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Korean Bitcoin Exchange Korbit Raises $400K From Angels, Bitcoin Opportunity Fund | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 1 | 20 | As Bitcoin trading and use spreads through medium-sized countries, local exchanges, wallets and processors are popping up left and right. South Korea’s is one of the latest and it’s picking up $400,000 in funding from angels including Tim Draper, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, SV Angel’s David Lee and SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert, who created a Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. Also participating are Pietro Dova of XG Ventures, Michael Yang, co-founder of mySimon, and Jay Eum, co-founder of Translink Capital. Interestingly enough, Korea’s government Ministry of Science helped broker contact between the startup and its angels. They had organized a pitch event in Silicon Valley where Draper was the judge. The company, which is already profitable, does about $300,000 in trading volume per day with a 0.6 percent fee on buys and sells. They have about 20,000 registered users, and recently launched real-time processing for deposits and withdrawals. Although they are currently an exchange, they plan to launch wallets eventually. Right now, like many other countries, the South Korean government doesn’t recognize Bitcoin as a currency. But CEO Tony Lyu says the government seems to be taking a “wait-and-see” approach otherwise. It’s not clear yet if gaming platforms, search portals and other big consumer destinations on the web and mobile in South Korea will be able to charge in Bitcoin. |
LoveList For iPhone Is A Simple Product Scanner For Pinterest | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 20 | Why bother with a gift registry or wish list, when you can just pin favorite products to a Pinterest board? With newly launched iPhone app , you can do just that, even when you’re out shopping in the real world. The app lets you quickly expand your Pinterest collections with products you find on store shelves, simply by scanning an item’s UPC barcode. The app itself is a side project created by Cincinnati-based , currently a creative director at global digital ad agency Possible, and , an independent iOS developer located in San Diego, who previously co-founded . The two have known each other for nearly a decade, after meeting through the same agency where Mahler still works. The idea for LoveList, explains Mahler, was prompted by his own shopping trip out in the real world. “My fiancée and I were shopping and we found an item we wanted to add to our Amazon registry,” he says. “We keep a Pinterest board for that purpose, so as my fiancée was pinning it she asked, ‘why can’t I just scan this to Pin it?'” Mahler knew this would be possible, but no one had built a tool that made that easy to do yet. (Pinterest’s own app lets you pin places, photos or links, but not actual products via barcode scans.) Mahler adds that he believes Pinterest works best when pinned products are actually available for purchase. As it turns out, this has been a problem with Pinterest for some time. According to mobile commerce vendor Branding Brand, almost 60 percent of Pinterest traffic to retailers’ sites during the 2013 holidays came from those in search of a product that doesn’t exist anymore. And this figure has been over 50 percent since the service launched. Of course, pinning real-world items to Pinterest doesn’t necessarily solve that problem. Eventually, those items could also disappear while Pinterest continues to recycle their links. Mahler says they built the LoveList app quickly. It went from an idea to proof-of-concept prototype in a day, and not too much later, it went live in the App Store. Not surprisingly then, the app is exceedingly simple. Similar to how you can use Amazon’s app to scan items and add them to a wish list, LoveList also lets you scan barcodes while out and about. That’s all it does, too, which means it takes fewer taps to do so than with Amazon’s own flagship application. You just scan, tap the board you want to pin the item to, and you’re done. Currently, the app is only connected to Amazon’s own product database, which, while large of course, is still limited. But Mahler says they want to quickly put LoveList in the hands of users, and hopes to add support for large and small individual retailers in the future, including those with online stores. For now, the app is a paid download at $0.99, but they’re considering an affiliate model and retailer partnerships further down the road. LoveList is certainly a useful tool to have on hand while shopping, but until it expands beyond Amazon.com products, it may not be worth moving away from Amazon’s own wish listing feature just yet. (Unless you’re heavily into Pinterest, or never use Amazon wish lists, perhaps). Plus, Pinterest could also just as easily add a barcode-scanning function to their own app if such a behavior proves to be popular, which could be a problem for LoveList if it doesn’t grow its feature set to offer more than product scanning. LoveList is ($0.99). Below, a quick demo video. (And thank you for not choosing that cloying Apple-esque music everyone is using now.) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-tOvv2ltX8&w=854&h=510] |
Buyhandpicked Applies Mechanical Turk Model To Personal Shopping | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 1 | 20 | Shopping online can be a tedious affair, characterised by bottomless trawling of search engine results and price comparison websites to try to locate whatever finicky thing you really need this time. Shopping requirements can also get pretty specific — a pair of blackout curtains with a 70+ inch drop, say, or a toaster that has a removable basket so you can lift your toasted bagels out without getting your fingers burnt. Requests that are often far too specific for a simple search engine query to turn up purely relevant results. Further human digging is all-too-often required to wade through the machine generated results and pull the wheat from the chaff. So enter : a startup, launching today in the U.K., that’s taking a Mechanical Turk approach to cracking personal shopping online by building a platform where online shoppers can submit detailed shopping requests, and — at the other end of the pipe — get humans to go a-hunting on their behalf. Buyhandpicked is starting off with a small team of personal shoppers signed up to its platform — when I started corresponding with co-founder Ben Cole earlier this morning the site had 23 shoppers. A few hours later (now they’ve opened up the personal shopper sign up process) it stands at 37. He says the aim is to have more than 100 within 48 hours of launch. How does it work? Would be purchasers submit shopping requests via the platform and one of the personal shoppers should pick up the request within a few minutes and start looking. The Buyhandpicked interface includes a chat window so the personal shopper can ask you questions and you can feed them more info as the search progresses. When/if they find something that matches your requirements they send you a description with a link to click through to buy the item. Or apologise for being unable to deliver. If they do recommend something, and you’re not happy with it, you can say so and send them back to the digital coal-face again. The service is entirely free to use from the shoppers’ point of view. The personal shoppers only get paid if a search results in a validated purchase (or purchases), and even then they’re only getting slice of the commission that Buyhandpicked gets for purchases via a small pool of websites it has affiliate sales deals with (which currently boils down to around So really these virtual personal shoppers are likely going to be getting virtually nothing for total time spent, assuming a large number of the searches they make result in no sale. Here’s the breakdown of what Buyhandpicked’s personal shoppers (apparently) get paid when a user does end up clicking through and buying the recommended item from one of the sites it has commissions deals with, as Cole tells it: How sustainable Buyhandpicked’s business model will be will depend on having enough personal shoppers willing to spend time search for only the chance of a fee, and doing a decent job of tailoring recommendations to requests. So time will tell on that one. (Sign up euphoria might soon convert into petty cash disappointment.) It’s also currently only accepting personal shoppers based in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia — so isn’t (yet) looking to take advantage of lower rates of pay in emerging nations. (Worth noting that the founders hail from London but relocated to Chiang Mai in Thailand to bootstrap the development work to keep costs down — so are clearly not averse to cutting business costs by taking advantage of differing global pay rates. Whether their personal shoppers remain based in Western nations, or end up outsourced to markets where small commissions can stretch further, is one to watch.) Cole describes the main competitors for Buyhandpicked as price comparison websites — which still require users to do a lot of leg-work figuring out which item to buy, instead of getting a single tailored recommendation. “They don’t really compare as they rely on algorithms to find products and prices which simply can’t provide the personal service BuyHandPicked will provide,” he says via email, adding: “We use collective knowledge (crowdsourcing) of hundreds of Internet savvy shoppers to provide truly personal and perfect results.” The latter claim doesn’t stand up quite yet — being as Buyhandpicked hasn’t yet recruited hundreds of personal shoppers. And, as mentioned above, it remains to be seen whether the personal shoppers it does sign up remain happy campers, or decide to seek more lucrative employment elsewhere. But BRANDiD charges a 10% surcharge for any items purchased in the process of using its recommendation service. Which again plays into its targeting of a very specific sub-section of dudes who care more about not being bored than paying a premium for their threads. Buyhandpicked is not so tightly focused. For starters, as mentioned above, its service is free to use for shoppers — so you can get a personal shopper to look for something on your behalf for absolutely zip. Gratis. Nada. Which does feel a bit decadent (so do resist the temptation to send your virtual helpers off on a fruitless search for a ‘long stand’ or a ‘big weight’). It’s also not focusing on a specific category of shopping — which is probably a bit of a risk, being as its crack team of human Internet trawlers are going to have to grapple with all sorts of random and specialist requests (some of which presumably can never result in any kind of shopper commission if they can’t be bought from a retailer the website has an agreement with). Ultimately, the proof of the pudding will depend very much on the quality of recommendations Buyhandpicked can generate. If its shoppers are good, they might be able to fire up a sales conversion machine. If they’re bad, well, no one gets paid — and that doesn’t sound like a business with very long legs. To test the service I asked for something I’ve previously trawled the Internet for: a cat litter tray with an entrance on top of the box, i.e. rather than the more usual side-placement. I made this search even harder by requiring the item not to cost a small fortune to a U.K. buyer — as apparently this ‘Holy Grail’ of cat litters trays does (for some reason). My own prior searching for this elusive litter tray did eventually turn up one U.K. option — still pretty pricey for what is essentially a plastic box with a circular hole cut out on top. But it took me considerable Internet trawling to find even that scant picking. How would Buyhandpicked fare? Katie, the Buyhandpicked personal shopper who picked up my request, had the same troubles as me initially — especially as I’d set the budget to a non-lavish sub-£50. But after a few minutes, maybe 10 or so, she delivered — finding the exact same item that my own web trawls had previously turned up. That’s either highly reassuring, or rather depressing if you’re the kind of shopper who hopes that there’s something even better out there, if only you spend enough time looking for it. Another Buyhandpicked shopper, called Ken, failed to find anything for a second request I made — for a no-drilling picture hanging system for a 6kg+ picture. “Due to the weight of the painting I can’t find any suitable products,” he said regretfully, not least because he’d spent time searching for something that probably doesn’t exist — and not getting paid to do so. |
WobL Smartphone Stand And Alarm App For iPhone Ensure You’ll Snooze Forever | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 20 | [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/428724973/wobl-iphone-stand-and-alarm-clock-app width=640] I have an iPhone, and like most adult humans I imagine, I use that as my alarm clock in place of one of those quaint old-fashioned pieces of dedicated hardware we used to use. But it’s not always ideal: you can’t just smash a button to get it to stop trying to wake you up, for instance. The launching today, hopes to fix that. As its name implies, the wobL wobbles, and therein lies the key to its functionality. It’s designed to be used with a companion alarm clock app for iPhone, which allows a user to activate a snooze mode simply through motion. The idea is that you reach over and simply tap the phone or the stand, resulting in a rocking motion which triggers snooze and gives you a free extra few minutes to catch some Z’s. Of course, this presents some problems: it’s so easy to trigger wobL’s snooze mode that you may manage to rock yourself into never waking up at all. You’d admittedly have to be really dedicated to staying under those covers, but if you’re in Toronto this week, say, and it’s -30 degrees out, you have some pretty good motivation. Wobble does make it easier to hit snooze instead of accidentally turning off an alarm altogether, so it’s got that going for it. It’s also mechanically simple, and yet allows for you to keep your phone plugged in and charging at night. The app is iOS-only for now, but the stand itself is designed to work not only with all iPhone models, all iPod touches and cases, but also with Android smartphones. The wobL team is looking to ship its device by October of next year, and early backers can get one for just $25. This is the first project from Third Prime studios, but the team behind it has ample experience building consumer products for other companies, and its relatively simple hardware design means it should stand a good chance of seeing the light of day should it reach its $29,000 funding goal. |
Libratone Loop Review: The AirPlay Speaker That Looks As Good As It Sounds | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 20 | For AirPlay speakers, there’s a lot of choice out there. Often that can result in the feeling that there are essentially a lot of people sticking to an easy formula and churning out virtually interchangeable devices, but Libratone is a speaker-maker that makes AirPlay sound ware that stands out, and the new Loop is no exception. Cons [gallery ids="943472,943473,943474"] Libratone’s strength is design: They make speakers that don’t necessarily look like you’d expect from something fitting that description, using heathered felt and odd shapes to surprise and also better mesh with modern interior design. A signature Libratone move is to offer interchangeable felt covers for its speakers so that owners can color coordinate with their existing setup, and the Loop offers this (spare covers will cost you extra, however). The disc design is a bold one, and might not mesh with everyone’s tastes, but it makes the speaker an object of art itself, rather than something you’re trying to hide away. Resting atop a TV bench or even just propped on its included stand by itself in the corner of a room, it looks at home and like a design decision rather than an afterthought. There’s another great aspect to the Libratone Loop’s design: its mounting hole and peg make it very easy to hang on the wall (where its disc-shaped design is especially attractive), and yet also keeps it portable should you want to take it with you to another room. The Loop not only looks good, it also renews my faith in Libratone’s ability to put out speakers that sound great. The Zipp impressed me with its sound quality, but the Loop carries that further, with a richer sound that’s better for a full-on living room home audio setup replacement. It’s a speaker that can get very loud without offering up any kind of distortion, and while it might be a little heavy on the bass side for many users, it’s probably right in the sweet spot for most people looking for an AirPlay speaker that’s pricey without being ridiculous. It’s also easy to set up, and you don’t need anything beyond an iPhone or iPad to do it. PlayDirect, the AirPlay that doesn’t require a shared network (the Loop can provide its own) is also a huge selling point that isn’t necessarily shared by Libratone competitors. Speaking of the competition, Libratone has a healthy crop. At this price range, there’s the new and very capable line of Cambridge Audio speakers, including the Minx Air 200 that I’d consider its closest rival. For an extra $100, the Minx Air 200 offers preset Internet radio stations that don’t require a computer or other audio source to listen to, and there’s Bluetooth built in. The Loop is cheaper, however, and better looking, plus it has deeper bass (though executes with less clarity in the mid-range) if that’s your bag. The Loop is a great AirPlay speaker, and with DLNA support, it’s relatively platform agnostic. I’m a sucker for the design aesthetic Libratone has chosen, too, so that’s a big selling point as well, but it’s the sound that brings it home. Libratone is essentially a boutique shop specializing in AirPlay sound, and it shows, so you can’t go wrong with their lineup, and the Loop fits nicely price wise in a gap between its Zipp and Live range of devices. |
Why Travel Startup Hopper, Founded in 2007, Took So Long To “Launch” | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 20 | CEO Frederic Lalonde is bemused by the coverage of his travel startup’s “launch,” which supposedly took place this past week, according to news stories. The company, reportedly in stealth for six years, had just now opened its doors, . Not quite, says Lalonde. “The site, Hopper.com, has been live since early last spring,” he tells us, noting it has since seen millions of visitors. But around two weeks (not days) ago, the company opened up access directly from the Hopper.com homepage. As it turned out, that was enough to draw people’s interest. The company, which was founded back in 2007 and has been operating in stealth for some time, had been working on a “big data” solution to the challenges surrounding travel discovery. Still, it’s been more of a gradual launch, rather than a sudden opening of its doors. If you look in Google, for example, there are 1.5 million Hopper.com search results in the Google index, and the service has gotten around 2 million impressions from Google, plus over 1 million from Facebook, we’re told. “Users have been flowing through the Hopper since most of last year,” says Lalonde, discussing the site’s traffic and growth. Today, the consumer-facing travel startup founded by former Expedia engineers and in venture funding now offers site visitors who create an account access to its trip-planning engine, which the company claims is powered by the “world’s largest structured database of travel information.” We first covered Hopper when the company had from OMERS Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, and Atlas Venture, but the company had declined to then go into much detail about the product it had in store. The founding team at the time included former Expedia engineers, with CEO , co-founder and CTO , , and on board. (CMO Dena Yahya Enos, previously of TripAdvisor, has since left the company to become VP of Marketing at Carbonite, according to LinkedIn.) Has Hopper really been working on its database of structured travel content since 2007? Apparently so, slowly and surely. “What’s really been taking time is the data collection,” Lalonde explains. “We aggregated 2 billion webpages…we ended up realizing there was this huge amount of amazing content that was being produced on blogs.” The problem is that this data was basically unstructured. It’s just sitting there, not even well-ranked on Google, since many of the bloggers aren’t “authorities” on travel or professional writers, but rather regular people posting photos and sharing stories about their trips, often on non-travel related blogs, too. So what Hopper built is proprietary technology that not only goes out and crawls the web to find those sites, it can also help to identify that a post is interesting, written by a real human, and is not spam or “content farm” content. It can also break up a longer post about multiple destinations or attractions into smaller pieces, and each of these bite-sized travel experiences can be then associated with the correct geo-location. Oh, and that’s the other thing Hopper had to create; in order to add all those interesting travel stories and photos to specific items in a place database, they needed one of those, too. “You need to know pretty much everything on Earth about travel. You need to know where everything is,” says Lalonde. “It’s akin to building maybe 10 to 20% of what Google has in Google Maps, and we had four engineers working on this problem.” But thanks to the Series B and earlier rounds, most of which is still in the bank, Hopper’s backend is up and running, crawling the web, finding the travel posts, pulling out what’s interesting, having those reviewed by human editors, then adding those pieces of content to its site. Of the 2 billion total pages crawled to date, less than 1 percent are good enough to make it to Hopper.com. In January of this year, new pieces of content were being added at a rate of 200 per day. Now, the current rate of production is 2,000 per day, and they’re hoping to grow that to 5,000 per day soon, as the team scales from 20 editors to 50 by March. This would put Hopper on a rate of growth of something like TripAdvisor, says Lalonde. For consumers, , which anyone can now access, is a well-built, travel-planning utility which allows you to search for places and activities from around the world. Every page on the site is annotated with information about the attraction or locale, including maps, directions, URLs, details on flights and prices, photos, related destinations, and more. What’s interesting about the service is its focus on discovery. You can search for any place or even any activity (e.g. hiking, skiing, surfing, etc.) to find inspiration about where to travel and what to do. It’s not trying to compete with the services whose main goal is to sell you a flight, hotel or car rental, the CEO explains. For now, it’s about building a great user experience around travel discovery, with the ability to then search for flights as the secondary step. However, to make this happen, Hopper also had to close deals with flight data providers (the three main companies that compete with Google/ITA) to get access to their data for free – deals that took two years to close, also slowing things down. But now, because of Hopper’s visibility into flight search activity, it can see about a billion flight prices searched by real people in real-time. This can help Hopper offer current flight search results on its site, but it also allows the company to track trends in consumer shopping behavior, or show how an event (like the Polar Vortex, or the Olympics) is impacting travel. This data is provided through , which takes journalists’ requests. Going forward, the real business for Hopper may not be in its consumer-facing service, or even its forthcoming mobile apps, but in offering developers programmatic access to the Hopper data store. “Travel APIs have stayed static for almost over two decades, and the data we have has never been collected,” says Lalonde. He thinks the developer API will certainly appeal to startups, but also potentially bigger businesses who come up with use cases they haven’t even thought of before. Now a team of 30 people, Hopper only started to speed things up since its move to Boston a couple of years ago. “People forget, the world exploded in 2008. There was a very long period where we didn’t want to burn any of the initial seed capital that we raised,” explains Lalonde. “We didn’t want to grow, because we knew it was a very risky thing we were doing.” will release a new version of its site by the end of winter, and promises mobile apps “soon.” |
Kim Dotcom’s Baboom Looks Like A Modern-Day Myspace | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 20 | Kim Dotcom of Megaupload fame (or, rather, ) and has today offered a sneak peek of his latest project, music service , which was previously known as Megabox. The site is scheduled to open its doors in late 2014, but this “soft launch” serves as a way for users to check out the service in advance, while also sampling Dotcom’s own album, . The album, which is already on Google Play and iTunes, is available both for streaming and download on Baboom in MP3, FLAC, and WAV formats. In addition, the accompanying artist profile page features things like photos, videos, interviews, social updates and more. Users can follow an artist’s Twitter account with a click of a button, too. Meanwhile, Baboom’s navigation is available in a simple sidebar on the right, which will soon let you access Search functions, your music library, plus Activity and Jukebox pages, when the service becomes publicly available later this year. What’s interesting about Baboom, or at least Dotcom’s Europop album featured on the site, is that it’s being offered both as a free download and paid. For paid downloads, the site points users to official music marketplaces, including iTunes, Amazon and Bandcamp. As Dotcom explains in the video posted next to his own album, “my idea is that artists should make their music available for free, and fans should only pay for it if they really like it.” “So I’m going to lead by example today,” he adds, encouraging users to make his album number one to prove that this model can work. It’s not an entirely crazy idea to release free downloads – after all, the appeal of today’s radio-like streaming services is not necessarily their fancy personalization algorithms but the ability to listen to music you like for free. Services like SoundCloud have also prospered because they’ve allowed a place for lesser-known or upcoming artists to feature their work and grow a fan base. But many of today’s on-demand services, like leading Baboom competitor Spotify, have to some extent struggled with aspects surrounding music discovery, too heavily focusing on the social graph instead of an individual’s own musical tastes. (After all, your Facebook friends don’t necessarily like what you like, nor do you always care what they play.) That being said, Baboom may be hard-pressed to compete head-on with the established services and platforms in the space, but by making an appeal to forward-thinking artists who have a better understanding of the shifting landscape in the music industry, there’s a chance that Baboom could end up looking more like a modern-day Myspace. Myspace, for those of you who only recall it vaguely as some pre-cursor to Facebook, originally took off because of its focus on music discovery, and being known as a platform where artists could connect directly with their fans. They could host profile pages, let Myspace users listen to tracks for free, and fans could in turn optionally post their favorite songs to their own profiles. Baboom feels familiar, almost like the way Myspace would look had it grown with the changing times instead of to News Corp and later . Baboom may not grow into a social network of its own, but it’s easy to see how, if artists choose to embrace the platform, it could serve those same urges to freely sample music while learning what you like, then buying the albums belonging to your favorites. You can and sign up to be alerted when it launches. |
Investors Drop Big Money On Dropbox So It Can Beat Box | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 1 | 18 | between $250 million and $400 million at a $10 billion valuation according to the and . Why? Because Dropbox has spent the last year rebuilding its product to make it work for businesses, and now it’s time to sell that product. How? Because a source says Dropbox has been doing well and felt it had the buzz behind it to take advantage of an easy fundraising market. The money could also fund poaching top talent from other tech giants and big acquisitions. But with more competition than ever, Dropbox needs to do a big enterprises sales push before potential customers jump into bed with Box, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, or Amazon WorkSpaces. Dropbox built its name as a light-hearted consumer product. “Your files everywhere” was its motto, cutesy pencil drawings were its style, and its mascot? A dinosaur wielding an AK-47…riding a shark…with a bald eagle on its back. The company even has a statue of the T-Rex in its San Francisco office’s foyer. Notice the lack of anything in this branding that would give businesses the assurance that Dropbox is secure, scalable, and great for complex teams. Yet in terms of becoming a techie-household name, its viral strategy worked. Handing out gigabytes of free storage for signing up friends let it grow quickly. By November 2012 it had 100 million users. A year later, it had doubled in size to 200 million. Plus the fun-loving culture helped it poach big names like Google’s , and veteran and Rasmus Andersson. But Dropbox couldn’t shake its amateur reputation. A year ago, I’d hear businesses say the Dropbox didn’t have the permissions and security features it needed to make sure employees only had access to the right files and to watch who was downloading what. Dropbox apparently heard those criticisms too. And it saw the heaps of money it could make in enterprise. For personal use, most people get enough gigabytes of space for free to satisfy their needs. If they wanted more for free, they could recruit friends and score storage bonuses. Few laymen need its $9.99 a month Pro plan with 100+ gigabytes of room. But at around $175 a year per enterprise user, Dropbox could quickly grow its bottom line. So over a year ago, Dropbox embarked an ambitious quest to rebuild its product architecture. The goal was to enable users to simultaneously access their personal files as well as an overhauled version of its enterprise service from the same account. In November 2013, co-founder and . He highlighted dual-wielding of personal and professional files from the same account, powerful permissions controls, Sharing Audit Logs that detail what each employee is accessing, blocks for preventing unauthorized sharing, and options for transferring an employees files to someone new or wiping them from all their devices if they leave the company. The beefed up Dropbox For Business product is rolling early this year. Its viral consumer strategy has given Dropbox a foot in the door with employees at companies around the world using it personally. But scoring huge enterprise installations with hundreds or thousands of $175 a year seats is still a war won with a sales army, and that takes capital to hire soldiers and generals. Lucky for Dropbox, . Spurred by massive, hundred million dollar-plus funding rounds for , , and its enterprise competitor , a source close to the company tells me Dropbox wanted to strike while the iron was hot. and have also contributed to a frothy market where it’s easy to raise big money for cheap at big valuations. The thinking is that this window could close eventually, and no fast-growing company wants to be left with a thin wallet when that happens. The source tells me Dropbox’s strong momentum made the new $250 million to $400 million raise a lot easier. 2x year-over-year user growth; high-profile talent poaches; and interest in its enterprise potential all likely contributed the hype. Dropbox has closed the $250 million investment led by BlackRock and featuring previous investors, according to . Dropbox may pull in another $100 million to $150 million from big mutual fund Fidelity and T. Rowe Price. The funding builds on the $250 million Dropbox raised in 2011 from Goldman Sachs, Sequioa Capital, Index Ventures, and Accel Partners. The new financing will bring Dropbox to between Now that Dropbox has plenty of cash and a product fit for enterprise, it can get serious about sales. First, that means staffing up with proven sales execs. Kevin Egan who built and led Salesforce’s sales team for the last 10 years. More recently, Dropbox has been , which could help it establish partnerships and integrations with other popular enterprise software products and mobile device makers. It just poached Henri Moissinac, Facebook’s director of mobile partnerships, and Tom Hsieh, who helped Spotify partner with a variety of companies. The funding could help Dropbox pay for these types of key hires, which can often require offering big compensation packages to get execs to leave cushy tech giant jobs. It could also fill out their teams with sales infantry. over the course of 2013, so it’s not scared to grow its head count. With a deeper sales bench, Dropbox can focus on recruiting new enterprise clients. The company says that over 4 million businesses use Dropbox, though it’s not clear to what extent. Most companies on Dropbox’s are on the smaller side. The are huge company-wide installations with hundreds of subscriptions at Fortune 500 companies. To win these clients Dropbox will have to beat and its charismatic leader Aaron Levie. Box cites only 200,000 business clients, but despite Levie’s penchant for punky red converse sneakers, his company has a reputation for the security and permissions features enterprises want. That’s how like Procter and Gamble, Nationwide insurance, LinkedIn, and MTV. A quick glance at the home pages of Dropbox (above) and Box (below) say a lot about where their focus has been to date. Dropbox will also have to fend off Google Drive, which benefits from its integrations with Google’s other enterprise offerings, SkyDrive which fits with businesses using Microsoft’s Office suite, and Amazon WorkSpaces with its affiliation with Amazon Web Services. Each of these companies’ empires give them an advantage over Dropbox’s independent platform. Houston and his CTO Arash Ferdowsi will have to make up the gap with nimble product development and savvy marketing. They’ll also have to minimize which scare away enterprises. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston As more and more companies enter the big data age, and as media files continue to grow, enterprise cloud storage, sharing, and syncing is becoming of increasing interest to enterprises. Dropbox’s modern bottom-up distribution method gives it a beachhead, but it will still need money to finance traditional CIO wine-and-dining. A few hundred million extra dollars could also help Dropbox buy more full-fledged products like its , as well as teams like , , and that can bring special features or expertise to its staff. If Dropbox can identify holes in its enterprise product (one big one right now is synchronous collaboration) and fill them with acquisitions, it could be more appealing to prospective clients. Last year, there was widespread speculation that Dropbox could IPO in 2014. But going public is a lengthy, clumsy process, and who knows whether the market will be as friendly by the time Houston and Ferdowsi might ring the bell in New York. With plenty of combatants vying for the increasingly-powerful enterprise storage throne and venture capital there for the taking, it makes sense for Dropbox to fill its war chest now. |
The Tablet Is The New General Purpose Computer | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 1 | 18 | Apple’s demonstrates that tablets have general purpose computing strengths that have never been exhibited by laptops. Laptops have had decades in the spotlight as our portable computers of choice and were on their way to eradicating desktop machines before tablets came along. But they’ve never managed to exhibit the flexibility of purpose that tablets can. Apple’s spot presents examples of people using iPads in various real world situations, which is a note they’ve struck before. But this particular spot focuses not just on the things that people are doing with iPads, but specifically things that would be cumbersome, irritating or impossible with a laptop. It’s a brilliant rotation of the argument that tablets can’t be ‘seriously’ used to create. In many ways this is the realization of the dream for the original ‘tablet computers’ of Microsoft — something you can view with more or less irony depending on what chances you give the company of succeeding in a crowded space. It’s not that you can’t use a laptop to do of these things. I’ve used a laptop as a tethered shooting companion for photography for years now. Seeing instant feedback as I shoot speeds up the process and makes editing faster, it’s great. But I’ve never to use a laptop. They’re bulky, they’re not the right form factor and they’re not optimized for easy one-handed operation (not counting the one you hold them with, thank you). And some of these cases, like diving, present an impossible challenge for laptops. They’re simply not the right tool for a lot of jobs. And I think that more of the jobs laptops aren’t any good at are becoming part of our lives every day. It’s not as if laptops (or desktops) are going to go away over night, but they’re definitely going to fade in importance as new general purpose computers like the tablet and smartphone grow bolder. And they’ll work in concert to allow us to do stuff better — I wrote this piece on a combination of phone, tablet and computer as I’ve been traveling. There will always be things that will be accomplished more efficiently with a dedicated keyboard and a device that allows us to perform several tasks ‘simultaneously’. But neither of those are sacred cows limited to laptops. If you pull the thread a bit technology-wise it’s not hard to see machines that run off of the power of our phones or tablets without having to have dedicated CPUs. Just flip open your display and keyboard and start typing, with your pocket computer doing the calculations. The spot isn’t just a good ad for iPads, though I think it is pretty good. It’s also a case study in what makes tablets in general such good ‘general purpose’ computing devices. I’m under no personal illusions that Apple will maintain dominance over the tablet market forever (and I don’t think Apple is either). Android is getting better with every iteration, and they’ve been improving rapidly in the areas that matter for the scenarios described in this spot. To illustrate, the iPads here, for the most part, are being used in conjunction with apps written by developers for niche professional use. Those apps were written for iOS because it’s a more friendly environment for niche developers to sell apps in. But there are factors shifting that balance as we speak. Google is heavily investing in improving its developer services and even now offers features that many of the iOS developers I speak to speak about with envy. Supportive beta testing frameworks, built-in a/b testing and translation services and a bunch more stuff that just makes developer’s lives easier. Which is good, because the nature of Android devices means that the testing and polishing stages of developing on Android are a massive undertaking in comparison to iOS. There’s still a sort of ‘social proof’ that needs to happen in the Google Play market — namely that Google needs to demonstrate Android users are willing to pay for these kinds of utilities. Even that, though, is being subjected to disruption. Recent data shows that for pay apps are even more than they , etc. All of that plays into Google’s hands fairly well with Android, though I do think that a market for paid apps with specific use cases will always exist. I digress, as I don’t want to turn this into a platform debate, but I did find it interesting that the spot was centered around not what iPads can do better than other tablets specifically, but what tablets can do better than other computers. The shift is upon us. |
How To Get An MBA From Eminem | James Altucher | 2,014 | 1 | 18 | In 2002 I was driving to a hedge fund manager’s house to hopefully raise money from him. I was two hours late. This was pre-GPS and I had no cell phone. I was totally lost. I kept playing over and over again “Lose Yourself” by Eminem. I was afraid this was my one shot and I was blowing it. I was even crying in my car. I was going broke and I felt this was my one chance. What a loser. Finally I got there. The hedge fund manager was dressed all in pink. His house was enormous. Maybe 20,000 square feet. His cook served us a great meal. I had made him wait two hours to eat. And he had cancer at the time. I felt really bad. Then we played chess and it was fun and he gave me a tour of the house. One room was just for toys made in 1848. He had a squash court inside the house. Another room had weird artifacts like the handwritten notes from when Lennon and McCartney were first writing down the lyrics for “Hey Jude.” Another was the official signed statement by Ted Kennedy in the police station after he reported the Chappaquiddick accident that may have ultimately played a part in his decision to not run for president. Eventually I did raise money from this manager and it started a new life for me. But that’s not why I bring up Eminem at all. The song “Lose Yourself” is from the movie “8 Mile.” Although I recommend it, you don’t have to see it to understand what I am about to write. I’ll give you everything you need to know. Eminem is a genius at sales and competition and he shows it in scene in the movie. A scene I will break down for you line by line so you will know everything there is to know about sales, cognitive bias, and defeating your competition. First, here’s all you need to know about the movie. Eminem plays a poor, no-collar, self-proclaimed “white trash” guy living in a trailer park. He’s beaten on, works crappy jobs, gets betrayed, etc. But he lives to rap and break out somehow. In the first scene he is having a “battle” against another rapper and he chokes. He gives up without saying a word. He’s known throughout the movie as someone who chokes under pressure and he seems doomed for failure. Until he chooses himself. The scene I will show you and then break down is the final battle in the movie. He’s the only white guy and the entire audience is black. He’s up against the reigning champion that the audience loves. He wins the battle and I will show you how. With his techniques you can go up against any competition. First off, watch the scene (with lyrics) before and after my explanation. Here is the scene: Watch it right now. Ok, let’s break it down. How did Eminem win so easily? Setting aside his talent for a moment (assume both sides are equally talented), Eminem used a series of cognitive biases to win the battle. The human brain was developed over the past 400,000 years. In fact, arguably, when the brain was used more to survive in nomadic situations, humans had higher IQs then they had today. But one very important thing is that the brain developed many biases as short-cuts to survival. For instance, a very common one is that we have a bias towards noticing negative news over positive news. The reason is simple: if you were in the jungle and you saw a lion to your right and an apple tree to your left, you would best ignore the apple tree and run as fast as possible away from the lion. This is called “negativity bias” and it’s the entire reason newspapers still survive by very explicitly exploiting this bias in humans. We no longer need those short-cuts as much. There aren’t that many lions in the street. But the brain took 400,000 years to evolve and it’s only in the past 50 years maybe that we are relatively safe from most of the dangers that threatened earlier humans. Our technology and ideas have evolved but our brains can’t evolve fast enough to keep up with them. Consequently, these biases are used in almost every sales campaign, business, marketing campaign, movie, news, relationship, everything. Almost all of your interactions are dominated by biases, and understanding them is helpful when calling BS on your thoughts or the actions of others. You have to learn how to reach past the signals from the brain and develop intuition and mastery over these biases. Notice Eminem’s first line: “Now everybody from the 313, put your mother-f*cking hands up and follow me”. The 313 is the area code for Detroit. And not just Detroit. It’s for blue-collar Detroit where the entire audience, and Eminem, is from. So he wipes away the outgroup bias that might be associated with his race and he changes the conversation to “who is in 313 and who is NOT in 313”. He said, “put your hands up and follow me.” Everyone starts putting their hands up without thinking. So their brain tells them that they are doing this for rational reasons. For instance, they are now following Eminem. The brain has a tendency to believe things if they are repeated, regardless of whether or not they are true. This is called Availability Cascade. Notice Eminem repeats his first line. After he does that he no longer needs to say “follow me.” He says, “look, look.” He is setting up the next cognitive bias. Brains have a tendency to view two things as very different if they are evaluated at the same time as opposed to if they were evaluated separately. Eminem wants his opponent “Papa Doc” to be evaluated right then as someone different from the group, even though the reality is they are all in the same group of friends with similar interests, etc. Eminem says: “Now while he stands tough, notice that this man did not have his hands up.” In other words, even though Papa Doc is black, like everyone in the audience, he is no longer “in the group” that Eminem has defined and commanded: the 313 group. He has completely from race to area code. He doesn’t refer to Papa Doc by name. He says “this man.” In other words, there’s “the 313 group” which we are all a part of in the audience and now there is this ambiguous man who is attempting to invade us. Watch presidential campaign debates. A candidate will rarely refer to another candidate by name. Instead, he might say, “All of my opponents might think X, but we here know that Y is better”. When the brain starts to view a person with ambiguity it gets confused and CAN’T MAKE CHOICES involving that ambiguity. So the person without ambiguity wins. Because the brain wants to take short cuts, it will look for information more from people with credentials or lineage than from people who come out of nowhere. So, for instance, if one person was from Harvard and told you it was going to rain today and another random person told you it was going to be sunny today you might be more inclined to believe the person from Harvard. Eminem does this subtly two lines later. He says, “one, two, three, and to the four.” This is a direct line from Snoop Doggy Dogg’s first song with Dr. Dre, “Ain’t Nothin But a G Thing.” It is the first line in the song and perhaps one of the most well-known rap lines ever. Eminem directly associates himself with well-known successful rappers Dr. Dre and Snoop when he uses that line. He then uses Availability Cascade again by saying, “one Pac, two Pac, three Pac, four.” First, he’s using that one, two, three, and to the four again but this time with Pac, which refers to the rapper Tupac. So now he’s associated himself in this little battle in Detroit with three of the greatest rappers ever. Eminem points to random people in the audience and says “You’re Pac, He’s Pac,” including them with himself in associating their lineages with these great rappers. But then he points to his opponent, Papa Doc, makes a gesture like his head is being sliced off and says, “You’re Pac, NONE”. Meaning that Papa Doc has no lineage, no credibility, unlike Eminem and the audience. Any direct marketer or salesperson knows the next technique Eminem uses. When you are selling a product, or yourself, or even going on a debate or convincing your kids to clean up their room, the person or group you are selling to is going to have easy objections. They know those objections and you know those objections. If you don’t bring them up and they don’t bring them up then they will not buy your product. If they bring it up before you, then it looks like you were hiding something and you just wasted a little of their time by forcing them to bring it up. So a great sales technique is to address all of the objections in advance. Eminem’s next set of lines does this brilliantly. He says, “I know everything he’s got to say against me.” And then he just lists them one by one: “I am white”
“I am a fuckin bum”
“I do live in a trailer with my mom”
“My boy, Future, is an Uncle Tom”
“I do have a dumb friend named Cheddar Bob who shot himself with his own gun”.
“I did get jumped by all six of you chumps” And so on. He lists several more. But at the end of the list, there’s no more criticism you can make of him. He’s addressed everything and dismissed them. In a rap battle, (or a sales pitch), if you address everything your opponent can say, he’s left with nothing to say. When he has nothing to say, the audience, or the sales prospect, your date, your kids, whoever, will buy from you or listen to what you have to say. Look at direct marketing letters you get in email. They all spend pages and pages addressing your concerns. This is one of the most important techniques in direct marketing. Eminem saves his best for last. “But I know Something About You” he says while staring at Papa Doc. He sings it playfully, making it stand out and almost humorous. There is something called Humor Bias. People remember things that are stated humorously more than they remember serious things. “You went to Cranbook.” And then Eminem turns to his “313 group” for emphasis as he explains what Cranbook is. “That’s a private school.” BAM! There’s no way now the audience can be on Papa Doc’s side but Eminem makes the outgroup even larger. “His real name’s Clarence. And his parents have a real good marriage.” BAM and BAM! Two more things that separate Papa Doc from the crowd. He’s a nerdy guy, who goes to a rich school, and his parents are together. Unlike probably everyone in the audience, including Eminem. No wonder Papa Doc doesn’t live in the 313, which was originally stated somewhat humorously but is now proven without a doubt. Eminmen says, “There ain’t no such thing as”… and the audience chants with him because they know exactly what he is quoting from “Halfway Crooks!” a line from a song by Mobb Deep (I did their website back in 1998), another huge East Coast rap group. So now Eminem has established lineage between himself and both the West Coast and the East Coast. And by using the audience to say “Halfway Crooks” we’re all in the same group again while “Clarence” goes back to his home with his parents at the end of the show. The music stops, which means Eminem has to stop and let Papa Doc have his turn. But he doesn’t. He basically says “F*ck everybody”, “F*ck y’all if you doubt me.” “I don’t wanna win. I’m outtie.” He makes himself scarce. After establishing total credibility with the audience he basically says he doesn’t want what they have to offer. He reduces the supply of himself by saying he’s out of there. Maybe he will never come back. Reduce the supply of yourself while demand is going up and what happens? Basic economics. Value goes up. He’s so thoroughly dominated the battle that now, in reversal to the beginning of the movie, Papa Doc chokes. He doesn’t quite choke, though. There’s nothing left to say. Eminem has said it all for him. There’s no way Papa Doc can raise any “objections” because Eminem has already addressed them all. All he can do is defend himself, which will give him the appearance of being weak. And he’s so thoroughly not in the “313 Group” that there is no way to get back in there. There’s simply nothing left to say. So Eminem wins the battle. And what does Eminem do with his victory? He can do anything. But he walks away from the entire subculture. He walks off at the end of the movie with no connection to what he fought for. He’s going to Choose Himself to be successful and not rely on the small-time thinking in battles in Detroit. He’s sold 220 million records worldwide. He discovered and produced 50 Cent who has sold hundreds of millions more (and is another example of “Choose Yourself” as Robert Greene so aptly describes in his book “The 50th Law”). Doesn’t it seem silly to analyze a rap song for ideas how to be better at sales and communicating? I don’t know. You tell me. I’ve exposed myself so much in my blog posts. In fact, I don’t hit “Publish” on something unless I’m afraid of how people will react. When you expose yourself there are many many ways for people to attack you. People will stab you and hurt you. But you can’t create art unless you show how unique you are while being inclusive with others who share your problems. I’m still scared when I hit publish. But I love that final feeling of risk and fear. The rush. The carriage return. Click. |
Up Close With Play-i’s Bo, The Lovable Xylophone-Playing Robot | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 18 | When we last met charming robots Bo and Yana they were busy pounding out tunes on a little colorful Xylophone and raising $1.4 million in crowdfunding cash. Now, however, they’re very nearly ready to ship and are doing some really impressive things that will help kids learn programming while having fun. You can think of toys as sort of like the simple programming language, Logo, in physical form. You can program the robots using your iOS device and there are a series of introductory games that teach you the rudiments of programming including functions, subroutines, and loops. For example, the app asks you to play certain notes on the xylophone using Bo’s robotic arm – say five blue notes and five pink ones. To do this you must program the robot to hammer down five times, move over a few spaces, and hammer down five more times. You can also add accessories to the robots and create, say, a platform for your LEGO creations or a mobile spy platform. While I’m always very skeptical of tech toys – they end up in the junk box far too soon and are often far too expensive – I’m impressed with how far the team has come in just a few short weeks. It looks like the product will soon be ready to ship and we will all have weird, blue robots running around our house busily hammering out jaunty tunes on our pets. |
Messaging Giant WhatsApp, Now With 430M Users, Has No Plans For Disappearing Photos | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 20 | , an early mover in the messaging app space, has racked up 430 million active users to date. But despite the influx of new competition from the likes of Line, WeChat, KakaoTalk and Snapchat, WhatsApp says it will be sticking to its guns: avoiding advertising; staying away from “gimmicks” like disappearing photos and games; and continuing to request its users to keep paying to use the service as its basic business model. The app, which used to be paid, is now free to download and costs $0.99/year to use after the first year. The comments were made by co-founder and CEO Jan Koum, who was speaking at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany. “The important thing is focus,” he said, not disappearing photos — a reference to the ephemeral messaging service Snapchat. Of WhatsApp’s 430 million users, some 30 million started using the app in the last couple of months (it only announced 400 million in ). WhatsApp now sees some 50 billion messages sent and received daily — rivalling SMS volumes. “No ads, no games, no gimmicks,” Koum said today. It’s a credo that is written on a Post-It note from co-founder Brian Acton (who first worked with Koum at Yahoo). Koum keeps that note, which he got Acton to sign, on his desk as a reminder of where WhatsApp would like to remain anchored. “We just want to focus on messaging. If people want to play games there are plenty of other sites and also a lot of great companies building services around advertising,” he added. It’s a “free market” with apps, so the beauty is that people can get those features elsewhere, Koum said. Koum declined to talk about whether the company is profitable or any other financial metrics. “We make money, but the important thing [now] is not monetization,” he said simply. Someday the company will focus on it, but today the main aim is to to make sure WhatsApp has a service that works.” We have heard reports of companies like Snapchat rebuffing acquisition overtures from the likes of , and similarly Koum and WhatsApp remain bullish on staying independent to grow, as they have before when surfaced. “When we started the company we wanted to build something for the long term and sustainable,” he told interviewer David Rowan of Wired. “It’s not hard to sell a company, but if you look at [leading online] companies today like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Twitter, they didn’t sell. They stuck around and built a great offering for users.” Koum acknowledged that these are all built on advertising, while WhatsApp is not, but the main idea remains: “For us it’s about [building] a company that is here to stay.” Although WhatsApp is now pushing half a billion users, the company has remained very light and has tried to keep its startup mentality. The company currently employs 50 people, 25 of which are engineers, and another 20 that focus on multilingual customer support. “We’re extremely small,” Koum said. And its business model is pretty atypical. “We’ve always thought that advertising would be the wrong thing to do,” he said. By people giving us money, “we’ve always had a direct relationship” with users. Koum’s upbringing in Soviet Ukraine, he says, has played a large part in how WhatsApp’s business model has developed. That extends from the no-ads policy and the ability to offer reliable and inexpensive communications, through to how the startup handles privacy. On the subject of pricing, Koum recalled how, when he first moved to the U.S., it was expensive and difficult to phone family long distance, with the need to sign up to long distance phoning plans — a challenge for immigrants with limited resources. “With WhatsApp you don’t have to pay [exorbitant] fees,” he said. The lack of advertising, meanwhile, is a throwback to his life before the U.S. Advertising, he said, is emblematic of the kind of information clutter that he did not know. “I grew up in a country where advertising didn’t exist and I had a remarkable childhood,” he said. “Looking back it was an idealistic environment. Even though there were thousands of problems, the joy of growing up in an uncluttered lifestyle [meant] you could focus on other things.” On the other hand, WhatsApp’s approach to privacy is a response in the opposite direction. “I remember my parents having no conversations on the phone. The walls had ears and you couldn’t speak freely,” Koum recalled. “It is extremely important [for us] to provide a level of security and privacy…. We don’t collect people’s personal information. We just know your phone number and those of the people you want to message with.” He said WhatsApp makes a point of knowing “as little as possible” about users. Covering a wide range of topics, Koum also was upfront about his preference for Android as a platform over iOS. “Android is a lot more open. We are able to build new features and prototype faster on Android, not to mention that we have a lot more users on Android,” he said. Longer term, it doesn’t look like WhatsApp plans to turn away from smartphones for its core experience any time soon. “Our goal is to be on every smartphone.” Quoting a projection of 5 billion total smartphones down the line, he said their goal is to be “on every single one of them.” |
The Rise Of The Hedge Fund Startup Investor (Again) | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 1 | 18 | The first question I thought of when I read that San Francisco hedge fund Coatue Management was the backer of funding was which VC firm lost the deal. My second question was why take money from a hedge fund? In the past two years or so, you have seen more hedge funds dabbling in tech investing. As one venture investor “They are the antichrist of patient, supportive early-stage investing. But increasingly, hedge funds are scoring some of the deals you would expect traditional VCs to get. Case in point — Snapchat. Over the past few weeks, I spoke to a dozen or so public and private market investors around this trend, why it is taking place, and what it means for founders. Coatue isn’t the first “cross-over” fund (an investment fund that crosses over to the private from the public markets) to emerge in technology investing. , co-founded by and , was one of the first to start doing this in the nineties. Hedge fund Tiger Global has created a separate venture fund (that is independent and separate from the hedge fund itself) that has backed Warby Parker, Nextdoor, Redfin, Eventbrite and Pure Storage, among many others. This wasn’t Coatue’s first mid-stage private tech backing. Last year, the firm established a $300 million growth fund for this purpose, as reported by The fund recently in September. Coatue also participated in Box’s funding round in 2012. And Coatue isn’t the only hedge funds to jump into the private markets tech-investing game of late. Altimeter has for the past few years. Valiant Capital Partners has backed Dropbox, Evernote, and Pinterest in the past two years. has participated in a few seed deals, including Zenefits in 2013. And the fund isn’t just going after growth-stage funding. In December, the firm in Estimote, which develops beacons. As one investor explained to me, hedge funds are once again seeing the potential for greater returns by dabbling in the private markets. Much of this is due to the fact that tech companies are waiting longer to go public. It used to be that the benchmark to go public was a $100 million revenue run rate, and the strategy would be to go public and then use that money to expand to international markets. Now companies are hitting this revenue and seeing international growth happening in the private markets. Twitter and Facebook both had this type of growth before their respective IPOs. Employee liquidity, which is another benefit to going public, is also an event that can be accomplished by private offerings. You’ve seen Twitter and other companies allow for this pre-IPO. By the time hedge funds start investing in these companies when they are public, there is not much upside in a two-to-three-year time frame. So to achieve some of the upside that VCs are seeing with hits like Twitter, Facebook and others, hedge funds are starting to go upstream in the investment stage. It’s important to note that we’re seeing this happen mostly among hedge funds that focus on tech. By engaging in crossover investing, hedge funds can use the expertise they’ve gained from the private markets (e.g. more knowledge on mobile advertising) and apply it to their public market investments, and vice versa. For example, Altimeter Capital in the travel industries across both public and private companies. As I heard from a few investors, the Goldman Sachs Private Internet Company conferences (as well as the other investment-backed private tech gatherings) over the past two years have been packed with hedge fund investors who want to see if they could gain access to the hottest, fastest-growing early and mid-stage companies in tech. “In 2008 and 2009, no one was showing up,” one investor told me. But in the past two years, these conferences have been oversubscribed and packed with hedge fund managers. For early-stage entrepreneurs, especially those looking for Series B/C and growth funding, more capital is always a good thing. Hedge funds can afford to be flexible on pricing, and tend to give founders higher valuations. Many hedge funds are willing to give founders valuations that VCs would balk at, one investor told me. This is where the negative effect could take place. Because hedge funds are often flexible in their mandates, they have the capacity and permission from their LPs to fund private deals. Also, hedge funds aren’t beholden to returning money in the same way VCs are. They can be flexible on pricing and valuations, because a 10 or 20 percent return is stellar. Last year, hedge funds returned an average of VCs aim toward a much higher percent return — and need to price and value startups to optimize for that. And because of this flexible structure, hedge funds can give founders cash more quickly than a VC. Hedge funds have their cash on hand and can liquidate faster. VCs operate on a commitment basis and don’t collect their entire funds at once. One investor referred to hedge funds as ideal for “easy, quick cash.” But some in the industry caution against going the Snapchat route and taking entire rounds from hedge funds. Because hedge fund managers tend to be passive investors, they probably aren’t going to get as actively involved in operations or board-level decisions as a seasoned VC might. In the case of Snapchat, CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel had already taken money from a number of well-known VCs, including Lightspeed, General Catalyst and Benchmark Capital. If a founder is considering taking money from a hedge fund, expect a hands-off approach for the most part, we hear. The downside to this lack of accountability, some investors say, is that they are not long-term holders of stock. These funds, say investors, will have little problem selling the stock after a company goes public. Or, as one investor warns, he’s seen funds that have tried to unload private stock when a company encounters strife of some sort, or if user numbers plummet. ” Most VCs are in it for the good and the bad, and that may not be the case for hedge funds, advised one source. As one investor tells me, hedge funds getting into private-company investing at the early stage is part of a greater trend of the unbundling of company building, which VCs tend to be good at, from actual capital. This year will bring more money to startups, but likely in the form of the non-traditional funds, whether that be hedge funds, family funds, and other alternative assets. It’s hard not to also acknowledge the effect of outside investors on the whole bubble perception issue. VCs caution that more hedge funds could drive up valuations, which in turn creates more of a bubble around these valuations. But unlike the craziness of the bubble, hedge funds don’t necessarily represent “dumb money” any more. The hedge funds investing in tech startups these days seem to be doing their due diligence, for the most part, and convincing entrepreneurs that they add some value. [Image via ] |
Announcing ‘Major Changes’: The Government Vs. The Private Sector | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 18 | The Internet is collectively experiencing disappointment over President Obama’s big National Security Agency . Instead of announcing a sweeping end to the bulk surveillance of our entire digital lives, the President charged authorities to investigate how incremental privacy protections could be enacted. For our readers who don’t think this meets the dictionary definition of “major,” you probably come from the private sector. When you think about government change, think incremental change, eventual retirement, a committee, and adopting decades-old technology. Governments only on very rare and very scary occasions do anything that is immediately substantial. For instance, upon entering office, when Obama announced he would radically overhaul how we treat enemy combatants in our custody, he promised to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in a year. After more than four years, it’s still open and he’s created a special committee to oversee how it can be closed. In TechCrunch’s own corner of the world, technology policy, Obama appointed a brand new senior position, the Chief Technology Officer, and promised a new era of open government and participatory technology. Aneesh Chopra, the first CTO, did not produce a suite of radically cool products (Congress XP or SenateOS). Instead, his was to create a set of legal principles that would finally allow future groups to work with the private sector, independent hackers, and release stores of government data. And, to be sure, by government standards, Chopra was moving at breakneck speed. A few influential products did get developed, such as the , WeThePeople, but it was more an indirect result of Chopra’s overarching reforms and it still took years to come to fruition. So, for those folks in the private sector, here’s a handy guide. In the private sector, when people need to get fired, the CEO is ousted, there are mass staff layoffs, and a dramatic management restructuring. The beleaguered Blackberry’s dropped the CEO and laid off a hundreds of employees. At Zappos, the entire company changed overnight, . In government, when folks need to go, an embattled director makes plans to retire, there are a few modified hiring standards and most everyone keeps their job. For example, the deputy NSA director , involved in the Healthcare.gov website debacle still has their job, and the White House has made plans to people from Silicon Valley. That’s how things work in government: you’re there until you retire. In the private sector, businesses make sweeping reversals of policies that outrage consumers and can offer users immediate access to their data. After a privacy backlash, Instagram reversed a decision to put users’ photos in ads. Google also permits users to download nearly all of their personal data as a matter of course. In government, agencies form a committee of experts to discuss how to make changes, which may result in a congressionally appointed advocate to oversee such theoretical changes. It nearly four years to approve the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and it could take still just as much time to enact meaningful change, if it happens at all. When the private sector needs to make product changes, they develop a dramatically different product line or change the purpose of the company altogether. For example, Apple announced the iPod back in 2001 and PayPal “pivoted” from to the payments company it is today. Federal agencies do not “pivot.” In government, agencies can plan to catch up to a private sector technology developed a decade prior. The website for Obama’s landmark initiative, the Affordable Care Act, hopes to eventually include a system like Travelocity’s, a website founded in 2007. There is good reason the government moves slowly: . The failure of the U.S. government would impact hundreds of millions of lives and potentially throw the world into a war-torn dystopia. If Facebook fails, it becomes slightly less convenient to share goofy pictures of my friends. So, the next time the government promises major reforms, set your expectations. After all, lowered expectations are the secret to happiness. [ : Flickr User Ilweranta] |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 20 | null |
Amazon Patents “Anticipatory” Shipping — To Start Sending Stuff Before You’ve Bought It | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 1 | 18 | Amazon’s plans for are so last year. The ecommerce juggernaut is purportedly working on something far more dystopian: pre-shipment. Amazon has filed a for a shipping system designed to cut delivery times by predicting what buyers are going to buy before they buy it — and shipping products in their general direction, or even right to their door, before the sales click even (or ever) falls. Which really is one more step towards cutting out human agency entirely from the ecommerce roundabout. Why not have machines autonomously buy stuff from other machines and have a third set of autonomous bots deliver it — while the quaking flesh recipients who open the door meekly accept whatever packages they are getting in the hopes that yet more machines won’t decide today is the day to . [Aaaand right on cue, the doorbell rings. It’s a delivery man, with — you guessed it — an Amazon parcel for me. This interaction should be entirely normal but there’s a distinctly sinister undertone, even though I’m 99.9% sure that the thing inside the box is something I ordered last week, not something Amazon thinks I’ll want to order next week. Or the thing I ordered a few minutes ago. But that, presumably, is exactly where Amazon is aiming to go.] The patent, which was filed in August 2012 and granted December 24 last year, describes a method for what Amazon calls “anticipatory shipping” — with one pre-shipping scenario (of the multitudes detailed) being as follows: …a method may include packaging one or more items as a package for eventual shipment to a delivery address, selecting a destination geographical area to which to ship the package, shipping the package to the destination geographical area without completely specifying the delivery address at the time of shipment, and while the package is in transit, completely specifying the delivery address for the package. The anticipated location of packages might be determined by analysing various “business variables”, according to the patent. Data that could be analysed to determine customer demand for a particular pre-shipped package to help decide where to route it geographically could include historical buying patterns, preferences expressed explicitly via surveys/questionnaires, demographic data, browsing habits, wish-lists and so on. The patent also goes on to discuss in detail various scenarios for “speculatively shipping” packages to destinations and how to re-route items based on proximity to potential customers — and even how packages might remain in near continuous transit on trucks until a customer makes a purchase. At times the language of the patent sounds as if Amazon is thinking of physical item delivery in the way a utility might approach supplying water or electricity to homes — by forecasting demand spikes and lulls, and tweaking its pipeline accordingly, but above all by keeping the stuff flowing (ergo having trucks constantly filled with packages in continuous perpetual motion). Such a system would likely require an overhaul of its existing ecommerce inventory and time-management systems (assuming Amazon hasn’t already started deploying the apparatus to support anticipatory shipments) — to make them more dynamic and responsive. But that in turn may allow for better inventory management, as the patent notes … speculative shipping of packages may enable more sophisticated and timely management of inventory items, for example by allowing packages to begin flowing towards potential customers in advance of actual orders. And in those instances when the demand prediction algorithm fails, as well it must, the patent suggests Amazon could deliver the package anyway — as a gift to someone who hasn’t actually clicked to buy it yet, but who, its data analysis suggests, might quite like it — i.e. if the cost of returning/rerouting the item exceeds the cost of paying a surprise visit to a pre-customer. Which could either be a great surprise, or hideously inappropriate — depending on how good an oracle Amazon’s algorithm turns out to be. Inappropriate like delivering a DIY Will pack to someone who has already died, say. Or kids toys to bereaved parents. Anticipatory algorithms are going to have to navigate plenty of human pitfalls if they’re not to end up clanging on the doorbell. In the U.S. Amazon paved the way for carving a huge chunk out of the ecommerce pie by patenting the right to , all the way back in 1999. That patent has stood it in excellent stead over the years, requiring other ecommerce players to license this method if they want similarly speedy checkout processes. Pre-shipping has the potential to let Amazon do that again by taking the online buying process to the proverbial ‘next level’ — and some. Clicking buy and getting your stuff hours or minutes later would be huge. Albeit, in future it could well be a case of: Amazon users, be careful what you wish(-list) for. (Via the ) |
The Techno-Militarization Of America | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 1 | 18 | Remember last year? Edward Snowden! NSA! Shock! Horror! Dismay! Looking back I’m amazed we all seemed so surprised. Over the last decade, pretty much every arm of American authority invoked “homeland security” as an excuse to acquire boatloads of new technology, and used it to help expand their power and authority to unprecedented levels. There is nothing at all exceptional about the NSA’s massive overreach. It was only keeping up with the Joneses — FBI, DEA, Border Patrol, police forces everywhere — who have all been busy doing exactly the same thing. The impoverished city of Oakland is spending on a “Domain Awareness Center” surveillance hub for its cops, and they see. Baltimore and NYC track license plates, too. Meanwhile, the , “Unmanned aircraft from an Air Force base in North Dakota help local police with surveillance,” and : The Border Patrol’s fleet of Predator drones were loaned out 248 times in 2012, to “unnamed sheriff’s departments, the Department of Defense, the DEA, the Texas Rangers, and even the Bureaus of Land Management and Indian Affairs.” Drones are just the tip of the hardware iceberg. Local police are now, as mordantly , “fighting crime with 18-ton military vehicles.” That’s just one example of the billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment given to police over the last few decades; “a disproportionate share … has been obtained by police and sheriff’s departments in rural areas with few officers and little crime.” As : We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns out a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens. A few choice examples : Cops in Cobb County, Ga. — one of the wealthiest and most educated counties in the U.S. — now have an amphibious tank. The sheriff of Richland County, S.C., proudly acquired a machine-gun-equipped armored personnel carrier that he nicknamed “The Peacemaker.” And it’s not just equipment. It’s ethos and attitude. Police across America have increasingly begun to apply the military doctrine of using overwhelming force whenever possible. So SWAT raids rose over two decades from 3,000 a year to 50,000, SWAT raids on illegal gambling, underage drinking, and Tibetan monks who overstayed their visas. Seven-year-olds are over a missing five dollars (which they did not steal). A few years ago, SF author * was arrested by the Border Patrol while trying to cross from America to his native Canada, and eventually convicted (though, thankfully, not jailed) because, as he : I just stood there, saying “What is the problem?”, just before Beaudry maced me. And that, said the Prosecutor in her final remarks — that, right there, was failure to comply. That was enough to convict. As novelist * : One of the things that’s making me angry about the Peter Watts thing […] is the way so many people […] are saying that it must be his fault, that he must have done something to provoke it, that it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been polite and done what he was told and if he had, in effect, cringed more. This may well be the case. But is that the world you want to live in? Unfortunately, it is in fact the world that many-to-most Americans live in today. The tech world — wealthy, educated, generally treated with respect by the authorities — seems to have been fairly blind to this fact … until cases began to crop up like , , , and *, who : There’s no real separation between the real world and the internet. What we’ve started to see is the militarization of that space. That isn’t to say that it just started to happen, just that we’ve started to see it in an incontrovertible, “Oh, the crazy paranoid people weren’t crazy and paranoid enough,” sort of way. : https://twitter.com/alex_gaynor/status/423923763537645568 while, as in , regarding the ongoing appalling abuse of civil-forfeiture laws, “Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes.” This collective power grab — I really don’t think that’s too strong a phrase — isn’t actually about security; it’s about organizations like the NSA concluding that since they use new technology and novel legal interpretations to increase their power ( ), therefore it’s imperative that they . It’s not that it’s bad for the authorities to use new technology. A lot of the time it’s an excellent idea. The NSA wants to listen in on high-confidence bad-guy cell-phone conversations in Yemen and Somalia? Fair enough. You can make a case for many aspects of Oakland’s Domain Awareness Center. And I’m a big fan of always-on chest/helmet cameras for police and others, for example, at least in theory … although of course, in practice, the authorities when that footage gets out to the public. But simply transposing military technology into the civil realm — or foreign surveillance techniques and tech into the domestic arena — seems really hard to justify to me, especially when … which is probably because of , not more cops. But nobody ever got a bigger budget and shinier tech toys by pointing facts like that out. The anthropic law of bureaucracies dictates that the ones which thrive are the ones which make self-perpetuation their first priority. And so now the police, and just about every American agency you care to name, and the contractors who supply them — call them the “security-industrial complex” — are implicitly colluding in . The more shadowy enemies we have, and the more dangerous they seem, the more money the security-industrial complex gets, the bigger and more powerful it becomes, and the it can justify. So Chinese hackers, although they can hardly hold a candle to the NSA’s klieg lights, are trumped up as deadly online foes who might launch a so-called “ ” at any moment. Important People somehow still manage to pretend, with straight faces, that the modern-day Prohibition called the War On Drugs is not evil, insane, futile, and doomed. And the War on Terror (which is a , not an enemy — what’s next, a War On Pincer Movements?) means trumping up into a deadly enemy on a par with mighty Soviet Russia. Terrorists will attack America again, but they’re unlikely to be as lucky as they were in 2001, when they murdered as many Americans as are . Drugs do ruin lives, although , and . And there are indeed many bad-news black-hat hackers out there. But it seems painfully apparent to me that, in juicing the alleged defenders against these shadowy enemies with the steroids of military technologies, rules, and attitudes, we have transformed them into a cure almost worse than the disease. Alas, nobody seems to have the incentive — or maybe, soon, the ability — to stage an intervention and send them to the detox and rehab they so desperately need. * Disclaimer/disclosure: Peter, Jo, and Jake are all personal friends. |
Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo Is Reborn As Mobile News App Inside | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | Jason Calacanis is getting back into the news business with a new app called , which highlights and summarizes the top news stories. Although Calacanis has been involved in several startups and startup events (including the TechCrunch50 conferences, prior to ), he may still be best known as the founder of Silicon Alley Reporter and especially of Weblogs, Inc., a group of blogs that includes Engadget and was acquired to AOL (which owns TechCrunch). More recently, he was the founder of — in fact, Inside is technically the same company. For Inside, Calacanis , formerly editor of The Wire at The Atlantic, to be his chief content officer. “The idea behind it is that the world is heading to mobile, but there still isn’t a solution in the new space,” Snyder told me. “I feel like the transition, in terms of news and mobile, is sort of where news and the web was in 2002. Everyone knew the web was going to be huge, but there still wasn’t a grammar to the form.” Naturally, Snyder hopes that Inside is going to reinvent that “grammar” on mobile. The “atomic units,” he said, are brief updates created by a global team of curators who find and summarize important news stories. The idea is to give you the basic facts of the news if you’re just browsing or you’re in a hurry, but if you’re interested in digging in, you can read the original article or swipe left to read the previous updates on the same topic — Snyder described it as an attempt to “marry what humans are good at and what technology is good at” in one product. The idea has similarities and to what Calacanis was already doing on a smaller scale for tech news with . Snyder and Calacanis aren’t pitching this as a replacement for original news coverage (“The news story isn’t broken,” Snyder insisted) and they emphasized their goal of linking to high-quality journalism, not just someone who has reblogged another publication’s stories. Snyder also said Inside’s curators are focused on making the headlines and updates as fact-based as possible, with a limit of 300 characters for each update — so the entire headline, image, and update text will fit on your smartphone screen without any scrolling. (My sense from browsing the app is that the updates tended to consist of terse declarations of a story’s main ideas divided by semicolons.) He added that over time, he’s interested in experimenting with what an update can do — for example, he suggested that it could become a new way to share live coverage of an event. Initially, you just browse the Inside app based on the top stories and on different news categories, but as you read, you can indicate the kinds of articles you want to see more and less of, and Inside will create a personalized news feed. And even though Snyder said the team is focused on the mobile experience, there’s a browser-based version too, which will be particularly important when people link to the updates on social networks. As for making money, the obvious plan would be advertising, but Inside doesn’t have any ads at launch, and Snyder said, “I don’t think anyone is really thinking about that right now.” As I mentioned, from a corporate perspective, this is actually latest iteration of Mahalo, with the same investors (including Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, News Corp, CBS, and Mark Cuban). The company started out as a “human-powered search engine” and . We last in the fall of 2012, when it seemed like the site was going to launch as a “knowledge community.” Calacanis told me today via email that a knowledge community was never the plan for Inside.com — he said that after he realized that Mahalo’s efforts to create YouTube content were a “suckers game”, the team has been “focused 100%” on developing the current product, and it still has enough money to continue running for two years. (The team has “sunset” Mahalo itself, which Calacanis said “is a fancy way of saying it makes 7 figures so we’re not shutting it off but we are not investing in it.”) I also asked how the news business has changed since Calacanis sold Weblogs, and he told me: In a way, what I’ve learned as a consumer is that the big problem today is not that there isn’t great journalism going on — it’s that there is so much “other” and “bad” stuff going on. You have massive link-baiting and reblogging going on, and the news organizations who do the best social media optimization are winning over the folks who ware doing the best journalism. I’m hoping that Inside highlighting the best journalism the product creates a “healthier media diet” for our consumers. Sort of like Whole Foods, where they don’t let any of the bad stuff [in]. Inside’s , its , and . |
Why Silicon Valley Can’t Find Europe | Contributor | 2,014 | 1 | 18 | . Go to Europe these days – to Berlin, London, Helsinki – drop in on any of the regional tech confabs and you will quickly see that the European startup scene is in the most bustling, vibrant shape it’s ever been. The potential is everywhere, and the energy is undeniable. Then you return Stateside, in my case to Palo Alto, and Europe isn’t just irrelevant among the tech industry power-set. It has virtually ceased to exist. That is a mistake. Blame for the ruptured relationship lies on both sides of the Atlantic, but it is Europeans that have the power, and should have the motivation, to mend things. I’m proud to be Estonian and European, but recently realized that very soon I will have been living in California for 10 percent of my life. I had a front-row seat to the first Internet boom as an exchange student at the super-wired Monta Vista High School in Apple’s backyard. I returned to the U.S. with some frequency initially as an executive with Skype, and later to pursue a business degree at Stanford. My latest perch in Silicon Valley today is as an entrepreneur-in-residence with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Let me give you a small taste of the way Europe was woven into the discussion at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Over the course of four quarters I heard one professor make one joke about short-term macroeconomic troubles in Greece. We also had a visit from a well-dressed and charming British banker in our private equity class. That’s it. No European startups, no cases of European success stories or failures. A joke and a banker. A few isolated examples of systematic bridge building, like the fantastic five-years-running European Entrepreneurship seminar at Stanford’s Engineering school can fulfill targeted curiosity, but Europe is not visible as a theme in other classes across the curriculum. I’m not blaming Stanford. In talking to many people about my growing realization that the place of my birth simply didn’t matter to most people in the Valley, I began to understand that there is a mental hierarchy of “important places” for people building, investing in and studying tech companies in Silicon Valley. They exist in the following order: Practically considered, the opportunity cost of venturing out of the bustling 30-mile radius of Sand Hill Road, whether you are an entrepreneur, investor or academic, is usually just too high. Yes, stuff is happening in Boston and New York, but not so much that a once-a-month trip can’t cover most of it. Massive tech companies do rise in China and go public in the United States, and Chinese investors have gobs of cash to invest in the Valley. There is a constant back and forth between both Pacific coasts. But it’s not just geography, and the historic manufacturing relationship that is stimulating this cozy dynamic. The Valley is looking more and more towards China for the next tech trends and expansion opportunities. India’s diaspora links to the U.S. are strong. Southeast Asia’s growth is hard to miss, and there is interesting mobile stuff happening in Korea and Japan. Markets in Mexico and Brazil are increasingly ripe for Silicon Valley tech, but the region is still a distant gleam for most companies. Here is what I mostly hear about Europe: “I took my wife/husband to Paris last year for our anniversary, and we dropped by Rome. Great food, so much history, Europe is wonderful!” For vacation. Rather than relying solely on my anecdotal examples of “important places,” I turned to LinkedIn. Mapping my network through the lens of the topic at hand, I can confirm that, while Estonia, the Nordics and Europe in general comprise a tightly knit blue blob, and Skype in Estonia (orange) and internationally (green) is an organism in itself, the Silicon Valley venture capital and serial entrepreneurship circles float as a distant burgundy cloud. And the international graduate student and teacher body of Stanford is even further out on the right. Those familiar with Granovetter’s theory about the strength of weak ties should feel a wave of joy here. Sure, there are benefits of weak ties, but then again, there are virtues to tight-knit communities talking to each other frequently, sharing the successes and learning from each other’s mistakes. And that is exactly what is missing between the U.S. and Europe — a real bridge. So how do we build one, and what can both partners in constructing this connection hope to gain? Let’s start with Europe. Raising money tends to be the No. 1 rationale from founders when asked why they’re in the Valley. It’s also the No. 1 mistake people make. You will be far more successful raising seed and early-stage VC financing close to home, on whichever side of the Atlantic it may be. Yes, the internationalization of the venture capital industry is well on its way, and one can draw quite pretty graphs of the increasing money flow across the globe. Bollocks. Here’s why you, European entrepreneur, aren’t going to get that money. Looking at closed early-stage deals listings in Pitchbook, it is very clear that U.S.-based VCs invest in U.S. companies, and European VCs invest in Europe. In my experience, this mindset applies to institutional investors in a clearly structured way, but is a notable behavior even for private angels in AngelList. Investors believe that there is much more that they bring to the table than just money – but that ineffable “value” is hard to bring across long distances and multiple time zones. No matter how much the video calling has improved, board seats, hiring networks, corporate development efforts and just quick (unscheduled!) calls work much better in proximity. Raise your money at home. Part of building a solid bridge with the U.S. is having a solid reason for being here, other than money. Selfies at Infinite Loop Drive and group pictures in front of Facebook and Google headquarters don’t count. One good reason for touching down at SFO might be that it’s because the companies that matter in your space – the ones you want to compete with, learn from, partner with or steal bored employees from – are in Silicon Valley. Ditto for customers. That said, you need to honestly evaluate decamping from Europe against your own personal strengths and networks. I am in the thick of things on Sand Hill Road. Yet that relative advantage doesn’t change the fact that I have been building software companies for 16 years in Estonia and worked mostly with teams around Scandinavia and in Prague or London. This is where the best engineers I know are. This is the core of my network. This is my actual unfair home-court advantage. If anything makes me stay Stateside, it must far outweigh the strongholds I’m leaving behind. That applies to every European (indeed everyone wherever they are from) pondering a move to Silicon Valley. So if exchanging money for equity isn’t the way to create tighter bonds between Europe and the Valley, the question becomes: how can we build more ties between our scenes? When building high-value ties in any network, the question should never be what you , but rather what can you to the other party? What can you help with? What can you teach? What can you spare? This tends to be true with your friends, your community, and your country – and how you ought to think about transatlantic relationships. If we Europeans can muster the confidence, and the U.S. can tone down its arrogance, Europe actually has a lot to give to Silicon Valley. Here are just a few examples. Silicon Valley’s weakest spot today is finding enough good engineers and designers. The European contribution here in the simplest case is talent. The next level of complexity, but more sustainable for both sides, are development outposts across the pond. This could also take the form of M&A targets that Europe could offer – something that Meg Whitman in her eBay CEO days used to call “off-balance-sheet R&D” when buying up another innovative marketplace team in the Netherlands or Sweden. What about making this a two-way street, and providing interesting-timed job adventures for early-career Valley experts? Why be the 3,481st guy in Facebook, when during a three-year stint in a cool European city you can be No.1 in the entire country in what you do? Yes, moving American hotshots to Europe can be a tough sell, but we did it successfully at Skype, and companies like Soundcloud are doing it again. For any European who has spent an extended time here, Silicon Valley can often feel surprisingly backwards. When it comes to online and mobile applications truly embedded in how people go about their daily chores, how they sign and exchange legal documents, how they interact with the government, how they do their consumer banking, how they receive services from their doctors and so forth, many places in Europe are light years ahead of what is widely available in the U.S. We can share those ideas and expertise. For most successful entrepreneurial ventures, there comes a day when growth needs to be found outside of the home market. And no matter how much the mobile handset makers talk about the next billion people coming online in Africa, and how lucrative the already-online billions of users in Asia are, the most common scenario for the Groupons and Airbnbs and Ubers of the foreseeable future is still to figure out their expansion strategy for the U.K., Germany and France. Europe is still the rational next market for most U.S. rocket ships who are looking to find customers with above-average incomes and access to credit cards who live on infrastructure you can deliver your products and services to. Who better to help U.S. entrepreneurs crack Europe than Europeans? The value of understanding foreign markets does not stop with Europe, though. Far too much of U.S.-originated innovation is born in the form of English-language, iOS-only apps with hard-coded dollar signs. European entrepreneurs, especially those from the smallest countries, are much better trained at operating globally in multi-currency, multi-cultural markets. As a proof point, look at how the likes of Finnish Rovio (Angry Birds) and Supercell (Clash of Clans) or Skypers in London or Tallinn and Evernoters in Zürich or Moscow have conquered the astonishingly tough Chinese and Japanese markets. In the post-Snowden days we’re living in, there is a new set of questions around the physical and legal location of users’ data and the regulations governing its privacy. Although the rules and behaviors driving this have been evolving in a U.S.-centric way thanks to U.S.-based Internet giants, if you look at where the of the Internet live today, of them are in the United States. And that share is declining. It is obvious that nations other than the U.S. will have an increasing say in the governance mechanisms and regulation of the system with Europe at the forefront. And this is not just a government thing. The European tech scene can help its U.S. peers figure things out as private entities first. If we Europeans can follow through with an approach of giving something unique and valuable, as opposed to just trying to get funding from the other side, I believe the European and Silicon Valley tech scenes have a shot at moving closer together. For U.S. players, this would presume paying a little bit more attention to the world outside. For Europeans, it’s mustering a bit more confidence in ourselves. I am sure more non-financial bridges can be built. And as it : Cold hard cash will eventually follow the international corridors where smart people are already on the move. [Image: ] |
Strategy Analytics: 1.7B Mobile Handsets Shipped In 2013, 990M Of Them Smartphones | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | If you needed an indicator of just how much the mobile market today is a smartphone market, look no further than the figures put out early today by Strategy Analytics. The researchers estimate that overall mobile phone shipments , with smartphones accounting for — or 990 million, to be exact. While the wider mobile market grew only 5% in that time, smartphone units increased by 41% over 2012’s 700 million smartphone shipments. But it’s not all a rosy picture for smartphones. While 41% growth sounds good, Ken Hyers, an analyst at Strategy Analytics, notes that it is actually down slightly on the 43% growth of a year ago. He says this is because of “high penetration in some major markets like the United States.” The figures coincided with Apple releasing its , and the issue of slowing sales in mature markets was something that had a direct effect on Apple. Traditionally a strong player in the U.S., CEO Tim Cook noted today that Apple’s . And its second-biggest market, Europe (“mature” as well Old World), was up by only 5%. As we pointed out , although Samsung continues to remain in the lead with its 32% of all smartphone shipments, the real story appears to be about what is happening underneath that. Apple continues to fall (pardon the pun) and is now at 15.5% for the full year (compared to 19% a year ago) on 153 million units. And although Huawei, LG and Lenovo are all behind Apple, together they are nearly overtaking the iPhone maker in units, with a combined share of 14.6%. That’s not to overlook that Samsung’s growth is nothing short of impressive: its 319.8 million smartphones shipped in 2013 was the “largest number of units ever shipped by a smartphone vendor in a single year,” according to the analyst group’s executive director Neil Mawston. Samsung also retained its title as the world’s biggest mobile phone maker overall: it shipped 451 million units for a 27% share of the market. As in quarters past, the Samsung/Apple juggernaut is all but dominating the smartphone world in terms of vendors. “Large marketing budgets, extensive distribution channels and attractive product portfolios have enabled Samsung and Apple to maintain their grip on the smartphone industry,” writes analyst Linda Sui. The question will be whether the economics of making cheaper phones will mean that the smaller vendors like LG, Huawei and Lenovo can stick around longer, or whether they will eventually find themselves in the same positions as Nokia, BlackBerry and HTC — all out of the top five rankings now partly because it eventually became unsustainable to play in the smartphone game without scale. In any case, although in times past it seemed that the route to being a worldwide phone leader was to have a strategy of offering devices across a range of price points and feature sets, today that’s not as clear. Over 70% of the handsets Samsung’s shipping right now are smartphones. And Apple, the number-three player in mobile sales overall, is a smartphone-only vendor. Meanwhile, Nokia’s smartphone share these days is so small that Strategy Analytics doesn’t break it out, meaning that its number-two position among mobile phone makers is based largely on its power at the lower end of the market. However, it turns out the strategy of not having a killer smartphone lineup not only is not lucrative but eventually self-destructive. Nokia’s global mobile phone shipments fell 25% between 2012 and 2013, from 335.6 million units to 252.4 million units. “Nokia faced tough competition from Samsung in developing markets like India, while LG and others ramped up the pressure in developed regions such as Western Europe,” writes Mawston. “Nokia’s Windows Phones have been performing relatively well, but this was not enough to offset sluggish demand for its Asha models and other feature phones during the course of the year.” As Strategy Analytics points out, one route for smaller, national players to survive longer term is to continue to grow internationally. Huawei, it notes, is expanding in Europe; LG’s Optimus range “is proving popular in Latin America”; Lenovo’s Android models are selling at competitive price-points across China. “Samsung and Apple will need to fight hard to hold off these and other hungry challengers during 2014,” notes Sui. |
Tom Perkins Presents GOP Boilerplate As Solution To Wage Inequality | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | In a over the weekend, legendary venture capitalist Tom Perkins compared what he sees as a “ ” to , the series of coordinated attacks against the Jews during Nazi Germany. Today on , Perkins apologized for using the word “Kristallnacht,” saying that he regretted the reference, but said he stands by the broader message of the piece. That message, he says, is that there is a demonization of the one percent happening — one which is “dangerous” and “preposterous.” Perkins said that he apologized to the head of the for use of the word Kristallnacht in his letter, and said he thought of the word after the protestors bashed in the windows of luxury car dealerships during the Occupy movement a few years ago. He also cited the experiences of his longtime partner , who was born in Austria and fled the Nazis in the late 1930s, before serving in the U.S. Army. In the interview Perkins said he believed Kleiner would likely have agreed with his message. Kleiner often warned to “never imagine that the unimaginable could not become real,” Perkins said, which fits in with the belief that the progressive 99 percent are targeting those more fortunate. The real crux of his argument, Perkins said, was that a majority of the population was seeking to demonize a minority of the population in both Nazi Germany and in today’s hostile treatment of the richest 1 percent in this country. “Anytime the majority starts to demonize a minority, no matter what it is, it’s wrong,” he said. “And it’s dangerous. And no good ever comes from it.” Perkins went on to say that the rich shouldn’t be demonized for what it does — which is, get more rich and create jobs along the way. He argued that his namesake venture firm Kleiner Perkins had probably created a million jobs over the years. “The 1 percent are not the problem,” Perkins said. “It’s absurd to demonize the rich for being rich, and doing what the rich do… which is getting more rich by creating opportunities for others.” According to Perkins, the rich as a class are threatened by higher taxes and higher regulation, both of which make job creation more difficult. He argued that he believed the solution was “less [government] interference” and “lower taxes,” which again, “would let the rich do what the rich do, which is get richer.” And, you know, create a rising tide for all the rest of us. That message follows the typical that the GOP has been pushing since at least the 1980s. And yet, despite than at any point since the Great Depression, just keeps getting worse. Perkins also mentioned that he felt Kleiner Perkins had “thrown him under the bus” after distancing itself from his statements over the weekend. And he used that as an opportunity to take a shot at the firm’s returns since he had been there, claiming a decline at the firm ever since he’s no longer been involved.
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Global Smartphone Shipments Top 1 Billion For The First Time Thanks To Cheap Android Devices, Says IDC | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | The global smartphone market shipped one billion units in a single year for the first time, with Samsung as the leading vendor, according to a new report by research firm IDC’s . Neither fact will come as a surprise if you follow quarterly reports about the mobile market. In fact, with similar figures, though its report said total shipments fell just short of the 1 billion milestone, with 990 million shipped. But what is interesting is that the smartphone market’s growth is now being largely driven by demand for very cheap Android devices–some less than $150–in emerging markets like China and India. The accessibility of smartphones means that , and companies like . It may also lead to challenges for companies like Huawei, Lenovo, and LG, which will have to figure out how to continue growing on the already razor-thin margins for cheap smartphones. In the report, Ryan Reith, program director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, noted that the top two trends driving smartphone growth are large screen devices and low-cost, with the latter being “the key difference maker.” “Cheap devices are not the attractive segment that normally grabs headlines, but IDC data shows this is the portion of the market that is driving volume. Markets like China and India are quickly moving toward a point where sub-$150 smartphones are the majority of shipments, bringing a solid computing experience to the hands of many.” Last year, vendors shipped slightly more than 1 billion smartphones, a 38.4% increase from 725.3 million units in 2012. Smartphones made up 55.1% of mobile phone shipments in 2013, up 41.7% from the year before. In the global market for mobile phones (including smartphones), vendors shipped 1.82 billion units, a 4.8% increase from the 1.74 billion units shipped in 2012. As expected, Samsung continued to lead in worldwide smartphone shipments. Samsung saw a decline in 4Q2013 shipments, but still maintained a double-digit lead over Apple. The Cupertino-based company posted record shipment volume in the quarter, thanks to the launch of new markets for the iPhone 5s and 5c, but it still had the lowest year-on-year increase of all the leading vendors. It remains to be seen if that gap will be closed now that . Huawei, which maintained its number three position, enjoyed the highest year-on-year increase among the leading vendors, while Lenovo and LG took the fourth and fifth spots, respectively. As TechCrunch’s , LG, Huawei, and Lenovo now face the challenge of figuring out how to sustain growth on the tight profit margins of cheaper smartphones. If they can’t, they may end up in the same positions as Nokia, BlackBerry, and HTC, which have all fallen about of the top five rankings. |
Twitter Mobile Update Bubbles Trending Events To The Top Of The Timeline, Adds Photo Editing | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | Twitter has just released an (coming soon to iOS) that brings new photo editing tools to the service, which are likely meant to make it easier to share photos direct and keep people out of competitive apps like Instagram. The second change adds a significant element of event discovery and real-time trend monitoring to user timelines. The event surfacing is the more interesting element, since it marks a considerable attempt by Twitter to meddle with the straightforward chronological nature of that part of its service (besides promoted content). In case a user doesn’t have any new tweets to load when you manually update it, it now brings up recommended posts from people you don’t follow, as well as trending topics and suggestions about new people to follow. In the U.S. only, it surfaces event updates for things unfolding on TV, in sports and on the news. Each content update features a link to click through for more tweets centered on that conversation. It’s an extension of some of the other work Twitter has been doing around surfacing events and breaking news, including the and a feature that was . A couple of things to flag about this change: It only happens when there’s no other new content for a user to view, and when they express a desire for more content, which is very clever; and it represents a way for Twitter to secure its place as the source of live, real-time information about things unfolding on the ground, a reputation that Facebook clearly covets. Others are already capitalizing on Twitter’s ability to identify and follow events as they unfold, , but Twitter adding this as a native feature in its mobile clients could change the nature of the service at a basic level. Should it roll out globally, and expand its scope, mobile users could be using Twitter a lot more for things like local discovery than they had been previously. |
Apple’s Mixed 1st Quarter In Charts | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | Apple’s December quarter was a mixed bag. If you just read the , revenue has never been so high thanks to continued growth in iPhone and iPad sales. But analysts expected more, and net profit is flat. Who is to blame? Probably . It wasn’t the market share machine that everyone expected. Selling more than 50 million iPhones in just three months is amazing, but it’s still a growing market and everyone wanted to see double digit growth in iPhone sales. It’s hard to expect more when a company can generate $13.1 billion . Many companies would love to report $13 billion . But it’s exactly what financial analysts and investors do with Apple: they always ask for more.
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CEO Tim Cook Says Touch ID Was Part Of Apple’s Thinking Around Mobile Payments | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | Apple CEO Tim Cook actually discussed mobile payments directly on the company’s earnings call today, saying that it’s an area that has “intrigued” the company and that mobile payments actually figured in the company’s thinking around Touch ID. There’s been a considerable amount of discussion around Apple’s potential exploration of the mobile payments space recently, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Cupertino was . Cook noted that customers have responded positively to being able to buy digital goods including music, movies and apps via Touch ID, and suggested that there’s potential for use of the fingerprint-scanning tech in other kinds of commerce, too. Apple has also filed a patent recently for a “touchless” payment system that uses a “secure element” on the iPhone to store and protect payment information. Apple already employs just such a cordoned area on its current system-on-a-chip to keep fingerprint data private, and it’s entirely plausible that it could be paired up with a physical payments system given its current use. Of course, being able to pay with a thumb press at retail stores is a tantalizing possibility, but even just the admission that this is an area Apple is actively exploring is plenty exciting enough. The company has well over 600 million credit cards on file, at least according to the best guesses from analysts, so it’s hard to understate the potential upside for Apple should it start competing with the likes of PayPal. |
Nintendo May Go Mobile This Year (But Not In The Way We’d All Like) | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | OMG! Mario on iOS! Not! According to a brief in Japan’s Nikkei (translated by ), Nintendo will announce plans to use Android and iOS as marketing vehicles, allowing Link, Mario, and the various and sundry Pokemen to appear on mobile devices to promote the company’s games. on the iPhone this ain’t. Nintendo will announce the plans in an investor briefing this Thursday. “To be more concrete, The Nikkei writes that Nintendo wants to use smartphones to expand its potential user base by spreading information about new game releases, i.e. by using video to introduce future titles. (This will probably happen through some kind of official Nintendo app.)” wrote Toto. This is obviously all conjecture at this point but if even the barest hint of Nintendo appears on mobile devices I suspect the fanbois will go mental. It will be fascinating to watch Nintendo’s first trepidatious steps into treacherous waters, to be sure. |
Flickr’s Upside-Down “About” Page Was Actually A Clever Job Ad | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | Some Flickr users noticed the company’s “About” page was upside-down yesterday. Yes, literally upside-down. And yes, we checked, . As it turns out, yes, Flickr’s upside-downness was on purpose. Yahoo confirmed to us today that the “mistake” was actually an easter egg meant to celebrate Australia Day (Jan. 26). “We changed our About page for Australia day (hence the upside-down) and replaced the team photos with all things Australia – for example photos of kangaroos,” a company spokesperson noted. But the page had another cool trick, too – it was also a job ad. Nosy developers who checked the source code saw a special “we are hiring” code, says Yahoo: The message was simple: “You’re reading. We’re hiring,” followed by a link to the Flickr jobs page. Quipped one reader on about the ad: “Something more esoteric would be more interesting..maybe a small but prominent Pi in the lower right hand corner that when clicked causes 3D CSS transforms to be applied that give the illusion of the web page as a gate opening up onto a job search site.” Zing, came a reply, “Someone has watched one too many Sandra Bullock movies.” (This perhaps?) We asked Yahoo how well the stunt performed in terms of referrals, but the company declined to say. According to Twitter, even noticed the change, it seems – which may speak more broadly to Flickr’s current “coolness” factor than the company may have liked to share. Flickr’s about page is…. is upside down. Why? — Design UX/UI (@DesignUXUI) Flickr’s ingenious upside down about page “were hiring” ad (figure it out): — Scott Robarts (@srobarts) |
Apple Says International Took 64% Of Revenues In Q1, Led By Growth In China And Japan | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | Apple CEO Tim Cook today admitted that in its home market of North America, “we did not do as well…our business contracted year over year.” But to counterbalance that, the iPhone maker is pushing its international business. In the company’s Q1 2014 earnings, , Apple says that international markets accounted for 64% of sales. As a point of comparison, international accounted for . Sales in Greater China and Japan, fuelled by Apple’s iPhone, have grown the most, respectively up 29% to $8.8 billion and 11% to $5 billion versus a year ago. The growth in these two countries specifically appears to be bolstered by a growing ecosystem in these markets: recent carrier deals with the largest players in each market, China Mobile and NTT DoCoMo, certainly helped, as did an early rollout of Apple’s newest iPhone 5 devices; but so does a strong content play. In China, Apple today said that developers have published some 130,000 apps in the App Store. In the regional sales breakdown that Apple provided in its earnings, sales were down slightly in the Americas and Asia Pacific outside of Greater China and Japan over last year; the rest of the markets were up. While Europe collectively is Apple’s second-largest market after the Americas, bringing in $13 billion of revenue in Q1, growth has slowed right down in the region: it was only up 5% compared to a year ago. If you look at s sales estimates for the last quarter that were out earlier today, the reason for the decline appears to be squarely down to competition from Android, and in some cases Windows Phone, as Apple battles it out against Microsoft for second place. The real international story for Apple right now seems to be in Asia and emerging markets. We had an indication that the results China would be positive, when Tim Cook said in an interview in Beijing that sales in China in Q1 were hitting a record for the company. Today Cook fleshed that out a bit. “We’ve been selling with China Mobile for about a week…and it’s been an incredible start,” he said on the call today, referring to its sales in the country a “new high water mark.” The company is only in China Mobile stores in 16 cities in China today; it expects to be available in over 300 cities by the end of the year. Even so, mainland China had record iPhone sales in the quarter and saw doubled iPad growth. Kantar Worldpanel’s figures, which Apple cited a couple of times in its earnings call, indicated that in Japan, Apple continues to wipe out the competition, taking some 69% of all smartphone sales. Emerging markets Apple has really not gone after a low-end device strategy compared to Android handset makers, but today the company set out to try to prove that this has not impacted its sales in emerging markets. CFO Peter Oppenheimer said Apple was “very pleased with our performance in emerging markets,” a sentiment Cook brought up later, with some relative numbers to spell it out: in Russia (where it just inked a new deal with carrier Megafon) sales were up 115%; in Latin America (lumped together in ‘Americas’ with the declining/saturated North America market) they were up 65%; and the Middle East sales were up 20%. Growth, of course, is more of a hopeful metric than actual sales, which Apple did not break out for these markets today. The big question is whether these international plays will help Apple continue to move the needle, and whether users in these markets will adopt Apple products as earnestly as consumers in the U.S., UK, Japan and other countries where Apple has proven to be a hit. |
Despite Multi-Year MSFT Surface Deal, Nearly All NFL Teams Use iPads As Playbooks, Says Apple | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | On today’s Q1 earnings call, Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer bragged that “nearly all NFL teams use iPads as playbooks.” This wouldn’t necessarily be interesting, except for the fact that Microsoft has a to provide players, coaches and other personnel with a Surface tablet. Of course, NFL teams have been using the iPad for years. , a number of NFL teams had figured out how to transfer their playbooks over to iPad, as well as view and edit game film on the fly. By fall 2012, the number of NFL teams using iPads as playbooks from 2 to 14. In 2013, though, Microsoft signed a multi-year deal with the NFL that had a number of stipulations. As the official sideline technology partner of the NFL, Microsoft Surface and Windows would be “the official tablet and PC operating system of the NFL.” This is made clear when you watch the NFL on Fox, as all the sports announcers sport kickstand-equipped Surface tablets on-air. However, it seems that coaches and players prefer iProducts, according to Oppenheimer’s statements on today’s call. And it wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened. Last year, erstwhile was caught despite promising herself to the BlackBerry Z10. The iPad has been a major tool across a number of enterprise businesses. , health companies and car companies began using the iPad for sales purposes. Inevitably, the iPad became a sales tool across many verticals in the enterprise. More recently, industries are looking to replace paper manuals, as is the case with airlines and flight manuals. In fact, American Airlines will save because of the weight decrease on flights. |
Apple Pays Out $2 Billion To Developers In Q1 2014 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | One number in indicates significant year over year growth, and it’s a number that’s vital to the continued success of the platform – the company announced that it paid out $2 billion to developers during its fiscal Q1 2014, which is a record number and also between three and four times what it paid devs during the same period last year. The growth for developer revenue is increasing at a very rapid pace – for all of 2013, the software store paid out $10 billion in total, which means that it’s on pace this year to far exceed that already. It’s a reflection that despite the fact that many critics suggest the , it’s still the best place for anyone building mobile products to make money. The App Store’s shift to apps that predominantly feature in-app purchases is a possible explainer for the growth rate, as well as there simply being more devs on the platform. A recent survey shows that the App store now derives 92 percent of its revenue from free apps with in-app purchases, compared to just 4 percent from paid apps and another 4 percent from paid apps with in-app purchases. Whatever the case, Apple still clearly dwarfs Google Play when it comes to paying out money to devs, and that doesn’t look likely to change any time soon. |
Dark Sky Is Ready To Be The Default Weather App On Your iPhone’s Homescreen | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | , easily one of the better weather applications on iOS, rolled out an update today that expands its focus beyond rain predictions to become a more comprehensive weather app which offers both 24-hour and 7-day forecasts, global maps, and more. The app was also rewritten from scratch for iOS 7, the company notes. For those unfamiliar, Dark Sky began its life as back in 2011, with a goal of offering “hyperlocal” weather information. That is, instead of just showing you what percent chance of rain there is in your area, Dark Sky looks at your exact location, then predicts the rain down to a minute. For example, it may tell you “Light rain starting in 20 min,” and offer a graph of what that future rain pattern will look like in terms of how light or heavy the rain will later become. In addition, the app’s beautiful but simple design won it support and accolades from its user base, where it has consistently earned top reviews on the iTunes App Store. Its four-star rating in the past seems to only have been brought down by those who complain of battery concerns, or of accuracy. Of course, there may be times where Dark Sky misses the mark, but overall, the app is more “surprisingly accurate” than not, at least in my personal experience living in a humid locale, as well as in the majority of app store reviews. And as for those battery concerns, co-creator Adam Grossman tells us that each time they’ve investigated complaints, it didn’t end up being the Dark Sky app that was the problem. After all, the app uses battery-draining GPS for location accuracy only when launched. For notifications, it uses cellular triangulation instead. Norwegian Meteorological Institute, and . Aggregated together, the service provides a statistically more accurate forecast for any given location. However, Dark Sky is currently only available in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland, due to the costs associated with licensing radar data. Fortunately, in the U.S., radar data is free, but the company has to pay recurring costs for U.K. data. But Grossman says he hopes that, in time, they’ll be able to afford expansions to other markets, like Canada, Australia, other parts of Europe, and Japan. A number of third-party developers have also built apps powered by Dark Sky’s Forecast service, including Check the Weather, Poncho, Osito, Saga, Today Weather, QuickRoute, WeatherCaster and Weather Line. These steadily increasing API and data sales now pay for Dark Sky’s infrastructure, but the majority of the revenue the company earns comes from app sales, says Grossman. (The app is $3.99 on the App Store.) Until now, Forecast’s complete feature set was never available within Dark Sky itself, which makes today’s update a notable release. With the relaunch, the app has been rewritten from scratch for iOS 7, offering you an at-a-glance homescreen with the current temp, the “feels like” temp, and precipitation forecast. You can then swipe to see the 24-hour forecast, and the upcoming week. You can tap into a number of screen elements, including the current temperature to see wind, humidity, dew point, pressure, and visibility, or you can tap on the days of the upcoming week to see mini forecasts for each. Meanwhile, a “maps” option also offers an animated globe featuring precipitation and temperatures, which you can zoom into and out of and spin around. Grossman says the team decided to release the update to its current user base for free because they didn’t want to frustrate customers or support two apps. “Even me, who’s a developer who lives off of people paying for my app, I got kind of pissed off at having to pay for all these apps again,” says Grossman of the ongoing pay-to-upgrade trend iOS developers try today in effort to squeeze additional revenue from their current users. It’s also worth noting that Dark Sky, which has been profitable since shortly after launch, is entirely bootstrapped. The app hit half a million users last week, thanks in part to an App Store feature. The team doesn’t really do much in the way of advertising or marketing, relying mainly on word of mouth, says Grossman. Even though today’s App Store has become a tough place to compete, something like Dark Sky shows that you can still be lean and become profitable. Unfortunately, Grossman has some bad news for those who don’t carry iPhones. “We will probably never make an Android application,” he says. “I can’t see making an app for a platform I just don’t use.” That being said, he was open to the idea of working with a partner on the “official” Android version of Dark Sky at some point in the future, though is not actively pursuing it at this time. [vimeo 84900757 w=500 h=375] |
Five Months After Launch, iOS 7 Has Been Installed On 80% Of Compatible Devices | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | With one of Androids’ few shortcomings being the uncertainty that any given device might get the next big update, Apple just to mention their iOS update numbers. During their earnings call this morning, the company shined a bit of light on just how many devices have been updated to iOS 7 at this point. The grand total? 80%. Of course, that’s 80% of devices, not all iOS devices ever. So that’d be 80% of the iPhone 5S, 5C, 5, 4S, and 4, as well as the 4th/3rd gen iPads, iPad 2, and iPad Mini. For comparison’s sake (though the comparison is a bit apples-to-oranges): the latest version of Android (4.4, otherwise known as KitKat), is on 1.4% of Android devices used between January 2nd and January 8th. The second latest major build, Jelly Bean, is on about 59.1% of Android devices. |
Despite Record Sales Quarter, Apple’s iPhone 5c Likely Wasn’t Key To Growth | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | Apple’s , and they also mark the company’s ability to ship as many smartphones as Samsung, which was previously the only company in the world to move over 50 million units in a single quarter back in 2012. But the number represents only 3 million more devices sold than in the same quarter last year, or around 7 percent growth. That’s a far cry from previous years, and it’s already caught the attention of those watching the company. I think you are right. — Ben Bajarin (@BenBajarin) This suspicion that the iPhone 5c is not selling quite as well as Apple might have expected is backed up by the average selling price (ASP) of devices. The ASP dropping would suggest that the more expensive iPhone 5s is far and away the stronger seller, which is also supported by Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer’s assertion on the earnings call that the iPhone 5s faced supply constraints, while no mention was made of the iPhone 5c. They sold more iPhone 5s devices than expected in North America, CEO Tim Cook explained, which made it difficult for them to get the right “mix” and caused the North American market to actually contract year over year. Cook also suggested that changes in carrier upgrade policies negatively affected North American sales. https://twitter.com/asymco/status/427923677271695360 There are a couple of potential takeaways which could suggest changes to Apple’s iPhone strategy: First, it could indicate that Apple needs to really deliver on the idea of a cheaper iPhone – the iPhone 5c was anticipated to be that, but in the end it was the same price as older devices bumped down the line in previous quarters. Second, it could provide the reasoning behind the recent that Apple will ditch the plastic case for any upcoming iPhone devices to be released this year. Refocusing on the top end and premium metal finishes is one way to address the iPhone 5c, but it’s unclear what effect that might have on growth plans. Emerging markets are still the prime target when it comes to driving continued smartphone growth, and that’s where cheaper devices are going to stand out. Apple may discuss iPhone 5c specifically during the conference call, so stay tuned to find out more. |
Police Using 3D Scanners For Panoramic Crime Scene Analysis | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | Police in Roswell, NM are now using 3D scanners to virtually map crime scenes, allowing investigators, jurors, judges, and lawyers to inspect the environment from any angle with a 3D, panoramic image. The Roswell Police Department is just one of many police departments currently using ‘s 3D imaging hardware to analyze crime scenes. In other words, you’ll probably see this kind of crime scene scanning on one of your favorite TV shows very soon. This could play a significant role in solving crimes, as well as prosecuting crimes in the court room. The ability to see the crime scene from any perspective gives jurors more insight into the case than any 2D picture could. Roswell’s police department has been requesting this equipment since 2008, and has finally achieved their goal in a capital outlay program that cost $86,000. Faro Technology offers a device that uses a laser and various touchpoint markers to measure every cubic inch of the scene. It’s called the Focus3D, and it is equipped with a touchscreen, GPS, and a height sensor. The handheld device connects to computers via a WLan connection. The final is a lot like using Apple Maps or Google Maps in 3D mode, but with far more detail on a smaller area. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NTOXI7kH0o&w=640&h=360] [via ] |
Department Of Justice Will Allow Big Tech Companies To Disclose Detailed Numbers Of Surveillance Requests | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | released more details on the requests it receives from government surveillance agencies after the Department Of Justice releaxed limits on disclosures. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and LinkedIn today to disclose more details on the data requests and orders they receive from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court the government for months to declassify these numbers. The Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement today, first reported by the , that says “Through these new reporting methods, communications providers will be permitted to disclose more information than ever before to their customers. The office of the Director of National Intelligence…has determined that the public interest in disclosing this information now outweighs the national security concerns that required its classification.” Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and LinkedIn to drop their lawsuits in exchange for the declassification. Apple has published a describing its relationship with the government surveillance agencies and releasing narrower ranges of numbers of National Security Orders for data that it’s received. As seen below, Apple received between zero and 249 National Security Orders on a number of accounts in that rage. Apple received 927 total law enforcement account requests about 2330 accounts, disclosed data on 747 accounts, objected 102 times, disclosed no data on 254 accounts, disclosed non-content dta on 601 accounts, disclosed some content on 71 accounts, and the percentage of account requests where some data was disclosed was 81%. Note how these numbers are more detailed than those , 2013: The ability to disclose specific numbers could boost confidence amongst tech companies’ users that the government’s data requests are specific and targeted, not a dragnet pulling in everyone. , ambiguity in surveillance is what causes fear. That fear can be seen as a double-edged sword. While ambiguity could prevent true threats to national security from understanding our surveillance methods, it also worries innocent users that they’re being needlessly spied on. By striking a better balance in terms of specificity, the tech companies hope to reassure their users while still letting the NSA do its job of trying to protect the United States. Unfortunately, in the monthd since the big tech companies began asking for more disclosure freedom, we’ve seen Edward Snowden’s leaks indicate that the NSA doesn’t necessarily have to go through official channels to get user data. That means people might not care about how many times the government knocked on the front door or was let in when it can always go through the back door. Here’s the full text of the statement from the Department Of Justice.
Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, January 27, 2014
Joint Statement by Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on New Reporting Methods for National Security Orders Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released the following joint statement Monday:
“As indicated in the Justice Department’s filing with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the administration is acting to allow more detailed disclosures about the number of national security orders and requests issued to communications providers, and the number of customer accounts targeted under those orders and requests including the underlying legal authorities. Through these new reporting methods, communications providers will be permitted to disclose more information than ever before to their customers.
“This action was directed by the President earlier this month in his speech on intelligence reforms. While this aggregate data was properly classified until today, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with other departments and agencies, has determined that the public interest in disclosing this information now outweighs the national security concerns that required its classification.
“Permitting disclosure of this aggregate data resolves an important area of concern to communications providers and the public. In the weeks ahead, additional steps must be taken in order to fully implement the reforms directed by the President.
“The declassification reflects the Executive Branch’s continuing commitment to making information about the Government’s intelligence activities publicly available where appropriate and is consistent with ensuring the protection of the national security of the United States.” |
Apple’s 51M iPhones, 26M iPads And 4.8M Macs In Q1 2014 Set A Record, But Growth Slows | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | Analysts had predicted that Apple would have a strong day with hardware this quarter, anticipating between 54 and 56 million iPhones shipped according , as well as around 25 million iPads and 4.6 million Macs. The showed Apple missing on iPhones with 51 million moved, but beating expectations for the rest slightly with 26 million iPads and 4.8 million Macs. Remember that this is the quarter that holds the bulk of Apple’s holiday sales, spanning as it does October through December, 2013. iPod sales, which continued their downward trend, selling only 6 million units, vs. 12.7 million in the year ago period. That’s not surprising, though, and nothing Apple is likely very concerned about as people continue to move to multi-use devices like iPhones and iPads. The iPhone number is the one everyone will be watching and talking about. iPhone and iPad sales were both up year over year, however. In . That makes this a record quarter for Cupertino on all counts, spurred by the introduction of the new iPhone 5c, 5s, iPad air and iPad mini, as well as new MacBook Pro models introduced in October. It was an incomparable year in terms of new hardware leading into the holiday quarter, and the numbers reflect that. iPhone sales showed a 29.5 percent increase between and Q1 2013, while iPads had just over 48 percent growth in shipments during the same period. This time around (between Q1 2013 and Q1 2014), the iPhone showed just 6.7 percent growth, while the iPad had only 8.4 percent increase in shipments. Those numbers likely won’t do much to curtail the impression that Apple is starting to struggle with how much room it has to grow those businesses, but they still represent record quarters.
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Apple’s Mixed Q1 2014 With $57.6B Revenue, $13.1B Profit And $14.50 EPS | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | Apple has just its fiscal Q1 2014 earnings, reporting $57.6 billion in revenue, $13.1 billion in net profit representing $14.50 per share. Compared to the , it corresponds to a growth of 5.7 percent in revenue, and 5 percent in EPS, with net profit flat year over year. Apple sold 51 million iPhones, 26 million iPads and 4.8 million Macs in the quarter. As the iPhone remains the big money-making device for Apple, analysts had expected 55 million iPhones. Apple fell below those expectations. Compared to Q1 2013, iPhone sales grew 6.7 percent (more than Apple’s overall revenue) while iPad sales grew 13.5 percent. Read all the details about hardware sales in our . Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said in the earnings call that they sold 26 million iPads “despite supply constraints.” It means that it could have sold more iPads if it had more inventory. “We exited the December quarter near supply/demand balance,” Oppenheimer said regarding iPad production. “We are really happy with our record iPhone and iPad sales, the strong performance of our Mac products and the continued growth of iTunes, Software and Services,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in the release. “We love having the most satisfied, loyal and engaged customers, and are continuing to invest heavily in our future to make their experiences with our products and services even better.” According to , the consensus among analysts was for Apple to report earnings of $14.36 per share on $58.1 billion in revenue, with both revenue and EPS growing. expected $57.46 billion in revenue and $12.68 billion in profit, this time with profit down 3 percent year over year. Despite an in sales with more than 50 million iPhones sold for the first time, revenue is below the street’s expectations. On the other hand, EPS is above expectations with flat profit. Gross margin was 37.9 percent compared to 38.6 percent in the year-ago quarter. That’s why net profit is flat. As a reminder, Apple $37.5 billion in revenue, $7.5 billion in profit representing earnings of $8.26 per share. Guidance from its last earnings release forecasted between $55 billion and $58 billion in revenue, with gross margin between 36.5 percent and 37.5 percent. Over the past three quarters, Apple’s own guidance has been much more accurate, with the upper end of the forecast very close to what it actually reported. Software revenue is up 26 percent compared to Q1 2013. iOS 7 is installed on of compatible devices. “It’s the most popular operating system in the world,” Oppenheimer said. iWork apps are now free on both OS X and iOS, but it didn’t affect growth for now. Overall, iTunes, software and services represented $4.4 billion of this quarter’s revenue.
The company’s cash on hand greatly increased from $146.76 billion to $158.8 billion. It remains a great strategic asset for Apple. Yet, only $34.4 billion is kept in the U.S. Over the past couple of years, the company has become more generous when it comes to dividends and share buybacks, but it still managed to add $12 billion this quarter alone. Many tech companies would have loved to make $12 billion .
Apple expects to have a revenue between $42 billion and $44 billion for the next quarter, with a gross margin between 37 and 38 percent again. The company reported $43.6 billion in revenue for Q2 2013. In other words, Apple expects more or less a flat quarter when it comes to revenue next quarter. Apple shares are currently down 5.7 percent in after-hours trading, mostly due to next quarter’s guidance and not today’s earnings. Revenue in Greater China and Europe continue to grow year over year while it’s more or less flat in other regions. Read more about international outlook in our .
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Happy Birthday, D&D | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 27 | On January 26, 1974 the world changed. A panoply of creatures popped into existence – Owlbears lumbered out of the woods while Bullettes snuffled out of caves, blinking in the sunlight. Adventurers donned metal plate armor and led their ambling pack horses into darkened dungeons. Traps sprung, capturing teams of dwarves in iron nets while gold glittered tantalizingly close to a shambling skeleton. For some, the ’70s were an era of free love. For others they were the era of untrammeled adventure. Dungeons & Dragons, the pen-and-paper role-playing game that engulfed so many of our childhoods, turned 40 this weekend to little fanfare. Originally created by and , the game built on many RPG mechanics that were beginning to percolate out of board gaming at the time. Like before it, D&D games were engrossing romps through worlds yet unvisited by the player. However, unlike the traditional board and die drivel, D&D borrowed from the popular mythologies of the day and the strange world of J.R.R. Tolkein and his ilk. The result – an all-encompassing game that took cues from improvisational theatre, model-building, war gaming, and political strategy – has become a signifier in the tech world and an interstitial generation of pre-electronic nerds as much as the bong and bell-bottoms defined the generation that spawned these role-players. Things didn’t look good for D&D parent company TSR when they were bought out by Wizards Of The Coast who created the third and fourth editions of the game. A fifth edition is planned for this year. D&D created nearly everything we hold dear. The games we love today – from to – all owe gratitude to the sweeping expanse of D&D gaming. Western fantasy is basically one long D&D game played solo while even the team structures and hierarchies we’ve come to use in business – from black belt consultants to agile teams – owe something to the camaraderie of kitchen-table dungeon crawls and the language of the Internet (arch, knowing, snarky, and at the same time earnest and obsessive) is the language of the RPG gamer. It is hard to overstate how culturally important D&D was. It made us nerds powerful, and gave us a sword, a shield, and a dragon to slay in some dark corner. Like Bilbo tasked with robbing Smaug, we take the lessons of D&D and make beautiful art, conduct business, and interact as humans. It’s something we need and I’m glad it was born. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E6AOd6r6Qi8] [Image from which you should read if you want to learn where a lot of the original monsters came from.] |
Neiman Marcus Breach Could Be Part Of Larger Holiday Cyberattack On U.S. Retailers | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 1 | 11 | In the weeks following Thanksgiving, of a massive attack and data hack, which reportedly affected as many as 110 million people and exposed an array of personal data, including names, addresses and credit card information. beginning to notify customers that it, too, has been hacked, it seems that we may just be of a larger cyberattack that took place during the holiday season. This morning, reported that upscale retailer has teamed up with the U.S. Secret Service to investigate its own data breach which led to the theft of credit card and personal information. The company reportedly discovered the cyberattack in December from its credit card processor but has still yet to disclose how many shoppers have been affected by the hack. However, account that it is beginning to notify customers whose credit card information has been “used fraudulently” since the breach in December. The company said that the forensics team it has been working with had discovered that customer personal information had been compromised, but that it has “begun to contain the intrusion and have taken significant steps to further enhance information security,” it said in a statement about the breach. Beyond how many of its customers were exposed to the attack, the company has yet to share details on how the breach occurred. There is no concrete evidence that the two attacks on Neiman Marcus and Target were linked, as, at least according to Krebs. Target has yet to publicly share details on its investigation which could help other retailers discover whether or not the attacks were perpetrated by the same hackers. However, that Neiman Marcus and Target were not the only victims of the Holiday Hack Attack ’13, as I’m calling it. According to Reuters, at least three other “well-known U.S. retailers” were subject to data breaches, which used “similar techniques” to the attack on Target. Not only that, but those investigating the events indicated that similar breaches may also have “occurred earlier last year.” The report claims that hackers used “malicious software” to infiltrate the retailers’ databases and steal credit card information. indicated that one of the Trojan horses used by hackers was a “RAM scraper,” which allows the burglar to snatch encrypted data at a moment of vulnerability. This happens when the data appears in plain text as it moves through the live memory of the customer’s computer, according to Reuters. Visa apparently warned of a series of attacks using this method that had been attempted on its network earlier last year, but while this kind of “RAM scraping” attack has been around for years, the report said that the attacks on Target and others were much more sophisticated. While cyber security itself has increased dramatically (and improved) over the last few years, it appears there’s still headway to be made. While the attacks reportedly took place during the holiday season, the major retailers affected have delayed any public announcement about the cyberattack. The reason is that many credit card companies and banks are “forbidden” from naming merchants affected by attacks unless “they disclose that information themselves.” Naturally, big brand merchants would rather protect their image and business, rather than publicly announcing a breach. It’s an understandable move to protect their business and prevent mass hysteria, but it’s also frustrating to customers, banks and many others who may not become aware of exposure until days, weeks or months after the attacks occur. Many states require companies to contact customers when their information is exposed, and usually it’s payment processors who bear that responsibility. But that’s not the case everywhere. As more information on this comes to light, we may learn that the hackers ran a series of test-runs of their new methods involving RAM scraping and other techniques, which could be (or could have been) a harbinger of things to come. We also may learn that a host of companies have been exposed to these sorts of attacks, even though those companies may resolve try to prevent that information from coming to light. Image credit: |
MeMINI Is A Wearable Camera That Let’s You Save Video Clips Minutes After Cool Stuff Happened | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 1 | 11 | Meet meMINI, a wearable videocamera that’s currently seeking $50,000 in crowdfunding on to help you save the best bits of your daily life for posterity without having to record everything and then edit the footage for highlights. Wearable life logging cameras are nothing new, even if the idea of walking around with an all-seeing digital eye recording your daily life (and therefore other peoples’ too) still raises eyebrows. Whether it’s GoPro for adrenaline junkies, helmet cams for police or cyclists, or Google Glass for, well, , the hardware kit to capture your unique-snowflake first-person perspective on everyday life is already out there. But — privacy issues aside — there are some problems with existing lifelogging tech. Not least, the too-much-data issue. Those cameras that take a record-it-all approach introduce the tedious and time-consuming problem of sifting and editing the reams of data generated to pull out the gems. Those bits of hardware where you selectively record your bits and bobs (so to speak), a la Glass, mean you’re inevitably going to miss some cool stuff — i.e. when you don’t manage to shout OK GLASS RECORD THIS SHIZZLE NOW fast enough. Well meMINI’s makers reckon they have a neat solution to all these problems. Their wearable camera prototype records (and deletes) a continuous video loop until the moment something cool happens. At which point you press a button on the front of the device which tells it to save the last recorded loop — allowing you to capture that cool thing that just happened — just after it happened. The size of the video loop that meMINI buffers will apparently be configurable to between five seconds or up to five minutes of past time, depending on your preference. The finished product will also include two RAM chips to ensure there’s no disconnect between when you press the record it button and when the hardware can start recording. Now, depending on your perspective, all of this is either insanely cool, or rocketing off into a dystopian future where we are all inescapably tied to our transgressions, humiliations, failings and faux pas since these events can be forever recalled from the great all-seeing buffer in the CCTV-strewn sky, and replayed ad infinitum (until we are truly, truly sorry). Mostly, though, meMINI’s awesome/terrifying qualities will depend on how slick its tech is. And, right now, the current rack open its two plastic halves and meMINI’s messy electronic guts, hacked together with glue and bits of metal, spill out. This is cutting-edge hardware, Kickstarter-style. So really, it’s a bit harsh to judge its creators for taking a DIY development approach. It is worth noting that we’ve seen this sort of buffer recall ability before — for audio in app form, with the likes of , for instance. And, even more pertinently, in , a lifelogging camera with a retroactive recording feature that’s out in the market already. So MeMINI is not the first mover here. And it’s not planning on shipping its hardware to backers until June — assuming it hits its funding goal (although that’s looking likely with, at the time of writing, more than $35,000 pledged and still 26 days left of its campaign). MeMINI’s makers are promising a three-hour battery life for their camera, which is an hour longer than the Looxcie 3 will apparently give you. However the meMINI is currently a lot bigger and heavier so that extra juice may well add substantial additional heft to carry around vs the 1.3-ounce, 1.5cm-thin Looxcie. MeMINI is designed to be attached through your clothing via a magnetic backplate, which doesn’t sit too well with its current size and weight — with the prototype dragging at thinner fabrics (yet the magnet requires fabrics that aren’t too thick to ensure a secure fix). So meMINI’s makers really do need to pull off a dramatic miniaturisation trick for this to be a comfortable wearable for everyday situations. A smaller and lighter meMINI stuck in the middle of your t-shirt would also probably look less intimidating at the breakfast table, as you film your kids goofing around. The meMINI will offer 1080p HD video recording, vs the Looxcie 3’s 780p. But it is more expensive, with a early bird Kickstarter backer price-tag of $150 (or $170 thereafter) vs $100 for the Looxcie 3. Plus, you have to wait til June (at the earliest) to get it — giving Looxcie a chance to work on uping the resolution of its range in the meanwhile. Add to that, the Looxcie 3 is generally more fully featured, with the ability to simultaneously live stream and record content, live-stream directly to Facebook, and snap still photos. But meMINI’s makers look to be focusing on the retroactive recording feature — along with a cloud service that you can opt to save clips to — which isn’t a bad thing in itself. If they can make a retroactive video camera that’s really simple to operate, with just the one big button to press, that could appeal to more mainstream users. Judging by the current state of the prototype they do have a way to go to get to ‘effortless operation’, though.
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I’ve Seen The Future Of Health Tech And It’s Going To Improve Your Life In 2014 | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 11 | I just returned from the most exciting Consumer Electronics Show I’ve ever covered. Thanks to extraordinary demand for gadgets that make us healthier, stronger, and smarter, the technology industry is putting some serious brain power behind the next generation of wearable health devices. Over the next year, a torrent of new devices is hitting the market to provide automated elite coaching, a pocket-sized clinical lab, and your own personal assistant. It seems that nearly every time I rush head-first into a new diet or exercise program, I find months later there’s some crucial oversight that’s holding back my progress or actively destroying my body. Exasperated in frustration, I drag myself to a clinic for expert diagnostics, only to discover simple advice I should have been following from the beginning. Now, nearly every expensive lab test I’ve gotten over the past year is coming to the delightful convenience of my smartphone. , leading to a workout-stopping knee pain (available this spring). (a common measure of endurance) in a nearly painless five minutes of light stair-stepper work on the CES show floor (available now). The results were within 5 percent of lab-test results I received months earlier and helped me know that two months of running San Francisco’s hills are probably paying off. Quality rest is just as important as hitting the gym. .* I got a preview of Sleeprate’s heart-rate-monitor-powered app, and apparently I’ve got a nasty restless sleep cycle (Basis update coming January 21, Sleeprate January 23rd, and Aura in the spring). Unlike a lab test, these devices can follow you wherever you go, ensuring you actually follow through with the advice. Many of us work so hard at self-improvement; it’s nice to know that our time isn’t going to waste. The defining feature of the world’s sharpest coaching minds is a broad novel strategy that is meticulously applied to each student. The delicious replicability of elite coaching makes it ripe for automation. While last year was all about fitness gadgets that monitor activity, “what’s going to happen next is teaching technique,” said Ruth Thomason of Cambridge Consultants. Cambridge was showing off the . Normally available to college sports teams with budgets larger than the entire Humanities Department, this kind of video technology could bring elite coaching to the masses. The marathon-enthusiast fitness company, Polar, is releasing what claims to be the most advanced training watch on the market. meticulously tracks heart rate to advise athletes when they’re overtraining, analyzed through a free online web app, Polar Flow (available in April). There’s also hope for my fellow ADHD brethren: . Using classic techniques from the , the behind-the-ear mounted EEG device measures brainwaves to coach users into a state of meditative peace. Unlike its competitor, , which is mostly used for brain-controlled computing (and women who love to in San Francisco), the muse will track improved mindfulness over time. In the same way online education is bringing the teachings of world-class professors to anyone with an Internet connection, the future of health tech will be to essentially roboticize elite coaches in the devices we wear on our bodies. “Sit up straight and brush your teeth!” Sometimes, we know exactly what we’re supposed to do, but just aren’t very good at following through. The latest health tech is here to gently nag you into better health. . It’s pretty much impossible to answer 5,000 emails a minute and remember to sit up straight for eight hours. This little guy helps you remember (available in the spring). For objects around the house, the aptly named . Sen.se’s Mother interacts with satellite “cookies” that know when and how an object is being used; for instance, whether a bottle of pills is being picked up and poured upside down. The same goes for a jar to water the plants (available in the spring). 2014 is going to be an exciting year for digital health. For years, technology has conspired to transform our upright bodies into hunched-back zombies. Now, it can make us all ubermen. Bring on the gadgets! |
A Gentle Buzz To Improve Your Posture And, Soon, Yoga Poses | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 11 | Bad posture is collectively turning the desk-chained workforce into a mass of hunchbacks. is a magnetic shirt pin that delivers gentle buzzing nudge whenever it senses poor posture. It’s a reminder “to keep your shoulders back and down and your head lifted,” explains Lumoback Founder, Monisha Perkash. Because Lumoback collects all the user data on their servers, they actually know that it’s consumers are changing their posture over time. Many of “our users report significant improvement in days or weeks,” says Perkash. The Lumo Lift is also relevant for folks with a Standing desk, since . Perkash revealed to TechCrunch an even cooler feature of Lumo Lift that’s on their product roadmap: Yoga poses. In our interview above, she demonstrated how an upcoming version of the Lumo Lift software will make sure our cobras and downward dogs are top notch. The Lumo Lift will be available for around $79, launching in the Spring. |
Toshiba’s 5-in-1 Computing Device Concept Looks Like What Windows 8 Is Meant For | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 11 | One of the best parts of CES are the devices that companies show off that are more or less conceptual, and may or may not ever even get made. One such gadget is the Toshiba 5-in-1 tablet, notebook, media player, drawing slate, etc. It’s sleek looking in pre-production solid aluminum, and also has a lot of potential as a flexible hybrid with a form factor that’s tailor-made for Windows 8. As explained by Toshiba, the device isn’t yet ready for production, though it does exist as a fully functional prototype. And really it isn’t too far off from existing devices like the Lenovo Yoga line of notebooks. But this Toshiba concept has some unique elements, like the dockable keyboard which is usable on its own with any other Bluetooth-enabled hardware, and the battery that lives in the display for fully independent tablet-style usage. [gallery ids="939634,939635,939636,939637,939638,939639"] Windows 8 is a bit of an odd duck for many PC OEMs: It’s not something that necessarily works with traditional device designs including notebooks and desktops, and yet it’s also an OS that’s made to take advantage of existing Windows software, which isn’t optimized for touch-based interfaces. It’s rare that concept devices displayed at CES make it to market fully intact, but Toshiba’s got something good going on with its industrial design, as well as the basic concept behind this 5-in-1, so hopefully it doesn’t get too watered down before hitting store shelves. |
Gillmor Gang: Kick the Can | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 1 | 11 | The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — digest the complete lack of CES news and the consolidation of the aggregation newsletters. Jason Calicanis’ Launch newsletter went pay-only today, as tech news and events appear to be in a maturing phase. With new sites appearing from All-Things D vets Mossberg and Swisher and a NY Times redesign, the impact of mobile is beginning to sink in. 4K Netflix awaits a broader adoption of plus-15megabit download speeds, but if House of Cards can make Kevin Spacey VP without a vote, anything is possible. PC sales dropped another 10%, iOS content surged, and battery case sales are booming. It was a very Binging New Year at the streaming box office. @stevegillmor, @dbfarber, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Ad ‘Experiments’ Come To Delicious As It Updates Social Bookmarking API With Authentication, Rate Limits | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 11 | , the veteran bookmarking site that last year released a , is moving into its next phase of growth: the company has a new version of its API that gives it more security and control over data that is passed through the platform; and it is going to begin to run advertising alongside content on the site. The news underscore how Delicious — once a plucky poster child of Web 2.0 that got acquired, ignored and then — may that it was in its . (ComScore puts the December 2013 figure at 296,000 uniques, compared to its 5.3 million figure on its fifth birthday.) But new owner AVOS — YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen’s newer venture — continues to work on ways that it might recover some traction and glory. There is another reason for the the changes. Delicious has been on a bit of a development tear with new apps for , , and ; integration with ; and a — all free to use, like the main site. Tightening up the API and getting more commercial are not only unsurprising, but possibly essential for Delicious to support its current services and whatever it may have planned for the future. Delicious illustrating its blog post with a GIF featuring dynamite wicks on its logo also seems to point to how the company itself views the significance of the news. Delicious says the new API, version 1.1, will go live in the coming weeks. Delicious doesn’t give a full run-down of what features it will have but does note two key points: it will require authentication for every request to its API, and it will introduce stricter rate limits (again – no details on what those limits will be). The main reasons for the API update appear to be general security and stronger control of Delicious data by Delicious itself. The existing version 1.0 of the API does not require developers to provide authentication when making API calls, “essentially enabling them to access public information from the Delicious API without us knowing who they are,” save for IP address. Adding authentication will help Delicious better track developers and also what kinds of requests are being made. As for the rate limits, Delicious does not say that a more liberal policy up to now has led to malicious security or data breaches as such — in fact, the biggest headache for Delicious in its users on the security front seems to be glitches related to the first major relaunch of the service under AVOS back in . But it makes a few references to what could possibly go wrong because of the kind of activity they already see on the platform. “Many applications that are pulling data from the Delicious API at very high rates (scraping, bots, etc.),” it notes as one example. Delicious has chosen its API announcement as the same time to note that it will also soon launch advertising — which it gingerly refers to as “experimenting with ads.” Just as with the API, there are no specific details or even screenshots of how these ads might look, but it does give a few guidelines for how it intends to proceed. First, the content will be “transparent to users” — which you can take either as clearly sponsored, or simply extremely in your face. Second, the introduction of ads will be “iterative” — likely because Delicious knows that this is a sensitive issue for some regular Delicious users. “We are conscious of preserving the existing Delicious experience and will make improvements based on feedback,” the company notes. Another reason, not noted by Delicious, is that it gives the company the freedom to try out different things to see what works. As with API update cycles at other platforms (Twitter is one notable example from last year), these often can be traced to wider business decisions being taken by the company in question. The same can be said for Delicious. Advertisers and marketers generally require a significant amount of data on how sites are used before making spending decisions, and so the API will go some way towards being able to provide that kind of reporting. |
Such DFW. Very Orwell. So Doge. Wow. | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 1 | 11 | Let’s talk about , but first let’s talk about the late great , who 13 years ago wrote a classic essay about modern English* entitled “ ,” which, realistically, is better than anything I will ever write, so I should maybe just point you to it and end this post here. But I won’t. Not least because I strongly suspect that if DFW had not taken his own life five years ago, he would already have updated “Tense Present” for the modern era. He almost would have had to. It is instructive that his essay includes the phrase . That may have been true, just, in 2001, but it is not true today. You cannot escape computers any more — and that fact has affected language in a way which is, if you ask me, nothing short of revolutionary. Once upon a time, not so long ago, most people didn’t write much, and even if they did, only a tiny handful of people might read the results. As a result, most of the words that people read were written by a tiny elite group of authors and journalists, and almost exclusively in an anodyne, pristine mode which DFW in his classic essay called SWE, for “Standard Written English.” (Also “Standard White English,” but I’m not even going to go there, except to say again that you should read his essay.) I’ll go further and say that the overwhelming majority of widely-read nonfiction was written in an even smaller, strictly controlled subset of SWE – call it CSWE, for Clinical Standard Written English. Textbooks. Cookbooks. IRS instructions. The , the , the British broadsheets, etc. All written in a similar mode: authoritative, declamatory, distant, dispassionate, impersonal, and (allegedly) neutral. Formal, pure, and precise. The problem, of course, is that English, as actually used by 99% of its practitioners, has never been even to formal, pure, and precise. As ** famously put it: The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary. So why did SWE become the standard? DFW answers: The real truth, of course, is that SWE is the dialect of the American elite. That it was invented, codified, and promulgated by Privileged WASP Males and is perpetuated as “Standard” by same. That it is the shibboleth of the Establishment and an instrument of political power and class division and racial discrimination and all manner of social inequity. Easy enough to perpetuate when only a tiny elite were writing the words that most read; but now is different. Now is the era of social media. Now people are both reading and writing more words, by far, than they ever have before — which is great, right? — but only a small and diminishing fraction of those words are written in SWE. Once upon a time, high-school teachers and broadsheet newspapers and their ilk defined how English was written, and the were the linguistic equivalent of outlaw renegades. No longer. Now that definition is provided by Reddit. Nowadays we have different online dialects for cats and dogs, and . Nowadays even scholarly articles may include a “tl;dr” summary. Nowadays: Holy crap, that's a legitimate term now! RT @JeremyWNA: Thagomizer! — arclight (@arclight) And nowadays — this is where things get interesting — . Because the new usage, call it Modern Written English, is everything CSWE is not: first-person, colloquial, breezy, open, and personal. That’s what readers understand and trust. But if you write like a high-school essay, or the ? That is now a big red flag. Your readers don’t know you … but they know that you have deliberately hidden who you are, by donning that mask called CSWE. And on some level they do not like it. DFW again: When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (the actual information I’m trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It’s a function of the fact that there are uncountably many well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. “I was attacked by a bear!” to “Goddamn bear tried to kill me!” to “That ursine juggernaut bethought to sup upon my person!” and so on […] “Correct” English usage is, as a practical matter, a function of whom you’re talking to and how you want that person to respond — not just to your utterance but also to you. This is the weird thing the Internet has done to language: Standard Written English — or, at least, its most fundamentalist form, Clinical Standard Written English — has actually in most online contexts. Before he wrote 1984, George Orwell wrote a famous essay called “ ,” which decried: In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. I submit to you that, increasingly, this is how Clinical Standard Written English sounds to the Reddit-reading masses: orthodox, lifeless, soulless, a parade of pale impersonal zombie words drained of blood by some linguistic vampire, if you’ll pardon the mixed horror-movie metaphor. I’m not saying it actually , necessarily; I’m saying that even well-written CSWE is, to many, fatally undercut by being CSWE. It still has its place — Wikipedia, say, and a few other sources whose pretensions of authority are still deemed acceptable, like maybe — but it is not the standard mode of our ongoing online discourse. It is out of place there. It is incorrect. That in turn is one reason why — online, at least — a new generation of irreverent, colloquial, acerbic online sites is eating old media’s lunch. Compare this about performance-enhancing drugs with, well, anything ever published by the Sports section of the . Can you even the Gray Lady ever publishing anything so profane, so offensive, so informal, so full of questions without answers? Hell no you can’t; in part because you can’t imagine the publishing something so vibrant, so scattershot, so — in other words, something not written in Clinical Standard Written English. The so-called , which in a way is the basis of 1984, suggests that language influences thought. There isn’t actually a whole lot of experimental evidence which supports this; but it seems to me that the language to which one is exposed does influence what and how one . And that’s why I welcome doge, and LOLcats, and every other atrocity visited upon the English language by the Internet. They’re anarchic. They’re juvenile. They’re a horrific mess. And they make it clear that we can and do shape the language however we want, rather than being shaped by it, for the sake of greater beauty, truth, and endlessly repetitive ironic comic gold. So I for one am all in favor of the Internet’s slow but inexorable unwinding of that impersonal straitjacket CSWE, even though I personally happen to be unusually fluent in it, which has benefited me in countless little and large ways over the years. I applaud the eruption of a thousand awful-but-perfect linguistic grotesqueries such as doge and GIF listicles. Because it seems to me that Standard Written English, for all its virtues, has become something of a desiccated undead corpse. I submit that whatever can breathe new life into it — even bizarre memes, subversive polemics, and the mad ravings of anonymous redditors; hell, even 4chan — should be welcomed with open arms. Because words matter. Language matters. And, with respect, it’s past time for last century’s Standard Written English to give way to something a little more lively. the late great David Foster Wallace, by Steve Rhodes, on . *More specifically about “the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography … Did you know that U.S. lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?” **Who, by odd coincidence, I’ve known since I was 12 years old. |
Keen On 2014: Apple, Apple & Apple | Andrew Keen | 2,014 | 1 | 11 | Having 2013 with me, Robert Scoble now turns his Google Glass enabled eyes forward to 2014. What, I asked him, are going to be the really big deals in 2014? Apple, Apple and Apple, Scoble predicts. Firstly, there’s going to be what Scoble calls a “war of wearables” between Apple’s iWatch and Google Glass in the next twelve months. Secondly, traditional television is about to be finally blown up by products like Apple tv. And, Scoble says, if Tim Cook really wants to radically change things, he can spend all those Apple billions on something really big – like NFL tv rights. Thirdly, Scoble says, Apple has the chance to truly win what Fred Vogelstein calls the to control the $250 billion media industry. But Scoble isn’t just a misty eyed Apple fanboy. He sees great potential for Amazon in 2014, a company that, he says, “knows” his buying habits better than anyone. And he even thinks that Microsoft – if the new CEO could unchain all its remarkable talent – could make a dramatic comeback in next 12 months. But the biggest winner in 2014, Scoble says, may be what he calls “iteration”. There won’t be any truly new-new things in 2014, he says. It will be a year of refinement rather than revolution. |
BrightFarms Reaps $4.9M Series B To Expand Its Urban Greenhouse Network | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | , which builds greenhouses in urban areas, announced that it has raised $4.9 million in Series B funding from NGEN Partners, Emil Capital Partners, BrightFarms founder Ted Caplow, and others. Its latest round brings the total BrightFarms . The startup is interesting because it sits at the intersection of two trends: cleantech and the even in areas that are nowhere near farmland. Other recently-financed startups that are focused on meeting consumer demand for fresher, healthier food include , which ; , which to be the “Birchbox for healthy foods;” and , which to deliver boxes of local produce to consumers. Based in New York City, BrightFarms develops , which are built on the rooftops of grocery stores whenever possible. Each structure is designed to conserve land, water, and reduce greenhouse gas commissions while yielding produce that is consistent in quality year-round. In addition to enjoying fresher produce, grocers also don’t have to worry about how weather patterns in different regions of the U.S. will affect prices or losses from shipping damage. In order to entice supermarket owners to build a greenhouse, BrightFarms pays for construction costs and lets retailers sign 10-year, fixed price contracts. Or, as the startup puts it, “BrightFarms is exploiting a financial and environmental arbitrage opportunity by building a distributed network of local greenhouse farms.” In a statement, NGEN managing director Peter Grubstein said “We are particularly excited to be supporting BrightFarms, as it sits on the leading edge of the demand for local food production, utilizing sustainable practices and disruptive distribution model. BrightFarms is well-positioned to rapidly scale its model and now has the customer support and team to do so.” |
Nintendo: It’s Dangerous To Go Alone! Take This. | MG Siegler | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | Who am I kidding? I love to say that. But while I’m happy about being correct, I’m sad for Nintendo. I love Nintendo. I really do. And so it pains me to see them in . But I come bearing gifts. Rather than being the millionth person to advise them to move their games to smartphones, I thought I’d offer another alternative. It’s one , and the response to it seemed positive enough that I thought it was worth elaborating upon. Because again, I want Nintendo to survive. And thrive. What Nintendo needs to do right now is create another console. They can continue support for the Wii U through their current roadmap of games, but then it’s time to call a spade a spade and put all their resources behind this new system. Here’s what I’m thinking: a $99 box built from the ground up to play retro Nintendo games. Mario. Zelda. Icarus. Donkey Kong. Pokemon. You name it. Have a bunch of titles ready to go at launch to ensure a blow-out. Release more as time goes on. But not in stores, entirely online. This device would not have any physical media. No cartridges. No optical drives. Only a hard drive and an online store. Games would be $5 to $15 depending on the title. Hundreds of titles would be available within months of launch. Thousands within the year. Stagger them. And that’s just step one. Step two of my strategy would involve updating old classics to run with updated HD graphics and new levels. New Mario. New Zelda. New Icarus. New Donkey Kong. New Pokemon. Same idea. Updated graphics. New levels. These games would be $15 to $25 depending on the game. Stagger them. There’s more: step three. Strike deals with other “retro” game makers such as Atari and Sega to license their old games and give them the same treatment. Updated graphics, new levels. Sell the games through your online store at $15 to $25 a pop. Watch the money roll in. Does anyone in their right mind doubt that such a box would be an immediate best seller? It would be massive. It would blow all the other consoles out of the water. $99! The Wii offered some of this via the . But it wasn’t nearly good enough. It was too slow. Too unintuitive. And it was tied to an albatross. This should be the selling point of a device. Set it free. Nintendo’s strength is in nostalgia. They should be playing to that rather than trying to compete with the likes of Sony and Microsoft. I guarantee you that if Nintendo made such a move, those companies would have another “Wii moment” and drop everything to emulate Nintendo’s strategy. Except they wouldn’t be able to without Nintendo’s IP. And in the moment when the competition is dizzied, that’s when the upper-cut comes. Announce that this new Nintendo box is opening up its SDK to all developers. Both the bigger game studios and more importantly, independent game makers. They will all be treated equally as long as they’re willing to create fun, simple games for the new Nintendo box. Such titles will sell anywhere from $5 to $25. Nintendo will take a 30 percent cut, the developers will get 70 percent. I almost feel silly writing all of this. this is what Nintendo should do. They probably won’t — instead, they’ll dick around with and or whatever. But they should do this. How do they not see it? It’s because they’re proud. And that’s too bad. Because the end game if they do continue down the current route is to be a maker of smartphone games. They can still be a successful company doing that — but they’d be a shadow of their former selves. Atari. Sega. My $99 Nintendo box in an era of $500 consoles is a clear winner. ARM chips are good enough now. Have you seen recent iOS games? Nintendo needs but make a great controller. A great controller. They can do it. And once that box is a huge success, they should release a mobile device that can play all the same games. Cheap. Easy. Fun. Don’t worry about beating the iPhone or Android. Play to your strengths. And that’s the key. Nintendo is not Sony or Microsoft or Apple or Google. They are a gaming company with the best gaming IP in the business. They’re losing an arms race right now because they’ve tried to enter it. They’ve created a box in an attempt to compete with the Xbox or Playstation with a controller to compete with the iPad. They’ve failed in both regards. It’s time to try something different. It’s time to use what others and turn it into a strength. The Wii gave a glimpse of how this should be done. It’s time for a new Nintendo box to drive the point home. Take this, Nintendo. It’s dangerous to go alone. |
Lenovo’s Motorola Mobility Buy Is Partly About The Chance To Own The Enterprise Mobile Market | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | Lenovo’s ThinkPad is the brand of choice when it comes to enterprise notebooks – Dell has a strong footing still, to be sure, but , followed by HP and then Dell. The gives them a chance to parlay that success in the traditional computing world into the booming enterprise hotspot of mobile tech. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lenovo Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing and CFO Wong Wai Ming explained that the purpose behind the purchase was to help Lenovo enter the U.S. smartphone market and make the company a worldwide player in the smartphone market. But we’ve also learned that Lenovo has been conducting research about what customers might be looking for in a ThinkPad-style smartphone, particularly at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Lenovo asking prospective buyers what they might expect in a ThinkPad phone doesn’t necessarily equate to a major mobile enterprise push, but there are more pieces to the puzzle to consider, too. One important one is that , but the deal was ultimately since BlackBerry was so important a part of the Canadian telecommunications infrastructure. It’s true that the company already sells Android phones abroad, and that these aren’t necessarily enterprise-focused. But the ongoing demise of BlackBerry leaves a gaping hole in the industry in terms of secure devices, and so far the only company really making a concerted effort to capture the attention of that market is Samsung, which has been touting its Knox security software for Android a lot in the past few months. But , and Samsung hardly has the brand cachet that does Lenovo when it comes to building enterprise hardware. Lenovo says it will keep its Motorola brand separate in the same way it has done with ThinkPad, but that doesn’t mean it’ll keep the focus solely on consumer devices. Lenovo is clearly interested in that side of things too, as proven by its existing line of mobile hardware, but the growth opportunity in the U.S. is ironically replacing BlackBerry at the moment, so I think we’ll see an attempt by Lenovo to use Motorola to build on its strengths and give business users the phones they’ve been looking for. |
India’s Flipkart In Merger Talks With Fashion Retailer Myntra, As Common Investors Push For Consolidation | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | Two of India’s biggest e-commerce retailers — and — are apparently in talks to merge, a proposal being pushed by their common investors Accel Partners and Tiger Global. that Flipkart has already approached Myntra, and a decision on whether to go with the merger would be taken in two weeks. Flipkart has been looking to expand in newer categories such as fashion retailing, its co-founder Binny Bansal had told me recently. By merging with Myntra, Filpkart can add another category, and also widen the gap with everybody else even further. Flipkart is aiming to achieve $1 billion in gross merchandise value by next year. Flipkart has raised $540 million so far from investors including Accel, Tiger, Dragoneer Investment Group and Morgan Stanley Investment Management. In October last year, it raised $160 million, taking its Series E funding to be . India’s nearly $3.1 billion e-commerce market (excluding online travel industry) is dwarfed in size by China’s nearly $200 billion market for online sales, but it’s expected to grow by over seven times to $22 billion in five years, according to a report published in November 2013. Myntra, one of India’s biggest online clothing and footwear retailers, has been in discussions with several investors to raise around $50 million, sources are telling us. These discussions included a proposal to merge with Flipkart or acquire another e-commerce company to gain certain size, but nothing has been finalized yet, the source added. Clearly, the signs of consolidation are very visible in India’s e-commerce sector. An intense battle for market share is being fought among Flipkart, eBay-backed and Amazon. A lot is riding for investors backing Flipkart, so any proposals that help it garner a larger share of the market cannot be ruled out. We have reached out to Flipkart, Myntra and their investors for reactions and we will update after hearing from them. |
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Facebook Trades North Of $60 For The First Time | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | In after-hours trading today, investors rewarded Facebook with a rising share price after it reported . The company reported that it earned $0.31 per share, and had revenue in the quarter of $2.59 billion. As reported earlier, the analyst set had predicted that Facebook would earn $0.27 on revenue of $2.33 billion. The earnings beat sent the company’s stock up 5 percent in moments. Facebook has since risen more than $6 per share, and is still up more than 12 percent in after-hours trading. The company briefly passed the $60 mark in its post earnings frenzy, though it has since ceded back ground and fallen below the mark. According to Google Finance, before today, Facebook’s 52 week high was $59.31. Given Facebook’s prior ranges outside of that period, we can assert that Facebook traded over the $60 per share threshold in its history. Essentially Facebook has never been more richly valued than it is at the moment. Using a non-diluted share count, Facebook’s market capitalization is creeping up on the $150 billion mark. In another milestone long in the making today, Facebook reported that it now generates the . Mobile fears brought the company’s share price down, and mobile strength has brought them back and pushed them higher. Facebook faces concerns regarding its user base along certain demographic lines, but at least for today, the company can rest easy. |
With $9M From Bessemer, Open Textbook Pioneer Flat World Looks For New Life In Personalized Learning | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | When first emerged back in 2007, the company was on a mission to overturn the textbook industry, and the staid world of educational publishing along with it. One of the pioneers in the movement to bring more affordable, “open” educational content to college students, Flat World has since grown into one of the largest open, eTextbook publishers in the U.S., with over one million students now accessing its content in 77 countries. However, while education industry’s adoption of open education content and resources has begun to gain speed, thanks to resistance from traditional publishers, it’s been a bumpy road for companies like Flat World. Though its free, customizable and on-demand textbook model gained plenty of support from students over the years, to its textbook platform. Reflecting the monetization challenges faced by many open education platforms, the company said that the cost of continuing to support its free access model had become unsustainable. Since then, Flat World has begun looking for more lucrative areas within education in which to grow its business. Moving to capitalize on the growing demand within education for personalized learning tools, the company is placing its bet on both adaptive learning and mobile. To help develop a platform which aims to help universities offer mobile-first, adaptive courses and degree programs, Flat World announced this week that it has raised $9.5 million in venture financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The company’s existing investors, including Valhalla Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, Penguin Random House Holdings and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, also participated in the round, bringing its total funding to $35.7 million. While the company says that its textbook publishing business continues to grow, the new investment comes nearly three years after its previous round and, tellingly, will be devoted principally to developing its new platform. The raise follows on the heels of a new partnership with Brandman University in California, with the investment enabling Flat World to offer the university an online, competency-based bachelor of business administration degree. The key, however, to this new program is that it will be delivered “entirely on a mobile device for a total cost that is 65 percent lower than current alternatives,” the company said. Going forward, Flat World will look to bring this kind of mobile-first, adaptive learning experience to other universities, enabling them to offer courses and degrees online and on mobile devices. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Call it pivoting, or “expanding,” Flat World’s new thesis and value proposition sounds strikingly similar to the one 2U has been pursuing for years, or to the latest incarnation of Udacity. It’s also a direction in which companies like Coursera and EdX have been moving. The company said that it sees its new mobile-first learning platform for courses and degree programs as a natural extension of its publishing business, and it will no doubt be leveraging the personalization technology and content behind its textbook platform to support its new direction. Whether or not this augurs an eventual, more categorical shift away from the business it’s become known for remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see the company fold the key assets into its new mobile courseware platform at some point. Its eTextbook platform and digital content will provide the foundation on which it can build its new course and degree services business. Doing so likely gives Flat World a leg up as a growing number of education technology providers look to capitalize on the opportunities in adaptive learning and personalization tools. For more, find . |
With 1M Reviews Logged, Consumr Brings Price Comparison, Personalization And Refined Scoring To Its “Yelp For Products” | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | Today, with more product information and data on consumer goods living on the Web than ever before, launched in 2011 to give average Joes like you and me a better way to make sense of that data and find the best products. In an effort to become the Rotten Tomatoes or Yelp of consumer products, a platform and mobile apps that allow users to create and peruse reviews on any product — written by other buyers — while strolling down the aisle in their local supermarket. The startup’s app allows users to both search and browse its crowdsourced data on products by way of keyword search or actually scan barcodes with their phone to view customer reviews. Founded by the former head of mobile at Zagat, Ryan Charles, and CTO Noah Zitsman, the app’s clean design and clear use case were recognized in the mobile category at the 2013 Webby Awards and have managed a 4.5-star rating on the App Store. Over the last year, however, Consumr has been focused on expanding its potential use case and developing a more personalized recommendation system and user experienced. In the first case, on Black Friday 2012, Charles says, he was lured into buying a laptop that seemed like a great deal. However, it turned out that it was a lemon, and was slower than the laptop he had replaced. In these cases, it would make perfect sense for users to be able to turn to Consumr for electronics reviews, but the startup was initially focused exclusively on packaged goods. With the long-term goal of building a better shopping guide for all products, Consumr has since expanded from the world of impulse buys into more considered purchases, including appliances and electronics. For those categories that don’t yet have enough reviews, Consumr offers reviews from outlets like Best Buy to fill in the blanks. More recently, the startup has begun to add more personalization features to its platform and app, surfacing categories users are likely to be interested in based on their tastes and habits. If you don’t own a pet and don’t want to be shown pet care products, then presto, Consumr analyzes your taste profile and prioritizes its recommendations accordingly. Users can specify the categories they’re interested in, as well, so that new parents can customize their experience so that baby, toys and grocery products are the only categories to appear in their feed. The startup has also developed its own proprietary measurement technology, Charles said, which allows it to provide better insight into the quality of ratings — and those behind the ratings. Initially called RateScore, Consumr is able to, over time, assign a score to each user based on a variety of factors, including how many ratings they provide, how helpful those reviews are, and so on. The goal, the founder says, is to help shoppers better understand the historical quality of a rater’s content to ultimately provide them with better (and more trustworthy) recommendations. For review platforms like Consumr and Yelp, the key in the early going is coverage. The more product reviews, the more utility it provides, and the more stickiness it has as a result. Charles tells us that the platform recently reached one million product ratings through its mobile app and has been doubled its ratings in the past six months. Furthermore, there are now more than 3.3 million products in its database. As the platform and its coverage grow, the key to a review platform maintaining its upward trajectory shifts to limiting the noise (and increasing the value of its product information), and monetizing its data. In relation to the growing potential for noise pollution, that’s why Consumr has been building its “RateScore” feature. While the Consumr founders believe they’ve made progress on the big question they set out to answer — “what’s the best product?” — the next logical questions from most users are, “where can I buy it?” and “Where can I find the best price?” To begin providing answers and improve the discover experience, Consumr recently added a price comparison feature so that it now shows local and online prices for over one million products. It’s tools like these that have begun to put Consumr on the radar of some familiar names. Case in point: Consumer Reports has recently been bidding to purchase the word “Consumr” within Google AdWords presumably so it can advertise against searches for the company, the founder tells us. On the one hand, it’s frustrating because the young company isn’t in a position to get into a bidding war with Consumer Reports, but on the other hand it’s a point of validation, considering that one of the biggest names in the space is willing to put money down on people searching for the company — or people misspelling consumer, either way. As to what’s next? Charles tells us that the team is looking to refine its natural language processing in an effort to provide better search, automated extraction and scoring of particular product features. The idea is to allow people to see how high a particular razor scores in terms of “durability” or view ratings on the “sound quality” of a TV, for example. Look for this functionality to start rolling out soon. Users can also potentially look for Consumr to build out some sort of integration or app to leverage the wave of interest in wearable technology, although the founders aren’t ready to share details as of yet. Consumr has raised $550K to date from Lerer Ventures, IA Ventures and MESA+ and will be looking to add more coin to its coffers in the coming months. For more, . |
U.S. Justice Dept Joins The Target Credit Card Data Breach Investigation | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | The investigation behind Target’s data breach, which affected 40 million customers and is one of the largest hacking incidents in retail history, just intensified. The he hunt for the perpetrator, which already includes the FBI and the Secret Service, which usually oversees the federal government’s credit card fraud cases. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that his office is trying to find the hackers who are responsible for the data breach, as well as anyone using stolen data to commit credit card fraud. Between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, credit and debit card numbers from 40 million Target customers were stolen. Then earlier this month, Target said that up to 70 million additional customers also had personal information stolen, including email addresses and phone numbers. Last week, the FBI involving the same kind of malware used against Target, which harvests data from point-of-sale systems, including cash registers and credit-card swiping machines. Target is not the only company affected. , with 1.1 million customer cards exposed, and Reuters reports that several other retail chains have also been affected. The FBI said that the malware used, RAM scraping, is becoming increasingly difficult to track down because one variation, Alina, is frequently updated remotely. TechCrunch’s John Biggs on Target, which grabs sensitive data from point of sale terminals. Data security expert that appeared on Target computers had been designed to hide itself from anti-virus software. He also traced it to a programmer called Antikiller who sold it on hacker forums. “The accessibility of the malware on underground forums, the affordability of the software and the huge potential profits to be made from retail POS systems in the United States make this type of financially motivated cyber crime attractive to a wide range of actors,” the FBI wrote in a confidential report that was sent to retail companies. As , the hacking incidents may be a sign that credit card companies need to start switching from black magnetic strips to encrypted microchips, which are widely used in several parts of the world but have not been widely adopted so far in the U.S.. |
Nest Team Will Become Google’s Core Hardware Group | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | Google Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. While many speculated that Google would release phones after it bought Motorola in 2011, it didn’t happen — Motorola remained a partner like other Android OEMs. Recently, Google Nest, and TechCrunch has learned that Google has big plans for the team behind the connected device company. Google will keep the Nest group intact inside the company. The new division will still work on hardware devices, but not necessarily thermostats or smoke detectors. In fact, Google would like Fadell to work on gadgets that make more sense for the company. Will it be a phone or a tablet? It’s unclear for now. While Nest first became popular with its thermostats, Google didn’t buy the company for these devices. First and foremost, the company wanted to snatch the great product team. Nest founder and CEO used to work for Apple on the iPod and was a founding member of the iPhone development team. Many people working in hardware consider him one of the best executives that understand both hardware and software — he is comfortable working at the intersection of the two. Moreover, Fadell managed to attract great Apple engineers when he started working on Nest. They wanted to follow Fadell’s plans and were good engineers. And that’s exactly what Google was looking for when it acquired Nest. When it comes to budget, Google is willing to let the Nest team use as many resources as it needs. In other words, the company is getting serious about consumer hardware, and Motorola was just a false start. Google will Motorola’s patents, and it seems pretty clear now that Google only wanted that from the get-go. Acquiring Nest and selling Motorola now make more sense when you put these two things side by side. Something was missing with Motorola. With Nest, Google finally has the right team and mindset to create and produce gadgets. |
Intel Will Shut Down AppUp PC App Store On March 11, Apps Will Stop Working By May 15, 2015 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | So much for Intel’s bid to get hip with our app-filled times: the company is shutting down its consumer-facing , its app store for Windows-based PC apps. “The world’s largest app store that nobody’s ever heard of,” in the of AppUp boss Peter Biddle, a description that in hindsight may have been tempting fate. The service will be closed for good on March 11, with the apps from the store that communicated with the AppUp client no longer working by May 15, 2015 — or earlier if you uninstall the store client. (The large, full list of affected apps is .) Other apps that did not communicate with the client should still work, Intel says, although they will have to be launched separately. Intel doesn’t provide much of an explanation for the closure on the now-redirected for AppUp. “At Intel, we’re always thinking about the future, which often means making changes today. That’s why, on March 11th, 2014, Intel AppUp® center will come to a close as we focus on developing new and exciting PC innovations that will continue to shape your world,” Intel writes. A spokesperson fills us in on a bit more detail: this is part of a shift towards offering more services for enterprises and less for consumers: “When we started AppUp it was to cater to a unique need for consumers at the time. I think it served its purpose when were there new emerging devices [such as Ultrabooks] that needed apps, but now we see a change for consumer needs and so we’re directing our resources elsewhere. We have decided to realign and focus services on businesses — the needs of of enterprises and business users.” There may be more app activity in the future, but in more of a B2B2C vein. “We are moving from directly providing apps to consumers to providing services to enterprise who will have an interface to consumers,” she adds. She did not disclose the number of apps or users in the AppUp store. “We have been communicating with the companies directly. They have very broad markets and are unlikely to be impacted by the change,” she says. Intel also sent out a note to AppUp users describing the shut down and detailing refunds: Dear valued Intel AppUp® user, At Intel, we’re always thinking about tomorrow, which sometimes means making changes today. That’s why we’ll be closing Intel AppUp on March 11th, 2014 to focus on other groundbreaking platform innovations. As part of this closure your AppUp Center Customer Account Registration Agreement also will terminate effective March 11th, 2014. Some apps you have downloaded may stop working on May 15th 2015, or earlier if you uninstall the store client, and you can confirm if any of your apps are affected here. You can claim a full refund of $4.99 through our AppUp refund program, for the amount you paid for apps. Your transaction history appears at the bottom of this email. Closing Intel AppUp was a tough decision and we understand how important the service has become to our users so we’ve provided a detailed FAQ section with links to guided support to answer your questions as the program comes to a close. Of course, Intel AppUp would not have been possible without loyal users like you. Thank you for participating in the experience. It’s been a fun ride. Back in 2010, taking a leaf from the app explosion on mobile devices, Intel saw an opportunity to leverage its brand recognition with Windows device users, and build out its ecosystem of developers, by building out a store specifically to cater to new devices like Ultrabooks and netbooks, although AppUP worked on all PCs. In launching AppUp, Intel preceded Apple announcing a Mac App Store by some 10 months. But whether it’s because Windows users were simply not as keen to use Intel’s AppUp, or whether it’s because Microsoft has stolen a march in this space with its own store, it’s not clear that AppUp ever really took off in terms of traffic and downloads. Intel had been aiming for as global a reach as possible, with the store working in over 60 countries, with paid transactions in 45 countries and five languages. A year after launch, it a $100 million AppUp fund to encourage developers to create apps for the store and businesses that might encourage the wider ecosystem. But geographical reach and paying money to encourage developers doesn’t equal loyal users. “Intel has put itself out of its own misery by shutting down the ill-fated “AppUp” app store,” is how one tipster described it to us.
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Tech Investors Buy Themselves Some Blue Bottle Coffee | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | After all the VC deals that get done at Blue Bottle Coffee, it’s only fitting that be one of them. The tony coffee brewery $25.7 million series B investment, completed at its flagship store in Oakland, earlier today. The investment was led by Morgan Stanley Investment Management, the same Morgan Stanley adviser behind the investments in Twitter and Facebook, according to a source. (While primarily invests in public companies, the 5 percent of the capital it is allowed to invest in private companies goes to stuff like Blue Bottle and Twitter, we hear. Morgan Stanley declined to comment.) While Morgan Stanley getting into coffee does not seem that far-fetched, the list of names on the Blue Bottle term sheet also included a pack of tech founders and executives. In addition to former investors , and , Instagram’s , Twitter and Medium co-founder , Twitter investor , WordPress founder , Flickr and Hunch founder , investor (Fred Wilson’s wife) and a16z partner joined the round. Aside from Systrom, who was a trained barista post-Stanford, no one on the above list has any kind of coffee background. So why the tech pile on? Is right? Is no Silicon Valley? True Ventures partner and Blue Bottle champion told us that the appeal of Blue Bottle was about entrepreneurial camaraderie. “Tech investors in particular are good at identifying these kinds of people,” he said, referring to Blue Bottle founder James Freeman. “[Freeman] sounds like a Matt Mullenweg to me, or an Evan Williams or a Bre Pettis. The reason that True Ventures got into it was that I was considering it on a personal level. I have enough technology investments. From a tactical point of view, boy it’s diversified.” Conrad is no stranger to atypical investments, having backed and seen multiple returns from an investment earlier in his career: Stoneyfield Farms yogurt. “That worked out pretty well,” he said. “There’s definitely a new breed of entrepreneurs in coffee,” Blue Bottle Chairman Bryan Meehan explained, describing why the brick and mortar entrepreneurial spirit has found fast friends in tech. “Jack Dorsey [a Sightglass investor] hired his second employee, launched Square at Blue Bottle in Mint Plaza. Perhaps our tech investors recognize something in our brand and in James that they see in themselves?” Or perhaps they just really like coffee? “We could spin it and say that it’s tech, but that’s not the case,” Tony Conrad explained. “Investments like Blue Bottle and hair color startup are physical products. That amounts to about two percent of our portfolio. If you look at Sequoia and Greylock, they probably have a couple companies like this [in fact, , a grilled cheese company].” He continues, “What does The Melt have to do with technology? Sequoia did that deal. Sure, our LPs want us investing in technology. And we respect that. But they also want us to be smart, and have an unfair advantage. We had access here that nobody else had.” https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/428621444269223936 If you boil venture capital down to a pure goal of getting in early on huge, scalable opportunities, specialty coffee roasting is definitely a large enough market. In terms of dollars spent, coffee purchases in the U.S. top $30 billion dollars a year, with the specialty market — including Starbucks, Peet’s, Stumptown, Fourbarrel, etc. — raking in about half that at $15 billion. Starbucks revenue is about half the specialty market. SF-specialty coffee shop Philz Coffee also just last summer. When asked if he considered Starbucks Blue Bottle’s closest competitor, Meehan said no. “We’re so naive about competition. I pay close attention to Stumptown, Fourbarrel and Sightglass because I like what they do. All of us small companies are tiny, but one or two of us are going to be very big. Even $200 million in revenue would be 1 percent of the market.” He wouldn’t tell me what their revenue is currently. Meehan says the company will spend the money on developing its “ready to drink” iced coffee product, and building out more stores to sell fancy coffee and beans roasted fewer than 48 hours ago. He tells me Blue Bottle has just signed seven leases, with five more in the works. And of course, Blue Bottle is going to vamp up its website, though Conrad holds that, despite being more tech-connected than a night at , Blue Bottle is not making an e-commerce play. “It’s a company that leverages tech. And it will have an increasing online component where people can order beans, etc. But that’s never going to be the motor of our business.” For the record, Conrad’s favorite drink at Blue Bottle is the “SG – 120.” |
Sabertron, For All Your Foam Swordplay Needs | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | LARPers rejoice! A new project, called , will allow you and your fellow followers of the great goddess of the Whispering Eye to fight to the death using wirelessly connected foam swords. The swords, which cost $99 for a two-weapon set, have rings of colored lights around the hilt that note when you’ve been hit by other players. Once the lights go out, you become one of the the Eaten Ones, forced to roam the World of the Undead in the Nevermere for all eternity until the kiss of Princess Mooncake brings you back to life or you just have to sit out the round and drink a Capri Sun over by the backpacks. Created in Austin by a team of three engineers, the group is looking for $195,000 to complete the swords, which contain an accelerometer and NFC system to tell if two swords hit or they hit a player. They are also working on a special LARPing mode with a bright, bold chest plate that displays your current health. One of founders, Tim Reichard, said “LARPing refers to Live Action Role Playing and is mostly associated with medieval renaissance enactments… think of guys and gals in the park or woods doing sword fights and medieval activities.” “Kind of geeky, I know,” he added. “Nowadays, LARPers create Boffers (home made wooden swords) to use. Our product isn’t only for LARPers, it is also for anybody who wants to play sword fight and have a detection system that lets the participants know who won. Our Sabertron is also littered with LEDs and has some impressive sound.” “I came up with this idea when playing in the back yard with my kids about five years ago,” said CEO David Lynch. “I created a few swords from PVC pipe and foam, and it was a lot of fun, but the kids lost interest because it wasn’t interactive. I am a computer engineer and I can do anything I set my mind to do. I finally set my mind to do this and built this system to allow the swords keep score electronically.” The swords have an on-board display that shows stats and allows you to set game play modes including “One Hit To Win It” and “Eternal Struggle” in which “each hit depletes one to three bars of health, depending on the strength of the hit and the sensitivity setting in the options menu. Ranges from two hard hits, to six small glancing blows will win the game.” So slash away, Paladins Of The Ancient Order Of The Three-Eyed Sloth! Your LARPing will be improved tenfold by these exciting swords and as you wade through the marshes of Darkwood, on the hunt for the evil Surgoron, keep your weapon at the ready and your wits about you for, as you know, Paul from your wargaming group likes to bop you in the nards.
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Zuck Is Finally Ready To Fight Snapchat | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | In the since Evan Spiegel , the Facebook CEO sent a very clear signal to competitors. “Our vision is to create a set of products that let our users share with any audience they want,” said Zuck. “Not everyone wants to share with all of their friends at once. A lot of the new growth we see is from giving people power to share with different, separate groups of people.” Three products, in particular, help Facebook fight off Snapchat: Messenger, Instagram, and Groups. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook Messenger, which was revamped in November to be much faster, has grown by 70 percent in the past three months. Meanwhile, Facebook Groups have grown to 500 million users, with Zuck calling them a “core product.” And then there’s Instagram, Facebook’s golden ticket. The photo-sharing service in December to give photo-sharers control of the audience for any picture they’d like. All of this, obviously, is a push against the market and mindshare controlled by Snapchat, which is growing at a rapid clip. Users send more than 400 million snaps per day on the service, which has raised more than $123 million in funding since launching in 2011. The app lets users share disappearing photos with individual friends or multiple users. Not only does the content disappear (freeing them from any concern that Mom will see what was said on the internet), but it gives users total control over who sees what they share, on a case-by-case basis. Instagram Direct tried to mimic this behavior, though it . And even if growth isn’t a threat (yet), Snapchat’s stubborn CEO certainly is. He’s the first young, driven wunderkind since Zuckerberg himself. Almost 24 and fresh out of Stanford, Spiegel even has his own frat-boy drama lawsuit on his hands, with a scorned founder suing Snapchat for a third of the business. If Zuck’s throne has a usurper, it could very well be Evan. Snapchat is one of very few (successful) social apps that isn’t reliant on Facebook in any way. Snapchatters find their friends through the Contacts app in the phone. There is no Facebook Connect. No Facebook Friends. No sharing to Facebook. Inside Snapchat, there is no Facebook. The shift has been a relatively slow one, but over the course of the past few years, Facebook has with teens and younger demographics. Even . No one going through puberty wants to share the internet with their parents. Snapchat, entirely independent of Facebook, has given teens a playground. And Facebook has failed, thus far, to seal that leak. By the time Snapchat caught Facebook’s attention, it was too late. The (a Snapchat clone) was a . And once Facebook was vulnerable, reportedly for the service, Spiegel said no. Today Zuck has responded, albeit somewhat subtly. The stats around Messenger alone show that Facebook is ready to fight for the kids, whether the social network . After all, 1.2 billion monthly active users certainly isn’t worrisome. Snapchat is still, very much, a David to Facebook’s Goliath. Going forward, Zuck plans on from the central Facebook app. “If you think about the overall space of sharing in communication, there isn’t just one thing that people are doing,” said Zuck. “People want to share any type of content with any audience they want. Facebook has always had a mission of helping people share with any audience, and historically that has always been through a single app.” “Messenger used to feel like a feature of Facebook, but we’re making it more of a standalone app,” he added. “We’ve even taken it out of the main app, giving it room to breathe as its own experience. We’re now focused on making that really good and adding to it.” In other words, “here’s Facebook minus your parents.” What say you, Snapchat? It’s your move. How will standalone apps impact Facebook’s future? Read our writer Josh Constine’s feature piece “ “.] |
Amazon Wants To Include Peer-to-Peer Payments In Its “Real World” PayPal Competitor | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | Earlier today, the published a report on how Amazon is building a Kindle-based point-of-sale payments service for local merchants using technology it picked up via its Gopago acquisition –something we actually . In fact, this looks like just part of what Amazon has in mind. The e-commerce giant is also developing a solution for person-to-person payments — bypassing banks and other payment networks — putting it in even closer competition with P2P payment giant PayPal. The P2P payment system, as it’s being conceived, would have a mobile component to it, and it would be cloud-based, so presumably usable over desktop, too. we and others keep talking about could be coming soon — the latest that we’ve heard, by the way, is that they may get announced in the next 60 days and ship this summer. Building in a P2P service to sweeten the deal, and help differentiate the phones from the rest of the pack, could be a smart move. Amazon describes the P2P solution as being part of a bigger strategy to build “products and services which will delight billions of customers as they buy and sell things in the real world.” The company is currently looking to hire a number of developers for new payments services beyond those that it already offers online, through its and now . Some of the roles specifically are to develop products that will extend Amazon’s reach “from e-commerce to commerce in general”, and some are specified to work on products for local commerce. , for a position as a Senior Technical Program Manager in San Francisco (there is another, identical role in Seattle) is for someone to build a P2P payment product. It reads like this: Our team is charged with extending Amazon’s value proposition (price, selection, and convenience) from e-commerce to commerce in general. We are building products and services which will delight billions of customers as they buy and sell things in the real world (as opposed to online). One of these products is person-to-person (P2P) payments. As part of this ambitious new initiative we need experienced Senior Technical Program Managers to help us deliver a set of innovative mobile and cloud based products. The customer experiences we are building are powered by secure, scalable, and highly available cloud services. You will work with multiple technical teams to deliver solutions, and will be the driving force that orchestrates all the moving pieces as needed to ensure successful and on-time delivery. If you are focused on delivering exceptional products and services that provide exceptional value to end customers, and like to be part of team that likes to have fun… JOIN US! Among the qualifications, applicants are requested to have computer science backgrounds, seven or more years of software engineering experience, mobile app experience, as well as evidence of having cut teeth product delivery and startup experience. There are a few reasons why it makes sense for Amazon to build a P2P payment platform. For starters, in a side-by-side feature war with PayPal, offering a solution to enable people to send each other money — the basic service that got PayPal started — would be an essential product for Amazon if it hopes to win business away from eBay’s payment leviathan. And PayPal is not the only one playing here. There is also and, just earlier today, .) Why match the features? Because making a payments platform as ubiquitous as possible makes it also more convenient. In payments, I can’t help but think that the solution that will be the most seamless to use will be the one that wins out. It’s the reason why so many mobile payments services have been such a flop: they’re just simply not as good as what is already in place, between cards and good old fashioned cash. Apart from enhancing Amazon’s overall position in payments, and adding another mobile payment service into the mix, a P2P service would be useful for Amazon on a number of levels. As Amazon has grown, it’s been building out business into developing markets, where there are still a high proportion of “unbanked” consumers — that is, people without financial profiles in the forms of current accounts or credit histories. Creating a P2P framework is one way that Amazon can start to become a bank for these people and potentially bring them into Amazon as would-be customers. One person can transfer money into another person’s Amazon account. That money can then be cashed out, or it can be used to buy goods on… Amazon. Of course, such a solution could also be applied in developed markets, too. Think here of parents topping up their kids’ allowance, in the form of an Amazon accounts, which can be used to buy books, for example. While a point-of-sale solution would help Amazon expand its relationship with merchants who sell in physical stores, a P2P solution could be used to bolster relationships with even smaller vendors who could use it to make and accept payments. This potentially expands the kinds of sellers that might appear in Amazon’s marketplaces, not just for goods but professional services, too, perhaps as a micro complement what it already offers with its for developers. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment and will update this post as we learn more. Photo: |
GoDaddy Admits Hacker’s Social Engineering Led It To Divulge Info In @N Twitter Account Hack | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | An update in the @N account hacking case has just come through from GoDaddy, one of the companies involved in the somewhat convoluted social engineering case. The company admits that one of its employees was ‘socially engineered’ into giving out additional information which allowed a hacker to gain access to Naoki Hiroshima’s GoDaddy account. The hack, which we , was performed by calling up PayPal and GoDaddy to gain access to Hiroshima’s personal email, which was then used to extort the @N Twitter user handle from him. Hiroshima in a post on Medium, which garnered a lot of attention. We received responses from Twitter that the matter was being looked into and PayPal was spurred to issue a denial that it had provided credit card information, and to note that its employees were trained to avoid social engineering attacks. Social engineering is a method of hacking in which attackers utilize personal or not-so-personal information to impersonate the rightful owner of an account. They call up the company in question and engineer a ‘reset’ of the account permissions that allow them to take over. In Hiroshima’s case, the target was simply his Twitter handle, but it could easily be things like bank accounts or websites. GoDaddy Chief Information Security Office Todd Redfoot issued TechCrunch the following statement about the hack: Our review of the situation reveals that the hacker was already in possession of a large portion of the customer information needed to access the account at the time he contacted GoDaddy. The hacker then socially engineered an employee to provide the remaining information needed to access the customer account. The customer has since regained full access to his GoDaddy account, and we are working with industry partners to help restore services from other providers. Redfoot also says that GoDaddy is “making necessary changes to employee training to ensure we continue to provide industry-leading security to our customers and stay ahead of evolving hacker techniques.” The sour note here is that these techniques really are nothing new. As we noted in our piece earlier today, some very high-profile hacks have been accomplished over the last couple of years using them. Not the in which Wired writer Mat Honan’s accounts were nearly decimated by hackers employing social engineering techniques. If anything, cases like Honan’s and this one about shared via should have thrown up red flags for any Internet company dealing in identity. These are not new tactics and they should be guarded against as a very basic precaution. More to follow… Image Credit: |
Facebook’s Plot To Conquer Mobile: Shatter Itself Into Pieces | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | don’t cut it on mobile. Packing in too many features creates apps that seem bloated and slow. Perhaps more than any company, Facebook has struggled to adapt its busy website to the small screen. But through a talk with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and its Messenger team in November, a strategy to make the social network feel lean across devices came into focus. Facebook plans to conquer mobile one app at a time. You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s odd, considering two of Facebook’s attempts at standalone apps failed. Facebook built its for shooting, filtering, and sharing photos in 2012, as it watched Instagram’s popularity skyrocketing. But then Facebook acquired Instagram before Camera even launched, and it never saw much development after that. In December 2012, Facebook cloned Snapchat in 12 days and an app for sending self-deleting text, photos, and videos. Facebook had been interested in acquiring Snapchat, yet was rebuffed so it built its own version instead. But a lack of organic community and entrenched worries about Facebook privacy led Poke to quickly peter out, . Now Facebook has given up on Camera and Poke. Though they remain available in the App Store, the company confirmed to me they’ve been depreciated and will receive no more active development. But Facebook’s quest to build an arsenal of standalone apps is just getting started. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on today’s earnings “One theme that should be clear from our work on products like Messenger, Groups and Instagram is that our vision for Facebook is to create a set of products that help you share any kind of content you want with any audience you want.” Wall Street seems to like the sound of that. Facebook’s share price is up 12% in after-hours trading to what would be an all-time high of $60 if it stays there until the market opens tomorrow. As I drove in to Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in November, I was greeted by a familiar 15-foot tall thumbs up. But for the few weeks before, the billboard at the entrance to Facebook’s campus had been emblazoned with a symbol of its future: the new Messenger icon. In case there were any doubts, launch of the completely redesigned Messenger app was big deal to the company. For the past year, it had watched slim and stylish messaging apps explode in popularity around the world by using people’s phone books to kickstart their social graphs. WhatsApp is Messenger’s biggest and most direct competitor, and it now has . China’s WeChat has 272 million active users thanks to growth where Facebook can’t go. Japanese sticker-messaging app as of November, and South Korea’s with its own gaming platform has 130 million users. Meanwhile, Facebook is encountering increasing competition from Google’s mobile Hangouts messenger and Twitter’s newly highlighted Direct Messages. So Facebook set out to . In November it launched and I got a chance to sit down with its development team: Product Design Manager Luke Woods, Product Manager Peter Martinazzi, and Facebook’s Vice President of Growth and Analytics Javier Olivan. What began as a rebranded version of group messaging app , in March 2011 had finally been given its own identity. You can watch my interview with the team at Facebook Headquarters below: The design got a complete overhaul which distances it from the look of Facebook’s kludgy all-in-one main app. Gone is the heavy Facebook-blue top banner. In fact, the word “Facebook” hardly appears in Messenger at all, and its logo and navy hue have been banished too. Instead, it’s filled with breezy whitespace and simplified navigation. Woods proudly explained to me “You can tell it’s a different app. It’s not like the old Messenger. The icon is different, the color is different. We want you to recognize this is new. And with time we’re going to make it more and more distinct, and more clear it’s a standalone product.” Messenger even sounds different. It’s got its own range of carefully composed tones for sending and receiving messages, but also new ones like a little keyboard clatter that tells you your conversation partner is typing. It’s optimized for Facebook’s cutesy stickers that let people express complex emotions quickly and vividly. And new indicators tell you if a friend is on the web, on mobile without Messenger, or has Messenger installed and will be more likely to respond quickly. Facebook is even letting you message people who aren’t on Facebook with the app. Martinazzi told me “There are a lot of graphs in your life. Everyone you’ve ever emailed, you have your address book on your phone, and you have your Facebook graph.” Facebook integrates those by letting you text people by phone number from within Messenger, so you don’t have to ditch out to SMS if someone you want to talk to doesn’t have a profile on the social network. That’s been a talking point of Facebook’s messaging competitors that’s now been eliminated. But the biggest change isn’t how the app looks or works, but how you get to it. On stage at a closed door event for third-party developers in November, Zuckerberg spoke candidly with me about what mobile will look like for Facebook in 2014: “The other thing that we’re doing with Messenger is making it so once you have the standalone Messenger app, we are actually taking Messenger out of the main Facebook app. And the reason why we’re doing that is we found that having it as a second-class thing inside the Facebook app makes it so there’s more friction to replying to messages, so we would rather have people be using a more focused experience for that.” Zuckerberg calling features buried inside the main app “second-class” is a big indicator for how he sees Facebook’s mobile strategy evolving. Previously, Facebook’s main app had its own messaging tab, which was redundant and confusing if you also had Messenger. It wasn’t clear which to respond with, and loading the entire main Facebook app just to get to messages was slow. So with the big relaunch, Facebook made it so if you have Messenger installed but tap the messages tab in the Facebook app, you’d be quickly app-switched to Messenger. Olivan tells me “We’ve realized we were trying to put too many things in the same app at the same time.” Martinazzi followed up, emphasizing “To do mobile you have to be fast all the time. Standalone apps can load faster.” It’s bit strange to get bounced around, and the app-switching replaces the enjoyable overlaid messaging bubbles called Chat Heads that were ported to Facebook’s iOS app from Home. But overall, the new Messenger feels like it was actually built for mobile, instead of being Facebook’s website crammed into a small screen. And users like it. Mark Zuckerberg said today on Facebook’s Q4 2013 earnings calls “The number of people using Messenger grew more than 70% in the past three months, and we’ve seen a large increase in the number of messages sent. We have a lot more coming to Messenger in the first half of this year.” That’s not the only app Facebook’s working on, though. Zuckerberg wants to bring this feel and engagement increase to more of its features. On stage in front of a crowd of third-party developers and employees but no press, Zuckerberg spoke candidly with me about what mobile will look like for Facebook in 2014. I asked for his thoughts on unbundling Facebook’s functionality in an effort to appeal to mobile-first and younger audiences. Zuckerberg said (emphasis mine): We just did this big Messenger release and certainly having Instagram here is really shaping our thinking on how you can build out these communities and reach a global maximum for the impact an app can have rather than a local one. So the thinking I think we’ve had in the Facebook mobile app for a while is that or things like that can reach a lot of people because the vast majority of phones have Facebook on them and people are using Facebook everyday. About 20% of the time people spend in mobile devices is on Facebook, so having these experiences tied in is a good way to seed them. or even messaging for that matter. In order to make these things really be able to reach their full potential, And you’re seeing us do this right now with Messenger… …And now there’s this big question, we don’t know how far this goes. Right, obviously you don’t want to have 30 different Facebook apps. So we need to figure out exactly where that goes, but in general, I do think that Facebook has made a big deal about reorganizing talent to make it so every team builds its own mobile products. On today’s earnings call, it announced that it surpassed the halfway mark for the first time and now 53% of its ad revenue comes from mobile. But it’s the shift to standalone apps that Zuckerberg reveals in the quote above that truly makes Facebook a “mobile-first company”. Over the next year we might see Facebook giving small teams more freedom to build apps that nail a specific use case and delight a particular audience. That matches ‘s sources who say Facebook is planning a suite of standalone apps in 2014. And today on Facebook’s Q4 2014 earnings call, Zuckerberg confirmed the company is focused on building separate apps that let people share different types of content with different size audiences, rather than sharing to all friends through the News Feed. As Zuckerberg suggested, Groups and Events could be two features unbundled. Facebook launched Groups as a web-first product back in October 2010 and it hasn’t changed much since Facebook got serious about mobile. But today, Zuckerberg said there are now more than 500 million people using Facebook Groups, hinting Facebook might try to capitalize on that interest with a standalone Groups app. Meanwhile, Events have become one of Facebook’s most unique features. It’s a popular place for organizing and promoting birthday parties, cultural events, club nights, and more. While Eventbrite is often used by organizers trying to throw ticketed events, for gathering people for free events Facebook is far and away the most popular choice. A standalone Events app that offered users a calendar of the upcoming events, discovery of nearby events they haven’t been invited to, and their friends birthdays could gain serious traction with Facebook’s most outgoing users. And soon, Facebook is expected to launch a reimagined news reading experience we first caught wind of a year ago. More recently, the product is called Paper and will let people share news stories from a variety of publishers and their friends, some of which are curated by human editors working for Facebook. [ : Facebook made good on this standalone app strategy by today announcing the upcoming launch of . The iOS app was built by , a new initiative born to let small teams within the company build new experiences without worry about screwing up the core Facebook app.] All of these center around a new insight Zuckerberg outlined on today’s earnings call: People don’t just want to share with all their friends at once. They want to share different types of content with audiences of a variety of sizes. That means sharing status updates and photos, but also links, games, parties, and more with a loved one, a small cluster of friends, a big group of acquaintances, or the general public. That flexibility lets Facebook host content you might have been scared to share before for fear of annoying people with different interests. The term “Facebook Friend” has evolved a lot in the nearly 10 years since Facebook launched. While once it was just people from the same college, it now encompasses, family, co-workers, and distant acquaintances. There’s only so much that’s appropriate to share with everyone. Facebook has tried and failed to get us to build friend lists that could stimulate “microsharing”, but the catalyst may be offering whole different apps for different sharing communities. If the strategy works, it could defend Facebook from single-purpose mobile competitors trying to bring it down with a ‘death by a thousand cuts’. “We want to build a handful of great experiences that are separate from what you think of as Facebook today” Zuckerberg said at the end of the earnings call. The path to making the world more connected starts with disconnecting Facebook from itself. |
Google Keeps Motorola’s Advanced Technology Group, Home Of The Modular Phone And Password Tattoo | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | Google has just let us in on another tidbit about the deal it has built with : It keeps the high-tech Q division-type stuff being developed at Motorola’s Advanced Technology Group. That means the Ara modular smartphone concept, as well as sensors you swallow and passwords you tattoo on your skin. The Advanced Tech team is headed by one-time Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency director Regina Dugan, and has been behind some of the more sci-fi things that Google has demonstrated since acquiring Moto’s mobile biz. was one of those projects that garnered a lot of attention back in October. It essentially features a single base unit design that pairs with components that can swap out including keyboards, bigger batteries, memory, sensors and more. Users can easily customize the device to taste using these parts, building the perfect phone for business, or for travel, or for media consumption etc. And this isn’t something that’s still so far away as to be purely contemplative: Google said back then it would be launching a pilot beta test of the Ara soon. Motorola’s crack research team was also working on truly wearable (and ingestible) tech, including passwords that are embedded tattoo-like beneath your epidermis and can be activated on command, and authenticators that can be swallowed in pill form. Another ingestible product discussed on stage at was a sensor that could be swallowed to relay medical information to a user and their doctors. One more recent Motorola Advanced Tech project details a lie-detecting neck tattoo that uses embedded electronics to take in auditory information via microphones and relay that back to an attached smartphone for analysis. Lie detection is just one possible use (imagine audio recording or other types of environment sensing, too) but it’s definitely an intriguing one. All of this stuff fits pretty nicely under the Google X division at Google, where its other kooky experiments are currently housed. Luckily this part of the deal should mean we’ll see the Advanced Tech team continue its work under that department, or anywhere at all really, since it’s too interest-grabbing to just mothball away. |
Larry Page Thanks The Motorola Team And CEO Dennis Woodside In Internal Memo | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | Google just took to the wires and to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. TechCrunch obtained the following internal Google memo that outlines the reason for the sale and plan going forward. Towards the end of the memo, Larry Page thanks the Motorola team and states the obvious that he is confident that Lenovo can drive the Motorola brand forward. More as we get it. CONFIDENTIAL – DO NOT FORWARD Googlers, We are just in the process of announcing the sale of Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. This is important news so I wanted to communicate directly with you. We acquired Motorola in 2012 to help supercharge the Android ecosystem by creating a stronger patent portfolio for Google and great smartphones for users. Over the past nineteen months, Dennis Woodside and the Motorola team have done a tremendous job reinventing the company. They’ve focused on building a smaller number of great (and great value) smartphones that consumers love. Both the Moto G and the Moto X are doing really well and I’m very excited about the smartphone line-up for 2014. And on the intellectual property side, Motorola’s patents have helped create a level playing field, which is good news for all Android’s users and partners. But the smartphone market is super competitive, and to thrive it helps to be all in when it comes to making mobile devices. It’s why we believe that Motorola will be better served by Lenovo–which has a rapidly growing smartphone business and is the largest (and fastest growing) PC manufacturer in the world. This move will enable Google to devote our energy to driving innovation across the Android ecosystem, for the benefit of smartphone users everywhere. As a side note, this does not signal a larger shift for our other hardware efforts. The dynamics and maturity of the wearable and home markets, for example, are very different from that of the mobile industry. We’re excited by the opportunities to build amazing new products for users within these emerging ecosystems. Lenovo has the expertise and track record to scale Motorola into a major player within the Android ecosystem: they have a lot of experience in hardware and they have global reach. In addition, Lenovo intends to keep Motorola’s distinct brand identity–just as they did when they acquired ThinkPad from IBM in 2005. Google will retain the vast majority of Motorola’s patents, which we will continue to use to defend the entire Android ecosystem. The deal has yet to be approved in the US or China and this usually takes time. So please don’t speculate about the impact of the deal either outside or inside Google, and direct any press inquiries to press@google.com. Until it closes it’s business as usual. But if you have any questions, please come to TGIF tomorrow (or add them to the dory). Finally, a big thank you to the entire hard working Motorola team. I’d also like to thank Dennis for taking this on and also working really hard to make great products. I’m proud of everything the team at Motorola has achieved and confident that with Lenovo as a partner, Motorola will build more and more great products for people everywhere. |
Google Keeps ‘Vast Majority’ Of Motorola Mobility Patents In Sale To Lenovo | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | Motorola Mobility is being sold to Lenovo, in a deal worth $2.91B. Google is divesting itself of the handset division it purchased for $12.5B in 2011, but it will keep some of the assets — including patents. “Google will maintain ownership of the vast majority of the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio, including current patent applications and invention disclosures,” says . “As part of its ongoing relationship with Google, Lenovo will receive a license to this rich portfolio of patents and other intellectual property. Additionally Lenovo will receive over 2,000 patent assets, as well as the Motorola Mobility brand and trademark portfolio.” When Google purchased Motorola Mobility, much of the discussion swirled around whether it was buying it simply to own a hardware pipeline on which to deliver its Android juice — or whether it wanted patents for protection. The answer, as is typical, lay somewhere in the middle. Though the Motorola patents never turned out to by incredibly effective winning solo battles against Google’s patent enemies, they did work as a part of a larger tactic which has seen Google aligning itself via cross-licensing with OEMs like Samsung. One segment of the statement today by Woodside was interesting: Since being acquired by Google in 2012, Motorola has transformed itself, focusing on solving real consumer problems and providing amazing experiences built on a foundation of pure Android. The result has been Moto X, Moto G, and a reinvigorated Droid line. Together, these devices have won over consumers and critics alike and helped re-establish the Motorola brand around the world. Indeed, Google’s purchase and investments in Motorola did raise the flagging manufacturer’s profile significantly over the intervening years. They have several well-received smartphones on the market and have made a lot of noise about technology innovations in wearable computing and . Google sold off several aspects of its initial Motorola purchase including its . And it managed to leverage the patents — which Google valued at $5.5B — to at least some positive outcome. So, while the monetary ‘wins’ or ‘losses’ here are one for the bean counters to figure out, the strategic victories for Google may actually be fairly strong. According to some maths from analyst , Google’s total outlay may have been closer to $7.15B than $12B — the divestitures, retention of patents and the sale price would cut the plain monetary loss down further to under $2B. There is now a renewed Android vendor on the market peddling Google’s OS, in the care of Lenovo, the logistics firm that made IBM’s old enterprise business the biggest consumer computer retailer in the world. And it has some new cross-licensing agreements on patents — the majority of which it gets to keep. And, with the purchase of Nest, it has a fresh young hardware company with a design focus and a set of high-profile talent. “As a side note, this does not signal a larger shift for our other hardware efforts,” noted Google CEO Larry Page in an . “The dynamics and maturity of the wearable and home markets, for example, are very different from that of the mobile industry. We’re excited by the opportunities to build amazing new products for users within these emerging ecosystems.” It may look bad in the raw math, but may not turn out so bad for all parties when the pieces settle into place. Image Credit:
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Tim Cook Celebrates China Mobile’s iPhone Launch | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | The iPhone is finally available for sale in China Mobile stores after Apple with the carrier, the world’s largest by subscriber number. In a sign of how important the partnership is to Apple, CEO Tim Cook showed up at the China Mobile launch today to meet customers, pose for pictures, and autograph iPhones. Having fun in Beijing at the iPhone launch with China Mobile! — Tim Cook (@tim_cook) China Mobile has 740 million subscribers, but competing carriers China Unicom and China Telecom have already carried the iPhone 5s and 5c since September. As , China Mobile subsidies are also pricier. For example, China Mobile users can get a 16GB iPhone 5s for free if they commit to a 24-month plan for about $97 per month, or they can pay about $625 for the same phone if they get a 24-month contract for $31 per month. But China Unicom subscribers get an iPhone 5s for free when they commit to a 30-month contract for $63 per month. China Telecom users also get a free iPhone 5s by signing up for a 24-month contract at $64 per month. China Mobile’s contracts are less attractive than its two competitors, but it can afford to charge a premium partly because it for its 4G networks, making its network speedier than its two competitors. So far, the deal appears to be paying off for Apple. Earlier this week, Cook region than it has at any time previously, which means it moved over 10.4 million iPhones there after selecting China as an iPhone launch market for the first time ever. The China Mobile deal will also bring the iPhone to cities where it was previously unavailable, with the devices now sold in 3,000 more locations. Cook also said he was unconcerned about competition from inexpensive Android devices, stating that 57% of mobile browsing in China happens on iOS hardware. But Android devices , according to research firm Umeng, and there is still plenty of room left for growth in China’s mobile market, especially buy their first smartphone. Android smartphones , so Apple still has plenty of competition even with the China Mobile deal. [[Image: ]] |
Digg Is Experimenting With Original Content | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | is currently testing a system which would see the viral news aggregator running its own original content on the Digg.com homepage, the company confirms to us today. This would be a new direction for the betaworks-backed service, which has historically collected the most interesting stories from around the web on its site, where they’re then voted on by Digg users. We first noticed the test today, when a story on the Digg homepage had an interesting source: not another news website or blog, but Digg.com itself. Clicking through on the link to the post in question – an interesting longer read about – and we found the resulting page was branded as a “Digg Original.” According to Digg’s Creative and Editorial Director, David Weiner, Digg Originals are still in the experimental phase. “We look at Digg as having the potential to be like any other editorial outlet that features freelancer content,” he says. “This was a piece we commissioned to be written for Digg, so there was never any question of where else this could live.” By commissioned, what Weiner means is “paid.” The company says it offers fair and competitive rates. Right now, there aren’t any set rules around the process, only that the Digg editorial team will be firmly in control of anything that goes live on the site whether a Digg Original, or any other aggregated content, for that matter. He adds, “so as long as it adheres to our editorial mission of providing the best and most interesting stuff, we’re pretty open.” Digg has run “Originals” similar to the one appearing on Thursday a couple of times before, or so . However, in these earlier cases, the content was penned by betaworks staff. One story, for example, was , while on the topic of Twitter networks was written by Gilad Lotan, a Chief Scientist at betaworks. Digg doesn’t currently have a timetable for when it will post more original stories, but hopes to have more work out there “shortly,” says Weiner. “We also don’t want to do content for content’s sake,” he adds. “That said, it’ll probably be a little bit of time before we run as long a piece as this.” Instead, the company is sketching out some shorter items that may be done in-house by its own editorial team or outsourced to other freelancers. The pieces might also involve video at some point, as video has been one of Digg’s fastest-growing verticals, even prompting the site to open up a standalone section . One thing to note is that the original story promoted on Thursday on the Digg.com homepage was placed in the marquee position as soon as it went live – that is, it didn’t have to generate clicks, votes or go “viral” elsewhere on the web before earning its top spot. Digg says that it gives similar editorial consideration to other publishers’ work at times, too – something that indicates the different sort of beast today’s Digg is than the one co-founded by Kevin Rose, whose then much larger user base once sent websites crashing just by pushing their stories to its front page. Though it can be argued that , the new Digg is more about marrying the concept of a trending post with the human touch that only comes from an editorial eye about what deserves consideration. That puts Digg.com into a category where it could compete with other viral aggregators like BuzzFeed or Reddit, news aggregators like , and also with services like , which offers a sort of collaborative blogging platform where top stories and recommended content is also presented to end users. But Weiner says that Digg Originals are, for now, only for those vetted by Digg staff, and it has no plans to compete directly with Medium by launching its own blogging platform at this time. |
Google Redesigns Stock Quotes Widget, Removes Links To Competitors | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | have long been a staple on Google’s search results pages and date back to the search engine’s earliest days. Since its launch, the stock quotes widget has gone through a few iterations and today, it looks like the company has launched . There are no new features here as far as I can see. The new widget has a slightly cleaner look, bringing it more in line with the rest of Google’s tools. For the most part, Google moved the buttons that allow you to select different timeframes to the bottom of the widget. One thing users will notice, though, is that the company removed the links to its competitors Yahoo Finance and MSN Money that had been prominently featured at the bottom of each widget. Those were always featured on Google’s search results pages – even in of the widget. Back when Google first launched these kinds of widgets that featured its own services, having these links as part of the package helped the company deflect that it was favoring its own services over those of its competitors. At one point, Google also linked to AOL, CNN and Reuters, but it dropped those links with the . Google obviously continues to link to its competitors’ finance sites, but the prominent links to the stock charts on these sites seem to be gone for now. : |
Confirmed: Yahoo’s Editor-In-Chief Is Out | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | Effective tomorrow, Yahoo’s Editor-In-Chief is out at the company. A Yahoo spokesperson confirmed the news with TechCrunch following of his exit. Yahoo is currently undergoing a period of executive turbulence, with today’s news coming on the heels of the yesterday’s firing of its chief operating officer. While the came with enormous financial potential, it is not clear that Singh’s departure will cost the company much financially. Of course, losing your editorial leader as you ramp up your content strategy is hardly a promising sign, especially as his self-recusal from the company was initially described as just that: quitting. Yahoo has spent big money to hire mass-market talent like tech journalist David Pogue and media personality Katie Couric. Perhaps those hires did not suit Singh. It’s more likely that Yahoo’s new direction under Mayer — Singh was hired before Mayer became the CEO of the company — didn’t suit Singh, or he was made internally redundant. Yahoo declined to provide additional guidance on the nature of the departure. Yahoo is a company remade. Under the guidance of Mayer, it has refocused its product vision, purchased talent at a rapid rate, and expanded its native content efforts. Given a new dollar flow toward content and the like, Singh could have enjoyed a rising profile inside the corporation. |
Google’s New Smart Contact Lens Is Old News For Microsoft | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | Google today announced its , but it’s not the first by a long shot (or even a ). Other companies have long been working on smart lenses — including Microsoft Research, which unveiled a similar project in 2011 in collaboration with someone who now works for Google X. Babak Parviz used to be a professor at the University of Washington, where he collaborated with Microsoft Research. He was of the first to work on smart contact lenses. Today, he is at Google and working on Google Glass and the smart lens project. But as is often the case with Microsoft Research projects, it doesn’t look like the project ever went anywhere. Here is the video Microsoft made back in 2011 to showcase this project: It’s also worth noting that there are already some smart contact lenses on the market today. They don’t measure glucose, but the , for example, is a disposable contact lens that uses a sensor to measure changes to the eye in order to personalize treatment for glaucoma patients. This technology has been available in Europe , but the company hasn’t received FDA approval to sell it in the U.S. yet. There is also a team at Sweden’s Malmo University that has a lens similar to Google’s and which uses . Other researchers in the U.S. and elsewhere have been working on , too. This, of course, is the way science works. Different teams share and publish their ideas. Google wasn’t the first to wonder “if miniaturized electronics […] might be a way to crack the mystery of tear glucose and measure it with greater accuracy.” Others went to the moon before them. |
Zynga Drops 12% In Regular Trading On External Warnings About Its Coming Earnings | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | Social gaming firm Zynga today plunged 12 percent in regular trading, following a , which indicated that the market’s fourth-quarter consensus may be too optimistic. Shares fell by 49 cents to end the day at $3.54. Also today, UBS on Zynga’s stock from hold to sell, indicating deteriorating confidence in the company’s business fundamentals. Summing simply: Zynga got wrecked today as outside investors threw shade all over it. Zynga has had a textbook rough time as a public technology company, with an IPO followed by a dramatic rise in its value, followed by a precipitous decline, and now years in the doldrums. According to , investors expect Zynga to lose 4 cents per share on revenue of $183 million in the fourth quarter. If those projections are too strong, you begin to wonder what upside the company may have. A quick look at past earnings, and the loss expected, is on the back of decreased year-over-year revenues. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Zynga had revenue of $331 million. Zynga has not been quiet. The company has a new CEO and in late 2013 to respond to its deteriorating condition. Still, it isn’t idle speculation to ask if those changes were less than what was required, and perhaps already over the event horizon. The decline puts Zynga in an ironic position to excel: If it manages to merely meet the market’s consensus when it reports earnings, it could enjoy a firm bounce. |
Meet The Malware That Took Down Target | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | The inimitable has found some interesting details about the massive credit card breach that exposed millions of pieces of customer data over the holidays. The hackers used a specific form of malware dedicated to grabbing sensitive data out of hardened point of sale terminals. Shortly after news of the Target attack hit the net, someone posted a on . Shortly thereafter the listing was pulled but not before it was analyzed. Krebs and his sources found that the version of the software that appeared on Target computers had been specially designed to hide itself from anti-virus software and was “customized to avoid detection and for use in specific environments.” According to Krebs, the software has been traced to a programmer called Antikiller who put it up for sale on hacker forums. The person or group responsible for selling the cards after the breach also infected Target’s computers, initially accessing the system via a compromised web server and then “hoovering up” the data as it came in. Do yourself a favor and read . They are amazingly detailed and the story is chilling and fascinating and it’s great look at just how vulnerable even the most powerful commercial organizations are against a meticulous enemy. |
Google Unveils Smart Contact Lens That Lets Diabetics Measure Their Glucose Levels | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | This isn’t Google Glass in a contact lens, but it may just be Google’s first step in this direction. The company’s Google X lab just teased on its blog that is meant to help diabetics measure their glucose levels. The company says it is currently testing prototypes of this contact lens that use a tiny wireless chip and a miniaturized glucose sensor. These chips are embedded in between two soft layers of lens material. In its , Google notes that scientists have long looked into how certain body fluids can help them track glucose levels. Tears, it turns out, work very well, but given that most people aren’t Hollywood actors and can cry on demand, using tears was never really an option. According to Google, the sensor can take about one reading per second, and it is working on adding tiny LED lights to the lens to warn users when their glucose levels cross certain thresholds. The sensors are so small that they “look like bits of glitter.” Google says it is working with the FDA to turn these prototypes into real products and that it is working with experts to bring this technology to market. These partners, the company says, “will use our technology for a smart contact lens and develop apps that would make the measurements available to the wearer and their doctor.” It’s worth noting that other companies, , have previously shown similar lenses. Until now, though, it doesn’t look like there are any smart lenses available in the U.S. yet. Given Google’s reach, however, it may just be able to find the right partners to bring this technology to market. [image via ]
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Hackers And Spambots Are Going After Your Fridges and Smart TVs Now | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | There are plenty of good reasons you might want an Internet-enabled smart refrigerator. Your friends will constantly tell you that you’re from the future! You could check how much milk is left You can… uh… tweet from it when every other more-suitable gadget in your house is dead? But there’s also a good reason to want one, at least until we figure this whole “Internet Of Things” (read: LETS PUT THE INTERNET IN EVERYTHING) is going to work: security is hard. Example A: according to a new study by security firm Proofpoint, hackers have already started crackin’ away at smart appliances in hopes of further expanding their zombie spambot armies. Between December 26th, 2013 and January 6th, 2014, Proofpoint says they detected upwards of 750,000 spam emails being sent from over 100,000 compromised routers, multimedia centers, smart TVs, and, in one case, a smart fridge. Yeah. A refrigerator. “Who ,” you might say. “They only detected one case! Who has a smart fridge anyway? What are hackers gonna do, steal my recipes?” But it’s important to think a bit more long term. You see, each Internet-enabled device you bring into your house is a new point of failure – another place for folks with ill intent to find their way into your world. That shiny new smart TV with the teleconferencing built right in? That’s another webcam and microphone that you’ve got to think about. Meanwhile, the are gettin’ caught peeking at data they probably shouldn’t be anywhere near. As it currently stands, a very large majority of the devices that we allow on our network are pretty locked down. The smartphones, the gaming consoles, the laptops — they’re all running on tightly guarded operating systems, and (generally) receive regular updates for years after they debut. As we gleefully stride toward the day when the Internet is in , how do we maintain that? Ask someone who owns a smart TV what operating system it’s running. Chances are? They have no idea. Ask’em when it was last updated. Same deal. Now, consider how many different TV models these manufacturers – the Samsungs, the LGs, and the Sonys of the world — cough out each year. How long does the average person keep a TV? Around , on the low end. How long will manufacturers actually each TV, monitoring for potential exploits and quickly issuing patches when they arise? Does protection from security exploits end with the 2-year warranty? Now add a million other types of smart devices into the mix. . Refrigerators. Friggin’ voice-activated . I’m denouncing this movement towards ubiquitous device connectivity. Like any other kid who grew up watching The Jetson’s, I’m ready and waiting for the house of the future. We just have to be smart about it. We need to demand the same level of security we expect of our laptops and smartphones with every “smart” device we allow on our networks — because, really: once you start packing things like CPUs and web cams and microphones into appliances, those appliances computers. Manufacturers need to commit to securing a device for the average lifespan of the product, or things could get messy fast. |
Microsoft Sold 908,000 Xbox One Consoles In The US In December, Besting The PS4 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | According to NPD numbers , 908,000 Xbox One consoles were sold in the United States in December. Microsoft had previously reported that its new console had sold 1 million units in its first day of availability globally, and 3 million through the end of 2013. The console, which launched November 22nd, has seen lower aggregate sales than its rival, the Playstation 4. By year’s end, Playstation’s new console had sold 4.2 million units to Microsoft’s 3 million sum. However, the Playstation did come to the market slightly before Microsoft’s device, giving it an edge. There is a war of numbers at play here: Both Sony and Microsoft want to about their sales, implicitly telling gamers that they are winning, and as such will warrant more developer attention and therefore sport a healthier platform in the end. You can get pretty far into the weeds on the matter. As when Microsoft announced the 1 million figure: Sony’s PlayStation 4 in 24 hours when it launched around a week ago. So far, the two console giants are neck and neck. , there’s just one little detail Microsoft fails to mention in its PR: The Xbox One launched in a total of 13 countries, 11 more than the PlayStation 4. As a final carrot to all of this, Microsoft sold 643,000 of its now dated Xbox 360 console in the month as well, meaning it sold north of 1.5 million consoles in the month in the country. Given the rising importance of the living room for digital platform companies as they pursue cross-device and interest services, you could call that number a win. Sony for now retains that global sales lead. It will be interesting to see who leads come mid-year. |
Dyson’s Latest Vacuums Ditch Not Only The Bag But Also The Filter Maintenance | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | I hate vacuuming but I actually like using my Dyson, and the UK company has a few new models it’s unveiling today. For the U.S. market, there’s the , which is a handheld cordless stick vac that bumps up the suction, and for the UK, there are new Cinetic models of three of its canister vacuums that do away with the sole remaining piece of maintenance required by Dyson hardware: the occasional filter cleaning. [gallery ids="942375,942376,942377,942378,942379"] The DC59 is the latest in Dyson’s Digital Slim line, with a cordless design that provides up to 26 minutes of use on a single charge. It improves over the previous DC cordless vacuums with suction power that’s up to three times as powerful as any other one currently available on the U.S. market, the company tells me. Mothballs have met their match, in other words. That one’s impressive, but the real trick here comes from the brand new Cinetic line, which is launching in the UK now but will make its way to other global Dyson retailers in due time. The Cinetic offers up the same ball-based design you’re probably familiar with from its existing line of motorhead, turbinehead and multifloor vacuums, as well as bagless operation, but also introduces a solution to the last annoyance associated with using Dyson cleaners: you no longer have to clean wash and dry, or even ever replace the filter in these bad boys. [gallery ids="942380,942381,942382,942383,942384,942385,942386"] It essentially means the new Dyson vacuums are maintenance free, unless you accidentally vacuum up a huge hunk of cheese or something and you gunk up the tube. Dyson even claims that it can operate with the equivalent of 10 years’ worth of accumulated dust, without any kind of filter cleaning at all, without any loss of suction at all. Of course, Dyson charges a premium for its swanky designs and newfangled technology: the Cinetic line starts at £419 and ranges up to £469 (roughly $685 to $766) and is on sale this month in the UK, and the DC59 starts at $499 when it goes on sale January 19 in the US. If you’re a weird design snob like me, however, you’ll pay the extra and you’ll like it, especially since you can just use the thing to clean, and not really have to worry about cleaning the thing that cleans the other things. |
Twitter Also Considered PayPal For Its Square-Market Competitor | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | , now a listed company with more public accountability for how it makes money, has put the bulk of its chips down on generating revenue from advertising. But another area it appears to be exploring is commerce — using its platform not just to help spread the word about brands, but to help people buy from them, too. Earlier today, Recode published a about how Twitter is working on a commerce platform. It’s something that we have heard about for a while, too, along with a few more details: Twitter is looking at building a marketplace on its platform that is similar to what Square offers in the , with listings for goods across different categories. “They’re working on a concept similar to Square,” is how one source described it. (Yes, the same Square where Twitter’s chairman Jack Dorsey is the CEO. But to be fair, it doesn’t sound like it would compete; just that this is a model for it.) It’s not completely clear, but it sounds like marketplace may exist in a standalone format but also on Twitter’s main river. “They want to partner with bigger retailers and have check out cards on the platform, instead of just hashtag commerce,” said another source. Hashtag commerce is a reference to some of the efforts that have existed on Twitter up to now, which use hashtags to trigger purchases (as pioneered by companies like ) or discounts (as it did with in February 2013). From what we understand, Twitter would provide the “storefront” for the service, as it were, but not the commerce backend. “They say they don’t want to handle the whole commerce side of things,” is how one source put it to us. Recode reports that Twitter has been talking to Stripe. We have heard that, too, along with another major player in payment processing: PayPal. It’s not clear if PayPal is still in the picture. Neither Stripe nor PayPal, nor Twitter, returned requests for comment. Along with ex-Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard, who was named head of commerce at Twitter in , there have been other hires as well who are focused on building out the commerce solution. profile on AngelList, you can see that he has also followed a number of them. Whether that has been for potential acquisitions or partnerships, or just for his personal interest, is not clear. On the subject of Twitter partnering with commerce companies, this would make some sense, if you think about how Twitter built out its wider audience by way of developer-friendly APIs that helped seed the service in a number of third-party apps. As for why Twitter may be moving ahead on a commerce effort, this is perhaps inevitable. The company as it is today is based on advertising as its main revenue stream. Adding commerce would be a way for Twitter to demonstrate to the market that it is not a one-trick pony, but a true platform for people to transact, not just in ideas and news but money, too. But whether it will succeed is a different question. Another social network that has made efforts in commerce is Facebook, but today its payments business accounts for less than 11 percent of revenues — . Photo: |
Thanks To Ads, Rdio Now Offers Free Streaming On The Web | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | Not to be outdone by Spotify, Beats or Pandora, Rdio is now free through its website. Mobile users still have to pay if they want access to the full Rdio experience. Users will also have to pay if they want an ad-free experience — because that’s how Rdio is making its service free. As the announcement says, “Free listeners will hear a mix of new feature announcements, messages from partner brands, notifications about exclusive content, and other helpful tips.” So, you know, commercials. This move isn’t that surprising for Rdio. Just yesterday, Spotify dropped its time limit on its free service, which previously limited freeloaders to unlimited streaming for six months. On mobile, Rdio’s free version remains unchanged where it previously offered users a radio-like (or Pandora-like) experience where stations streamed for free but users could not select individual songs. Last month Spotify launched a similar service. Rdio’s longevity has long been called into question. Recent layoffs and restructuring seems to indicate not everything is well in Rdio’s house. And the competition is about to get even more tight. The streaming music scene is about to get a new player. Backed by AT&T, Beats Music launches on January 21st. The service is said to be sold in AT&T stores and likely bundled in some fashion with AT&T phones and included on wireless plans. Rdio, and for that matter, Spotify, need to grab all the marketshare they can before this new player enters the game. Free is a good, if desperate, way to do it, too. As Janet and Luther once proclaimed, the best things in life are free. |
Intel Beats Q4 Revenue Forecasts With Top Line Of $13.8B, Misses On Profit With EPS Of $0.51 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | Today Intel reported its fourth-quarter earnings, including revenue of $13.83 billion and earnings per share of $0.51. Investors Intel to earn $0.52 per share on revenue of $13.72 billion. In regular trading, Intel eased under a percent. In after hours trading following its mixed earnings Intel is down several percent. In the quarter preceding, Intel beat expectations by 9 percent. The sharp decline in its share price in after-hours trading could indicate that investors had somewhat bearish takes on its quarter, and to have Intel fail to best that low threshold came as a surprise. For the full year, Intel had revenue of $52.7 billion and net income of $9.6 billion. Earlier this morning Best Buy reported weak sales, causing its share price to fall dramatically. It cast a pall over the consumer electronics market, a part of the economy that Intel competes in dramatically. Early reads of Intel’s first-quarter projections have them in line with investor expectations. The company noted “signs of stabilization in the PC” market in its note to investors. After a historically bad year for personal computers, market analysts are expecting a more mild decline in this calendar year, and a stabilization over the 300 million yearly unit mark. Provided that intel can carve out a growing niche in non-traditional devices, the PC market’s decline could be almost a rear-view issue for its revenue in coming years. It’s important to note that Intel’s mostly in-line earnings could indicate a somewhat solid quarter for other PC market participants, such as HP and Microsoft. If Intel sold lots of chips, others might have sold lots of boxes. Its $110 million revenue beat could be viewed optimistically in that regard. However, it’s still too soon to tell how the larger consumer electronics market fared in the final quarter of 2013. |
Ogle Outfits And Share Your Unique Style With WearToday | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | Fashion might not save the world, but it can be a creative outlet that gives you the confidence to improve your life. That’s the ethos behind , built by veteran Facebook product designer and eccentric dresser Alexandre Roche. Launching today on iOS in invite-only beta, WearToday lets you photograph your current outfit, ID your clothes and share full-body shots with tags of your threads. Roche dropped out of college to work at Facebook where he worked on the now-defunct Listen With Friends music feature, as well as Facebook Questions, the search typeahead, friends lists, and privacy. After quitting in February 2012 and taking some time off, he tells me he became enthralled with cheap, outlandish vintage clothes because “you buy something you think you could never wear but then you do!” Roche noticed people were sharing a lot of outfits to Instagram, but the square format and lack of metadata about names and brands made it less than ideal. So together with his dad, also a snazzy dresser and the of , they came up with WearToday. It’s a community where people don’t have to feel shy about sharing their outfits. You (on the wait list as it’s currently invite-only) for WearToday with your phone number and Instagram account, which helps you find friends to follow. The app also suggests some stylish folks to follow for inspiration. Each time someone you follow posts a new outfit, you get a push notification. To post to WearToday, you stand up your phone, start the camera’s 10-second timer, and take a long-distance head-to-toe selfie. You can snap multiple takes if necessary and choose the best pic. Then you tag the different parts of your outfit with brands and Foursquare store locations using a smart little auto-crop tool that homes in on your shoes, shirt, or whatever. When you post to WearToday, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, the photo shows you all suited up on the left and the tags on the right. If it gets that far, WearToday could monetize by linking you through to buy the outfits you see in the app, or maybe offering on-demand fashion consulting. For a bootstrapped v1, WearToday feels pretty slick, but there are some big issues. Push notifications work at invite-only scale, but could get very noisy if WearToday becomes popular, and there’s no way to mute certain people. It’s pretty damn tough to get a good photo of yourself since WearToday uses the iPhone’s higher-def rear camera and you can’t see yourself. Each shot takes 10 seconds so it’s slow to keep shooting until you get it right. You can’t enter a text description of your clothing items, and have to tag at least a brand or location which isn’t always available, like if it’s some handcrafted piece of jewelry from a craft fair. WearToday’s biggest challenge will be proving to people the value of a dedicated outfit-sharing app. Other vertical-specific photo apps like Justin Bieber’s selfie sharer Shots Of Me have tanked as people just end up using Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to share. Plus there are already fewer mobile-first fashion photo startups like , , , and most notably . WearToday will have to beat the odds and focus on strong attention to detail, an easier outfit-sharing flow and loyalty from fashionistas if it’s going to survive. Roche tells me sharing on WearToday matters because “It’s an expression of who you are. It’s an expression of how we feel independent of one another. I think encouraging people to be creative is a really good thing.” Still, it’s easy to deride WearToday as one of those small-minded Silicon Valley startups no one needs. “Another photo sharing app? Uggh.” And yes, from one perspective the whole thing is silly and likely to fail. But have you ever felt that rush of confidence when you’re decked out in a fresh outfit you love? It’s the feeling that lets you create your own luck, win the girl, nail the interview, or just feel happy. When you wear something that captures your identity, you attract people who like you for the real you. If the app can inspire us to express who we are on the inside, could do some good. Even if it’s as silly as Roche’s outfits. |
Housecall App Pulls Up The Long-Tail Of Services From Appliance Repair To Plumbing | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | In the wake of and , there are still plenty of other startups doing home services on-demand from your mobile phone. , out of San Diego, is a startup that handles the long-tail of services like electrical or swimming pool work and carpet cleanings. The team came out of Qualcomm Labs, where CEO Ian Heidt had been working on a context-awareness platform called Gimbal that would infer meaning from a smartphone’s sensors. “We wanted to start our own new thing. That initiative had done really well,” he said. “We were super intrigued by people making new mobile businesses out of these older-school ideas. With , we really wanted to accentuate that relationship between the homeowner and the service provider.” The six-person startup currently offers more than 20 types of services, including housekeeping, junk removal, plumbing, painting, locksmith work, window cleaning and so on. So while other platforms like Homejoy laser in on cleanings, has a much more expansive range of offerings. They follow in the footsteps of other web-based platforms like RedBeacon, that went on to . “When we launched it, it was literally just us addressing any of the places where home and technology like home automation intersect,” Heidt said. “Then we started bringing in all these other professionals from other categories.” When you sign up with , you pick categories that you want work finished in and then you’ll see service providers. You can look up their services and prices, and then book them if they seem appealing. So far, is only available in San Diego, and they’re expanding it carefully by ZIP code after ZIP code. They haven’t disclosed their fee splits with providers. “At the outset, we were basically marketing it through our personal networks and the people they knew well,” Heidt said. “That has carried it a long way.” The company has raised $1.5 million from investors, including e.ventures, and was part of EvoNexus, a pro bono technology incubator based in San Diego. |
BrandProject Aims To Apply The Betaworks Model To Consumer Products And Goods | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | A new seed-stage investment fund and ‘company creation’ startup called launched today, with offices in Toronto and New York, and a team of founders who, between them, have a boatload of experience building, shipping and marketing consumer hardware and software for some of the biggest brands on the planet. The five-person founding team includes founder and CEO Andrew Black, who’s worked with Nike, Virgin and Lego; Stanley Hainsworth, a former VP of Starbucks and in-store branding/packaging expert who invented the Gatorade bottle; Jay Bhatti, CTO and former director of a boutique search marketing firm that counted Barneys and Coach as clients; and Sarah Prevette, former founder of entrepreneurial social network Sprouter and startup publication BetaKit (disclosure: I previously worked for BetaKit when Prevette was editor in chief). The team will be working in what Prevette described in an interview as a “ “-style approach to incubating talent and early-stage companies that aim to create consumer software and physical products, sometimes investing money with the $12 million initial they’ve amassed from private investors, the founding team itself, and BDC Venture Capital. “The model is really flexible,” Prevette explained. “We look for really exciting transformational ideals that have traction in a wide variety of consumer verticals. We look at everything from health, to fitness, to beauty, to home consumer hardware and consumer tech. We’re also always looking for phenomenal people with a track record of success, but people come to us at different stages.” BrandProject is incubating some ideas sourced from the founders that solve problems they’ve been having themselves, for instance, and they’re seeking “industry experts who share that passion” to help build those products and bring them to market. They’ve also already quietly worked with , , and via investment and assistance in growing their business. The consumer focus with a willingness to bet on hardware, especially for an incubator and early stage investor that has one foot planted firmly in Canada, is a rare thing. The investment climate locally in Toronto seems to have become more cautious lately, which has led to some , and both investors and accelerators turning their attention to more enterprise and B2B companies, which represent less risk relative to the fickle consumer market. Prevette says to expect to start seeing more from BrandProject and the companies it’s helping build very soon, but while the concept has a solid proven foundation with the likes of betaworks and Idealab, there’s still a lot of risk inherent in the model. BrandProject does have a team with a solid history of building and selling consumer products, however, and it shouldn’t have any trouble attracted talented people on the Canadian side of the border where resources for entrepreneurs interested in chasing the consumer market are relatively few and far between. |
YesGraph Simplifies The Process Of Using Referrals To Hire The Best Candidates | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | For companies that want to scale up personnel fast, hiring can be a big problem. Conventional wisdom says that the best candidates typically get referrals from existing employees within the company, but those referrals can be tough to come by has a solution for finding top talent, by highlighting people that employees already know. YesGraph simplifies the process of finding new workers by asking existing employees to refer people in their social networks. But rather than simply asking them to name one or two people that they’ve enjoyed working with or would be happy to refer, YesGraph surfaces people in their social networks and asks whether they’d like to refer them or not. Those looking to hire send a link to employees they’re looking for referrals from. Those employees then connect YesGraph with their accounts on Facebook and LinkedIn, and the platform does the work of finding connections who might be qualified. Thanks to the data that people share on those networks, YesGraph can easily recognize candidates who have the requisite experience and skills for a certain job. What happens next is a kind of hot-or-not for talent acquisition. Users are given a feed of possible candidates and asked if they would recommend them or not. The results get fed back to the recruiter, who overall will have a better list of qualified candidates than just searching LinkedIn, and those candidates are more likely to fit a company’s culture than if they came without referrals. Early trial customers for YesGraph include Airbnb, Stripe, and Pinterest, but founder Ivan Kirigin (who has worked for Facebook and Dropbox in the past), says the platform isn’t just for tech companies. “They’re a certain-size company that’s worried about scaling the referral process,” he said. But the same rules could be applied to any organization that is looking to find new talent. As for growth, Kirigin hopes that the viral nature of the product will lead to greater adoption over time. While it’s a B2B play, “the core product is that you invite others to make recommendations,” he says. YesGraph is free at launch, but it expects to begin charging for usage on a SaaS seat license basis at some point in the future, providing advanced features to paying users. The company has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes NextView Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Founder Collective, Quotidian Ventures, Rivet Ventures, Michael Birch, Gustaf Alströmer, Lance White, Tom Williams, and Adam Gross. |
The NSA Collects Hundreds Of Millions Of Global SMS Messages Every Day | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | Another day, another NSA story involving dragnet surveillance of global communications. Out this morning in is news of Dishfire, an NSA program that collects nearly 200 million text messages each day. The program is notable for its scale, and what the Guardian quotes as its “untargeted” nature. It is not collecting the SMS notes of targets, but instead of apparently random individuals on a larger scale. The GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s NSA equivalent, can access the information, with some safeguards in place regarding its own citizens. According to a GCHQ document, the program collects “pretty much everything it can,” making it likely a controversial effort. The program is broad enough that documents indicate that analysts are asked to constrain searches to no more than 1,800 phone numbers at a time. Want to know if you are protected from Dishfire’s reach? Here you go: The note warns analysts they must be careful to make sure they use the form’s toggle before searching, as otherwise the database will return the content of the UK messages – which would, without a warrant, cause the analyst to “unlawfully be seeing the content of the SMS”. The note also adds that the NSA automatically removes all “US-related SMS” from the database, so it is not available for searching. I’m sure you feel better. It is edifying to know that in the U.K., a whole user interface sits between your right to privacy and an analyst who might forget to click a button. At least the NSA deletes everything that it considers “US-related.” I feel secure. The above story is almost boring. The NSA collecting billions of texts a month from untargeted sources? Heaven forbid it behave in a manner unbecoming of an international actor. What’s depressing is that our lackadaisical emotional response is unwarranted: we should be less happy than we are. No one thinks that nations shouldn’t, or don’t spy. The current question instead is what is the proper backdrop for privacy in the digital age? The above implies a future of no privacy at all. That’s less than good, from my perspective. President Barack Obama will speak to the issue on Friday. Tune in. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 29 | null |
Hinge Hits SF With Its App For Finding True Love, Not Just Hookups | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | Tinder is great if you care about looks, not personality. But if you want a simple dating app that matches you based on interests, education, and profession, there’s . Today it launches in San Francisco. In city of quirky and sometimes socially awkward people, Hinge’s focus on brains and background over beauty could help people find a Jedi in the streets, not just a Sith in the sheets. Hinge thrived in its hometown of Washington, D.C., after launching in February with its you might want to date. It saw strong 25% monthly growth and an average of 40 logins per month as it expanded to New York and Boston. In November it led by Great Oaks and ‘s Social+Capital Partnership who see the dating industry being transformed by mobile, and verticalizing around different amounts of commitment. You can check out a quick demo of Hinge and my interview with founder Justin McLeod below. [tc_5min code=” “] At first glance, Hinge’s and apps look a lot like Tinder with their swipe to approve or dismiss matches, and the option to chat if you and someone else like each other. But Hinge is striving to create a much different usage pattern. Rather than endlessly swiping through strangers, Hinge gives you a limited set of potential matches each day, represented by a line of dots on the left. Hinge wants you to seriously consider each person and check out their listed biographical info rather than make a snap judgment based on their first photo. And since you have friends in common, it feels less creepy to talk or go on a date with someone. Hinge’s secret weapon is what I call “The Romance Graph.” The app pulls in your interests, work history, education, religion, and mutual friend list from Facebook (but never posts there). Hinge lets you edit these and also add some personal adjectives — kind of like more family-friendly Lulu hashtags — so you can say you’re a “science nerd,” “animal lover,” “die-hard carnivore” or “after-partier.” Ok, yes, that’s me. Then Hinge looks at who you like and dislike so it knows if you always dismiss short guys, or vegans, or even people of certain religions or ethnicities. It combines all this data to show you people you’re most likely to be into, without forcing you to answer awkward questions about what you’re looking for in other people. McLeod tells me this Romance Graph approach has the average female user approving of 30 percent of their matches and guys approving around 50 percent. By doing data-driven matchmaking, Hinge has succeeded where other friends-of-friends dating apps like Yoke, Acquaintable, Thread, and 3 Degrees have failed to gain traction. And since your connection goes deeper than looks, it’s more likely that two-way approvals and chat threads lead to offline dates and relationships. Hinge even suggests dates you could go on by looking through your Date Spot preferences. So if you both, say, you’re in to “museums,” it might recommend going to check out some art together. Eventually, Hinge plans to monetize by selling premium services that enhance users’ experiences. Those might include getting more matches, being able to select someone you want to keep appearing in front of, or being able to tell if someone read your message. Hinge has an uphill battle in competing with and was seeing 400 million swipes a day plus 4 million matches per day in November. Tinder has solidified a norm in swipe-based dating apps that you have nearly infinite potential matches, so you can flippantly dismiss or approve people en masse. Hinge will have to fight to make people slow down and give their matches real thought. Tinder has also expressed interest in facilitating more than just hookups, and its playful style may prove more addictive. But almost everyone dates at some point in their life, so there’s likely enough room for both Hinge and Tinder to succeed. In fact, I bet we see even more verticalization in mobile dating around different subcultures and relationship styles. Perhaps there’s room for an ever more “let’s have sex now” app than Tinder or a more “let’s just hold hands” app than Hinge. For now, though, San Franciscans have a new way to find someone who loves them for who they really are with . |
Google Brings Dart To Runnable, Gives Developers An Easy Way To Try It | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 16 | , Google’s JavaScript competitor, launched its 1.0 version . While Google’s language has quickly caught on with developers, though, Dart has been struggling to attract them. In an effort to get more developers on board, Dart today became the first project to on one of ‘s . Runnable, which launched a few months ago, wants to become something akin to a “YouTube of Code.” Instead of videos, it hosts a library of code snippets that are all executable right on the site. For the most part, the Runnable team audits all the code that goes on the site, but it also recently announced these new Code Channels, which are a way for vendors to integrate their frameworks with its platform. This, the company argues, makes it easier for developers to take new frameworks for a spin, and that’s clearly what the Dart team has in mind, too. “We’re thrilled to have been selected by Google to host the new Dart framework,” said Runnable CEO Yash Kumar in a statement today. “Dart will be an extremely valuable addition to our ever-growing code library, making our library even more useful for developers. This is a great example of how Code Channels can help any company or developer let the world discover, run and use reusable code, and we’re excited to see the projects Dart allows our users to create.” Given that the Dart virtual machine is only available in an experimental Chrome build called , it’s no surprise that on Runnable focus on the Dart-to-JavaScript compiler that allows developers to write Dart code and still run it in all modern browsers. Getting Google on board is a nice win for Runnable, of course. Today’s announcement also validates the company’s overall model and will likely give it the visibility necessary to get even more well-known frameworks and vendors on board in the next few months. |
Walmart Begins Testing Online Grocery Shopping With Local Store Pickup Option In Denver | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | the retailer’s on-demand shopping service offering home delivery of general merchandise, including in some cases, groceries, is expanding its test in the Denver market today to also include a local pick-up option. Denver area customers will now be able to order their groceries online, then pick up at a nearby store – without having to set foot inside the store. Instead, customers will pull up to a designated pick-up spot on the side of the store, as directed. Or, in the case of those stores where a drive-through pharmacy is available, they’ll pick up their groceries from the pharmacy window. Depending on the location, they’ll either dial a phone number or enter an order into a touchscreen kiosk to let Walmart staff know they’ve arrived. Then it’s only a matter of popping the trunk. To get started, customers will first place their orders online, and Walmart will call them directly when the order is ready. The idea is that you could effectively “do your grocery shopping” in the morning, or while on your lunch break, then swing by the store on your way home to pick them up. However, Walmart believes many customers will still park and come into the store, even after placing the order online. This is because, in surveys the retail giant has conducted, 55 percent of shoppers said the idea of grocery pick-up (as opposed to home delivery) appealed to them because it would give them a chance to grab the items they forgot when placing the original online order. While in store, they may also come across other things to buy that weren’t on their list, Walmart hopes. But to be clear, the local grocery pick-up option is meant to replace home deliveries, nor is the home grocery delivery experiment being called a bust. “It’s all about choice,” Walmart’s Director of Public Relations, Ravi Jariwala, explains. The retailer understands customer behavior is shifting, he adds, but the customers are the ones who will dictate what’s most convenient for them. “At this point, we’re really trying to assess what our customers are gravitating toward, and the good news is that I don’t think this is an either/or [situation],” says Jariwala. Denver is one of the few areas where Walmart To Go offers home delivery of grocery items, and one of the most recent at that. – making it the first market outside of Walmart’s e-commerce headquarters in Silicon Valley to receive access to the service. To date, “hundreds” of grocery deliveries have been processed through Walmart To Go in Denver, and the service has been rated by 90 percent of users as 4 or 5 out of 5 in follow-up customer surveys. The retailer has also been testing grocery delivery in San Jose and San Francisco since 2011 where thousands of customers and orders have been placed to date. There, the company is in the process of expanding its delivery fleet from 7 to 10 trucks. Meanwhile, Walmart in Northern Virginia (outside D.C.), Philadelphia, and Minneapolis, in addition to San Jose and San Francisco as of October 2012. All the various services – same-day delivery, grocery delivery, and now in-store grocery pickup – are offered under the “Walmart To Go” brand, which can be a bit confusing. And to further muddy the waters, Walmart has offered a “site-to-store” service, too, which lets customers shop online, then pick up at their local store. In some cases, those pick-ups can also be same-day when items are in stock. This particular service has been available nationwide since 2007, which gives Walmart extensive experience in managing the operational side of local pick-ups, at least. Walmart has to hire and train “Walmart To Go” associates who handle picking and bagging the items, which are then held in the back of the store and kept cold if necessary for local pick-ups, as well as drivers for the home deliveries. Though Amazon has been eating away at Walmart on the e-commerce front, Walmart’s competitive advantage when it comes to pick-ups and deliveries are the locations of its stores. Unlike Amazon, whose warehouses are situated well for its e-commerce business, two-thirds of the U.S. population is within 5 miles of one of Walmart’s 4,100 U.S. stores, which means the company has more flexibility in offering both pickups and deliveries alike. For now, Walmart’s home delivery service is significantly cheaper than competitor , which is available in L.A., San Francisco, and Seattle, and costs customers $299 annually. Walmart charges only $5-$7 per order. Both services have minimum orders (Walmart’s is $30; Amazon’s is $35). Of course, both companies are taking a loss on these experiments while they test. The question for now is which option – or as it may turn out, which suite of options – can reach profitability? Grocery pick-up in Denver is live now in 11 stores. |
Yahoo Has Closed The Tomfoolery Acquisition, Will Shut Down Anchor, Team To Work For Bonforte | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | We now have more details about the deal between and , an enterprise app studio co-founded by ex-Yahoo and ex-AOL alums, which and have reported is getting acquired by Yahoo. According to a source close to the deal, the acquisition has indeed now closed, and Yahoo will officially announce it as soon as this evening or tomorrow morning. The intention was to put the news out at the end of this week or the beginning of next week, but with the story coming out already, the company has sped up the timing. Tomfoolery’s existing business, including its , will be shut down. Whether the concepts behind Anchor and the other things Tomfoolery was planning will be reborn as consumer or enterprise products at Yahoo is not clear. All four co-founders — CEO Kakul Srivastava, chief product officer Sol Lipman, VP of platform Simon Batistoni and VP of mobile Ethan Nagel — will be joining Yahoo SVP Jeff Bonforte to work on products in Yahoo’s Communications division. Current products in the division include Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Groups, Contacts, Calendar, covering both the mobile and desktop versions. It’s not clear whether all of Tomfoolery’s other 10 or so employees are coming over to Yahoo. Bringing more product and engineering talent into Yahoo makes sense for the company right now. As I wrote earlier today when looking at Yahoo’s and declining sales, it has put a lot of investment into building out its portfolio of services, but in a business model that is predicated on advertising, Yahoo will need to continue to do more of that product development to grow its traffic. (And if it’s going to be predicated on something else, such as paid services, then those products will need to be built, too.) There are some ties between Bonforte and Tomfoolery that point to this being an acquisition of a known quantity, so to speak. Before leaving to start relationship and contact management startup Xobni — which was eventually — Bonforte had been a Yahoo employee, working on search and communications products. Srivastava is the former GM of Flickr, where she oversaw the Yahoo-owned photo network during its biggest phase of growth, from 37,000 users to over 50 million. She also worked on Yahoo Mail in her time at the company. Batistoni helped to build the monetization and community aspects of Flickr. A connection to another Tomfoolery exec appears to go even further back. One of Bonforte’s was founder and CEO of , an early player in online storage. According to Lipman’s , he had worked briefly at i-Drive, too. More immediately, before Tomfoolery, Lipman had been a mobile VP at AOL (where he joined after AOL ). We are still trying to get our own confirmation on the price of the deal. The WSJ reported it as $16 million. If correct, that’s not a bad return for a company that had raised only from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, David Tisch, and a number of Yahoo and AOL veterans including Jerry Yang, Brad Garlinghouse, Ash Patel and Sam Pullara. |
Yahoo Is Shutting Down IntoNow, Nearly Three Years After Acquisition | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | IntoNow — the second-screen app that Yahoo , just 12 weeks after — is being shut down by its parent company. As of last week, IntoNow was taken off the Apple App Store and Google Play, and an email sent to users as of March 31. For those who might have forgotten, IntoNow was one of the many second-screen TV apps that popped up in the early part of the decade, offering users the ability to “check in” to the television shows they were watching, and share their viewing habits with others on social networks that people actually used, like Facebook and Twitter. (The idea was as preposterous then as it seems now, but thanks to the relative early success of Foursquare back in those days, eager app makers were trying to get people to check into every damn thing.) IntoNow had at least a technological advantage over the other social TV apps out there, in that it had built-in auto content recognition (ACR) technology — which generally meant that it knew what you were watching before you did. It could, in a sense, identify what you were watching and check you into that program automatically. That had lots of awesome implications for people who cared about stuff like advertising, because suddenly marketers could know with some certainty what shows people were watching while tooling around on their mobile phones and tablets, and hey — wouldn’t it be great if brands could serve up the same ads on the iPad that they were watching on the TV? Consumers were understandably less enthused about that prospect, which is probably why none of the social TV apps out there have ever gone anywhere, IntoNow included. The app itself is being shut down, but its technology lives on. Yahoo notes in a statement that apps like Yahoo Smart TV, and the new Loops feature in the Yahoo Sports iOS 7 app, will continue to leverage IntoNow’s ACR feature. And let’s not forget probably the most important thing Yahoo got out of the acquisition was former IntoNow CEO Adam Cahan, who has been bumped up the ladder as part of Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo. He’s SVP of Mobile and Emerging Products at the company, helping to manage its portfolio of mobile apps and identify hot young startups for Yahoo to acqui-hire. Anyway, for those of you who haven’t yet given up on the whole “second-screen thing,” there’s still hope. i.TV, which at a fire-sale price late last year, relaunched the thing with a new name — . Consider it the circle of life or whatever. Yahoo statement on the shutdown below: As part of our ongoing efforts to sharpen our focus, IntoNow will no longer be available for download in iTunes or Google Play as of January 24, 2014. Additionally, as of March 31st the IntoNow app will no longer
operate. The core IntoNow technology will live on through other products and apps, like Yahoo Smart TV and the new Loops feature in the Yahoo Sports iOS7 app. |
Tech Stocks Slip On Earnings Weakness | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | It has been a difficult 24 hours for tech earnings, with Apple, Yahoo, and VMware losing ground after reporting their quarterly results. Apple, despite growing its revenue and earnings per share, reported flat net profit and an iPhone sales figure that, while higher than the year prior, . Its stock fell in after-hours trading and today dropped a corresponding 7.91 percent in regular trading. Its shares are flat in after-hours trading. Yahoo reported its , showing revenue decline but an earnings per share win. Despite rising search revenues — for which Microsoft is at — Yahoo’s revenue decline highlights continued weakness in its core product makeup. If it can’t grow its top line, its earnings per share have a low ceiling on growth. As TechCrunch reported earlier: Display advertising, excluding traffic acquisition costs, was $491 million down 6% compared to $520 million for Q4 of 2012. Display revenue ex-TAC was $1,737 million for the full year of 2013, a 9 percent decrease compared to $1,899 million for the prior year. Losing revenue despite growing the very user base — mobile for Yahoo, of course — that is focused on could highlight a weakness in its business plan. Investors sent Yahoo down 2.8 percent in after-hours trading after bidding up its shares during regular trading. Yahoo’s quarter was mixed, but in all frankness until Yahoo manages year-over-year top-line growth the company is little more than a declining cash flow lashed to equity in a foreign tech company. And finally, VMware is down 2.3 percent in after-hours trading after reporting in decent year-over-year revenue growth. Facebook reports tomorrow, and Twitter will be clocking in next week. Tech earnings continue, but the last 24 hours haven’t been very easy on the industry. |
Google Brings Chrome Apps To Android And iOS | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | Google’s offline are about to find their way to both Android and iOS. Using Apache’s well-known open-source for turning web apps into native apps, Google today launched a developer preview of for building native apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Using these tools, developers can take their existing Chrome Apps, wrap them into a native shell and submit them to Google Play and Apple’s App Store. Google is making a wide variety of Chrome APIs available for these apps, including ways to authenticate users using OAuth2, push messaging, storage and alarms. On Android, the toolchain also supports payments and rich notifications. In addition, developers also get access to the full range of APIs available , which includes a wide range of services for every popular mobile platform. For web developers, Google says, this new toolchain will give them an easy workflow “for extending the reach of Chrome Apps to users on mobile platforms.” To get started, developers on all platforms need to install Node.js version 0.10.0 or higher, as well as a number of , depending on which platform they are developing on and for. All of the Chrome Apps have been available on the desktop for quite a while now (with the Mac coming online last December). As far as I am aware, there haven’t been any breakthrough Chrome Apps yet that have taken the desktop by storm, though. Today’s launch may just motivate more developers to write Chrome Apps, however, given that they know they will be able to easily port them over to mobile as well. |
Here’s Where To Watch Obama’s 2014 State Of The Union Online | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | PRISM. Net neutrality. Patent reform. The government’s hand in tech has perhaps never been stronger, and the tech matters that have arisen in the last year affect . It’s a good idea to watch the President’s State Of The Union, but if you’re someone who even remotely cares about technology, this year’s is one you should make an effort to tune into. Fortunately, they’ve made it pretty darn easy to watch this year, even for those of us who ditched the cable box ages ago. There are two English-language versions of the stream: one “enhanced” version with all sorts of stuff (read: lots, and lots of tweets) tossed up on screen, and one standard, less-noisy stream. I prefer the latter, so I’ve embedded both. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5djtYZuqz_8?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkRBi45pScQ?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] If you’re tempted to hit that play button before the show starts, it’ll work — but don’t expect much more than a static slide for the next few hours. |
Opera 19 Brings Back Bookmarks Bar, Adds Support For More Extensions | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | When Opera’s desktop browser moved to Google’s Blink rendering engine last year, it also a number of features, including bookmark syncing and its bookmarks bar. The company brought back syncing after a short while and with today’s , it is also finally bringing back the bookmarks bar. What the browser is still missing, though, is a regular bookmarks menu. #facepalm Unsurprisingly, Opera’s user base was anything but happy when the bookmarks menu and bookmarks bar suddenly disappeared. Opera that its switch to the new engine also meant building a new native user interface, so it only launched with a basic set of tools. Given that early versions of Opera featured everything from multi-pane browsing to sidebar tabs and lots of other goodies, the new version came as quite a shock to Opera’s small but dedicated user base. Over the last few versions, the team has been adding new features again, though given that the company seems to be de-emphasizing the desktop browser, it remains to be seen if it will ever get back to being as feature-rich as it used to be. With this update, Opera is also adding support for more extensions. In total, the now features over 700 plug-ins. The only other new feature in this update is the ability to turn any image into a browser wallpaper for your theme. Opera was always a very capable browser, but it stood out from the competition because it offered so many built-in features. At some point, it even included a , though nobody ever what to do with that. Now, it’s a very stripped-down version of its former self and it remains to be seen if that will help it gain new users in the long run. |
.Guru, .Bike, .Singles And 4 Other Domains Will Open For Business Tomorrow | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | If you are looking for a good domain name, your choices are about to get more interesting. Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to register a .bike, .clothing, .guru, .holdings, .plumbing, .singles and .ventures domain name through numerous worldwide. Last year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) already made four new gTLDs in Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic scripts available, but this is the first time new gTLDs will become available in Latin characters. The domains that are rolling out this week were delegated to , the largest of the registries for the new domain names. In total, Donuts applied for and is now under contract for just over 100 of the new gTLDs. Next week, for example, users will be able to register .camera, .equipment, .estate, .gallery, .graphics, .lighting and .photography. Going forward, the company plans to roll out new names on a weekly basis. As Donuts’ VP for communications and industry relations Mason Cole told me, the new names will be available “as soon as someone registers the name and sets the nameservers to point to the site. That could happen as early as tomorrow.” Donuts, for example, was permitted to register for itself and it’s already pointing to the company’s homepage today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eZY9HpEsSJ4 Users who are interested in buying these names will be able to head to a number of registrars, including the likes of GoDaddy, Web.com and 1&1 Internets, to register their names tomorrow. Donuts applied for over 300 domain names, and ICANN has already signed 264 registry agreements for names like .autos, .frogans, .glass, .maison, .pics, .toy and others, with many more to follow. There is something to be said for having more choices when it comes to domain names, but it remains to be seen if users will even care about these. The standard .com domain names (or local TLDs like .de, .uk, etc.) have become so closely linked with how we use the Internet that it’ll take a long time for those habits to change. If the earlier rollout of .info, .aero, .jobs and similar new domains is any indication, it’ll take a very long time for anybody to warm up to many of these new names. On the other hand, though, we’ve seen a fair share of companies that now use .io, .ly, .co and .fm, so these new names may just have a shot. For the most part, though, I expect that many people will register these domain names and then point them to their existing .com addresses. |
Gillmor Gang: Turn Turn Turn | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — christen the maiden voyage, or shakeout cruise, of Newtek’s new TriCaster 860. The learning curve is intense, but the results are worth it. Hope you enjoy the show. Recorded in HD but not yet released in that format. I’d be remiss if I didn’t take note of the passing of Pete Seeger, a national treasure and family friend. As a child my rot hers and I sat in thrall as he and the other Weavers played in our living room in Woodstock. My dad was a good friend of Pete, but isn’t that the way everybody who came in contact with him in his long and exhilarating life. A time to every purpose, under heaven A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Cheap Laser-Sintering Printers Are Coming Thanks To The Expiration Of A Key Patent | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | Today is a big day for 3D printing: Patent is set to expire and will open up the possibility for makers to use laser sintering — shooting a laser at a layer of nylon powder — in cheaper devices, essentially opening the technology to the small maker. The patent is fairly clear on what sintering is. It describes an “apparatus for selectively sintering a layer of powder to produce a part made from a plurality of sintered layers and the apparatus includes a computer controlling a laser to direct the laser energy onto the powder to produce a sintered mass.” This means anything that shoots a laser at powder could run afoul of this patent much as stereolithography patent. Most larger “professional-quality” printers use laser sintering and you can create homogenous, solid-looking objects with stable structures using the technique. Does this mean we’ll have sintering printers in our homes next year? Possibly, but given the materials needed and the components involved I could see prices going down but not dropping until there is mass acceptance of 3D printing. FDM printers that deposit layers of plastic is still the cheapest method, but sintered parts are almost seamless, creating a cohesive whole that is very useful in prototyping and engineering. In short, however, it’s a great day for makers. |
Marissa Mayer On Yahoo’s Fired COO: De Castro “Not A Fit,” No Plans To Replace Him | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer offered some brief comments about during today’s earnings webcast. The company announced earlier this month that De Castro, who joined Yahoo from Google in 2012, was leaving. The move that was resulting from De Castro’s difficulties turning around the ad business. (In , Yahoo said sales and display advertising declined 6 percent year-over-year.) When asked about the departure, Mayer said, “Ultimately, Henrique was not a fit” for the company: “It was a conclusion we tried very hard to avoid.” She added that there are no plans to replace him — instead, she touted the strength of Yahoo’s sales team and said this gives her “the opportunity to be much more involved” on the revenue side of the company. During the call, about early traffic to Yahoo’s new tech and food sites. One of the analysts on the call asked for more details, and Mayer replied, “Out of respect for Henrique, I’d rather not comment on the past and on his performance, but rather on what we’re going to do going forward.” She reiterated her plans to work more closely with the sales and the media teams, and to create “a more flat organization” overall. |
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