone contacts app back in 2007, to use contacts “like never before.” “We’re building a system to put people in context of all these connected devices,” says Jain. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etWxwsKEIBA?rel=0&w=560&h=315] |
Microsoft’s CEO Dares Google, Amazon Execs In Ice Bucket Challenge | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | The current meme of dumping really cold water on your head to raise awareness for ALS is . Today, Microsoft’s CEO the winning team from his company’s internal hackathon to pour a large amount of chilly dihydrogen monoxide onto his expecting pate. Then, Nadella challenged Google and Amazon CEOs and to do the same. Bezos, like Nadella, doesn’t keep much on top. Page, on the other hand, has a more natural defense. Soak the rich! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YDxB6hXWYc |
Mark Zuckerberg Dumps Ice On Himself For ALS Awareness, Passes The Challenge Onto Bill Gates | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Snark all you want about this wonderfully goofy trend of dumping ice water on your head to raise ALS awareness, but here’s the deal: it’s working. Donations to the ALS Association Plus we get to see people like dump friggin’ ice on their heads.
ALS, or Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that attacks the brain and spinal cord. You can find more information , and . Following up on a challenge from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Zuck dumped the bucket on himself in what seems to be his backyard. And since it’s tradition to pass the icey-torch onto at least three people, he called out Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, and to do it next. Seriously though: if Bill Gates does it, I think we’ve reached max absurdity. Game over, achievement unlocked. |
Apple Bans Two Nasty Chemicals From Being Used In iPhone Factories | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Much as we’d all like to think otherwise, the production of smartphones generally isn’t very eco-friendly. From the mining of rare earth metals to the myriad hazardous chemicals involved to the crazy emissions involved in shipping these things around the world, there’s enough nastiness involved to make Captain Planet say screw it, take his Planeteer rings back, and fly off to be Captain Some-Other-Planet. Apple has always about the efforts they’re taking to make the process better, if only one small step at a time. Today they take one more step. Following petitions from China Labor Watch and Green America regarding the use of two known carcinogens (benzene and n-hexane), Apple launched an investigation into how the chemicals are used in their 22 assembly plants, and how their workers are exposed. If benzene sounds familiar, you probably know it as the chemical that makes gasoline work a bit better (increasing octane rating and decreasing engine knock). N-hexane, meanwhile, is often used in the production of glues. In electronic manufacturing, however, these chemicals are used as a cleaning agent because of how quickly and easily they evaporate. Alas, each chemical is pretty awful in its own right. With sufficient exposure, benzene causes cancer, leukemia, chromosomal damage, and organ damage. N-hexane can cause vertigo, drowsiness, and . According , Apple found traces of either chemical at 4 of their 22 assembly plants — and “ ” at those locations. Moving forward, however, Apple says they chemicals are outright banned “in final assembly processes”. Of course, “final assembly” is but one stage of dozens — so this is just a start. |
Intuit Acquires ItDuzzit, An IFTTT-Style Service For Businesses To Connect Cloud Apps | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | More acquisitions for as it continues to build out its cloud services platform for small and medium businesses. It has bought — a Chicago-based startup that provides tools for businesses to integrate different web and mobile apps with each other: think IFTTT for enterprises. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it looks like that product will continue to live on, and its two co-founders, Joe Dennis and Steve Mendoza, will join Intuit. The idea here is that Intuit will add itDuzzit to its QuickBooks platform, which provides accounting and increasingly many other adjacent services to businesses. “[itDuzzit’s] technology benefits the entire QuickBooks Online ecosystem: third-party developers, accountants and small businesses,” noted Avi Golan, VP and GM, Intuit Partner Platform, in a announcing the news. “This acquisition brings us closer to achieving our mission of helping every small business app connect to the QuickBooks platform.” ItDuzzit competes against the likes of , a YC alum that counts Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ and others among its investors. The that can be linked up using the itDuzzit include the likes of Asana, Box, Coinbase, Freshbooks, PayPal and Shopify, with promises of further apps to come. What it essentially means is that while Inuit may not have its own hand in each of those pies (yet), it will give its customers an easy way of using them on its platform and with Intuit software regardless. The acquisition follows after also aimed at expanding the features and functionality the company offers to small businesses and those who develop products for them. They include buying mobile payment and bill management company and inventory management service . |
Cisco To Trim 8% Of Its Global Workforce After Reporting Modest Earnings Beat | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Today Cisco its fiscal fourth quarter 2014 results, including revenue of $12.36 billion in revenue, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.55. Investors had expected $0.53 in profit per share in revenue of $12.14 billion in revenue. Despite besting expectations, Cisco’s quarter was lackluster. The company’s revenue fell 0.5% compared to the year ago period, and its net income fell 1% compared to its fiscal fourth quarter of 2014. Investors had merely expected steeper declines. The company’s full fiscal year revenue totaled $47.1 billion, down 3% from the prior year. Cisco will lay off 8% of its workforce, or around 6,00 jobs, it announced. That should help the company trim its cost structure. In after-hours trading, Cisco is down around 1% |
Spiral Hopes To Nail Location-Based Communities | Billy Gallagher | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | A new app called could change the way we connect with the people and places around us. The idea is pretty straightforward: users see a news feed of posts near them, and can add their own updates and comment on other people’s posts. Users can adjust their geographic filters to see posts from a larger or smaller radius. was founded by , , and . The team has an impressive mix of backgrounds, from engineering and product experience at Microsoft, Apple and Google, to studying at Stanford and Harvard business schools. Colyer and Ma came up with the idea when they were at Coachella this spring and noticed that the festival’s tight-knit community could be replicated elsewhere and enhanced by technology. Spiral’s logo features a ferris wheel, which Colyer says symbolizes the use of the ferris wheel as both a gathering point at music festivals and cities, and as a vantage point from the very top to get a sense of what’s happening around you. “We see ourselves as a Reddit-style community for local chatter, with proximity as the guiding principle,” Colyer says. Spiral is playing in an interesting space right now, giving it both a great opportunity and fierce competition. Spiral recently launched an Incognito feature that lets people post anonymously, and the team is going to be adding college-centered communities within the app in the near future as students return to classes. These moves bring Spiral into competition with Yik Yak, Secret and Whisper, among others; the simple location aspect will pit Spiral against everyone from Facebook to Snapchat to Foursquare’s new Swarm app. “We want to become the pulse of location,” Colyer says. “So whenever you’re moving around, and especially if you’re at an event and want to get a sense of what’s happening around you…this is where you would go.” The team has taken a small $47,000 grant from thus far, and Colyer says they will look to raise more money later this year. You can download Spiral now on and . |
Pour Your Pellets Into The Sculptify David For Some 3D Printing | John Biggs | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Most home 3D printing systems use a few basic tools to build objects. First you have a build plate and an extruder. A motor pulls plastic filament through a heated nozzle and squeezes it out, slowly but surely creating layer after layer until you have a 3D-printed Pokemon knock-off. But specialized filament is comparatively expensive, and the raw resource from which it’s made, plastic pellets, isn’t. That’s where the comes in. Created by Columbus, Ohio, natives Todd Linthicum and Slade Simpson, this 3D printer reduces the cost of 3D printing by allowing users to use cheap pellets instead of expensive custom filament. This means you could feasibly use all sorts of materials, from nylon to plastic to wood-based pellets, to print. “We have been using 3D printers for some time now, and have realized how powerful the technology is/can be. But both the printers and materials themselves have insanely inflated prices – six figures for some printers, and hundreds of dollars for a couple kilograms of material,” said Simpson. “Our main philosophy at Sculptify is that for 3D printing to become a truly useful and viable technology, material options have to expand, and material costs have to decrease – not every plastic product in your life is made out of PLA, especially at $48/.9kg.”
The team will launch the but they’re planning on selling early bird units for $2,745, a pretty penny but still within the range of standard 3D printers. They’ve created a pre-sale page where users can when the product is for sale. Why pellets? Simpson explains: Pellets offer many distinct advantages, with more material options, higher material quality, and reduced material cost, being the most primary. Basically every plastic product in the world starts out in pellet form, so they are widely available in hundreds of different grades, materials, and colors. Also,since David eliminates the need for spools of filament, materials no longer need to be optimized for a spool – just poured into our system. You could feasibly use any color plastic in the machine and even use multiple kinds of plastic. The print bed is heated so you can print ABS and other chemical plastics, as well as starch-based PLA and other composites. Does this make it better than any other 3D printer on the market? Potentially, if it means you can print more materials more easily. The founders were Mechanical Engineering majors who worked at major automotive companies in the past. They’ve been working on David for most of the year and are ready to start mass producing in Ohio. “We want to start a business, not make quick money off of a project, and we are dedicated to making that happen. We plan to offer sales of production units after our Kickstarter units have shipped,” said Simpson. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlltfKvzTg0] |
Fresh Off Of Raising $30M, BitPay Staffs Up In San Francisco With Visa, PayPal Alums | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Three months after raising a round of capital, has staffed up its San Francisco contingent with a few hires that are worth noting. Currently, BitPay has 40,000 merchants signed onto its service, which helps companies of all stripes accept payment for their goods and services in bitcoin. , formerly of , which handles payment verification, will pick up the chief commercial officer title. , formerly of Visa, will become the company’s director of business development. And Gregg Zigler, formerly of PayPal, will become a senior developer. In September 2013, BitPay had 10,000 merchants signed to its platform. It amped that figure this year. The company has a goal to have 1 million merchants using its platform by the end of 2016. It’s a massive objective, given that the company is implicitly hoping to grow its merchant base by 25X in less than a year-and-a-half. is an interesting company, as it provides wallet-agnostic bitcoin payment processing — transaction tipping, if you were curious, is taken care of by the paying party, not BitPay itself. As such, the company can offer stronger margins than traditional payment providers who accept dollars and so forth. BitPay’s pitch to merchants is therefore simple: Use BitPay for free, accept bitcoin-based sales that might expand your total transaction volume, and even if they don’t, you might save a few points on the sales that shifted from traditional currencies to bitcoin, as the bitcoin transactions were free. Apart from the implosion of Mt.Gox, 2014 has been a slow period for bitcoin. The price of bitcoin, which is , has been somewhat flat. According to BitPay executive chairman , that stability is actually seen as a plus by merchants — though most merchants clear their bitcoin from sales directly into their currency of choice. That bitcoin is no longer gyrating like an inebriated yo-yo makes it seem like more stable stuff to invest time into supporting. BitPay is taking a shovel, not gold-panning approach, to deriving revenue from the bitcoin economy. The company charges for premium processing on a monthly basis, though its free tier is robust. BitPay expects to cross the 50,000 merchant mark in September. Quick growth, but not brisk enough to reach its 1 million merchant goal. I suspect that to reach that mark, the larger bitcoin market will need to expand — there is only so much momentum inside of bitcoin itself, which has seen its transaction volume stagnate and flatline. If bitcoin itself can rapidly grow, that will provide natural lift for BitPay. For now, BitPay has all the cash it needs to quickly staff, and have sufficient reserve cash to handle far greater payment volume. The company stated that it had , a year that saw the company wrap up with around 15,500 onboard merchants. Given that metric, it’s fair to assume that the company will process a small multiple of that figure in 2014. That’s sizable. The bear case in all of this is that, perhaps, bitcoin’s price sags, interest declines, and instead of becoming a new form of money, bitcoin slowly devolves into obscurity. BitPay, among others, doesn’t expect that to happen. |
Yep, Activision Is Bringing Back Sierra (And Kings Quest!) | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Just a quick update for last week at the idea of bringing back the legendary gaming brand that is Sierra: It’s happening. Details are still pretty light, but Activision made the revival official at the Gamescom conference this week. It’s an interesting move. Many of the people behind the titles that Sierra is best known for (Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.) are long retired — so “getting the band back together” wasn’t really an option. If the options, then, were “let Sierra’s old games fade away forever,” “spend a ton of money to hire a bunch of new developers/artists to try to recreate something that resembles Sierra in its glory days,” or “let carefully selected indie developers with proven track records take a stab at making these old series great again,” I’m glad they went with Door No. 3. |
The End (Of Hardware Alley Submissions) Is Nigh | John Biggs | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | We need you at Hardware Alley. But we’re about to shut down submissions. You need to get cracking. We want you there. So maybe get a ticket? Or ask me for a free one if you’re bootstrapping? Either way, let’s do this thing. Remember: It’s a great time. You get to meet great founders and VCs, and I’d love to meet you. Hardware is my favorite thing in the world and you’re some of my favorite people. What is ? It’s a celebration of hardware startups (and other cool gear makers) that features everything from robotic drones to 3D printers. We try to bring in an eclectic mix of amazing exhibitors and I think you’ll agree that our previous We’d like you to register as a Hardware Alley exhibitor. You’ll get to exhibit on the last day of Disrupt SF, September 10 (or take a full, three-day package), to show off your goods and get access to some of the most interesting people (and most interesting VCs) in the world. All you need to demo is a laptop. TechCrunch provides you with: 30″ round cocktail table, linens, table-top sign, inclusion in program agenda and website, exhibitor WiFi, and press list. You can reserve your spot by purchasing a . If you are Kickstarting your project now or bootstrapping, please contact me at john@beta.techcrunch.com with the subject line “HARDWARE ALLEY.” I will do my best to accommodate you. Hope to see you in SF! |
Dash’s Smart Driving App Arrives On iPhone | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | The smart driving assistant that made its debut has launched on iPhone answering one of the most frequently heard requests from its users. The , which is backed by Techstars New York, connects to any ODB-II dongle that you can get for your car (most cars made since 1996 should have one that’s easily accessible) providing feedback about your trips like fuel efficiency and even info about vehicle diagnostics. The on-board diagnostic (ODB) port on modern cars is something that is typically only used by mechanics, mainly when they’re trying to determine the reason behind warning lights that signal potential engine or other car problems. Dash plugs into that available data trove, connecting to an ODB dongle that has Bluetooth connectivity (which are available on Amazon starting as low as $10). I’ve been using Dash with my vehicle for a while now, and it adds a lot to the driving experience. It can tell you what’s wrong with your car if a light activates on the dash, for instance, but it can also tell you how much it should cost to fix that problem at a reasonable rate, including a breakdown of parts vs. labor, and it can even let you turn the light off. Dash also rates your trips, based on fuel efficiency and measures of driving skill, including how aggressively you’re braking. After each trip, the app will provide feedback about how you could’ve improved your score, which means increasing the energy and cost efficiency of your driving, and prolonging the life of your brake pads and engine parts. Other features include locating nearby gas stations and prices, as well as road emergencies and mechanics, all without having to leave the app. Other startups have tackled this kind of ‘Fitbit for cars’ product, including Automatic, which also pairs its software with a proprietary ODB dongle called the Link. Dash’s app gives users flexibility on the hardware side in terms of what kind of money they’re willing to spend, however, and beyond that, its design is top-notch and already feels at home on iOS despite its Android debut. Dash is optimized for U.S. use as of right now, and available only on the U.S. iTunes Store, but it’s a great (and free) solution for those looking to keep better track of their driving habits, either in order to optimize their automotive experience or just for curiosity’s sake. |
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Incubated: Inside Matter.VC’s Structured Approach To Helping Media Startups | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | A few years ago, a startup accelerator called launched with some funding from The Knight Foundation and KQED. Since then, the San Francisco-based accelerator has been working to help usher in the next generation of media-focused startups. takes a different approach from many incubators out there in that it has a fairly long and pretty structured program for helping startups to build and iterate on their products. It has a five-month acceleration program, compared to the typical 12 weeks for accelerators like Y Combinator or 500 Startups. The accelerator also takes a prototype-driven approach to product design, putting its startups through a series of monthly design sprints to build up, tear down, and improve their products. That starts with an initial week-long “boot camp” that gets startups familiar with the program’s way of thinking around user-centered design. At the end of every month, Matter does a design review through which companies pitch their startup, demo their product, and take constructive criticism from the rest of the group. Matter works specifically with media-focused startups who are looking to innovate around the industry. Based in Silicon Valley, it’s hoping to bring that spirit of entrepreneurship while also providing in-roads to major media companies through its partner and mentor connections. To learn more, watch the video above, and check out some other episodes of Incubated. Check out all the episodes of Incubated here: |
Facebook Now Tells Advertisers When Ads Lead To Purchases Across Devices | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Facebook announced today that it will be giving advertisers a new report showing how often ads drive users to buy the advertised product on a different device. The company says that to gather cross-device conversion data, it’s combining information gathered by the Facebook Conversion Pixel (which tracks desktop web conversions) and mobile apps that use the Facebook SDK. With the new report, Facebook says advertisers will now be able to see “the number of customers that clicked an ad on an iPhone but then later converted on desktop, or the number of people that saw an ad on desktop but then converted on an Android tablet.” In fact, the company says it found that 32 percent of people who showed interest in mobile Facebook ads in the US converted on desktop within 28 days. While , particularly on mobile, the company has also had to work to convince marketers about the value of Facebook ads — for example, it to show when its ads led to offline purchases. You can read more about the new report in . |
WeedMaps Partners With Uber So You Don’t 420BlazeIt And Drive | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Dude, where’s my car? Back in the garage because you took an rather than driving high. At least that’s the idea behind leading service and Colorado pot shop The Clinic partnering with Uber. Each time a new rider enters the , Uber will donate $5 to multiple sclerosis research though the end of year. The campaign starts this week in hopes that no one will take take bong rips and try to pilot their hippie bus to the The Clinic-sponsored this week. This is how eager Uber is to grow. It will do anything and partner with anyone as long as it pulls in new users, no matter how high they are. From to delivering , offering or helping you , Uber is demonstrating that it’s willing to get weird and wild in the name of marketing. You’d think Uber’s management was chiefing on that good-good. But Uber’s next growth plan is no joke. , which could colonize the mobile landscape with “Get an Uber” buttons. So even if you get so stoned you forget what homescreen folder you put Uber in, you’ll be able to hail one of its drivers from another app. |
AuditFile Raises $3M To Offer Task Management For Accountants | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Few jobs require more boring drudgery than what accountants have to deal with on a daily basis when performing an audit — they literally spend their time making sure that numbers in one column reflect what numbers in a bunch of other columns should add up to. Beyond the nature of the work, the actual process for verifying all those numbers isn’t pretty. According to CEO , most CPAs he’s encountered built their workflow on top of the Microsoft Office suite, keeping track of accounts in massive spreadsheets and audit progress in Word documents. A typical audit will have hundreds of steps of verification, and some don’t have to be done depending on the results of other steps. But because they’d have to go back and search through Word documents to see those results, huge swaths of time are wasted just figuring out what to work on next. Bong saw this inefficiency as an opportunity, and in 2011 set out to create a service that would put the entire process in a simple web app. After two years of development, landed its first paying client in 2013 — a 15-person accounting firm based in San Francisco. Once it was able to prove that it could significantly increase productivity, Bong says the company began to hunt down bigger game. Today, AuditFile’s clients employ 300 accountants on average, and the majority of accountants at each firm use their software. To expand, the company is increasing the size of its sales force and building out its app so that it can be used for internal corporate audits, in the hopes that it can become a killer app for finance teams at Fortune 500 companies. Neither of those plans are cheap, which is why the company recently raised $3 million in a round led by that also included investments from , the rapper Nas, Rothenberg Ventures, and Ray Tonsing. As part of its new sales efforts, the company is rolling out a nationwide ad campaign that includes some old-school strategies for getting attention. Cold-calling, a direct mail campaign, and print ads in the are all part of the plan, which sounds outdated in 2014 — until you remember that this is the same group that managed one of its most important tasks by manually logging progress in Word documents. |
Snowden Reveals NSA Intervention In Syria, Hacking Program Compelled Him To Leak Documents | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Many in the media have conjectured that supporters of were responsible for a series of Internet outages in Syria in 2012. But National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden asserts at least one was caused by the U.S. government. Snowden went public with this claim for the first time in a recent interview with another NSA whistleblower, James Bamford, . Snowden’s basis for this claim seems more flimsy than past revelations (it doesn’t seem like he has documents to back it up), and it is based on the word of one source. At first glance the assertion seemed to be fantastical, but so have other Snowden claims before they were confirmed. By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock. One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible The Wired interview gave an unprecedented perspective into why Snowden decided to steal a trove of documents from the NSA and disperse them to journalists in 2013. Following the Syria revelation, Snowden discovered a quick, automated system that responds to cyberthreats, . The program also was first disclosed in the Wired interview. The system’s automated nature is dangerous, according to Snowden, who said that cyber attacks can be “spoofed,” implying that an automatic response could hit the wrong target. According to the interview, Snowden “views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy” due to its need to acquire huge amounts of communications data. Snowden points out that to analyze “all traffic flows,” you have to “[intercept] all traffic flows.” Such an effort would violate the Fourth Amendment, according to Snowden, as the government would be “seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing.” Much of the Wired profile focuses on about Snowden’s personal history and movements since he came forward as the NSA leaker last summer. But in a fresh anecdote about Snowden’s time with the NSA, Wired reported Snowden became completely disillusioned with the spy agency when former asserted to a senate committee that the NSA does not collect information on millions of Americans, or that it didn’t do so “wittingly.” “[C]an you believe this shit?” Snowden said he asked his coworkers. Considering all we have learned about the actions of the intelligence community since the first story was published last June, it’s somewhat stunning to consider that the Snowden saga is just over 14 months old. For now Snowden appears to be mostly secure. He was recently granted legal status for a three-year stay in Russia, so he likely doesn’t face short-term expulsion. But that doesn’t shield him from digital threats. As he told Wired: “I’m going to slip up and they’re going to hack me. It’s going to happen.” With the documents no longer in his possession, what a government might be able to access would be limited, but still interesting to various parties. |
YC-Backed VizeraLabs Projects New Materials Onto Any Surface | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Let’s say you’re at a furniture store and see a couch you like. It has the number of seats you need for your living room and the cushions are comfortable. But the model in the store is cotton, and that just won’t do — you wanted leather. How are you supposed to know if you like how it looks in person? At stores with Y Combinator-backed projector installed, you can instantly see what every fabric looks like on a display model. The company wants to replace the books full of different fabrics you can look through at furniture retailers with a projector paired with Microsoft’s Kinect hardware and pretty much any device that can connect to its growing database of materials and patterns in the cloud: At least, that’s the idea. It’s not quite the same experience as being able to feel the material, and while it looks good from a few feet away, you’re not going to be fooled up close. In ‘s vision of the future, most furniture stores become much more compact. Showrooms would use fewer models, arranging them in such a way that customers can see any material on any chair or couch via their projector system. You find the model you want, find the look you like, and then submit your order for online delivery. Eventually the company hopes that its 3D-mapping technology will be used for more than just furniture. There are quite a few use cases where it might help to see what something looks like before you buy, like wallpaper and paint. Beyond that, the company envisions their technology being used to see what a product under development would look like by projecting CAD renderings onto 3D-printed models and to show cars in different colors in showrooms, among other uses. I’m curious to see how VizeraLabs’s expansion goes. The company has arranged trials at retail locations in Turkey (where the startup was founded) and in the Bay Area and will soon begin to charge its early users a subscription fee. It’s not willing to publicly discuss the details of its pricing just yet, but according to co-founder Ali Çevik, VizeraLabs it’s aiming to make it so that a retailer can justify the expense with approximately three additional sales per month. You can see VizeraLabs’s projector in action in the video below: |
Greenhouse Raises $7.5M To Engineer How Startups Recruit…Engineers | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 8 | 13 | Uber, Pinterest, Snapchat and BuzzFeed all share a not-so-secret weapon in the talent wars: . The recruitment optimization SaaS turns hiring into a science, and guides them through where to source job candidates, what to ask interviews, how to score responses. Now has raised a $7.5 million series A led by to sell the answers to those questions to everyone. A year ago when , it was perfecting its recruitment software. Now CEO and co-founder tells me its hiring engine is humming. Next it’s turning into a platform of integrated recruiting tools and going into all-out growth mode to add more clients to its roster that includes Airbnb, Mixpanel, Medium and Oculus. “When you talk to companies about how they recruit, so much of it is based on folklore and habits,” says Chait. “They’re in the dark about how many candidates they should have, or when they bring candidates in, how should they evaluate them. All that stuff is made up by every company every time.” That’s crazy. Most founders cite rate hiring as their No. 1 priority, and their No. 1 time sink. When you’re getting off the ground, one lollygagger or toxic personality can poison the whole company. And in an age of 100X engineers, visionary product designers, and ruthless salespeople, recruiting not just good but truly great talent can make or break your business. That’s why Greenhouse’s product is designed to turn recruitment into a well-oiled machine. So what’s it actually do? Companies are eager to buy annual licenses to Greenhouse to get all that sorted out, which attracted the investors for this $7.5 million round that brings the company to . Resolute Ventures and Felicis Ventures joined the round alongside Social+Capital Partnership, whose partner Mamoon Hamid is joining Greenhouse’s board. Chait said he went with Social+Capital because “They’re super well-connected, and for us they provide the right level of input and feedback given the fact that we’re not really looking to have our hands held.” Some of the money will go to marketing its product and growing the team, but more interesting is how it will fund Greenhouse’s platform aspirations. Box.net became the hub of enterprise collaboration apps by building integrations with frontrunners like Google, Microsoft and Salesforce. Greenhouse wants to do the same for recruitment software. Greenhouse co-founder and CEO Daniel Chait The idea is that any app you use for a specific part of recruitment, like video interview tool HireView, can be integrated into Greenhouse so all your hiring data is automatically aggregated. Chait says it can incentivize partners to jump on board because it can pass them back anonymized aggregate data from later in a client’s hiring funnel to help them improve their recruitment products. This open platform strategy could be what Greenhouse needs to displace the big applicant tracking systems of yore like Taleo and SuccessFactor, as well as less complete startups like . Chait admits the recruitment tool market is “super crowded” and if that bubble everyone’s talking about is real and actually bursts, its client flow could thin out. But Chait insists “Recruiting is always going to be a big competitive issue. It’s increasingly obvious that businesses are competing based on the people they can attract.” Like Dropbox is professionalizing now, Greenhouse will have to continue beefing up its enterprise IT support and scalability to handle bigger clients. But at least demand is strong. “When we started the company we didn’t know if it would take a decade of evangelizing to convince people hiring is important,” Chait concludes. Instead “we’ve uncovered this movement that recruitment operations is a thing.” If it can keep founders focused on innovating rather than hiring, may have its day in the sun. |
Alfvén & Didrikson Invests In Cloud-Based Workforce Management Software Quinyx | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | Just a few months back, Planday $3.75 million from Nordic VC Creandum. And today another European company in the workforce management software space has picked up fresh capital. , headquartered in Stockholm, has received backing from Alfvén & Didrikson. The round, which adds to the previous $1.5 million raised by the 2005-founded company, is being billed as a $14 million investment. However, this includes some secondary funding, meaning that a minority of the new capital won’t find its way into Quinyx’s coffers. Specifically, previous backer Mint Capital disposed of its shares, resulting in Fredrik Ekman stepping down from the board and being replaced as Chair by Alfvén & Didrikson’s Maria Åhr. Like Planday (and competitors and ), Quinyx offers cloud-based and mobile workforce management software, enabling companies who employ a shift-based ‘flexible’ workforce, such as those operating in the fast-food industry, to do-away with more arcane organisational methods, including Excel spreadsheets or even pen and paper, and legacy ‘on-premise’ software such as that offered by Kronos, Workplace and JDA. Its feature-set includes scheduling, shift planning and swapping, timesheet functionality via workers checking in using Quinyx’s mobile apps, and budget forecasting. The company’s backstory is interesting, too. Erik Fjellborg, CEO and founder, tells me he founded Quinyx after having worked one summer at McDonald’s where he recognised the issue of workforce management hands-on, spotting that his manager was constantly on the phone trying to piece together the employee schedule. McDonald’s subsequently became Quinyx’s first customer. “Today we work with many other fast food chains such as Burger King, Subway, Friday’s and Vapiano,” he says. “We have also ventured into other industries and help companies such as FedEx, Decathlon, Santander Bank and Compass Group.” The company also claims revenue of $7 million this year. Alongside Alfvén & Didrikson, former Google engineer, and (now) angel, Magnus Sandberg, has co-invested in today’s round. Meanwhile, I’m told Fjellborg remains the largest individual shareholder. |
Facebook’s $400M-$500M Acquisition Of Video Ad Tech Startup LiveRail Is Now Official | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | closed today, a source told me, and Facebook confirms to me the deal is now official. Facebook announced the buy without disclosing a price back on July 6th, but . Regulators apparently had no issue with Facebook buying , which help brands that want to buy online video ads to target their spots and place them with publishers that have videos they want to monetize. The 170-person startup will start working with Facebook on Monday, a source said. LiveRail could help Facebook better target the video ads it runs in the News Feed, and pipe in more advertisers. Meanwhile, Facebook could aid LiveRail with its own targeting of video ads across the web and mobile apps, plus connect it to Facebook’s vast array of ad clients. The close of the deal comes just days after , signaling there will be big competition between the social networks for ad dollars as they transfer from TV to digital. |
CloudFlare’s CEO On Expanding In Key Markets Like China And Brazil | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | As Web security startup grows internationally, it plans to take a slow and steady approach to dealing with the challenges of expanding in key markets like China and Brazil. In a discussion with TechCrunch senior editor Jonathan Shieber this week at TechCrunch Beijing (organized with ), CloudFlare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince talked about dealing with laws and regulations in different countries and the challenges of finding a partner in China, its second-largest market. CloudFlare, which has raised a total of $71.2 million in funding, currently has data centers around the world and Prince said about five percent of Web requests now flow through its networks. According to . Not surprisingly, the size of the attacks that CloudFlare handles are growing rapidly, said Prince. “We’re seeing an increasing number of performance threats, as the world moves from mobile to mobile. Attacks range from hacking attacks to DDOS attacks that are launched on us. We stop on a daily basis, over a 100 DDOS attacks, including ones that are 100GB per second, which is impossible for any one organization on their own to mitigate.” Prince said that CloudFlare is looking for a partner in China, which is its second-largest market after the U.S. Beijing, in a particular, is a fast growing market, said Prince. “We believe that we will never internally develop the expertise to truly understand and service the China market. It’s a very special market and it has special concerns. We wanted to make sure we are careful as we enter the market.” But CloudFlare still hasn’t find one “that we felt met our quality standards,” said Prince, adding that “when we do work with someone in China that will mean that the company is the best technically and has the best resources to provide that around the world.” CloudFlare is taking a slow and deliberate approach to finding a Chinese partner because “almost all U.S. [tech] companies that have entered China have failed. We may fail as well, but we hope to fail in a smarter way, but if we are fortunate, we will succeed.” Finding a partner in China will help CloudFlare , including censorship policies that differ from province to province. But China is not the only major market where CloudFlare has to deal with major issues. In Brazil, for example, the company also has to deal with . “We are looking closely at Brazil and what they are doing with data localization. You have to keep it local. A lot of companies are turning to CloudFlare because we have data centers all over the region, so we can help them solve those regional problems and deal with different law enforcement regimes there,” said Prince. The key to entering different markets is taking a pragmatic approach. “The challenges in China, in Europe, in America, as we go into various markets, is that we make sure that in those regional markets we follow and respect their laws,” Prince said. “A number of U.S.-based companies like Google thought ‘we know better, we are going to change the way things go.’ We don’t have that same attitude. We try to be a respectful partner to whatever region we work with.” |
Sam Lessin Is Leaving Facebook | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | Facebook VP of product management Sam Lessin just announced he’s leaving the social network. The announcement came as a post on Lessin’s personal Facebook page saying, “Esteemed colleagues, it is with quite mixed emotions that I write to say that August 29th will be my last day at Facebook.” Lessin was when his company Drop.io was acquired by friend and Harvard alum Mark Zuckerberg. While at the social network, Lessin was instrumental in working on the “Timeline” feature and other important product development roles. Lessin says he chose to do a “short” post instead of his usual 10,000 word diatribe. After leaving Facebook, he says he will be generally taking some time off for “kite-surfing, skiing, and general adventuring / possibly some trouble making.” Following that, he leaves the door open to go back into the startup world. “This is the first time I can think of since middle school where I didn’t have a very concrete next step to take in life…If past performance is any indication, I will be starting something soon enough… What, I don’t know, but generally volume of ideas has never been much of an issue for me,” he writes. With one smiling emoji to close it off, Lessin makes a reference to Hook as a goodbye, “‘That Was A Great Game.’ Hurray!” |
ScriptRock Scores $8.7M In Funding According To SEC Filing | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | IT DevOps monitoring company ScriptRock has recently received 8.7 maillion in venture funding, according to an is listed as a director, which usually indicates that his firm led the round. ATP Innovations hasn’t replied to a request for comment, nor has ScriptRock replied to multiple attempts to contact them to confirm the story. Nonetheless, the Form D makes it clear they have filed the paperwork that follows a funding close. was founded in 2012. Its focus is data center configuration monitoring in the datacenter or the cloud. The idea is to provide an organized way of understanding how your systems are configured such as the number of licenses, how well you are complying with regulatory compliance and so forth. This type of information is usually locked away in dense documentation or inside the heads of personnel scattered across the company. ScriptRock’s primary product GuardRail provides a central repository for managing this kind of data. What’s more the product includes an API to connect to popular tools like Chef, AnsibleWorks, Puppet and Docker. With the funding outlined in the Form D, it brings the total to date to $10M. Previously it had a $25,000 seed round in In January, 2012 around the time they launched and $1.2M in seed funding 6 months later from a variety of funding sources including Mark Jung, Anthony Marcar, Alan Jones, Larry Marshall, Scott Petry, Valar Ventures, 500 Startups, Starfish Ventures and Square Peg Capital. Co-founders and co-CEOs (and unusual division of labor to be sure) Mike Baukes and Alan Sharp-Paul are also listed on the Form D. A third co-founder left the company last year. Both remaining co-founders have long histories in IT at big companies and set out to solve a problem they had seen in their years working in the field. |
Apple’s Sapphire iPhone Costs Could Be Lower Than Expected | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | Apple’s plan is to work synthetic sapphire into pricier next-generation iPhone models, , provided they can get enough supply. While some analysts quoted expect this to potentially increase the consumer price of iPhone hardware, I’d be very skeptical of next-gen smartphones from Apple carrying retail costs higher than they currently do for buyers. Instead, screen size would likely be the driver of an increase in price. That could make a 5.5″ iPhone, if that happens, more expensive, but would leave the current starting price alone for a new model, even at a slightly bigger 4.7″. Even Apple’s smartwatch, which is also said to be getting a sapphire screen in this new report, likely won’t overstep the cost of current competing devices when and if it ships. Keep in mind that Apple watchers from the analyst community have previously thrown cold water on the idea that Apple would be able to replace Gorilla Glass with sapphire as the main material for its screens at all. Analyst Eric Virey has often been cited as claiming that, based on his cost estimates, sapphire was for Apple, citing manufacturing costs of $30 for a smartphone screen, with a possible drop to $20 after “a couple of years” – now, he’s quoted in the WSJ as saying that it might cost more than five times as much ($16 vs. $3) to make the displays using sapphire rather than Gorilla Glass. But after consulting materials and industry experts, we discovered that Apple has some tricks up its sleeve that could offset the cost of manufacturing sapphire displays. Last year, it partnered with sapphire manufacturer GT Advanced to begin ramping up production of the material. GT Advanced also acquired a company called Twin Creeks Technologies, which created a wafering process called ‘Hyperion’ which can . By using a cheaper glass as the ‘base’ of the laminate, with sapphire on top, Apple may actually be able to keep the costs down. Low enough to come far closer — or even below — the costs of Gorilla Glass (which, according to sources, Apple hasn’t actually used for iPhone for a while now). Gorilla Glass is reinforced glass, and far more expensive. By manufacturing sapphire and using the Hyperion ion bombardment technique — slicing super thin sheets of sapphire in a really high-yield — along with lamination, Apple could produce a stronger cover sheet for their smartphones for around the same cost. Not, as some analysts are saying, for a multiple of 5x or more. In other words, Apple might have to spend a bit more to create sapphire displays for its smartphones, especially given the sizes required to create screens for 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch devices, as rumored, but it shouldn’t have to deal with any increases significant enough to it to up the price for consumers. If Apple does bump up the price, it will likely be due to increases in cost that come from size — including a larger display of course — and what it feels the market will bear. And, judging by the demand for larger screen phones, it could probably bear more scratch for an Apple version. All will be revealed on September 9, so we don’t have long to wait to find out just how sapphire-infused and just how expensive (or not) the next iPhone is. We’ll have live coverage and in-depth posts when the whole thing goes down. |
Windows Phone, The PC Market, And Global Smartphone Shipments | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | Windows Phone sales aren’t doing well. According to the , 7.4 million Windows Phone units shipped in the second quarter of 2014. That’s down from 8.2 million in the year-ago quarter. Microsoft’s smartphone platform saw its market share fall from 3.4 percent to 2.5 percent in the year period. In comparison, the lager smartphone market grew from 240.5 million units in the second quarter of 2013, to 301.3 million units in the second quarter of 2014. So, as the smartphone market grew, Windows Phone shrank. The 300 million smartphone number is interesting, as for something else: yearly PC shipments. As PC sales have declined, the market for the computing segment has reached . This means that smartphones are now about four times more popular than PCs, on a global basis, in terms of sales. Of course, you replace your smartphone more often than you do your laptop, but, the comparison is worth some meditation. All this mixes the following way: Microsoft’s market share in the PC game is massive. But for the larger Windows platform to grow, the only workable market is smartphones. And there it is going backwards, both in terms of units sold and market share. Ergo, Windows is shrinking. To his credit, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella recently commented on this directly, saying that his company controls only 14% of the larger device market, despite its massive PC market share. So, the company’s leader groks the market dynamics. It’s the numbers that are tough. In broad terms, presuming 90 percent market share for Microsoft is PCs, about 67.5 million Windows PCs were sold in the most recent quarter. Using the 7.4 million Windows Phone figure, we can see that smartphone shipments for Microsoft were just under 10 percent of the combined Windows Phone and Windows device figures in the second quarter. It will be interesting to track that ratio, which is currently about 1:10. The faster Larger Windows grows, the greater that ratio will be — at 2:10, for example, Windows Phone — keeping PCs stable for this bit — would sell at around the 15 million unit rate per quarter, or about 5 million per month. The faster Windows Phone grows, the faster Windows grows. We should lay bets on what the ratio of Windows Phone:Windows PC sales will be in a few years. The irony is that if PCs decline further, it will bolster the Windows Phone side of the equation. |
TeVido BioDevices 3D-Prints Skin And Fat Grafts For Breast Cancer Survivors | Sara Inés Calderón | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | Laura Bosworth spends most of her time talking about breasts — nipples, specifically. For the past three years as CEO of , which works with human tissue and 3D printing to create skin and fat grafts, Bosworth has been researching how these products can help breast cancer survivors. For women who survive breast cancer, the damage left behind by lumpectomies or mastectomies can be traumatizing. That’s where TeVido is poised to step in, Bosworth explained. The company has been working to develop 3D printing of skin and fat grafts using the recipient’s own fat and skin cells. The company’s first product is a nipple for breast reconstruction, but eventually the company hopes to expand products to include an array of fat grafts for medical and cosmetic use. TeVido was recently selected as one of 20 startups to participate in the phase of the Livestrong Foundation’s Big C competition. Earlier this year, in May, TeVido was named one of and in June the company TechCrunch’s One-Minute Pitch-Off in Austin. Bosworth got into the nipple 3D printing business in 2010 after retiring from a 20-year career at Dell, and began working with entrepreneurs in Austin, ending up at the University of Texas at El Paso, in her hometown. That’s when she met Dr. Thomas Boland, “the grandfather of bioprinting.” She said his work blew her mind. “To be honest, I was just astounded. Still gives me goose bumps to think of it,” she said about discovering Boland’s technology. By 2011 she and Boland had created TeVido Biodevices as a company to further develop the 3D printing technology, and she’s been studying the market for 3D-printed tissues ever since. By her estimate there’s at least a $6 billion industry for the types of products that TeVido will make — and that’s a low figure. “Every time I talk to plastic surgeons they come up with other uses for our fat grafts. The most recent example was the scar left by chemotherapy ports,” she tells TechCrunch. “Someday, maybe, we’d be able to do a big enough fat graft to where you could do a small breast augmentation. We could custom match breasts, eventually color.” What TeVido is proposing to do is use a woman’s own fat and skin cells to create the fat grafts and a nipple that will stay in place, stay alive, and not need to be redone over time. “We start with the nipple because it’s little, but as the technology matures we’ll be able to do larger fat grafts that have a lot of potential,” she said, adding that calf and buttock implants are also a possibility. In addition to the nipple product, TeVido is working on small fat grafts for women who have had lumpectomies. Breast reconstructive surgery requires multiple steps, and often recreating a woman’s nipple can be the most difficult part. Surgeries have been developed to use skin to recreate the shape of a nipple; there are also implants, and tattoos often add color. Problems associated with these methods include the of the nipple and the of the tattoo, and implants also have some . TeVido completed a first round of lab tests on just a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and is hoping to receive another from the National Institutes of Health. In order to move into the second phase of testing, TeVido is seeking more funding. Once TeVido secures enough funding to begin the next round of lab tests, Bosworth said the team can begin to nail down exactly how close the skin cells need to be, how many fat cells to include in each centimeter of graft, and generally the ideal parameters for the best and most stable product. The final products wouldn’t be in the market for about five years, she says, during which time TeVido would conduct lab tests and clinical trials and await FDA approval. Although the road to riches for medtech startups can be long, Bosworth said talking to breast cancer survivors gives her more than enough inspiration to keep going. “It’s risky — but if it works, we can change the quality of life for millions of people,” she says. |
Beacon Is Crowdfunding Journalism In Ferguson, Missouri | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | Now this is a startup crowdfunding campaign that I can get behind. , a , has started a campaign for original news coverage of . The company says that in , readers have funded reports from multiple journalists, and allowed Peter Tinti You can visit to see all of the coverage, paywall-free. As I write this, the campaign has raised $3,035, which is 86 percent of its goal. However, co-founder Adrian Sanders says the fundraising will continue after the goal is reached — every $500 covers another day of coverage. Sanders added that without crowdfunding, “ wouldn’t exist.” As noted in , this is an exciting example of how crowdfunding doesn’t just work for long-term journalism projects, but for breaking news, as well. So that’s one reason I’m writing about it. Here’s the other reason: Given the craziness of what seems to be happening in Ferguson, and especially , I think this is a campaign that deserves your support. |
The Tech Behind 50 Cent’s New SMS Audio Fitness Tracking Earbuds | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | 50 Cent’s SMS Audio is holding an event in NYC tonight, but the cat’s out of the bag: the product to be unveiled is a new fitness tracking in-ear headset, which is entirely Intel inside – the technology used was originally developed by Indira Negi, an Intel engineer who created Intel’s smart earbuds reference design, which is what the SMS Audio product will basically be, with 50 Cent/SMS branding on the outside. The product was leaked earlier today by , and our own sources confirm that the earbud, dubbed the BioSport In-Ear, is indeed on track for its big unveiling today. These headphones are made to provide fitness buffs with a way to track their run without having to resort to carrying multiple devices, and that actually use workout data to inform playback details on the fly. Negi studied biolectronics in graduate school, and is herself a dedicated runner, leading to her desire to want to create a device that could fix her main annoyances while exercising. “I am a runner — I get hives from the sun, I have to run with gloves on,” Negi explains in an in an article around the device’s unveiling at CES this year. “That means when there is a bad song, I have to take out my phone, take off my gloves, unlock my phone and change the song.” The earbuds monitor a wearer’s heart rate using embedded sensors, and can work with software on a user’s device to use that data in order to change music tracks to influence your ability to stay in your target heart rate zone (meaning it’ll play tracks with a faster tempo if you’re below your target, or slower if you’re pushing too hard). These earbuds will also be wired, according to our information, so that wearers don’t need to worry about charging or pairing as you would with a Bluetooth device, and they also include accelerometers to help compensate for a runner’s motion in order to correctly determine and record heart rate data. The corded connection also powers the sensors, as it draws its required energy from the 3.5mm jack, and it uses this connector to transmit data to the smartphone for processing and engineering too. Wristworn heart rate running accessories like the TomTom GPS Cardio watch are a big improvement over chest-worn versions, but getting real-time heart rate feedback – which can actually be used with fitness apps – from the in-ear headset you’re already wearing is a huge advantage in terms of comfort and convenience. Brands that aren’t Beats trying to succeed in the headphone space are likely nervous about Apple backing the Dre-powered brand, but these fitness track earbuds could help attract some attention back from Apple’s latest acquisition. Update: An Intel spokesperson has provided us images of the SMS Audio earbuds. A that the earbuds are derived from Intel’s reference device and notes that data from the earbuds will sync with the popular fitness application upon release. It goes on to say that “additional application support” is planned for the future, leaving open the possibility that you’ll eventually be able to use SMS Audio’s earbuds with , , or health-tracking software. [gallery ids="1044356,1044352,1044351,1044350"] |
YC-Backed Naytev Enhances Social Media Shares To Drive Website Traffic | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | Digital publishers are increasingly reliant on content shared with social networks like Facebook and Twitter to drive readers to their sites. hopes to optimize the way content is shared by that make their way to those networks. The startup helps digital publishers increase their traffic and engagement by improving the content that readers share on their social networks. Previously publishing companies have mostly focused on enhancing the content they share on their own social networks and increasingly hiring social media specialists to help them drive traffic to their posts (Tech Crunch recently brought on ). But Naytev takes a bottom-up approach, using what its founder joked was “weird wizardry” to ensure the link provided to readers when they share an article on Twitter or Facebook will gain the most traction. Naytev accomplishes this by experimenting with several different versions of the headline and image for the post. The platform also allows writers from the publication to write their own headline options. Then each time a user shares a post, Naytev shares a different option. After the post is shared several times, Naytev uses the headlines and images that have gained the most traction. says as more people read the news on their mobile devices, this technology will be even more important to content providers. “As search becomes less important, social becomes more important. Social networks become the primary drivers to content,” Liscio said. Not only does this function increase website traffic by driving more of a reader’s friends or followers to the website, it can also help a publication tweak its own posts to fare better on social media. Publications can look at which version of the post is getting the most traffic and engagement, and then use that on main accounts. Liscio said the startup has already partnered with some major publications, including the and . Liscio also said most companies that use Naytev experience about a 30 percent bump in traffic. Naytev’s four founders bring a range of backgrounds to the startup, which received Y Combinator backing only weeks after they shipped the first draft of the code in the spring. Liscio has worked for Google and has been involved with several other startup projects. has worked primarily in energy and also several startups, and came to the project from . came to Naytev after his own stint in the news business, working as an engineer at . Although Naytev is primarily interested in working with publications for now, Liscio said the company could be used by any vertical trying to get a message across on social media. Politics may be the next step for the company, which began testing the product with a political party. “I absolutely believe campaigns in 2016 that use Naytev will have the best chance of winning,” Liscio said. Naytev integrates with multiple major content management systems, including WordPress, Tumblr, Drupal and Squarespace. Liscio said the platform can also be applied to custom sites. Sign-ups are free, which has allowed Naytev to gain traction among small publications and websites since it first launched in beta in June. Naytev also offers pro and enterprise services that offer additional analytics, custom branding and Facebook insights. |
SmartThings Acquired By Samsung For Around $200 Million | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | Remember when we said that Samsung was looking to acquire Internet of Things company SmartThings for around $200 million? That’s another big exit for a company . Apt for their name, SmartThings builds… smart things. Light switches. Water sensors. Door locks. All packaged up and prepped to hook into their iOS/Android app, which lets you control and monitor these devices from afar. had raised about (not including the $1.2 million raised on Kickstarter), with its latest round being a . The company says it will continue to operate independently and under the SmartThings brand, though they’re packing up and moving into Samsung’s Palo Alto branch. |
Microsoft Debated Rebranding Internet Explorer | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | In a , the Internet Explorer team revealed that it has discussed rebranding the browser. The team made its comment in response to a question regarding the negative public image that Internet Explorer earned. It’s fair to say that Internet Explorer has improved rapidly in recent years. Its brand, however, has lagged. Microsoft has introduced . Here’s the comment thread: A few things stand out here. First, that Microsoft discussed the idea at all is interesting, perhaps intimating that Redmond isn’t as cut off from the rest of the world as it once was thought to be. Also interesting is that the idea didn’t succeed. I’m not surprised that it failed to launch — for so many less technologically savvy people, Internet Explorer isn’t a browser, it’s Internet. That’s to say that lots of folks don’t get that their browser is something that they can change, any more than they realize that it isn’t called ‘ .’ And if you yank that particular rug out from underneath the digitally feeble, things would get sticky. That the discussions were occurring as recently as this summer is also notable, as it implies that Microsoft — at least on some level — remains dissatisfied with the current brand position of Internet Explorer. That is not a surprise. Chrome , something that must have come as a loud thump — even if long anticipated — on the company’s campus. What might have Microsoft called Internet Explorer if not that? One employee in the Reddit thread had a pretty good suggestion: “Windows Internet Ubber Browser 2014 SP1 Ex+.” Yes please, Microsoft. |
Square Wants You To Know Everything’s Perfectly All Right Now. We’re Fine. We’re All Fine Here Now, Thank You. How Are You? | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | Square just outlining and refuting what it says are the “top 10 myths” about the payments company. In some ways, the post is like a general FAQ, saying that, yes, Square does indeed offer customer support, and no, it’s not just for small businesses. The company also addresses the reports that it delayed its IPO (something that ). Myth #5, it says, is that “Square’s business is struggling,” while the company writes that in reality: Like you, we’re a growing business. You invest in your future, and so do we. We’re well-capitalized and putting our money to good use: investing in people and new products. Reports that we tried to sell the company, or of a delayed IPO? False. We’re here for the long-term. Why run this post now? Particularly when, despite the whole “refuting myths” framework, it kinda ? Square is a bit coy on this front, except to say that there’s “a lot of misinformation out there.” However, the company certainly has been dealing with some negative press, including suggesting that the company may have “lost its edge.” Whatever the reason, it’s worth getting facts out there, but I’m not sure that a quick, not-particularly-in-depth response is going to convince the skeptics. [top image , lower image ] |
Watch A Thousand Micro Robots Self-Assemble Into Wild Shapes | John Biggs | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1t4M2XnIhI] The madmen at Harvard have finally done it: they’ve simulated real life swarms with tiny robots, thereby bringing the coming robot apocalypse that much closer. Or maybe they just created some really cool proof-of-concept robotic self-assembly systems. Either way, what you’re seeing is a set of a thousand “kilobots” that can self-assembled into shapes and patterns. The first few bots create a seed and then the other bots fall into line, positioning themselves perfectly among their peers. The process they use is actually quite amazing. The seed bots gather together and send out little blasts of IR light. The dimmer the light the further away, so the other robots begin moving towards the seed. Finally, once they get enough robots in one place, the robots communicate with each other to position themselves properly. These robots could also be charged via IR or an internet power network that activates when the robots chain up. The robots can even tell other robots when they are broken or off course, allowing the healthy robots to maintain their work. It’s some amazing technology and looks wildly cool on video. I suspect, however, that we don’t have to worry about these little bots just yet – they’d die underfoot with a satisfying crunch – but I worry what will happen when they form the shape of a gun. |
The JOBS Act Progress Report: The Number Of Tech IPOs Can Double By 2016 | Sandy Miller | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | In early January 2014, there was a widespread concern that the IPO window was going to snap shut. But the chilling IPO winter transformed into an early blossom, and the market rebounded. Recently, the soul-searching and spirited talk about the long-term health and sustainability of the IPO market has included much discussion of the benefits brought by the , which the Securities and Exchange Commission rolled out two years ago to encourage emerging growth companies to file for IPOs. But is it working? Recent quarterly numbers from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) indicate there is indeed a healthy market for new public offerings, although the market is still a long way off its historic highs of the mid-to-late 90s. In the second quarter, 28 venture-backed IPOs raised $4.9 billion, a 45 percent increase, by dollars raised, compared to the previous quarter, according to the Exit Poll report by Thomson Reuters and the NVCA. It was the fifth consecutive quarter that saw 20 or more venture-backed IPOs. However, this was still far below the strongest three-month period for new listings, which was the third quarter of 2000. Observers are now watching the delayed IPOs for and , calling it a litmus test for the market. In 2009, the tech IPO market was struggling; only 13 companies went public, including OpenTable and Fortinet. Since then, however, the IPO market has been boosted partly by the 2012 JOBS Act. While some, including academic researchers, have claimed it’s hard to credit the act for the improved IPO marketplace, from my perspective it has had a very positive impact for CEOs who are readying themselves to take their companies public. Benefits of the JOBS Act are undeniable and here are three reasons why: Through the last 14 years, the tech IPO market has been far behind the period of the mid-1990s and the bubble years: It was slow, and IPOs became unfashionable. This is a negative feedback loop. When fewer companies go public, startup CEOs have fewer role models to guide them and, as a result, fewer startups go public. And so on. With a number of successful tech IPOs in the last couple of years, including Twitter and Marketo, this cycle has changed, laying the groundwork for a more robust IPO market. So what’s still missing in this IPO market equation? There is a need for more rigorous research of the tech industry, especially small and midcap tech companies. Many of the best research analysts have left for the buy side given the bureaucracy driven by the well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided, separation of research and investment banking. It is time for a re-evaluation of this separation and creation of a more nuanced, balanced approach that would enable investment banking firms to deliver a more complete product offering. Looking ahead, I see the structural pieces in place and a tech IPO market with good legs under it. My expectation is that tech public offerings in future years will be 2X the current levels based on the high quality of scaled, venture-backed companies and the demand from institutional investors. Over the past 50 years, Silicon Valley has witnessed great innovation and seen companies rise from humble origins to industry giants. There’s no doubt in my mind that, in recent years, the JOBS Act has helped to spur the IPO market forward and will continue to do so. As the old saying goes, “From small beginnings come great things.” |
Unity Will Let You Make Plugin-Free, Browser-Based Games For Free | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | , Unity announced that they’d soon allow developers to deploy Unity-based games to the web without the need for any plugins, thanks to the magic of WebGL. Unity’s WebGL announcement was pretty light on details — but with the company’s annual Unite conference coming up next week, more details are starting to trickle out. Namely, Unity’s WebGL deployment support for both free and Pro users. You’ll be able to build a game in Unity’s engine and push it to the web without paying them a dime. Wondering what the heck a WebGL is? The short, oversimplified version: WebGL is a tool that lets web developers tap the power of your computer’s graphics card to render 3D games and applications right in the browser without requiring you to download anything. It’s been around in early forms since 2011, but has really only started finding its way into browsers in the last year or so. Unity games have worked in the browser for ages now — but thus far, they’ve required a hefty plug-in download. It’s 2014. Getting users to download plug-ins is hard. With that, Unity game deployment is now free on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and all of the next-gen consoles (though actually getting to publishing or even testing on any of the next-gen consoles is a whole different story.) (As for how the heck Unity makes money if they give the engine away for free… Three ways: Premium licenses for advanced users, partnerships with the Microsofts/Sonys of the world, and agreements that the product is only “free” until you make $100,000 or more per year with it.) |
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Senator Calls On FCC To Hold Net Neutrality Round Tables Outside Of Washington | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 14 | Senator Patrick Leahy recently the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to host round-table discussions about net neutrality outside of Washington. The agency that it will hold a number of sessions concerning the open Internet inside of the capital. The FCC should heed the senator’s call and follow through with hosting sessions around the country. It would be reasonable for the FCC to, say, hold a round table or three here in Silicon Valley, given the technology industry’s obvious stake in the Internet’s health. The senator noted that he recently spoke to a number of companies in his home state of Vermont that depend on the Internet to do business. They have a stake in preserving an open Internet, as well: In July, I held a Senate Judiciary Committee field hearing in Vermont on the importance of protecting an open Internet. That hearing allowed the Committee to hear from voices that otherwise would not have had an opportunity to be heard in Washington. These voices included small business owners like Cabot Orton of the Vermont Country Store and Lisa Groeneveld of Logic Supply, Inc. Both of these companies are great Vermont success stories thanks to the equalizing power of the Internet. The issue of net neutrality is no small matter, and it has attracted mainstream attention. Precisely what sort of net neutrality rules will eventually be passed isn’t clear. It isn’t clear whether paid prioritization will find its way in the coming set of regulations. And it also is not yet clear what legal standing the FCC will select to base its rules upon. Soliciting feedback inside of Washington isn’t a bad idea. But also picking up a few in-person comments outside the Beltway isn’t such a bad idea, either. The FCC responded to a request for comment on the senator’s suggestion by saying, “The roundtable events are designed to incorporate a wide range of views on this important topic, and they will be open to the public and streamed live online. In addition, both online viewers and those who attend in person will have the opportunity to ask questions.” |
Plan B Uses Old Printer Parts To Create Detailed 3D Models | John Biggs | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | If you’re bored this weekend, go ahead and tear apart your old inkjet printer and grab a few pieces of aluminum. Then head over to and get cracking. His new project, called Plan B, is an open source 3D printer that lets you print solid plastic objects by binding a thin layer of plastic powder with an old printer head. How does it work? Well the Plan B is a 3DP printer which means it uses a little bit of glue to bind thin layers of gypsum powder. The head “draws” the layer in binder and then brushes away the excess. Then another layer of powder is placed and the system repeats itself ad infinitum until the object is built. The printer has a layer height of 0.15mm to 0.2mm and prints fairly slowly, for now. However, considering it’s completely open source, uses off-the-shelf components, and can be built for under $1,000 it’s definitely an interesting experimental rig for experience 3D printers. You can download the or just wonder at the majesty of an era in which a working 3D printer can be made from lab scraps. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIAddQmqlgE] |
Airbnb Hands Over Data About 124 Hosts To The NY Attorney General | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | In the latest exchange between and the NY Attorney General’s office, the peer-to-peer lodgings marketplace has agreed to hand over “unredacted, personal information” on 124 of its past and present hosts. The news follows a long-running back-and-forth between Airbnb and the Attorney General, which has been seeking to crack down on illegal hotel operations in the state. In a post on the , Airbnb public policy chief David Hantman said the vast majority of those hosts were no longer on the site. Earlier in the year, the company ahead of a court date it had with the Attorney General. Airbnb’s fight with the AG’s office began last fall, when it issued a subpoena requesting thousands of host records. The company argued that request was “overly broad” and actually won a . However, his office issued another subpoena before Airbnb agreed to settle and . Now Airbnb is taking that agreement a step further, as the AG’s office ferrets out hosts with multiple listings on the site. |
Announcing The New Convenience Economy Disrupt Panel With Blue Apron’s Matt Salzberg, Good Eggs’ Rob Spiro, And DoorDash’s Tony Xu | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | Convenience is one of those problems that almost any entrepreneur can tackle, whether you are running an expansive business like WunWun’s on-demand delivery for everything, or running a specifically tailored business like . But some entrepreneurs are looking at the problem of convenience and pairing it with universal needs. With that in mind, I’d like to introduce some of the incredible speakers joining us on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF for The New Convenience Economy panel: from Blue Apron, from Good Eggs, and from DoorDash. Each one of these companies has made its own strides — was recently valued over $500 million; raised a hearty $7.5 million Series A from Sequoia; and has taken off in the South Bay with nearly $20 million in funding. But it’s not just these folks that are making waves. Sprig , Spoonrocket just , Caviar , Postmates , and Munchery just . The space is on fire, which is why we’re absolutely delighted to have Salzberg, Spiro and Xu join us on stage. These guys will be joining an already-impressive speaker list for Disrupt SF, which currently includes among many others, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, Marc Benioff and Vinod Khosla — best yet, we have a number of surprises yet to announce. There is still time to snag . After September, the price jumps by $1,000. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, for more information. |
Microsoft Research Shows Off “DeLorean,” Its Tech For Building A Lag-Free Cloud Gaming Service | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | When looking to the future of gaming, few concepts get people as excited as the mythical “Netflix for gaming.” It’s a concept that we’ve seen in multiple forms, from early efforts to Serving up games from giant clusters of servers has several advantages over the traditional model of running a game on your own console or PC. It allows any device that can play streaming video to play high-def games; graphics can improve at a steady rate because improvements to a cloud architecture are easier to roll out than new console hardware; and games can be played instantly rather than waiting for ~20GB game downloads. While Microsoft hasn’t gone as far as Sony in releasing its own streaming game platform, it’s shown interest in the concept before. Just this April, Microsoft showed off how developers of are taking advantage of the Azure cloud platform to include better AI and physics without reducing performance overall. Yesterday, that signals that the company is looking for ways that it could use its cloud expertise to create a unique cloud gaming platform at some point in the future. It discusses DeLorean, a “speculative execution engine” that makes it possible to delivery seemingly lag-free gameplay from the cloud despite the myriad sources of network latency between Microsoft’s Azure servers and a player’s device. The report concludes that most users involved in the study couldn’t tell the difference between playing and , two relatively action-heavy games, on a local system or from the cloud using DeLorean with 250 milliseconds of latency. That’s a game-changer — most gamers experiencing that kind of lag would throw their controllers in frustration. How did Microsoft Research pull off such a feat? The key to DeLorean is the “speculative” descriptor. Video games generally can’t be buffered like a video from YouTube or Netflix because player actions affect what happens on screen — if I shoot my gun in Titanfall and the game showed me jumping, I’d be annoyed. But by looking at previous player input and sampling the player actions, Microsoft found a way to predict the few actions you’re probably going to take and sends the video of each of them over ahead of time, letting it show players the most accurate guess as the game catches up. The biggest problem with that solution is that it’s very bandwidth heavy: Microsoft notes that the bitrate for its predictive engine is 1.5-4.5 times higher than simply sending just the frames that a game knows to be accurate based on actual player input. That means you’d need a faster connection in order to play games through a theoretical Xbox streaming service than you would for PlayStation Now or , but you wouldn’t experience the stuttering that happens for gamers that don’t live close to the physical servers hosting those services. |
For The First Time, The Majority Of Opera Software’s Revenue Came From Mobile Ads | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | may be best known for the desktop and mobile web browser of the same name, but it’s increasingly becoming a mobile ad company, as shown in about . Opera says that for the first time, its mobile ad division Opera Mediaworks was its largest source of revenue, accounting for 51 percent of the total. Mediaworks reported revenue of $51.1 million, up 83 percent year-over-year. Opera has fueled that growth, in part, by buying startups. The company has made nine acquisitions in the past four years, most recently . “The shift in digital advertising towards mobile, combined with our expertise of being a mobile-first ad platform, has fueled tremendous growth at Opera Mediaworks,” said Mediaworks CEO Mahi de Silva in the blog post. “In a time where most ad-tech companies are struggling to make a profit, we are very proud to deliver record revenue and profit in the second quarter.” The company’s total revenue grew 38 percent year-over-year, to $100.6 million. |
Most U.S. Businesses Don’t Know They Were Caught Up In Massive Cyberattack | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | Is your payment information safe? It’s hard to know, considering many companies hit by the same cyberattack don’t even know it. , more than 1,000 businesses, including and , were caught up in a breach affecting in-store cash register systems. The Department of Homeland Security issued an advisory that said millions of American payment cards have been affected by the hack. At the end of July, the report says government agencies instructed companies to check for “Backoff” malware, a type of infection that occurs at the Point Of Sale. Since then seven companies have told the government their systems were hacked, but the Times says the Secret Service estimates more than 1,000 have not checked or stepped forward. Government agencies have instructed companies to search for the “Backoff” malware on their systems or enlist the help of antivirus companies. Reports like this highlight the need for stricter government regulation and oversight when it comes to protecting customers data. Companies don’t have an incentive to report these breaches because it can result in a public relations nightmare and . If it weren’t for the work of cybersecurity , the public may not have known about the massive breaches that affected retailers like Target. Businesses also need to take these repeated attacks seriously and upgrade their payment systems. As the Times report notes, magnetic stripe cards aren’t secure. The cost of upgrading to chip-based smart cards can cost large companies millions, but the alternative is watching these hacks continue to happen. |
Oregon Sues Oracle | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum is . The state of Oregon — my home state, go fightin’ rain and trees — is unhappy with the performance of the website that Oracle built for its Obamacare rollout. The site, frankly, didn’t work as expected. The cost of the Oracle effort? Hundreds of millions of dollars. The best part to all of this is Oracle recently sued Oregon for $23 million more for its work. According , current Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber in May “asked the state attorney general to take legal action against” Oracle to get its money. This one won’t be over soon, and it will not be pretty. The from the state of Oregon is blistering: “Over the last three years, Oracle has presented the State and Cover Oregon with some $240,280,008 in false claims under those contracts. Oracle’s conduct amounts to a pattern of racketeering activity that has cost the State and Cover Oregon hundreds of millions of dollars. Accordingly, plaintiff Ellen Rosenblum, the Attorney General for the State of Oregon, along with the State and Cover Oregon, brings this lawsuit to recover losses to the State and Cover Oregon caused by Oracle’s fraud, racketeering, false claims, and broken contracts. When Oracle couldn’t show a working website by September 2013 — Obamacare kicked off in October of that year — the state realized that, according to the complaint, “Oracle’s assurances were worthless.” It gets better: Oracle sold the State of Oregon a lie. According to a former Oracle employee, “There was no solution.” The cobbled together collection of products that Oracle called the “Oracle Solution” was not flexible, was not integrated, and most importantly, did not work “out-of-the-box.” Oracle’s 2010 and 2011 claims to DHS and OHA were patently and categorically false. As this rolls along we’ll keep you posted. For now, Oracle isn’t looking that great. Jon Stewart, take us home:
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Mobile Verification Service Zumigo Closes $6 Million Series B Round Led By Intel Capital | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | Mobile device and location verification service closed a Series B funding round led by Intel Capital on Friday, reporting it raised $6 million. Zumigo wants to take the password out of the authentication process. Using the location of your phone, Zumigo can identify whether you’ve made a financial transaction based on the proximity of your phone to the source of the exchange. The funding news comes as the company begins participating in . Existing investors, including Aligned Partners, also participated in the round. In previous funding rounds, Zumigo raised a total of about $1.4 million. Zumigo founder and CEO Chirag Bakshi tells me the funding will be used to step up the company’s global presence and product development. Currently the company has a presence in the United States and India, and Bakshi says it has plans to expand to Europe starting with the United Kingdom. “Companies are becoming more focused on mobile,” Bakshi said. “We’re providing security around that. There’s going to be a big need for it. Investors are excited about that.” |
CrunchWeek: Fusion, Ballmer Takes Flight, And Aereo’s Fight To Stay Alive | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | Happy Friday everyone. It’s time for CrunchWeek. This week and sat at the round table with your to sift through , , and . It isn’t clear how much more fight Aereo may have in it. On a happier note, today’s show contains a shot of Ballmer high-fiving people so hard it appears that he is trying to knock their hands off. Crack a cold one, settle in, and hit play. We’ll see you again next week. |
Deepak Chopra Backs Art Marketplace GlobeIn | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | , an online marketplace where you purchase art and handmade goods from around the world, has the backing of an unusual investor — spiritual guru Deepak Chopra. The company is announcing that it has raised $1 million in additional funding from backers including Chopra and former IBM executive Doug Maine, bringing to $2.1 million total. It’s also launching today. (who might otherwise be offline) reach a global customer base. To do that, it has built a network of “Artisan Helpers” who photograph the artisans, record their stories, and help them use the necessary technology. The company says it now sells products created by “hundreds of artists from over 40 countries.” Chopra told me that he first heard about GlobeIn from AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky (who also invested in the startup), and he was excited about the company’s potential to help “eradicate poverty.” When I asked why he thought GlobeIn might actually succeed in that rather lofty goal, Chopra replied, “Any startup is a risky idea, but I think it’s worth taking a risk if that idea can transform the world in any way.” In addition to investing, Chopra will also be offering a monthly subscription service called “Explore the World With Deepak Chopra,” combining a meditation series with curated artisan products, for $29.99 a month. (The startup earlier this year.) GlobeIn founder and CEO Vlad Ermakov told me that Chopra has also been helpful in shaping the company’s marketing, making it more about storytelling than “straight up marketing to consumers.” Ermakov also noted that prior to launching the iOS app, GlobeIn’s traffic was 30 percent mobile. Like the website, the app allows users to browse through and buy products — in fact, he argued that it’s “much cooler than the web experience.” By the way, if you’re still wrapping your head around Deepak Chopra investing in a tech startup, he told me that his goal is to “highlight young entrepreneurs who are basically shifting consciousness in the world and have a social cause that they believe in.” Oh, and here’s . |
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This New Card Skimmer Is Almost As Thin As A Credit Card | John Biggs | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | Good old on a new card skimmer found in Europe. How is it different? It literally fits right into the card slot of any ATM, essentially allowing unfettered access to cards as they slide through. Add in a tiny camera and you’ve got a complete card cloning system. The skimmer is powered by a simple watch battery and uses a very small PCB and magnetic strip reader to store the numbers. Apparently the thieves didn’t remove this unit from the slot in time and it caused a fatal error in the ATM. Why was this in Europe? Mostly to grab benighted American credit cards. Because most European terminals use the relatively unbeatable chip and PIN system, this skimmer was primarily designed to grab the old (American-style) credit cards. This means devices like these are probably found in tourist-thronged areas like train stations and red light districts rather than bank ATM vestibules. How can you protect yourself? Protect your PIN code. I used to pull and tug on ATM parts before I used them, assuming that crooks would be attaching pieces of plastic to ATMs. Now, with these new devices, there is no visible trace of any sort of skimmer. The best thing you can do is simply cover your hand when you enter your PIN. It’s that simple – and that important. |
Tech Elites Aren’t Ruining Burning Man. They Get Their Hands Dirty, Too. | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | Don’t believe the hate. While it’s a juicy narrative that rich people spoil everything the common folk hold dear, there are plenty of tech bigwigs at Burning Man that work hard to contribute and embody the event’s ideals of inclusion. And the thing is, what they do has little impact on Burning Man as a whole. Whether they’re secluded in forts of cushy tour buses like The New York Times’ rails, or they’re cooking food and giving it away to total strangers as I’ve seen in my six trips to the desert, you probably won’t notice. It’s a massive , so there’s no need to worry about how the upper crust burns. As a quick primer, is an arts and community-building festival held for 10 days in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Focused on the principles of radical self-expression and radical self-reliance, tens of thousands of people come each year to delight one another with art installations, music, costumes, food, discussion and inclusion. Nothing but ice and coffee is for sale, so you bring what you need and give away as much as you can between the occasional trip to the porta potty. The whole thing is indulgent and excessive when compared to the hardship befalling much of the world. But like hitting the beach or the slopes, it’s another form of vacation, albeit with intention and plenty of serendipity. There’s plenty of frivolous art there, but that’s kind of the point. There’s a valid argument that the money and effort could better spent directly aiding people in need or at least creating political or humanitarian statement, rather than just entertaining those in attendance. However, some would say this “meaningless” art catalyzes inspiration that could push people to go home and better the world, or at least be kinder humans. In less hippie-dippie terms, most people come with something cool to show off or hand out, spend their days perusing the art and contributions of others, and their nights lit up in blinky lights, adventuring through the city or dancing to electronic music. For very, very few does Burning Man entail paying thousands of dollars to eat sushi and shit in private bathroom trailers while hired “sherpas” build and provide everything they need. Are more super-wealthy people coming to Burning Man? Sure. Because more people are coming to Burning Man. It’s grown from a few dozen people in 1986 to 30,000 in 2004 to 70,000 last year, so it’s naturally going to include more financial outliers. Yet , since most everything outside your camp is free. And moneyed burners aren’t all from tech. One widely criticized luxury camp that housed venture capitalists and likely inspired Bilton’s piece was actually started by a C-level executive of a giant hotel chain. Some of those VCs have ditched that camp because it felt at odds with the spirit of self-reliance. Arguably a bigger threat to Burning Man’s culture are techie spectators. They come with little forethought, buy what they need to fit in, glom onto a friend’s camp, but then don’t actively contribute much. While it can be tough to know how to add to others’ experience the first year, everyone should try — no exceptions. Those that only take and don’t give dilute the atmosphere. Luckily, one of the great things about Burning Man being a decentralized event set across seven square miles is that there are near-infinite ways to experience it. A temporary city the size of downtown San Francisco is tough for a couple of people to wreck for everyone else. if you try to cherry pick a few of them to build a story, you’re left with a basket of disingenuous anecdotes.” There may be a few tech elite who are spending fortunes to one-up each other, but they go largely unnoticed. The people who are remembered are those who contribute the most. The ones who build the fire-shooting steam punk octopus truck or hand out piping-hot french fries as the chill 4 a.m. winds wash over the moonlit landscape. It’s no wonder tech people are that is Black Rock City. So if Bilton gets to throw out his anecdotes of indentured servants preparing steak tartare for CEOs, I have a few of counter-examples of my own. Behind the bandanas and goggles, some tech people I’ve stumbled across at Burning Man include: For some in the industry, Burning Man is a chance to escape the rigors of their lives of ones and zeroes and do something different. It’s believed to be an inspiration for Google’s “20% Time.” For others, it’s a chance to for the benefit of the community. There’s: These too are unrepresentative of Burning Man. The event’s heterogeneity means any generalization about how people behave there will be wrong. There are jerks and saints, tourists and organizers, philosophers and mechanics. Street urchins who hitch a ride, business moguls who fly private, and daredevils who skydive right into the thick of it. There are introverts, extroverts, and everything-in-betweentroverts. And there are tech people. That should be okay, especially since no one really cares what your job or net worth is back in the “default” world. As Facebook co-founder and five-time Burning Man attendee last year in a must-read analysis of Burning Man haves and have-nots, “ Burning Man’s founder that “The opportunities of all these folks coming out who have command of wealth is to help us in extending our culture throughout the world.” In the end, Burning Man has likely influenced the tech industry’s culture much more than the other way around. If a combination of luck, skill, hard work, and more luck has granted some technologists immense wealth and influence, shouldn’t we want them immersed in a culture of generosity and communal love? It may take a little extra air conditioning at first, but if they don’t flaunt their money and bring home some of the ideals, that seems like a net win for the human race. |
Salesforce Spikes 7.34% After Its FQ2 Earnings Beat Expectations | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | In the immediate period after it yesterday after the bell, Salesforce slipped around 1 percent. Today, the company closed regular trading up more than 7 percent. Salesforce is now worth $33.87 billion. The share price rise comes on the tail of Salesforce’s revenue and earnings beat — $1.32 billion and $0.13 on a non-GAAP basis, respectively — and its slight boost of its fiscal 2015 revenue forecast. Salesforce lost money on a GAAP basis in the period, a change from the quarter a year ago when it booked both GAAP and non-GAAP profits. The difference between the company’s GAAP and adjusted results is mostly the non-cash impact of stock-based compensation. Whatever the case, investors are fans of what Salesforce is doing. |
HBO’s Silicon Valley Could Go To Burning Man Next Season | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | Mike Judge has never been to Burning Man, but that could change this year. We hear the creator may be going to do some research on what many believe is an essential experience for Silicon Valley insiders. One of those insiders is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who derided Judge at the premiere of the HBO show, saying he’d never been to Burning Man and therefore didn’t really ‘get’ the real Silicon Valley. At the premier, quoted Musk as saying, “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it. You could take the craziest L.A. party and multiply it by a thousand, and it doesn’t even get fucking close to what’s in Silicon Valley. The show didn’t have any of that.” We hear Musk will not be attending this year. However, Judge might be among the technorati attending the annual festival in the desert now. What Musk said about the show could be the inspiration for a possible Silicon Valley episode as well. After winning , Pied Piper is probably ready to raise its Series A Round. That’s a process that could lead the founders to the playa, which is increasingly becoming a place where deals like that get done. Burning Man is now with tech billionaires and young startups alike. There have been reports of actual business meetings (clothing optional?) being conducted out in the desert in year’s past. Here’s to hoping Dinesh Chugtai gets his freak on in a cloud of playa dust this next season. |
Access To User Data: If Microsoft Wins, Do Startups And Innovators Lose? | Kate Westmoreland | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | With user trust at an all-time low, keeping the FBI’s hands off foreign users’ data seems like good business sense for U.S. companies. Microsoft says it’s fighting the feds over your email, but it also happens to be fighting to support the Microsoft business model. If your business isn’t like Microsoft (and if you’re a tech company that’s fewer than 10 years old that’s probably you), backing this case might not actually be in your best interest. Microsoft is from using domestic search warrants to access user data that is hosted overseas. Microsoft is arguing that if a government wants to access a user’s email records, it should have to follow the law of the country in which that data is hosted, not the law of the country where the company is based. This aims to build international user confidence in U.S. companies by making it harder for the FBI to access foreign user data. Instead of just getting a search warrant, they would need to go through international channels such as the mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) process. However, it’s not only the FBI that would find this process harder; it also creates difficult legal issues for smaller companies with international users. If a U.S. company only has U.S. users, it is pretty straightforward to ensure fast page load times and have a sensible disaster-recovery strategy just by hosting data in the East Coast and West Coast of the U.S. This keeps things simple for the lawyers (read: less expensive) because it is only U.S. law that controls how governments access your data. However, once you start adding international users, you’ll probably need to host data outside of the U.S. If the courts adopt Microsoft’s approach, this creates a new range of legal headaches because your data will suddenly be governed by the laws of a slew of different countries. Any time you add another country to your data-hosting locations, you are making that data subject to that country’s laws (even if the user is in another country altogether). This is even more complicated if copies of the data are hosted in two different countries. This is where the lawyers and the developers may come to fisticuffs, because what is best for the company’s legal structure may be completely at odds with what is best for technical requirements. So why is Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith, so comfortable with this approach? Because Microsoft has a fundamentally different business structure from newer, cloud-based companies. Microsoft began as an enterprise software company. When you’re selling your product on floppy disks, you need employees on the ground. Microsoft has therefore invested the time and money in setting up a huge international infrastructure with employees (including lawyers) and subsidiaries all over the world. Microsoft’s terms of service already offer different jurisdiction choices across the world. Similarly, Apple, Verizon and AT&T all have business structures that involve an in-country, physical presence. It therefore makes good business sense that they support Microsoft’s position. However, if your company has evolved in the era of clouds, with a leaner business structure and a virtual international presence, you are at a distinct disadvantage. In order to maintain market dominance and keep growing, U.S. business needs to win back international trust. However, tech companies also need to be able to adopt decentralized, cloud-based business and data models and to build an international user base. Microsoft’s approach would entrench its own, old school business model and make it hard for startups to grow internationally unless they’re ready to hire a team of international lawyers. A win for Microsoft might bring short-term improvement in international user trust, but it would have long-term repercussions for the next generation of startups. |
Tor Exec Claims NSA Agents Supply It With Vulnerability Information | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | The , an effort to allow users to browse the Internet anonymously, thinks that it is from spies focused on finding its flaws. Tor’s alleges that the folks tasked with finding ways to break Tor, are supplying the group with the information that they uncover. Not all, of course, but according to a , Lewman claims that Tor receives tips on something close to a monthly basis, pointing out “subtle” bugs in Tor’s code. As such, it appears to Lewman that some involved in intelligence work are contravening their co-workers and helping Tor fix issues that those agencies might otherwise be able to exploit. It has been that Tor users running older versions of the software could have their privacy cracked. The NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, . The other irony to all of this is that the Tor Project has been funded in part by U.S. military money in the past, and the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor currently. So, to sum: A project to help Internet users be private that the United States has funded in the past, and currently funds today, is being hacked by the NSA, while other actors of state agencies appear to be leaking found vulnerabilities to Tor itself. That’s just so damn efficient it almost sounds like government. As , Tor matters because it provides much-needed cover to a broad swath of the population like journalists, dissidents and activists. You can see why the NSA would want a way in. Happily, it seems that there are those even on that particular side of the fence that aren’t comfortable with it. |
Clones Of “Flappy Bird” Sequel “Swing Copters” Flushed From App Stores | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | The mobile app stores are dealing with the app cloning problem at last, it seems. Earlier this week, “Flappy Bird” creator Dong Nguyen released the sequel to his insanely popular, but frustrating game, which had once led to from developers hoping to cash in on the trend. With ,” the cloners quickly returned, soon filling the app stores with similarly named titles – in Google Play’s case, some games even claimed to be developed by Nguyen himself, but were actually rip-offs. And then something interesting happened: the clones disappeared. “Swing Copters,” in case you missed it, is very much inspired by the original “Flappy Bird.” That is, it’s a simply designed, addictive, but unexpectedly difficult game which this time involves navigating a helicopter-man through gates blocked by swinging hammers, instead of navigating a small bird up and down in between Super Mario-esque green pipes. As of the time of writing, “Swing Copters” is the #5 free app on the iTunes App Store. (It’s not well-ranked on Google Play, at #191 in the “Arcade” section.) Like “Flappy Bird,” the new game was also easy to clone. And since doing so has been a successful endeavor for many developers in recent months, quite a few imitation apps were launched this week. Cloning has become a problem as of late on all the app stores. In fact, the “Flappy Bird” situation became so bad at one point that the app stores even that used “Flappy” in their titles. Even the Pebble smartwatch app store hosted a “Flappy Bird” clone. And the cloning problem – or “fast follow” as it’s known in developer-speak – hasn’t just affected the silly, viral apps like “Flappy Bird,” which sort of fall into the so-good-they’re-bad group, it has also caused problems for more serious app developers who spent time and put thought into their original titles only to see them ripped off in a matter of days. For example, the popular and thoughtfully designed game “Threes,” a paid app, like “1024,” “2048,” and others, which offered users a free version, eating away at potential “Threes” downloads and revenue. One could even argue that Facebook itself is a fan of the fast follow, having heavily borrowed concepts popularized by competing social apps when releasing its own versions, like the Bolt and Slingshot apps, the Flipboard-inspired Facebook Paper, . But now it looks like the app stores are trying to do something about the cloning problem. Just look at iTunes, right now, for instance: A search for “Swing Copters” delivers the original title in spot #1, and while the store isn’t totally clone- (three other results in the top five are clones), it’s arguably better than it’s been in days past. We’re working to confirm whether or not Apple is actively reject “Swing Copters” clones before they go live, or whether they’re getting pulled after the fact, but it’s clear that some sort of action has been taken. There’s simply no way developers only submitted their dozens upon dozens of clones to Google Play. [UPDATE: We’re hearing the clones are being caught and rejected during the Apple review process.] Meanwhile, Google Play has also been cleaned up. Though it usually fares worse in cloning situations because of its more open app publishing policies, it appears that Google has actually stepped in and swept its store of clones. Hundreds of clones have been pulled from Google Play, which before had pushed the official version out of the top 50 entirely. (Google doesn’t comment on individual apps). “Swing Copters: Attack Of The Clones” — Loris Guignard (@loris) Now the store looks like this: Not perfect, but certainly not as bad as before. There is, however, some weirdness still going on. This is not “Swing Copters,” for instance: Gaming site how badly “Swing Copters” was being cloned on Google Play this week, and argued that the platform makers themselves didn’t care about the problem because “they get paid regardless,” and most users don’t deal with the hassles of trying to request refunds. But apparently, the platform makers taking a stand against app cloning – at least in high-profile cases like this. Perhaps they know that a quality app store – one where users aren’t scammed and tricked – is something that matters after all. |
Engineers Build A 3D Printing OS For All Printers Everywhere | John Biggs | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | If you’ve used any 3D printers over the past year or so, you’ll notice one thing: fragmentation. A few use open source apps (which are abysmal) and many use homebrew solutions which range from amazing to “meh.” Now a group of engineers wants to create a standardized, usable OS for all 3D printers, ensuring that any time you click a button to print a 3D model you’ll see exactly the same screens and functionality. The solution, called is a standalone software system that connects to a number of popular printers. It works on Mac and Windows as well as Linux and Raspberry Pi. Using this software, your printer turns into a networked “black box.” Users can simply send over files and print them. The service is compatible with Makerbot, Ultimaker, and some RepRap models (essentially a few of the most popular printer models) and also allows you to control and submit print jobs over the Internet. “It’s incredibly exciting how fast the 3D Printing world is growing but without a platform that’s able to communicate across printers, softwares and applications users are unable to truly enjoy and unleash the full potential of 3D Printing,” said CEO John Dogru. “Our goal is a platform compatible with the majority of design tools and 3D printers so dreamers, designers and first time makers can collaborate, communicate and create in a universal language for the first time.” The idea is to make 3D printing as easy as 2D printing. By creating a queue, a way to watch jobs as they run, and adding in some solid compatibility you essentially turn your $3,000 Makerbot into a $150 HP – and that’s a good thing. Founded by Dogru and Anton Vedeshin, the project is rooted in cloud computing and IT security. By offloading the heavy stuff to a server, they reckon, you can make 3D printing more accessible and easier to use for all. “On top of this many of the current operating systems require complicated 20+ click workflows before a design could be printed,” said Dogru. “The ability to 3D Print is incredibly exciting. We still get blown away watching a 3D Printer whir to life to create a physical object out of something that was just an idea a few moments ago. We want to share that excitement and sense of wonder with the entire world.” The apps have just left beta and are now available for all and sundry. Perhaps, just perhaps, this will be the product that finally brings the error message “PC LOAD LETTER” to a 3D printer near you? |
Google Acquires Gecko, Which Did Mechanical Design For The Original FitBit | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | Google has , a firm operating out of Los Gatos, Calif., to help with its Google X special projects laboratory. The acquired company has done design work for a number of high-profile clients, including Aliph (Jawbone), Dell, HP, Slingmedia, OLPC and FitBit. It did all of the mechanical design work behind the original activity tracker , according to its online portfolio. Gecko was founded in 1996, and the company has worked with Yves Béhar’s Fuseproject and Frogdesign on past projects, firms which had a hand in the development of some of the most iconic gadgets brought to market in the last decade. Google X is the source of some of Google’s most ambitious projects, including Google Glass, its driverless car program, the wide-reaching Internet connectivity project dubbed Loon and its diabetes monitoring contact lenses. Gecko design gives Google some significant product design chops to help bring new hardware to market, with both manufacturing and industrial design expertise. Early rumors had pegged Google as shopping around for Jawbone or other wearable device makers, but it’s possible the company decided instead to target a design partner used by these startups instead of the startups themselves (it’s very common for companies, especially young ones, to outsource parts of their product design process). Google hasn’t released any specifics regarding the deal, but we’ll be sure to update the post if any are revealed. |
PawTrack Is A GPS Tracker Just For Cats | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 8 | 25 |
With so many GPS pet trackers out there, is there room for yet more? The pet products industry is estimated to be and there are more than , and as long as pets keep getting lost, companies will keep figuring out ways to help frantic owners find them. One of them is , which hopes to differentiate by making a GPS tracking collar that is designed specifically for cats. The company is and with more than two-thirds funded so far, has a good chance of making its goal by its end date of September 6. PawTrack’s collar design puts the GPS antenna on the back of the animal’s neck for more accurate readings and lets owners set how often it tracks. For example, it can be configured to track a cat for two days every 10 minutes, or be set for longer periods of time if owners go on vacation. In addition to a GPS, Pawtrack also has internal wi-fi, which means that the collar can recognize when a cat is home and put itself to sleep to preserve energy. On the other hand, PawTrack’s “lost cat” mode will alert owners automatically once the cat is located. “A big drawback of other products is that a cat could be under a bed sleeping or just moving outside. This wastes battery and, worst, still can give spurious GPS readings,” creator Jeremy Price told TechCrunch in an email. “You could be at work, panicking thinking that your cat has wandered across a road because the collar cannot get a good fix. With wifi you reliably know it is at home.” PawTrack’s also collects data on a central server. “A lot of trackers work on a simple SMS instruction, or just fire out an alert when the cat leaves a geo-fence boundary,” explains Price. “By going through a central server we can collect and analyze this data, and integrate it.” PawTrack plans to integrate data with social media next year, for owners who want to track their feline’s whereabouts on Twitter, for example, and also give access to aggregated data so humans can see how their cat’s activity compares with other pets. (Both of these features are optional). Any cat owner knows how finicky cats can be. While PawTrack’s collar is designed to be difficult to kick off, it also has an elasticated safety buckle, an important feature so cats don’t accidentally strangle themselves if it gets caught on a tree branch, for instance. Price says that PawTrack’s team has been running the web tracking platform and using the existing firmware for two years, and tracking cats around the world for the last 12 months. He’s confident that PawTrack will be available by its estimated ship date in November. “We are only integrating a new GPS functionality and updating the battery management. Therefore, from a hardware, firmware, and software perspective, the hard work has been done. The new plastics have been designed and we are going to plastic tooling in September.” For more information about PawTrack, . |
Airbnb’s Brian Chesky Will Be Our Guest At Disrupt SF 2014 | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 8 | 22 | I’m excited to announce that Brian Chesky is returning to speak at Disrupt SF. For the first several years of ‘s existence, most people didn’t know what to make of it. Fred Wilson famously , despite Paul Graham’s insistence that the than just renting out your couch to a stranger. One investor in a cafe when one of the founders went to the bathroom. And then there’s the story of how the founders were, for a time, to the Democratic National Convention in 2008. Yet here we are, several years later, and Airbnb is . Behind it all is , who along with co-founders Joe Gebbia and Nate Blecharczyk, has transformed the company from focusing on cheap airbed rentals to building what is now a global hospitality brand. Chesky and team grew the business through what Paul Graham has called, “ .” The founders traveled to New York to take photographs of some of its first listings to put them in the best light possible. Along the way, the also spoke with hosts about what they could be doing better and how they could improve the product. For a time, Chesky even lived solely in various Airbnbs as a way of . Airbnb now offers a wide range of lodging experiences — from treehouses to houseboats to entire villas — and over time it’s added more tools to help guests get the most out of their stays while providing hosts with guidelines for making the overall experience better. It’s also built-in trust and safety checks into its platform as a way to get both sides more comfortable with the idea of staying at a stranger’s place. In doing so, Airbnb has flipped the hospitality market on its head, giving travelers more options and new experiences as they explore new cities and neighborhoods. But not everyone is happy about that — increasingly Airbnb has faced opposition from the hotel lobby and various regulators around the world who have sought to crack down on what they see as a platform for unlicensed hotel operators. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Chesky will join us to talk about what it means to grow a startup into a global powerhouse, how Airbnb is dealing with an increasingly difficult regulatory environment, and what we can expect from the company as it works to offer more services to both hosts and guests in the future. Chesky previously spoke at Disrupt NY 2011. Please join us in San Francisco from September 8-10 as we interview Chesky and on what they see for the future of the industry. Tickets can be . |
Amazon’s Twitch Acquisition Is Too Big To Fail | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 8 | 25 | It’s official: for $970 million in an all-cash deal. It’s a move that caught most of us off-guard, as the common understanding was that Google has or was going to buy the video streaming startup for somewhere around a billion dollars. But in many ways Amazon’s purchase of the company makes a lot of sense. At the very least, it’s unlikely Amazon will lose money on the deal. Except for a few at the time, the Google-Twitch rumor seemed like a no-brainer when we caught wind of it back in May. Thanks to YouTube, the company already has experience turning user-generated content into a functioning business at scale. “Let’s Play,” the popular genre of videos where streamers provide commentary and analysis (or just jokes) while playing a game, are huge on YouTube, with tens of thousands of hits on videos of mildly popular Let’s Players messing around in everything from Minecraft to farming simulators. Today’s Amazon deal definitely doesn’t give off the same “this feels right” vibe as the Google rumor. While Amazon has Prime Instant Video, it doesn’t offer any way for people to upload their own content — everything you can watch on the service has been licensed or produced by Amazon. Interestingly though, late last month it came out that Amazon had rolled out But besides that, it isn’t immediately clear how Twitch would fit in with Amazon’s overall digital media strategy. With that said, Amazon does have rather strong ties to gaming. It sells and ships games and consoles, which likely gives it a uniquely informed opinion on trends in gaming overall, considering the fact that it sells across all major form factors and platforms. It also has a section that and gift cards for Sony and Microsoft’s online services, among others. Amazon Web Services provides an infrastructure for mobile, web, and desktop games played by millions of people. In the past year the company expanded its internal game studio with the and the from studios like Microsoft, Valve, EA, and Naughty Dog. So far, Amazon Game Studios hasn’t published any games that players would consider “AAA” releases, instead focusing on making While I’m sure that Amazon would love to see millions of gamers streaming gameplay from titles coming out of its own studio, the retail giant just doesn’t make the kind of games that grab people’s attention on Twitch. Two of the biggest reasons people watch Twitch are to or to watch people play recently released games to decide whether they’re worth buying. That latter use case offers an easy monetization route for Amazon: just attach a link to the Amazon page for any game that a person happens to be streaming. The Jeff Bezos-owned , and if a person decides to buy a game because of Twitch, it makes sense to try to take some credit for that purchase. Along similar lines, the core demographic that Twitch appeals to — young male gamers — is a lucrative one. If Amazon can get a decent chunk of Twitch users to connect their accounts to Amazon (as they have with Goodreads), they can gather some extremely valuable data about what people are watching and how that behavior correlates to purchasing decisions and timing. Along with better ads across Twitch and Amazon, that data might lead to better targeting for But looking at the other major use case — competitive gaming — presents some other interesting monetization options for Amazon. As with “regular” sports, eSports (and video game streaming more broadly) has its own celebrities. These players have fans that follow them beyond their play time on Twitch, watching recordings of matches on YouTube and interacting on Twitter. While Twitch allows these celebrity gamers to make decent money from ads on their streams, most of them also have sponsorship deals with sites like games marketplace : It didn’t make much sense for Twitch to become involved with those sponsorships when it was independent, but Amazon actively competes with those smaller retailers. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to see Amazon send these celebrity gamers lucrative sponsorship deals in the coming months. Besides getting popular streamers to sell more gaming-related stuff on Amazon, competitive gaming offers Twitch some unique sponsorship opportunities from outside companies. Last October, Sony paid to in order to advertise for the PlayStation 4’s release. That was pretty clearly an experiment for both Sony and Twitch, as it occurred on a pretty random date instead of during some major League of Legends tournament, which can bring in hundreds of thousands of simultaneous viewers. As eSports become more popular, Twitch is going to be presented with opportunities to make a lot of money from such sponsorships. Of course, all of this is assuming that game streaming isn’t just a fad that will fade as games like League of Legends lose their luster. To make sure that isn’t the case, Amazon has to get as many people hooked on Twitch as it can. That means that it has to remain available on other platforms and continue expanding premium features to new markets. In a Twitch Townhall Q&A this afternoon, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear and Amazon VP of Games Mike Frazzini hinted that gamers should expect both of those in the immediate future. Shear noted that Amazon “makes and sells a lot of its own games,” but reassured viewers that the company will “help Twitch make more money for our partners.” So don’t expect Amazon to take Twitch away from the PS4 or Xbox One any time soon. As for new markets, Shear suggested that Amazon’s experience in building a global retail presence will be an asset as Twitch looks to expand its premium subscription features to more markets. Amazon’s purchase of Twitch makes more sense than some of the other rumored suitors that approached the streaming service. A source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Yahoo floated an offer nearing $1.5 billion but lost the deal during negotiations. This same source also claims that Twitch had early discussions with Microsoft, though they didn’t get very far. Either of those deals wouldn’t have made much sense — Yahoo’s monetization likely would have amounted to rolling it into the company’s ad network, while Microsoft would have had to decide whether it should model Twitch after Skype (in terms of being available across platforms) or make it a selling point for Xbox and Windows gamers. Amazon is uniquely positioned to grow Twitch into a profit-generating giant in online video. It can be on as many platforms as will accept it, sell content in a way that actually comes across as helpful and not intrusive, and leverage Twitch’s celebrities in ways that Twitch alone couldn’t. Thanks to Amazon’s record of letting acquirees like Goodreads and IMDB continue down their own paths, users aren’t threatening to jump ship en masse like they were when the Google rumors started spreading a few months back. While it’s not clear if it’ll have a YouTube-sized opportunity on its hands, it seems likely that Amazon didn’t for no reason. |
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