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Users Should Be Able To Sue Tech Companies Over Spying, Says Sen. Rand Paul | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | Libertarian hero and presidential hopeful Senator Rand Paul tells me that tech companies should not be granted legal immunity from consumers suing them over government spying. The Patriot Act gave telecommunications companies immunity from being sued for allowing Intelligence agencies to tap phone and Internet lines. NSA head General Keith Alexander is to extend even more vague protections for tech companies, but Paul hints that Google, Facebook and Twitter should have to pay for any illicit programs. “I don’t like immunity. I think, really, you should honor your contract,” Paul told me at the State of The Net Conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Paul did not offer more details about how exactly this opinion could enter legislation. Tech companies are often compelled to turn over data and gagged from speaking about the coerced cooperation. In other instances (if they are to be believed), tech companies of surveillance of undersea cables. Still, in other instances, tech companies could be more cooperative with agencies on activity that is eventually deemed illegal. The immunity of telecom companies was upheld in , but both Paul and the NSA feel there isn’t sufficient coverage for this latest spying scandal. “This is something they [tech companies] may not like me for, but we made a mistake in the Patriot Act by saying that we immunize the telephone companies and Internet people from being sued. I want a contract with Google and I want them to adhere to that contract.” Notably, if either Paul’s to end bulk collection passes, or against the NSA is upheld, this might not be much of an issue. Interestingly enough, however, Paul said that there should not be any government restrictions on the way tech companies collect personal data, so long as users agree to it. Google especially has come under intense scrutiny for they treat user data, despite notifying users. Paul, it appears, will be a friend to the big tech companies when it comes to privacy regulations. We’ll have more on our interview with Senator Paul on Libertarianism and Silicon Valley soon. [ ] |
BBM Is Coming To Gingerbread Android Phones | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | BBM will soon be available for Android phones running Gingerbread. This is a shockingly brilliant move which allows BBM to fully compete in developing countries where BBM is already an established brand, but current smartphones are still running the legacy operating system. As , despite being generations old, Android 2.1.x Gingerbread still powers 21% of Android phones. A lot of those devices are located in emerging markets where new messaging apps, like WhatsApp, Line, and Facebook Messenger, are . Recent numbers suggest that BlackBerry cannot count on consumers in these markets, or any market for that matter, to jump on the BBM ship by buying one of its smartphones, so the company is making it available on competitors’ hardware. As the current version of BlackBerry sinks into obscurity, a new BlackBerry is emerging. For better or worse, this version seems a bit more lean and focused. Today’s update to BlackBerry OS 10 feels like a company clearing its current product pipe as it moves away from the cut-throat consumer hardware market. A public beta prior to the full launch in late February. |
Automatic’s Smart Driving Assistant Can Now Turn Your Car Into An iBeacon | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | ‘s smart driving assistant, which combines a , was designed to provide vehicle owners with new tools to understand how they can get more out of their car’s performance. Well, it recently added iBeacon functionality, which could fundamentally change the way users and their cars interact with other things around them. iBeacon transmitters uses Bluetooth 4.0 technology, which can send specific information to nearby devices based on location. In retail environments, like in , iBeacons are being tested as a way to transmit targeted information to users when they’re in proximity to certain sensors. As my colleague Matthew Panzarino , nearly “ .” The latest update to the Automatic app actually makes its own hardware device into an iBeacon, enabling users to transmit or receive information from other nearby sensors or devices. By doing so, Automatic opens up opportunities beyond the typical targeted retail notifications that are being tested today. Co-founder Thejo Kote says Automatic can enable a whole bunch of new car-specific applications with potential partners. Applying iBeacon technology to a vehicle could make it easier for people to pay for things like parking, or gas fill-ups, for instance — making the experience much better than it is today. For right now, those types of applications are still theoretical, but Automatic is interested in seeing where it could go. The company was able to add the new feature through a software update, which Kote says is unique to its platform. “The good thing with Automatic is that this is something that just comes along for free,” he said, noting that adding future applications is as easy as adding a new feature through software. |
Sources: Coin Is Raising More Cash | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | , a YC-backed company looking to thin down your wallet, is currently in the process of raising around $15 million in Series A funding, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Led by Kanishk Parashar and K9 investor/board member Manu Kumar, Coin offers a replacement for every credit card in your wallet. It swipes just like a credit card normally would, but with a button to switch between your AMEX, your personal Visa and your corporate credit card. But it does more than just slim your wallet. The company put the Bluetooth-powered wallet up for pre-order in November using their own crowdfunding campaign, and in less than 40 minutes. Coin promised to get first shipments out by this summer. According to sources, the company needed to raise a Series A to cover production costs in the midst of unexpected and overwhelming demand. (I pre-ordered, too.) Though the raise is imminent, it is unclear which investors are playing in the round. Rumors suggest that Redpoint may be involved. We have also heard that Coin has hired several new engineers, which could signal that they are expecting a cash infusion soon, or even that the round has already closed. Prior to this, Coin had raised $1.5 million in seed funding from , , and Y Combinator, . Coin creator and engineer Kanishk Parashar originally started a payments company called SmartMarket before moving on to develop . Pairing with your smartphone, Coin ensures that you never leave your credit card behind through alerts, and has sophisticated security features that recognize fraudulent activity the moment that someone tries to steal CC information. (Oftentimes, credit card owners aren’t aware that their credit card info has been stolen until the thief tries to use the card, not when they first steal the information.) The price for such a device? $50, plus $5 shipping, as long as you participate in the pre-order phase. Once the device goes on sale officially, it will cost $100. The company faced as it did hype when pre-orders first opened, but has done a good job of . This is hardly the first time a company has tried the all-in-one card strategy, nor is it the first time consumers have embraced it. In 2012, the press were similarly excited about a device called the , which is still listed as shipping soon. is another startup dabbling in the consumer payments space. Clearly, an evolution in the way we pay for things is on the horizon. The question, rather, is whether or not Coin will join Square and Stripe and Bitcoin and others as a major player in the revolution. If you’re interested in learning more about Coin, check out TC writer Ryan Lawler’s interview with CEO and co-founder Kineshk Parashar below: |
Calling All Hardware Startups In Atlanta, New Orleans, And Charleston | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | Hello, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Charleston. We’d like to meet you. After you guys shovel out your unenclosed garages and de ice your homes, please drop us a line so we can see what amazing hardware you’re working on in your cities and, in addition, get featured on our regular hardware TCTV show, . We’ve been running around the East Coast and SF for a while now. It’s time to see what the South is bringing to the hardware table. You can get in touch with me by emailing john@beta.techcrunch.com with the subject line “SOUTHERN MAKERS.” Not into hardware or not ready to show off your product? Join us at our Atlanta and New Orleans meetups instead. In late February, TechCrunch is heading to Atlanta and New Orleans, and we’re looking for a handful of undiscovered startups. If that’s you, and you’re comfortable pitching to 1,000 people and a panel of judges, apply below. If not, you could still apply and we’ll help you along. General admission tickets are also available for $5 and grant the holder a couple of beers and entrance into what will surely be a fantastic night. Buy them below. We’re excited to get out of the cold Northeast and visit New Orleans and Atlanta. Two years ago, Matt, Jordan and I hit Atlanta and, with the help of the amazing Dave Moeller of CodeGuard, held our biggest meetup to date at the SweetWater Brewing Company. This time there will be a pitch-off competition, too. Hopefully there will be . Participants interested in competing in the pitch-off will have 60 seconds to explain why their startup is awesome. These products must currently be in stealth or private beta. Office hours are for companies selected for the pitch-off. These 15-minute, one-on-one talks will be held on the day of the event. We’ll hear about your company, give feedback, and talk about the best pitch strategy for the 60-second, rapid-fire competition. Think of us as Adam Levine on The Voice. We will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch writers and local VCs, who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt NY; second place will receive two tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt NY; and third place will receive one ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt NY. See you there!
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3D Printing Goes Carbon Fiber | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | Meet the . Billed as the world’s first desktop printer capable of printing composite materials. For $5,000, you too can make a carbon fiber 1:1 scale model of a banana. Named aptly for its creator, Gregory Mark, who also owns Aeromotions, this desktop printer debuted at SolidWorks World 2014 in San Diego. After seeing the expense and time currently associated with carbon fiber manufacturing, Mark started down a path that eventually ended up at the Mark One. “We took the idea of 3D printing, that process of laying things down strand by strand, and we used it as a manufacturing process to make composite parts,” . “We say it’s like regular 3D printers do the form. We do form and function.” The Mark One not only prints composite materials like carbon fiber, but also fiberglass, nylon and PLA. Of course, only one at a time. The printer employees some pretty nifty advancements, too, including a self-leveling printing bed that clicks into position before each print. Pre-orders start in March with a price tag of $5,000. |
Yahoo’s Tumblr-Based Tech And Food Sites Have Seen 10M Uniques Since Jan. 7 Launch | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | At vertical news and information sites, which feature a visual-heavy redesign that resembles Flipboard somewhat but with more of an online news site vibe. Today, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer reiterated that the sites are based on a Tumblr backend, which marks a departure from the typically personal or informal use of the lightweight blogging platform as a CMS, and shared some traction figures around the sites. Yahoo also provided some updates about the traffic being generated by the Tech and Food sites, which feature content from big-name hires made last year including former NYT columnist David Pogue and TV news anchor Katie Couric. Yahoo has seen over 10 million uniques in the less than a month since the launch of the two new sites, Yahoo revealed. To put that in perspective, the entire NYT website claims . https://twitter.com/YahooInc/status/428288545598353409 Mayer also discussed Tumblr’s overall performance, perhaps as a way to respond to speculation in the media that the blogging site is facing growth stagnation. Tumblr’s user base has grown 30 percent since March last year, Mayer says, and usage on mobile is faring even better, with over 50 percent growth between the same time and today. Last week, suggested growth might be flat, but Yahoo’s Tumblr team said that engagement is actually up 51 percent overall and 251 percent on mobile, citing data not properly captured by comScore as the reason for the discrepancy. Mayer reiterated multiple times during the call that mobile and social are the key to Yahoo’s continued growth, and figuring out how the right way to advertise on that platform is clearly going to be a big priority. Already, Mayer says branded content on Tumblr is seeing huge uptake, so clearly the company thinks it’s addressing that opportunity correctly. |
Yahoo Q4 2013 Earnings Slide 6% To $1.27B On EPS Of $0.46, Display Ads Down 6% | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | Yahoo today for the fourth quarter of 2013, where it reported GAAP revenues of $1.27 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.46. Excluding traffic acquisition costs, revenues were $1.2 billion. Sales were down by 6% but EPS was up 31%. Non-GAAP income from operations was $330 million, down 3% on a year ago. Based on First Call analysts estimates — which put ex-TAC revenues $1.201 billion, non-GAAP Operating Income at $249.7 — this was a mixed bag. Analysts EPS at $0.38. The figures fell well within the guidance given by Yahoo of revenue ex-TAC of $1,180 – $1,220 and Yahoo’s exceeded non-GAAP operating income estimates of between $240 – $260 million. Full-year figures, also being reported today, show revenues at $4.7 billion, down 6%; and net income of $590 million, up 4%. 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. Search was a bit more of a brighter picture. Yahoo said search revenue ex-TAC was $461 million for the fourth quarter of 2013, up 8% compared to $427 million for the fourth quarter of 2012. Search revenue ex-TAC was $1,699 million for the full year of 2013, a 6 percent increase compared to $1,611 million for the prior year. With Yahoo’s revenues last quarter on sales of $1.08 billion and display advertising declining 7% to $421 million (ex-traffic acquisition costs), all eyes are on whether Yahoo has managed to reverse the course of its main revenue driver. This quarter was mixed in that regard. Earlier this month the company a new ad exchange and ad manager to buy across native, audience, premium and search products. It’s also now powering the sponsored posts on Tumblr — part of its to ramp up its presence in Tumblr ads this year. The effects of developments like these probably won’t trickle into results for some time, though. Under Marissa Mayer as CEO, the company has been on an acquisition tear, with eight acquisitions in the last quarter alone — Aviate (ThumbsUp Labs), PeerCDN (Instant IO), Evntlive, Ptch, SkyPhrase, LookFlow, Bread Labs and Hitpost. Combined with continued investment in Yahoo’s products and share repurchases, these three areas have reduced the company’s cash position to about $5 billion, down by $1 billion from a year ago. One thing that can provide a boost to that cash position could be patent sales down the line. CFO Ken Goldman, during the conference call, said that the company was looking at patent sales later this year, and emphasized that they would be to operating companies — not enforcement entities.
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Google Ventures’ Wesley Chan Steps Down As General Partner To Work On His Own Startup | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | Google Ventures’ is stepping down from his role as General Partner to see how the other half lives. Chan will become an entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures, with the goal of eventually building his own company. An MIT CS major, Chan was one of the first couple hundred Google employees and led multiple projects there, most notably Google Voice, Google Toolbar and Google Analytics. Chan has been a Google employee for 12 years and built the seed program at Google Ventures, bringing on superstars like Kevin Rose and TechCrunch columnist MG Siegler to bolster Google’s early-stage investments. As a GP, Chan led the AngelList Series B, the and the . He also led the seed round in Parse, which was recently by Facebook. Chan chalks up following the entrepreneurship bug to a cycle of doing something new every four years. He gave us, , basically the same level of detail about what he’d be actually working on, “Stay tuned.” “It’s been four years at Google Ventures and I’m ready for my next adventure,” he said. “ When asked if Google Ventures had already invested in Chan’s new gambit, Managing Partner Bill Maris said, basically, not yet. “He’s been a huge part of the culture here and he’s done a lot of great things here, we’re happy to get behind him.” (Maris tells me that the “E” in Google Ventures’ EIR can stand for entrepreneur or executive.) With Chan’s absence, Google Ventures, which was the in Q3 according to the WSJ, goes from 11 investment partners to 10, with no plans to replace Chan for the sake of replacing him. “We promote on merit,” Maris said, emphasizing that Chan leaving will not alter the course of their successful seed program at all. |
Nokia Revamps Its Financial Reporting Structure In Advance Of The Microsoft Deal | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | Nokia today that it will restructure its financial reporting as its deal with Microsoft nears completion. If you sell off a chunk of your revenue, investors are going to notice when your top line shrinks in the next quarter. Here’s the company on its changes: After receiving shareholder approval of the pending sale of substantially all of its Devices & Services business at our Extraordinary General Meeting in November last year, Nokia is reporting substantially all of its Devices & Services business as discontinued operations in its fourth quarter 2013 and full year 2013 results report. Nokia currently has three continuing businesses: Nokia Solutions & Networks (NSN), HERE and Advanced Technologies. Reflecting this composition, Nokia will publish financial information for all three businesses in next week’s report. Specifically, Nokia will report financial information for a total of four reportable segments – Mobile Broadband and Global Services within NSN, HERE, and Advanced Technologies – and, additionally, separate information for Discontinued Operations. When will the damn deal close? Well, soon. That’s what I keep hearing. If it hasn’t been locked down by the start of the second week of February, I will be surprised. Friend of TechCrunch this morning published a that indicated it’s “likely” that the Nokia-Microsoft Great Asset Transfer would take place on January 23. Both companies will report their earnings that day (they have announced in lockstep for some time, so don’t read too much into that), making it a pat date for the news. But that only works if the deal is done. And it isn’t. Still though, we’ll get a good look at what Nokia will be after the deal closes when it reports its performance. And that’s exciting. |
FaceSubstitute Is The Coolest (And Creepiest) Thing You’ll See This Week | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | Ready for your semi-regular reminder that technology is freakin’ ? FaceSubstitute is a tech demo that lets you use your webcam to try on someone else’s face (god, that was a weird sentence to type), and it’s just as creepy/awesome as it sounds. Want to be Walter White? Sure! Want to be a terrfying pseudo-Kardashian? Okay! Want to be Bieber for a day? No problem, weirdo! The app currently has 17 different faces for you to “wear”, from celebs like Nicolas Cage and Brian Cranston to stranger, cartoony masks like “Picasso”, or “Abstract” that intentionally distort your face in the freakiest of ways. The whole thing is bit “It puts the lotion in the basket”, but as a tech demo it’s just too damned neat. Doubly impressive is that it’s all browser based, through the magic of WebGL and , a Javascript library built specifically for facial feature tracking. The app was built by Norwegian developer to show his library in action. Is it perfect? Nah. It glitches out fairly frequently and it tried to render a face on my wall for some reason (Ghosts!). But when it all lines up, it’ll drop your jaw. Or Walter White’s jaw, or Bieber’s jaw, or whoever’s jaw it is you might be wearing. A few pro tips: The next obvious step for the devs, if they’re listening: make it so that people can easily record themselves wearing these freaky flesh masks, then charge’m a buck a pop to send the video to their friends. [Shout out to Mark Wilson over at Fast Co. for ] |
Dropbox Closes Roughly $250M Round At $10B Valuation, WSJ Says | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | Dropbox has raised a massive $250 million funding round, valuing the company at $10 billion according to the . The new funding round is led by a BlackRock fund, according to the WSJ, which cites “two people familiar with the deal” as the source of the report. This is actually the : It did so in 2011 in a round that included Goldman Sachs, Sequoia, Index Ventures and Accel Partners. Back in November, a rumor about an additional $250 million raise put the , which, based on various revenue estimates, could have been viewed as anywhere from expensive to cheap. When news of the raise was first circulating last year, revenue for the cloud storage company was rumored to be in the “hundreds of millions of dollars” range according to , which helps justify the company’s huge valuation. Other companies in the same ball park in terms of worth pre-IPO include Twitter, which was valued at ; Google, which went public with a $2.7 billion valuation; and Box, which is a direct when it raised $100 million late last year. The fact that Dropbox raised at a $10 billion valuation instead of $8 billion could indicate that the round was competitive, with third parties bidding for a chance to scoop up Dropbox shares. And, naturally, at a valuation that rich, Dropbox is placing itself far up the IPO queue. Prior to this raise, Dropbox has collected $257 million in funding. Provided that the WSJ has the new capital story correct, Dropbox will have raised a total of over half a billion dollars. Dropbox’s new capital dwarfs the $100 million that its traditional rival Box recently absorbed, perhaps granting it a competitive edge as both companies look to expand their core business and diversify their product lines. Also included in this round are existing investment partners, the WSJ says, but it’s unclear who exactly was involved at this stage. We’ve reached out to Dropbox to find out more about the reported funding and the backers in the round, and will update if we find out more. |
Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | What’s a little biomimetics between friends? Today’s edition of we present a few exciting projects from where they’re copying animal motion in order to create more efficient robotic hunter/killers. First up we have a charming cheetah that runs 2.3 meters per second and looks like a skeletonized cat that is looking to scrounge up a little skin for itself. Perhaps skin?
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKva13Y0RT0] Below we see a hopping, squirming lizard leg that can swim through water and, presumably, take to land for a bit of fun with you and the kids. These robots use high torque-density motors as well as a bio-like bone structures to copy what real animals do on their days off. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RBjIvcRSSY&feature=c4-overview&list=UUvnLTlzyhH6oxazo7cpdH1A] Finally there’s there’s this rollerskating robot. If I were still in a Roller Derby team (Go Rebel Scumz!) I’d maybe be afraid of this guy but really? Who’s afraid of a skating robot? Nobody, that’s who. Stay warm, humans, because the robots will be able to withstand cold that will freeze our bones! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BFO-KwGD-Q] |
Even BlackBerry Thinks Windows Phone Is Too Small | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | News is out today that BlackBerry has no intention of bringing a BlackBerry Messaging (BBM) application to Windows Phone. Comments from the company indicate that it deems Windows Phone too small to warrant the investment. TechCrunch confirmed the statements. According to TrustedReviews, BlackBerry’s David Proulx called the nonexistence of a BBM application for Windows Phone “entirely market driven,” and stated that the decision is not a “religious thing,” but is instead merely a choice made on the back (lack?) of consumer demand. So, sorry Windows Phone fans, if you were pining for BBM, you must wait. Might BlackBerry bring BBM to Windows Phone in the future? Yes, but only once Windows Phone reaches larger scale. In the words of Proulx, “as other platforms emerge, whichever they may be, we will execute on those platforms as well.” The question then becomes whether BlackBerry will still be around by the time that Windows Phone “emerges.” This is playing as you would expect in the Windows Phone world. WMPowerUser by the shade-tossing, for example: Blackberry, who clearly has a knack for making friends, has confirmed it has no current interest or plans to bring their BBM app to Windows Phone, citing the size of the Windows Phone market. Perhaps BlackBerry is saddened by the loss of its rank as the “third” mobile platform. |
A16z Looks To Raise New $1.5B Fund, Primack Says | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | Andreessen Horowitz is raising a massive new fund, . The expected total for the new fund is $1.5 billion, giving the venture group sufficient capital to pursue deals at every funding point at scale. It’s no accident that the funds are the same size, says Primack, who reports that the new fund will be “similar in structure” to the past fund. Given that, we can expect the new fund to contain monies for both early stage investment and large deals alike. Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment. |
VP Of Product Michael Sippey Is Leaving Twitter | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | Twitter’s Vice President of Product just announced that he’s stepping into an advisory role at the company, then moving on to, well, something else. In a company email that Sippey also , he said he realized that “it was time to move on” after discussions with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and COO Ali Rowghani. Sippey doesn’t go into too much detail, but he hints that he wants to be at a smaller company again: “I’ve spent most of my career working at startups, helping them scale and having a direct hand on the product.” It sounds like team members at Twitter have been frustrated with the product leadership, at least and . Isaac described the problem as a lack of a clear path for moving product changes “up the ladder at an efficient pace,” while Panzarino suggested that there was an over reliance on user testing. Sippey’s post says that as an advisor, he will be “helping with product strategy, providing input on the great work the team has lined up for 2014, and helping [COO] Ali [Rowghani] find a new head of product.” It sounds like that’s mostly a transitional role, because afterward, he’s “excited to go figure out what’s next.” Sippey has been at Twitter . He was previously at blog platform Six Apart and then at Say Media, the media company . |
Protect Yourself From The NSA With WireOver’s Encrypted File Sharing | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | Nothing is truly NSA-proof or hacker-proof, but wants to offer you more security than Dropbox, Google Drive, or Skydrive. The Y Combinator startup just emerged from stealth with a desktop app that lets you send files of any size for free. And for $10 a month, your transfers get end-to-end encryption so only the recipient can open them. WireOver can’t even look at what you’re sending. If you just want to send huge video files or photo collections to friends and aren’t worried about encryption, WireOver is totally free for unlimited file-size sharing. But its premium level of privacy could be a big draw for anyone with sensitive files to send. WireOver founder Trent Ashburn tells me there are security holes in the way big file storage and sharing providers transfer your stuff. “In the industry it’s called encryption in transit and encryption at rest. But the files arrive on the servers decrypted. Their servers will re-encrypt them and store them, but the encryption keys used are controlled by and accessed by the provider.” Ashburn tells me there’s a risk of the same company having both a copy of your encrypted files and the key to open them. But with WireOver’s end-to-end encryption, files are never stored on its servers, and it doesn’t have the decryption key. “The approach we’re going for is ‘Trust No One'”. WireOver Founder Trent Ashburn Ashburn spent several years building computational models for quantitative hedge funds before becoming a semi-pro cyclist. He wanted to start a company he could relate to, and he found he was having some trouble with file transfers. “With Dropbox, Google Drive, and Skydrive, sending small and medium-size files is pretty much solved but it’s a pain to send big files securely. So Ashburn entered WireOver into Y Combinator. They built a bunch of failed prototypes before settling on a Python-based desktop client. Along with the YC funding it got from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, and Yuri Milner, the four-person startup has raised an additional seed round from , Boston’s , and angels like . Once you’ve installed , you just dump files into its little window, and type in the email address of the recipient[s]. Once they have WireOver installed and running, the file is transferred completely peer-to-peer, or routed by WireOver’s servers but isn’t stored there. If you have a Pro account select “Secure” transfer , your file gets end-to-end encryption, even if the recipient doesn’t hasn’t bought a premium WireOver subscription. For even more security again man-in-the-middle attacks, you can request to verify the recipient’s machine’s crytopgraphic fingerprint. The big downside to WireOver using a transfer system rather than cloud storage is that both the sender and recipient have to be online at the same time. You can’t just upload a file, email someone a link, and shut off your computer. But since WireOver doesn’t store files, it doesn’t have to charge for unencrypted transfers. That means you could send 200 gigabyte or even terrabyte-sized files for free, which could cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on Dropbox, Drive, or SkyDrive. If you’re looking for security and privacy, WireOver might be worth the $10 a month. Ashburn says some clients have switched to WireOver from sending physical hard drives and USB drives through the mail or with FedEx. While there are other encrypted file sharing services, we haven’t found any popular ones that offer unlimited file sizes for free, or encryption of those files for as cheap. Companies large and small are seeing their data fall into the hands of hackers, and we’re realizing our governments are engaging in widespread surveillance. Meanwhile, as our cameras get better and our screens get bigger, file sizes just keep going up. So whether you’re paranoid or just want to send all your photos to mom, understands. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Lockitron, Nintendo, Google’s Smart Contacts, And Nest | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | It’s been a big week for smart things. Coming off the heels of CES, this week we learned that , Nintendo , that Google has been building and , and that our dear is leaving us. It may not be the happiest Gadgets Podcast you’ve ever heard, but at least it’s honest. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the , featuring , , , and . Enjoy!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
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Fantastic For iPhone Is A Smart, Social Music Player That Learns What You Like & Suggests Nearby Shows | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | , a company that had previously been working on a sort of “Google Now”-like for iOS users, is launching its latest creation called into public beta today. The new app, a smart music player for iOS devices, lets you not only play your own music, but discover new artists and tracks you may be interested in, as well as new videos, upcoming concerts and more. Fantastic takes advantage of the same technology Grokr had built for its flagship application in late 2012, before quietly shutting down sometime last summer. At the time, we had heard reports that the company being acquired by Apple, but, as it turns out, that was not the case. We understand now, according to sources, that while Grokr had indeed engaged in discussions with Apple and other large internet companies, the team decided to instead shift away from its original product to focus on a series of single-purpose apps instead. Asked why, co-founder and CEO at Grokr Labs says they realized that people were having trouble understanding the use case for Grokr because it was so broad. “They had no idea what the app did or for what reason they needed to go into the app. It was very eye-opening for us,” he explains. “And when we spoke with the Google Now guys, they gave us similar feedback: it’s one thing to build a platform, but it’s another to try to sell that platform as an app,” Sampath adds. So the Sunnyvale-based team went back to the drawing board, instead of opting for the exit. Sampath, who was founder and CEO of McAfee.com, Discussion Corporations, and Mercora in years past, says that he has learned not to give up too soon. “This is my fifth company. Out of five companies, two went public and two went under,” he says. “Plus, ninety percent of success is just surviving.” Putting his money where his mouth is, so to speak, Sampath personally invested another half a million into Grokr last June. Grokr had been going in the right direction in terms of the larger trend of predictive search, but now the company is going to take advantage of the underlying technology to build a series of new applications. After Fantastic, they’ll release other “smart” apps, like, perhaps, a smart news reader, video player and smart browser. , however, is the first out of the gate, as it was already something lead developer (and music lover) John Brunsfeld had already created as a side project. He had built an app that used the Grokr platform to allow him to find out about new music and concerts. Today, the more polished app, now in public beta, does the same. After installation, you tell Fantastic whether to reference your iTunes library or your Spotify Premium account. Then, using this data, as well as social data, location data and more, Fantastic will offer a real-time music feed detailing new and upcoming releases, nearby concerts, YouTube videos, trending Facebook posts, tweets, and articles about your music, as well as what your friends on the service are saying about a track or an artist. “Essentially, what the platform does is it learns everything about you,” explains Sampath, “and then it takes that and applies that to a knowledge graph – in this case, we have a massive knowledge graph of music-related, event-related, and artist-related information.” The end result is an app that, in theory, will tell you want you need to know about the music you like and related events. For obvious reasons, the app works better if your Spotify account reflects your own tastes, and not those of, say, your partner or kids who may also be using your same account. But over time, the service can learn more about you as you play tracks, which should improve the relevance of its suggestions. Fantastic has been in private beta since September, and now earns around $0.65 in album sales per user per month – basically, half a single. But the company’s goal is to increase that to $1.50. It could also push users toward ticket sales to generate additional revenue. Going forward, Grokr’s team is also shooting for one new app per quarter, including things like the iPad release and Android release of Fantastic, which will arrive before any other smart applications. (Unless, of course, one starts really blowing up during a private beta test). Fantastic is . |
Google Rolls Out In-Ad Surveys To Figure Out Why People Hate Ads | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | For about the last year and a half, Google has let you they don’t like. Just click the little [x] button and it’s gone and will never be shown to you again. That’s a pretty useful solution for noisy ads you really, really hate, despite the fact that they promise to show you that one weird trick to finally lose all your belly fat. Google’s users have already muted “millions of ads,” the company says, and it’s using this information as a signal to “make ads more relevant and useful.” To get even more data about how users interact with its ads, you will now also be able to give Google about why you didn’t like an ad. Over the next few weeks, Google will roll out an in-ad survey that will pop up when you hit the mute button. These surveys, Google says, will help it learn more about user preferences and why they mute ads. Based on Google’s screenshots, it will only give users three choices per survey, but it looks like the process could be spread out over multiple steps. As far as I can see, users don’t have to actually finish these surveys to mute an ad. Most people will think they have to, however, so this will probably give Google quite a bit of new data to fine-tune its ad targeting. |
Zapier Opens Its Developer Platform, Gives The Everyday Joe A Way To Connect APIs | Alex Williams | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | , a platform for connecting apps to automate tasks, has been constrained to some extent by the limitations for integrating third-party services. That has changed with Zapier’s that the company announced this week. The change is noteworthy for, if nothing else, how it opens systems so apps can talk to each other and data can be exchanged to enable people to get their work done more easily. Connecting apps also helps decompose entrenched, on-premise technologies. The data can be pulled out and used in ways that were not possible before. is one of those services that turns a trigger into an action. For example, you can use Zapier to get a notification when a web page gets updated. A photo sent to a social network can also be delivered to a Dropbox account using the service. Now any service with an API can be added to Zapier. Furthermore, Zapier can also now do multiple API calls for each trigger or action. That opens the possibilities for businesses to use the service to connect information from multiple departments such as sales and finance. Zapier currently has 262 services that can be connected. Gmail, MailChimp, Dropbox and Salesforce are some of the services it offers. Last August, Zapier launched its developer platform. Since then, 141 services have been added. Over the past six months, the Zapier team rebuilt the developer platform with to make it faster for people to use. The new platform has two major new features, said Zapier Co-Founder Wade Foster in a phone interview this week. Until now, only services with specific authentication capabilities could be added to Zapier. These were sophisticated apps such as Google Docs and Twilio that had fine-grained authentication features. Zapier has now engineered the new platform to allow the most common API authentication methods out of the box. That opens a huge landscape of apps that have APIs but do not necessarily have the authentication requirements needed for integration into the Zapier platform. It means a developer or even non-coder can add any services that have an API. These can be made publicly available or used internally for connecting different on-premise environments such as CRM and ERP systems. In this example, Etsy is added to the Zapier platform: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gb58ImS4c&w=640&h=360] A scripting engine that sits in front of the API for connecting services is also available, Foster said. This allows a developer to pull data from multiple sources. That’s opposed to traditional APIs that just connect two points. With the new capability, a service can call multiple apps and return information that draws from the different services or data sources. For example, invoice data and customer sales contact information may be in two separate silos. With the new features, a developer from Zapier can access both through one API. For too long, IT has been a maze of data silos. With Zapier, IT now has a new capability, said , who works in the CTO’s office at BMC Software. It means someone can connect SAP and Oracle data, opening all kinds of possibilities. A lot has been made of “Shadow IT,” which has helped with the rise of SaaS and the ability for anyone to get their work done with ready-to-use services. There’s a need for more ways to connect disparate forms of information so people can connect in new ways. Zapier’s developer platform is an example of how close we are to having ways to connect data sources that before would have required a team of engineers to do a custom integration that not only would have cost millions but most likely would be pretty much useless, too. We are now witnessing a new fabric emerging, consisting of data networks that are connected via APIs. The next step is ease-of-use, which means better API design and the ability to do instant data analytics that gives the everyday joe the ability to create their own recommendation engines and connected networks that have traditionally been the domain of developers. Welcome to the age of Inception IT. (Feature image Flickr) : I do a with Chris Dancy and Wired writer and TechCrunch contributor . We talk about cyborgs and APIs. |
The 360 Fly Can Capture Your Entire World | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | A Pittsburgh-based tech company approached us on the show floor last week and asked for a bit of time to talk about their product, a small ball that can take panoramic video and is rugged enough to be strapped to a helmet or surf board. The product, , is still in beta but the company wanted to show it to us – complete with male surfer model – so we could get an idea of how the device worked. The company’s previous products, line, sold very well. The products connected to your iPhone and allowed you to take panoramic video anywhere using the iPhone’s own camera. This idea isn’t particularly new but I think the 360fly is a fascinating refinement of the product. We’ll update you when these guys, Voxx, have more to show. Until then, enjoy seeing a poor man in board shorts and a t-shirt smile uncomfortably as I talk to the founder. |
Apple Turns To Old iPhone Models, And Lower Prices, To Woo Users In India | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | Executives at Apple in India are preparing to celebrate passing $1 billion in annual revenue in the country for the first time this financial year. But Apple today remains a small player in India, accounting for less than 2% of all mobile sales in 2013 according to one estimate. In a market where more than 90% of the 224 million phones sold in 2014 will be bought by first-time users, Samsung, Nokia and phones are expected to take the lion’s share, leaving Apple a bit-player. According to several estimates, including some sources at Apple India, the company shipped 1 million iPhones in 2013. As a point of comparison, newly minted iPhone carrier . There have been reports that Apple is now considering a drastic strategy: according to , the 8GB iPhone 4, at a price of about $250 to get more aggressive in India. We have heard from reliable sources that nothing like this is in the cards because there is “no way Apple would sell phones that cheap.” But it is correct that it wants to use an older model to target new, aspirational consumers who are ready to pay an extra $100-$150 to own an iPhone. Our source tells us that Apple is planning to sell 8GB iPhone 4 models in India for around RS 22,000 (about $358). That’s about $70 less than the previous retail price of around RS 26,500 (about $431) when it was launched, if not quite $250. India will account for nearly a quarter of the 1.03 billion smartphones that will be sold in 2014 globally according to . But iPhones will only be a small proportion of that. Even the most aggressive estimates do not expect iPhone sales to cross 1.5 million units this year. So far, Apple has attempted to make up for its premium pricing by throwing in extra offers such as buyback offers and option to pay in monthly installments. Part of the problem has been that India’s average phone pricing runs almost at complete odds with Apple’s bigger pricing strategy. In the last launch of new models, the “cheaper” 5C variant works out as more expensive ($525) to many top end smartphone models from Samsung (around $400) and Nokia (about $300), and that contrast is even greater in India. Now, Apple wants to target the sub-$350 smartphone category to woo aspirational users who are ready to pay an extra $100-$150 for owning an iPhone. According to a source who knows Apple’s India plans, this deal could be sweetened further by offering buybacks and monthly installment options to lower the upfront cost for buyers. Breaking $1 billion in revenues — a milestone for any company in India — could be an indication that Apple is turning over a new leaf in India. In 2006, and then couple of years later, within few months of hiring them. India was also among the last countries to get any Apple products until 2010. Things started changing for Apple in India after November 2011 when it began shipping the iPhone 4S in the country. In 2013, Apple more than doubled its iPhone shipments to India to around 1 million iPhones, according to several estimates. Apple’s share of the Indian smartphone market has grown from around 0.8% in 2012 to just under 2% in 2013, according to Mediacells, which tracks the mobile market. This growth was fuelled by some schemes that Apple allowed its team to offer in the Indian market. “The buyback scheme for the iPhone 4 in India was very effective in contributing to the 2% milestone,” said Brad Rees, CEO of research company Mediacells. , Apple India also sweetened the deal by tying up with banks who allowed consumers to pay in monthly installments. “From a purely macro-economic standpoint, Apple cannot and will not keep their eyes off the prize in India, China and Brazil but – guess what – neither will Samsung and Google, Nokia and Microsoft – it’s brutal out there,” Rees added. While China and India will together account for more than half of all smartphones sold in 2014, the two countries cannot be compared. “I don’t think one should compare India and China in the same breath; for one thing, they are both at radically different stages of smartphone development,” said Rees. Mediacells predicts that by the end of 2014, 30% of Indians will be smartphone-enabled, compared to 63% of Chinese smartphone owners in same time period. Despite Apple’s new-found love for India, it’s unlikely that it will get anytime soon. But with over 800 million active phone users currently and another 224 million smartphones set to be added in 2014 alone, and growing competition in other emerging markets like China, Apple may have found its India moment. |
Live Streaming Startup Ustream Quietly Pivots To The Enterprise | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | has recently made moves to de-emphasize its free, live broadcasting service. But those changes are just part of a larger focus on enterprise clients. Last week, Ustream sent an email to members who had free accounts, telling them that it was making changes to the way videos were stored or archived. The email said that videos recorded by its free, ad-supported Ustream Basic accounts would only be stored for 30 days, and then automatically deleted. The company offered up a new unlimited storage plan for users who wish to pay for them. For , Ustream is allowing its users to archive videos that they’ve already shot beyond 30 days. But for those who didn’t want to upgrade to a pro version of Ustream, the company offered the ability to download copies of their videos to store them offline. For Ustream, culling archived videos from free users is just one step in its continued focus on enterprise accounts. Over the past year, the company has been working to add features and win over more media and business clients to its service. Co-founder and CEO Brad Hunstable told me in a phone conversation that most of the company’s growth has come from working with major media companies. Also, he said that a small portion of the views the company gets comes from archived videos — which is one of the reasons it’s fine with having them disappear. “Our core competency is live broadcasting and that hasn’t changed,” Hunstable said. “There are plenty of places to store videos, but 80 percent of our viewership is live.” In addition to media companies, Ustream has seen its live streaming services used by other enterprise clients. Some of that comes from brands turning to live streaming as a way to increase visibility, but video is also being used as a way to reach customers, partners, and employees in the enterprise. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen companies like LinkedIn, Sony, and others using our products more like a media companies,” Hunstable said. “We’re seeing public companies doing their earnings announcements through video, and also internal broadcasting.” Founded in 2007, Ustream isn’t the only live streaming video startup to move its focus away from consumers. Competitor Livestream historically has been focused on major events as its largest source of revenue, and Justin.tv pivoted to eSports and more than two years ago. |
Spark.io Hackers Make An Open-Source Nest Thermostat | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | Sure it’s not made of metal, nor did it convince Google to give its creators billions of dollars, but dammit if this isn’t a cool hack. The folks at , creators of the , a unique Wi-Fi development board that allows you to add Wi-Fi controls to Arduino projects, have used their tech to create a . The team essentially created a web-connected thermostat by cutting out a nice hunk of wood and some plastic and adding a Spark Core and some control logic. The device can change temperature by scrolling the large wheel on the front and displays the temperature using an LED display. Most of the other logic – including temperature logging and remote control – happens on a remote server. To sense the temperature and humidity they added a Honeywell HumidIcon chip and a motion sensor tells the system when you’re away. They tested the whole project out on a breadboard first and then stuck the whole thing into the small casing they made. Is this high quality stuff? By no means, but it’s cool that they tried. As the team wrote: I love projects like these. They prove that almost anything can be reverse-engineered – even improved upon – and it shows just how easy it’s become to be a hardware hacker even without years of experience. Doing this, in short, would have taken a team months to develop and build and now it takes a couple of cool kids a few hours. Yowza indeed. |
Google Is Working On A “Chromoting” App For iOS Users, Too | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | A spotted on Chromium.org, home to the open source browser project Google Chrome is based on, states that a “Chromoting” application is in development for iOS devices. This would allow users to control their computers from their iPhone or iPad, for example. An Android version of this same technology has been in since last year, it’s been previously . These mobile clients would be an extension of Google’s with its screen sharing and remote access service, which exited from beta in fall 2012. With that still somewhat under-hyped Chrome application, users can securely share their computer over the web with others for things like remote tech support, or simply access their own computers, applications and files from another desktop or laptop. The benefit to using the Chrome application over competing solutions designed for professionals, like LogMeIn or TeamViewer, for example, is that it’s turnkey for existing Chrome users, and also, it’s free. (At least for now). From the brief post on the Chromium.org site, we’ve learned that the iOS version of the so-called “Chromoting” mobile client is still very unpolished at this point, and not surprisingly, further behind in development than its Android counterpart. But at the very least, it’s a confirmation that the project is still in the works. (Today, there’s available, but you have to compile the app from source because there’s not an official version being distributed at this time.) Details regarding the overall feature set, or a general timeframe to launch are still under wraps for these official “Chromoting” clients, but we’ve reached out to Google to see if the company would be willing to clarify the status of the project. We’ll update this post if or when we hear back. : Google declined to provide any clarification on this matter, saying only: “We’re always experimenting with new features in Chrome, especially in the Dev channel, but have nothing to announce at this time.” |
Inventus Capital Raises $106M Second Fund To Back US-India Startups | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | , an early-stage investment firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. and Bangalore, is announcing that it has raised a second fund totaling $106 million. In fact, Inventus says that it has already started investing from the fund, for example with . In the funding release, co-founder and managing director John Dougery (pictured) said the firm was founded in 2007 “to continue our two decades of success partnering with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and helping them access India’s natural advantages adding value to digital services businesses.” The release also says the firm is focused on digital services companies, arguing that the industry is “in the midst of a transformation from product to service-led businesses,” and pointing to the success of past investments redBus (which was ), ViVu ( ), and Sierra Atlantic ( ) as evidence. Inventus says it aims to lead a startup’s first institutional round and can invest up to $10 million over the life of a company. It backed 18 companies with its first fund and is planning to invest in 20 to 25 with the second. The new fund was also revealed in . |
Obama Announces NSA Reforms | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | , President Obama has announced a partial end to the National Security Agency’s surveillance dragnet. We’re still parsing official documents and expert reaction, but here are the bullet points: Readers can review the official White House proposals below. We’ll have more analysis soon.
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Path Finally Closes That Elusive Series C | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | It’s been a bumpy road for Dave Morin’s , as manic rumors over the last year have pegged the “private” social network at once as the subject of and potential acquisitions, while at the same time raising . Today, the company’s long path to a Series C appears to finally have come to an end. Having recently revealed an additional revenue stream with the launch of premium subscription plans and product additions like private sharing, over the last quarter, Path has been making moves that appear to have reassured investors of its long-term prospects. Tonight, that Path has raised $25 million and added at least one new investor in Indonesia’s Bakrie Global Group, bringing its total funding to $65 million. Morin, who is also an ex-Facebooker, also told Swisher that, while the company closed a smaller round than its $30 million Series B, it was in fact an “up round.” As Path was reportedly valued at $250 million for its Series B, if it’s an up round, the company’s value has increased since April 2012 in the eyes of investors and it could be as high as $400 million. What’s more, heard from sources that Path was closing a round of over $7 million that also included Morin’s friend and former Facebooker, . TechCrunch has again heard from sources that this is true — that Moskovitz is an investor in Path’s Series C — as we reported at the time. Swisher also reports that Path’s existing investors, which include Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Insight Venture Partners, Redpoint Venture Partners and First Round Capital, also participated in the round. As to why Path opted for an Indonesian lead investor for its Series C? Morin explained in an interview with Re/code that he “was always looking” for a strategic investor in Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia. Morin said that Southeast Asia is one of the regions where Path’s traction is strongest, saying that it was even stronger “than people understand.” Bringing on Bakrie as its lead investor gives Path a partner that understands the market and can help it strategically expand and increase its footprint in Southeast Asia. While it’s difficult not to see the raise (and improved valuation) as a positive sign, saying that it’s a sign where Path wants to be, particularly in the U.S., would be unfair. In conversation with Swisher, Morin admitted that Path still had a number of “challenges in the U.S. market” that it needs “to focus on.” With Morin confirming that Path is now at 23 million customers, the challenge may not be a lack of traction, but stemming a leaky user base in the face of the changing social market and the explosion of young mobile social networks like Snapchat. |
Meet The 13 Startups Wayra U.K. Is Accelerating In 2014 | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | Wayra U.K. is still a relative newbie to the London startup accelerator scene, back in May 2012 for its first intake. Last year’s cohort included journaling app and lesbian dating service , to name two of the 17. Today Wayra U.K. is naming its third intake that will be hothoused through the circa nine-month mentoring programme centrally based, near London’s Goodge Street. The 13 startups that made the cut for the 2014 intake are: The startups were whittled down from a shortlist of 27 — one of which (Lobster) was sourced from a reserve list and stepped in to pitch in place of a finalist that dropped out. The shortlisted startups pitched the judges earlier this week and today during Wayra Week. (The startups that did not make the cut are listed at the end of this article). Judging criteria for selecting which startups bagged a space in Wayra’s London academy — and the up to 50,000 Euros in funding that comes with it — focused on five factors: opportunity size, maturity, strategic fit, risk and innovation. The strategic fit portion of the criteria refers to Wayra’s parent company, the global carrier Telefonica. What’s a hoary old mobile operator doing accelerating startups? Well, despite having massive customer bases to sell stuff to, carriers have typically been terrible at coming up with innovative new ideas that engage consumers. Telefonica’s workaround for plugging this ideas gap is thus to outsource “talent detection” to a global network of Wayra academies — which now extends to 14 academies in 12 countries. (The full Wayra academy footprint is as follows: Bogotá, Caracas, Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Barcelona, London, São Paulo, Santiago, Dublin, Prague and Munich.) Unfortunately Wayra U.K. would not disclose how many applications its London academy received this year, saying only that across its entire network of academies it’s had a cumulative total of 23,000 applications to date (see our recent as a whole). Which is, as my TC colleague Steve O’Hear judiciously observed, “lame” in terms of putting its performance in context with other London accelerators. Seedcamp, for instance, which has been running its bootcamp programme since 2007, released on its performance last September — at which point it said it had received 2,000 applications in 2013 alone. Meanwhile, the newly-relocated-to-London (unsurprisingly) had far fewer applications — just 310 — to its programme last year. And although also a newcomer to London, TechStars, which held its last September, drew in 1,302 applications from 72 different countries — demonstrating the global pull of the TechStars brand. It remains unclear how much traction Wayra U.K. is getting in attracting startups willing to hand over a portion of their business — and share their best ideas — in exchange for a little business acumen, a little investment and the chance to pitch a roomful of VCs and investors when the time comes to seek more money. But it’s worth noting that the size of the 2014 intake is smaller than the 17 startups that Wayra U.K. incubated last year. The new Wayra U.K. cohort will take up their desks in the London academy on February 17. The shortlisted startups that did not make the cut this time were: |
null | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 1 | 28 | null |
Qualcomm Will Bring Lytro-Style Focus Selection To Mobile Photos With New Snapdragon Chips | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | Qualcomm showed off some of the magic powers of its latest mobile processors at CES this year, and many of the new features on display had to do with mobile cameras. The Qualcomm 805, announced back in November, will offer smartphone shooters some powerful new tools once it starts making its way into shipping phones later this year. The most impressive new feature is the ability to select focus after a picture is captured. You can either put everything into sharp focus for incredible depth of field, or choose one point and throw the rest into attractive, soft focus for pleasing bokeh. You may recognize this tech; it’s similar to how the Lytro light field camera works. The Lytro captures its images differently, however, which accounts for its elongated design. Qualcomm has managed to do all the heavy lifting by capturing multiple exposures in rapid succession, using existing camera hardware. That means it’ll be simple to build it into upcoming smartphones. Besides focus selection, Qualcomm’s chip can also power intelligent lighting and exposure correction, as well as help with making sure that flash photos don’t appear too washed out or unnatural looking. All-in-all, Qualcomm is doing a great job bringing to market tech that seemed to be many years out only just recently, and it’ll be great to see how OEMs employ this tech in their products in 2014. |
Fast-Growing Zenefits Adds Commuter Benefits, Flexible Spending And 401(k) Support As It Moves To Take Over Startup HR | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | Managing human resources is one of the more frustrating and time-consuming aspects of running a startup or small business. Because most can’t afford to hire an HR person, all that paperwork usually falls into the lap of founders and management. Knowing that entrepreneurs would rather spend their time growing their business rather than wading through administrative tasks and insurance forms, to help small businesses remove some of the pain inherent to managing HR. Initially, the company set out to create a platform that would automate the process of setting up and managing group health coverage and payroll, enabling resource-strapped businesses to move administration online (for free) without having to dip into their hiring budget. But Zenefits Co-founder Parker Conrad says that the team quickly found that startups were using the system not just for managing health coverage and payroll, but as an alternative to traditional HRIS or Human Resources Information Systems. In other words, to manage all HR-affiliated tasks. Since then, Zenefits has focused on building out more of those core HRIS features in an effort to allow companies to manage benefits, payroll, HR and everything in between in one place. Soon, the company added the ability for startups to automate hiring and firing of employees, auto-generating the necessary documentation (letters, employee handbooks, agreements and so on). It allows those in charge to add and remove staff from the payroll, for example, while sending automatic alerts to employees and admins via email. In turn, customers can also use Zenefits to track paid time off (or PTO) so that employees can apply for time off, while allowing managers to view balances, liabilities and a calendar of their team’s schedule. This winter, Zenefits is moving even deeper into the territory of enterprise HR services, like that of Workday, HP and many more by continuing to expand its coverage. Today, Zenefits has begun to offer commuter benefits, flexible spending accounts and HRA that can be integrated directly into a business’ HRIS and payroll. These types of plans, which are all pre-tax, allowing employees to save 40 percent on commuting costs, medical costs, childcare costs and, in the case of the HRA, let employers pay deductibles with those pre-tax dollars. This, like all admin and HR work, is a headache to set up and administer, requiring individual applications for each employee and forcing management to manually set up employee deductions in payroll themselves. Zenefits, as you might have guessed, automates that process, enabling customers to enroll in less than a minute and sweeten the deal for employees by offering a single debit card, which they can use for purchases across their plans. While there is a laundry list of companies competing across HR, health coverage, payroll and benefits categories, Zenefits claims that its the “first of its” (HR automation) kind to “provide all-in-one debit cards that integrate with HR systems and payroll right out of the box.” With these new commuter, FSA and HRA benefits, Zenefits wants to fully-integrate everything HR-related and put it in one place, offer one card, allow employees to make contributions to reduce their taxable income and have Zenefits set up and run discrimination and compliance tests for your business. Lastly, the startup is also launching its own affordable 401(k) service, in which companies pay a $495 one-time setup fee and $105/month in account fees, while employees pay $4/month + 7bps annually. In turn, Conrad says, the fees that it does charge to use these services are charged by the 401(k) provider and Zenefits doesn’t “tack on a penny.” The startup’s new 401(k) also allows founders to skip the process of transferring payroll data to the 401(k) provider each quarter, automatically doing this for them in a few clicks. Zenefits also automates the employee on-boarding process and bringing new hires online, paperlessly. If the employee chooses to enroll, the system automatically adds the deduction into the TC payroll system. Employees can then choose from over 40 Vanguard mutual funds and ETFs and customize by selecting different funds. According to Parker, businesses can enroll in 3 minutes online just by creating an account or logging in and clicking the “Setup” header under 401(k). By expanding its HR and benefits coverage to include commuter, FSA, HRA benefits and a fully-baked 401(k) — and by continuing to round-out its platform — Zenefits is well-positioned to take advantage of the growing demand for better, more flexible HR services. Especially for those that cater to medium-sized and small businesses alike — part of why Zenefits’ core focus has traditionally been on companies that are between 50 and 300 employees. Going forward, however, Conrad says that he expects Zenefits to continue to broaden its scope and to begin going after bigger and bigger companies. So far, the company’s efforts to expand into a full-service platform and serve the whole pipeline have been paying off. The Zenefits CEO tells us that the company’s overall growth rate has been doubling every six weeks — and 4x quarter-over-quarter growth — which is quickly making Zenefits a force to be reckoned with in this space. In less than a year, Zenefits’ payroll, benefits and HR management tools have attracted over 500 companies and is now helping them managing more than 5,000 employees. |
Update: Alleged Dropbox Hack Is A Hoax, Website Is Back Up | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | , Popular backup service Dropbox is offline and the hacktivist contingent, Anonymous, is claiming credit. “BREAKING NEWS: We have just compromised the @Dropbox Website http://bit.ly/1cMlbvt #hacked #compromised,” tweeted an alleged Anonymous Twitter account. [tweet https://twitter.com/AnonOpsKorea/status/421823871960899585] Dropbox seems to be denying their website was hacked: “We are aware of an issue currently affecting the Dropbox site. We have identified the cause, which was the result of an issue that arose during routine internal maintenance, and are working to fix this as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience,” . [ ] If they were, indeed, hacked it’s not clear who is ultimately responsible. Another hacktivist group, 1775sec, is also claiming credit: [tweet https://twitter.com/1775Sec/statuses/421820685766250496] We have reached out to Dropbox for more details and will update you on this story as details unfold. Meanwhile, 1775sec and Anonymous have been mocking Dropbox’s denial and claiming the hack was done in the honor of . [tweet https://twitter.com/1775Sec/status/421831664239509504] 1775sec also claims that they successfully stole a from Dropbox, which they posted on the website, pastebin.com. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 17 | null |
New Tactus Case Concept Brings A Disappearing Keyboard To The iPad | Chris Velazco | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | It was about that Tactus — the company behind the amazing disappearing touchscreen keyboard — really started making a name for itself. So what does a buzzy company do to top its previous showing at the world’s biggest consumer tech show? In Tactus’ case it quietly showed off yet another potential game-changer, so we met with Tactus CEO Craig Ciesla on the CES show floor to dig into what the team has been working on. If you’ll recall, the past few months have been interesting ones for Tactus. The Fremont, Calif., company linked up with Synaptics to cobble together a reference Android tablet and it just recently locked up a hefty to help it flesh out its relationships with new and existing OEM partners working to embed Tactus tech into their wares. As it turns out, they’ve been working on some kooky (not to mention awesome) hardware prototypes, too. Ciesla brought one such device for us to peek at, and should it reach production, it could potentially solve one of Tactus’ biggest hangups. You see, Tactus’ big deal is all about licensing its disappearing keyboard tech to other device manufacturers, which means that all the tablets currently floating around on the market are tablets that Tactus can’t make money off of. In order to fix that, the team whipped up an impressive 3D-printed case prototype within the span of a month that adapts that screen keyboard tech to existing devices. When it’s lashed onto a device (in this case, an iPad mini) the Tactus case pushes fluid into a series of vessels nestled in a thin layer that sits atop the tablet’s screen. The end result? A keyboard that can appear and disappear at will and work on any device. The case has the sort of rough edges you’d expect a prototype to have, but there’s no denying that seeing a fluid-filled keyboard up and running on an iPad is tremendously cool. Because of the aftermarket nature of the case, there’s no way to coax the keyboard into appearing through software, so a slider on the side controls how much fluid gets pushed into the screen. Neat as this is, Ciesla was eager to remind me that Tactus has no desire to craft and sell these sorts of devices under its own name. He expects the first batch of Tactus-enabled gadgets to hit the market toward the middle of the year, and with any luck, some smart OEM will bite the licensing bullet and crank these cases out for the masses soon. |
Bill Gates Is Not The Next CEO Of Microsoft, But His VC Investments Are Picking Up | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | Bill Gates may be one of the world’s most famous , , and , but could he be adding venture capitalist to the list? Over the past few years it seems that Gates has, in fact, been increasing his investment in . Though not as active in venture capital as , , technology billionaires, Gates is nonetheless putting together a growing stable of technology companies. And the pace of his investment is steadily increasing, according to the data in CrunchBase. Last year, Gates was involved in at least six new and follow-on investments in venture-backed companies, including a commitment to the energy storage technology developer Aquion, in a financing which wrapped up . That’s up from four new and follow-on commitments in 2012, and three in 2011, the CrunchBase data indicated. In addition to Aquion, the Gates portfolio also includes other companies tackling the energy problem, like the compressed air energy storage company, , and the battery technology developer . And those aren’t Gates’ only sustainable investments. , an electricity monitoring and management technology developer, is another cleantech pony in the Gates stable. Even more ambitiously, Gates is backing , the nuclear reactor developer spun out from Intellectual Ventures, alongside former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer and Intellectual Ventures founder and chief executive, Nathan Myrhvold. Intellectual Ventures is behind two other Gates investments. Both and came from Myrhvold’s IP monetization factory. Rounding out some of the newest investments in the portfolio of the man from Medina, Wash. are three healthcare investments focused on computational drug design and targeted cancer therapies: and its development partner are both focused on computational drug design, while develops diagnostic tests based on gene sequencing to identify personalized cancer therapies for patients. All of these investments hew pretty closely with some of Gates’ expressed goals of improving healthcare, or reducing carbon emissions in an effort to combat the effects of global warming, but he’s also an investor in , a company which sells technology and services to improve the operations of oil and gas and mining companies. Needless to say, Bill Gates did not respond to a request for comment for this post. |
Meet Urb-E, The World’s Most Compact Electric Scooter | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | One of the more interesting discoveries at this year’s CES was the , a super compact electric scooter that folds right up in a jiffy. We interviewed co-founder Grant Delgatti and learned that the little guy is meant for commuters who need a little extra push for the last leg of their journey, whether it be the mile from the train station to the house or from the cheap parking lot down the street to the office. The Urb-E can go twenty miles on a single charge, and has a max speed of 15 mph. I rode one around for a bit after the interview and while it takes some getting used to, it’s a whole lot of fun once you get the hang of it. Even better, the Urb-E folds up to be about the size of a small suitcase, and can be rolled around like one, too. In the final version, Urb-E will have a dock for you to charge your smartphone, as well as an app that can plug into the scooter and give back information on how much battery is left. Delgatti hasn’t made final decisions on price point, but that will be announced soon when the company launches its Kickstarter campaign. He estimates it will go for about $1,500. |
Martha Stewart Shops CES | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | For many of us, CES is a massive conference filled with the world’s most innovative technology. To , the world’s largest Consumer Electronics Show represents a day of gadget shopping. So what is Martha on the market for? The lifestyle guru and DIYer had a few specific products in mind when she joined TechCrunch for CES 2014, including a 3D printer, a new set of headphones, a new television for her home theater, and perhaps some updated appliances. That said, Stewart and I took a stroll through the 3D printing area, checking out FormLabs and MakerBot. In fact, she and Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis forged a few deals on the fly to license Martha Stewart designs as 3D printable objects. She also asked to be bumped to the front of the line to get Makerbot’s Z18 industrial printer. Then, we spent a little time at the Parrot booth discussing the benefits of drone ownership. Drownership, if you will. Martha already owns the AR.Drone 2.0, but seemed equally interested in Parrot’s new Sumo rover and Mini Drone quad-copter. After playing around with those highly expensive toys, Stewart and I visited the Monster booth in search of some nice, lightweight headphones. She has very specific tastes: something light, unobtrusive, stylish, and canceling. Luckily, Tyson Beckford was there to help us out, showing off his Inspiration line of Monster headphones. Seems Stewart wants the Inspiration Light in rose gold, with black leather and a black ballistic material headband. Tough. To finish off a long day of shopping, Stewart and I ventured into the biggest booth at all of CES, Samsung. We checked out curved display UHD tvs, smart fridges and washers, and even the new 12.2-inch Samsung tablets. [gallery ids="938371,938372,938374,938375,938378,938380,938381,938385,938387,938388,938389,938390,938391,938392,938394"] |
LuckyPennie Brings Music Discovery, Local Tastemakers To The iPhone | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | If your Spotify friends have terrible taste in music, newly launched iPhone app may be for you. This L.A.-based startup is hoping to re-imagine the way people discover music, including not only new songs available for streaming or download on iTunes, but those performed by local bands, too. The company was founded by a trio who have backgrounds in music, including Dr. John Wolanin, a Ph.D whose passion for music saw him writing his dissertation on using music as a therapeutic tool, and connecting with clients through music to get them back on the road to recovery. And on the side, Dr. Wolanin was in a band of his own. Meanwhile, co-founder and CTO Joe Ladon (previously director of mobile development at Break.com) also has a background in music technology and theory, while LuckyPennie’s third co-founder (who co-founded NextSpace in L.A.) is a musician, too, and ran a music distribution business in the past. Says Dr. Wolanin, “we’re actually toying with the idea of forming a band together.” (He’s not really kidding.) With LuckyPennie, the idea is to build a mobile music community where you can share and discover songs, concerts, photos and notes with others, and be able to connect with those who have similar musical tastes. You can add users to your “crew” or chat with them in the app itself. The app’s main screen is meant to serve as something of a community bulletin board of things happening around you which you can filter by distance and content type. (Right now, this seems biased to the West Coast scene, it appears. It could use a bigger feed of concerts across the U.S. to get things going.) More broadly, the app also lets you see what’s new and what’s trending, and soon, the app will introduce more social features, as well as a framework for building up your “cred”. The idea, the co-founder explains, is that you’ll be able to establish yourself as influential about your local scene, and one day other users will be able to easily follow those who are knowledgable about a given city’s music scene. Today, however, the app is focused on more general music and concert discovery, where you can buy concert tickets, and either preview tracks or play them full-length if you’re a premium Rdio or Spotify subscriber. This is available in the app’s “Radio” section, available from the side menu. LuckyPennie launched just yesterday in the , and is a free download. The company is basically bootstrapped with a little bit of friends and family funding to help them get off the ground. It’s worth noting too that the app is beautifully designed, with screens and menus that move around fluidly in ways I wish other startups would consider copying. However, the main feed is also a bit busy for newcomers as it lacks separations between posts, the filtering tools and navigational elements. It can be a lot to take in at first. But given that LuckyPennie is only a day old, it’s worth giving the company a chance to figure things out. After all, if your Facebook/Spotify friends are listening to awful stuff, you could use the help. |
Hands On With Samsung’s New Galaxy NotePRO And TabPRO Android Tablets | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | Samsung debuted a couple at CES this year, both of which are being positioned as “Pro” versions of its existing Note and Tab line of devices. The slates do indeed offer some features aimed more at enterprise users, but they also feature a UI that’s dramatically different from a stock Android experience. The Galaxy NotePRO is a 12.2-inch tablet with Samsung’s S Pen and 2560×1600 screen resolution, and the TabPRO comes in 12.2, 10.1 and 8.4-inch sizes, and also offers a 2560×1600 screen on the top-end model, as well as on both of the smaller screen devices, which is amazing considering you’re cramming more pixels into a smaller space. Each runs Android 4.4. The NotePRO and TabPRO models are powered by an Exynos 5 Octa processor for Wi-Fi and 3G versions, and the Snapdragon 800 2.3GHz processor for the LTE editions. But the really impressive thing about these new tablets aren’t found on a specs sheet; instead, it’s the new Magazine UX, which reimagines the basic home screen of an Android tablet with a design that has more in common with Windows Phone or even individual apps like Flipboard. There’s also a Multi Window mode that allows users to play with up to four different windows of separate active content on the same screen. In practice, it results in an experience that feels very unlike using any previous Android tablet, and while I didn’t spend quite enough time with it to make any final judgement, I did enjoy the cursory experience I did manage to get with the gadgets. Samsung is going to bring the NotePRO and TabPRO devices to market sometime in Q1, 2014, and there’s no official word on pricing yet, though has pegged them ranging between $389 and just under $900 depending on spec loadout. These are a curious breed of devices, and ones that could potentially take on Microsoft’s Surface and Windows 8 tablet offerings, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of impact they make once they do launch. |
Gillmor Gang Live 01.10.14 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | – Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. |
These Are The Headphones You’re Looking For | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | Stormtrooper: Let me see your headphones.
Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don’t need to see his headphones.
Stormtrooper: We don’t need to see his headphones.
Obi-Wan: These aren’t the headphones you’re looking for.
Stormtrooper: These aren’t the headphones we’re looking for.
Obi-Wan: 50 Cent can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: 50 Cent can go about his business.
Obi-Wan: Move along.
Stormtrooper: Move along… move along. 50 Cent’s SMS audio business with these so very Rebel headphones specially designed to match your golden slave Leia bikini and utility belt. Priced at about $200 and available in the spring you and band of interstellar adventurers can pick up deep space transmissions (and maybe ponder the fate of Fiddy’s musical career) while wearing the latest in Endorian tech. |
TC Makers: A Walk Through The Pinball Hall Of Fame | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | Pong, before Space Invaders there was pinball. And it was good. While we were in Las Vegas this week for we had the distinct pleasure of stopping by the , an amazing space dedicated to all things electromechanical. I spoke with Tim Arnold, Director of Things And Stuff (or, alternately, Stuff And Things) who has made it his life’s mission to maintain some amazing amusements. Arnold has a collection amassed over many years. He was – and still is – a trained Bally’s pinball technician and he has hundreds of machines in storage that he has amassed in fire sales back at the tail end of the pinball craze. He rebuilds many of the machines from scratch, using good parts from bad machines to make one uber machine that anyone can play in his nondescript museum. Arnold has it all: Gottliebs, Ballys, Midways, and more. He has standup arcade games, as well, including amazing electromechanical games like , one of the first arcade games to use transistor controlled electronics. He also has a mini workshop in back where he repairs the old machines, keeping them in working condition even 60 years after they rolled off the factory floor. There’s a lot of history – and a lot of fun – to be found in the Pinball Hall of Fame. Arnold is a tinkerer and a dedicated maker. He recommended that young makers learn to build things, not just mash things together. By being good with your hands, he said, you ensure your job and your skills are always in demand. Visiting a place like the Pinball Hall of Fame makes you feel in touch with the long arc of history that led from the first bells and gears of the original pinball parlors to the ultra-realistic game machines of today. It’s mind-boggling to think that we moved from the pinball machine – essentially a glorified gas pump – to the arcade machine to the home console in a less than 20 years. Plus the games are really, really fun. [gallery ids="939389,939391,939393,939394,939395,939396,939397,939398,939399,939401,939404,939405,939406,939407,939408,939410,939411,939412,939413,939415,939416,939417"] |
Snakebyte Vyper Adds Home Theatre Features To An Android Game Console And Tablet | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | Many companies are betting that people want some kind of Android-based gaming solution in their living room, from Ouya to GameStick to Nvidia. One new initiative along those lines debuted at CES 2014 called the . The Vyper is from a German startup, and the company is bringing the product the U.S. in the coming months. It’s one device that has a number of different faces, including a standalone 7-inch tablet that’s powered by Android, packing a quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM, along with 8GB of storage (and expandable Micro SD-based storage). There are two USB ports, a front-facing 2 megapixel and rear-facing 5 megapixel camera and HDMI out for plugging into your TV. There’s a docking base that you plug it into when you want to play games from your home theatre setup, or any television anywhere. It provides power and transmits video to your screen, and automatically puts the tablet into television mode. There’s a controller that acts as an air mouse and has a full QWERTY keyboard on the back for input, as well as a Bluetooth game controller with a fairly standard layout compatible with many Android games. The advantage of its platform over others, according to the company, is that it doesn’t focus on either gaming or media to the exclusion of the other. Instead it’s designed to do both equally well, as well as to be a standard, full-featured Android tablet in its own right, too. It’ll retail for $199 when it goes on sale later this month, which is a surprisingly good deal, provided it works well and offers at least a decent user experience. |
Supreme Court Will Hear Aereo Case, Settling The Broadcaster Battle Once And For All | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | , a streaming TV startup , has been embroiled in a legal battle with network broadcasters for the better part of this year. But the case has finally reached the home stretch, as the supreme court today decided to take on the issue and settle the matter once and for all. Aereo takes OTA signals out of the air through miniature antennas and streams that content over the internet to any device for a low monthly fee. It’s the first major step toward disrupting the current TV/cable subscription model. Obviously, broadcasters aren’t happy with it, despite the fact that courts have deemed Aereo to be as legal as cloud-based DVR or using rabbit ears. So far, in one market such as New York or , broadcasters . Tired of losing appellate cases, the broadcasters asked the Supreme Court to intervene and, in a somewhat surprising turn of events, to have the case heard by the Supreme Court. Why? Well, if the Supreme Court follows the decision of earlier rulings and deems Aereo’s operations legal, broadcasters can no longer implement the “divide and conquer” strategy of suing Aereo in various districts. Once the Supreme Court makes a ruling, that ruling is final. By agreeing to hear the case, the Supreme Court will most certainly shape the future of the media industry. Aereo’s long term goal is to create a market place where content creators can sell content directly to those who want to view it, rather than selling bundles of content at higher prices. By allowing Aereo to operate, offering customers access to what are ultimately free broadcast signals, the Supreme Court is opening us up to a more on-demand future. Here’s the official statement from Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia: We said from the beginning that it was our hope that this case would be decided on the merits and not through a wasteful war of attrition. We look forward to presenting our case to the Supreme Court and we have every confidence that the Court will validate and preserve a consumer’s right to access local over-the-air television with an individual antenna, make a personal recording with a DVR, and watch that recording on a device of their choice. This case is critically important not only to Aereo, but to the entire cloud computing and cloud storage industry. The landmark Second Circuit decision in Cablevision provided much needed clarity for the cloud industry and as a result, helped foster massive investment, growth and innovation in the sector. The challenges outlined in the broadcasters’ filing make clear that they are using Aereo as a proxy to attack Cablevision itself and thus, undermine a critical foundation of the cloud computing and storage industry. We believe that consumers have a right to use an antenna to access over-the-air television and to make personal recordings of those broadcasts. The broadcasters are asking the Court to deny consumers the ability to use the cloud to access a more modern-day television antenna and DVR. If the broadcasters succeed, the consequences to consumers and the cloud industry are chilling. We remain unwavering in our confidence that Aereo’s technology falls squarely within the law and our team will continue to work hard to provide our consumers with best-in-class technology that delights and adds meaningful value to their lives. |
Questions Is A Video Q&A App That Wants You To Have Curious Micro-Conversations With Anyone | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | is an iOS app, pictured left, that’s using video to animate and humanise the Q&A format. Spicing up the tried-and-tested Q&A format to make it fit for a visually obsessed age is energising plenty of startups at present. The very recent (and high profile) category entrant, Biz Stone’s new startup , for instance, is not just a Q&A startup; it’s a Q&A startup that let’s people frame their questions within its slick, photo-centric interface — which is one way to make the well-worn questions & answers format feel shiny and new, rather than, you know, like . Jelly’s -style swipe interface helps too. As does its piggybacking on existing social networks to provide a little structure to who is providing the answers to your questions. And of course it’s mobile first. Point is, Jelly is more about execution and interface than freshness of the underlying idea. But that’s fine. Curiosity satisfied (aka Q&A) remains an addictive, motivating force. The day people run out of stuff to ask each other is the day Q&A startups should give up and go home. is another Q&A startup that springs to mind as building momentum behind the format (although it’s since run into ). While search engines like Google are also a form of Q&A, albeit largely algorithmically retrieving answers to human questions. The dominance of algorithmic approaches by tech giants like Google has of course left room (and appetite) for startups to take a more human approach to Q&A. So enter Jelly, or hello . And so on. Returning to the Questions app, it’s tackling Q&A by reframing the format as a video conversation between askers and answerers. Founder, has previous pedigree in the video space. Back in 2011 he launched a startup called — which as “a sort of hybrid of Skype and YouTube”. Nyoombl as a social broadcasting platform hasn’t eclipsed YouTube but is still around — and has hosted chats between a plethora of individuals, including UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in . (The startup was seed-backed (mainly) by , former Chief Privacy of Facebook, with a roster of advisors that included entrepreneur , Sun Microsystems co-founder , and venture capitalist .) Presumably Nyoombl provided Olagunju’s inspiration for the follow up Questions app — although there are clear differences. Nyoombl hosts live broadcasts of up to seven minute-long conversations on its web platform, as well as playback after the fact. Whereas Questions is more ephemeral in its content — it’s about what you could call micro-conversations, with users recording 10 second video questions and other users replying to them with 10 second video answers. Ten seconds is pretty throwaway, in terms of content — your question/explanation can only go so deep (although individual videos can end up chained together to build up a longer conversation) — but it’s enough time for personality to shine. Questions’ user generated content can therefore be ephemeral — but can have more of an impact than its length might suggest, because of the personalities on display. Olagunju tells TechCrunch the short format video is designed to give structure to the conversations on the app by allowing people to start talking without worrying too much about the topic. “People need, psychologically and mentally, a convenient deconstruction of what a conversation is,” he says. “And by and large a conversation is a sort of concatenation of questions and answers.” It should also be noted that Questions’ content is not ephemeral; the videos remain on the platform as there’s apparently no way for users to delete a question or answer once uploaded. And that is slightly concerning, being as the app is clearly aimed at appealing to teens (it didn’t take much browsing of the app to find one youthful-looking Questions user effectively confessing to having smoked weed on video — a video that’s going to stay up there for anyone to play and replay for as long as the app is in existence). Being as users take videos of themselves asking and answering they are also typically identifiable. Which again isn’t great if you’re the kid publicly confessing to drug use, but the confessional video selfie medium may act as a general check and balance on user behaviour. That is important for a startup targeting the teen demographic — considering the difficulties with abusive content and teen suicide that Ask.fm has run into (for instance). Using video as the medium for its Q&A format also means Questions becomes a repository of animated selfies — affording brief glimpses into the lives and personalities of an assortment of strangers. In an age obsessed with selfies the app’s living ‘human library’ of content, displaying a grid of faces tagged with their queries to click on, feels as if it has the power to resonate and captivate. Certainly, it succeeds in humanising the Q&A format — although Olagunju actually says he does not view Questions as a Q&A app. For him, the mission of this micro-video medium is far grander than helping people find the right factoid with which to plug a particular knowledge gap. Its focus is on human curiosity and conversations. Qualifying that further, he says it’s about “everyday conversations” — meaning the resulting knowledge is necessarily colloquial. (But that of course can still be informative, or entertaining, or interesting, and so on.) “Questions is not a Q&A app. Wonderfully, verbal stimuli (Q) and facial or verbal reactions (A) to those stimuli do form the basis of conversations,” he tells TechCrunch. (To my mind, the app shares something with BBC Radio 4’s — a project to record and broadcast short conversations between two interlocutors that they choose to let the radio audience listen in on.) “The goal is not just to get people talking… if you think about the world today, you find that in private we are who we really are and in public, when people are looking at us, we are our aspiration self. That we aspire to be,” he adds. “We are not always who we are in private who we are in public, and vice versa. What Questions wants to do is how do we make us do in an app what we do in public — which hopefully is to be nice, kind, thoughtful.” Olagunju also stresses that the focus is on the first-person video medium itself, as a form of expression that generates the positive public personas that Questions wants to encourage. “I just feel we should give people a window to interact viscerally, to put their best foot forward, and we really want to crush the first-person video space. And so Q&A is a bridge, a means to executing that — it’s a mission to the vision,” he says. “YouTube has not crushed the first person,” he adds, discussing where he sees the opportunity for Questions to scale up (he’s not disclosing user numbers at this time). “Most of the videos on YouTube are third person perspective, whereby the camera is videoing somebody else.” Olagunju has a history of taking a stealthy approach in his startup launches — this was true of Nyoombl, and has also been true in the case of Questions, which quietly went live on the App Store back in October 2012. There’s also a serious streak to his startups — Nyoombl was about “democratising conversations”, i.e. by allowing others to listen in and learn. And although Olagunju doesn’t use the empathy word (as ), he does talk about having a vision for “what society should be”. So Questions feels like it has an ultimate goal of improving humanity by helping people better understand themselves and each other. In other words: more empathy, less prejudice. Which is indeed a noble goal. “We don’t gravitate towards trends or what may be comfortable. We have a vision of how the world and society should be, and we move with solemn conviction to bring it that vision to fruition,” Olagunju adds. (Questions is also still very much a startup business — the sense of mission/vision and the desire to show humanity’s better side are part of Olagunju’s philosophy on how to build big. “To create a $100 billion company, a $400 billion company you really have to touch the hearts of mankind,” he says.) So what sorts of questions are the current users of Questions asking? That depends on the user, of course, but there’s plenty of classic kids’ obsessions on display — favourite colour, food, how many siblings you have, how old you think they are, and so on. The app does also include categories so you can browse Q&As in channels — such as sports & entertainment, religion, science & technology — if you want to view and target specific knowledge areas or opinions. It also sorts content based on popularity, or by the newest posts, and there’s a search function to seek out particular types of questions or to find other users. Generally speaking, the sorts of questions you’ll find in the app are the sorts of queries that characterise humanity via its obsessions, large and small: so grand themes of sex, death and religion, rub shoulders with more quotidian concerns and curiosities, and/or the desire to fit in or be liked by peers. It’s the sort of stuff people are always curious about — regardless of gender, race, religion. And the answers provided by other app users, though usually necessarily partial and/or subjective, are curiously reassuring because they show how similar people are, despite the visual differences on clear display through the video medium. So, really, if you want to find an app that’s actually doing something to make the world a more empathetic place, not just sprinkling grand claims over a marketing-friendly interface like so many Silicon Valley Utopianism sprinkles, then Questions is a great place to start your search for answers. |
Newly Launched Marketing Platform Carnival Wants Brands To Stop Treating Mobile Like A Billboard | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | Just before the holidays, a new mobile marketing platform targeting brands and agencies, , quietly made its public debut. Based in New York and New Zealand, the company is aspiring to chart a course similar to what Buddy Media did for social on the web, but for mobile campaigns, engagement and retention. Mobile, of course, is quite a different beast from social, but it’s one that the company’s co-founders have a lengthy experience with. Shortly after the iPhone debuted, Carnival CEO Guy Horrocks, CTO Cody Bunea and others began creating some of the first applications to ever run on the iPhone – before there was even an iTunes App Store. Through their company , they had at one time reached 6 million downloads of their apps for jail-broken iPhones when there were only 10 million iPhones. They even drew the attention of Apple, Horrocks notes. At an Apple developer conference just ahead of the announcement of the iTunes App Store, an Apple employee told them that about half his company wanted to shut down Polar Bear Farm, but the other half was running its software. Over the years, the co-founders also contracted for to create Twinkle, one of the first Twitter clients for the iPhone. And later on, after selling their stakes in Polar Bear Farm in late 2008 to start Carnival, they began building apps for brands like Kraft Foods, Gerber, HBO, Dreamworks and others. They also worked on startup’s apps, like Ptch ( ) and . In other words, the pair has been active and invested in mobile for years. And, explains Horrocks, their experience building apps and working with brands allowed them to spot what they believe is an untapped opportunity in mobile today. “All these [brands] are producing a lot of apps, but they don’t know how to maintain them, and they don’t really focus on the users after they launch them,” he says. “And the other part of the problem is that a lot of these brands have multiple apps…but most of them are very siloed.” At Carnival, which has now shifted from being an app-building agency to a mobile platform maker, the goal is to aggregate all of a brand’s users in one place, so they can run analytics on that user base, and allow the brand to run various campaigns, targeting users with content through push notifications, in-app messages, contests, and more. The platform lets brands reach users using more standard content like text, photos, videos and links – which could be delivered in a “News Feed”-like experience within the app or pushed to the end user’s device via a notification. But Carnival supports other, more interesting or interactive content, too, like coupons, sweepstakes, or polls, or even sending users a fake FaceTime phone call. Users can also be geo-targeted (including via geofencing), or targeted based on other metrics like loyalty, engagement, device, or software version, for example. (The FaceTime call happened to be tested on One Direction fans, 50 percent of whom accepted the opportunity to FaceTime singer Harry Styles when the band arrived in their city during its tour. The call is actually a mockup of FaceTime with a pre-recorded message designed to boost ticket sales.) Many of the things Carnival handles are the kinds of things that many other mobile platform makers provide today, too, but Horrocks believes there’s a need for a platform that specifically targets brands that have different goals than the typical app or game developer. The company currently has around 60 branded apps using its SDK, including CNN, TIME magazine, Coca-Cola, Dreamworks, Mondelez (a Kraft-owned brand behind Oreo and Cadbury, for example), and more. These companies (or their agencies) pay Carnival on a subscription basis somewhere in the range of the low five figures to low six figures per year for access to the mobile platform, and additional support, if needed. The long-term plan is to grow that base and push them to six-figure contracts. “A lot of brands are still treating mobile like a billboard. They build an app and do a one-month campaign,” says Horrocks. The guys that are winning are those who “have built an actual audience, utility and value,” he adds. Carnival recently closed on an oversubscribed $2.4 million round led by Gary Vaynerchuk and Lerer Ventures, with participation from Bowery Capital, FlyBridge Capital Partners, Google Ventures, David Tisch, Jos White, and Buddy Media co-founder Michael Lazerow. |
FOBO Launches In San Francisco To Become The Fastest, Easiest Way To Sell Your Consumer Electronics | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | By now you probably know that Craigslist sucks as a way to sell stuff. You have to contend with spam emails, buyers who promise to purchase your goods but flake, and people who show up then try to haggle down the price after the fact. But somehow, no one has figured out a way to make it better or provide a real alternative. Well, there’s a new app out called that aims to solve all those problems, providing users with a local marketplace for selling consumer electronics. FOBO launches in San Francisco today, offering its users a new way to sell goods via mobile app. It gets rid of all the hassle that is usually associated with local marketplaces and makes it ultra-simple and ultra-fast to do so. The app guarantees sellers will get a certain price for their devices and will be paid upfront, and ensures that their product is sold fast — within 97 minutes. When you list an item on FOBO, the app instantly prices your item, usually based on the average sales price on eBay. It then starts up an auction that lasts a little more than an hour and a half, during which time other FOBO users can bid on your goods. But if by some bit of bad luck your item doesn’t sell to another user, FOBO will buy it for the guaranteed starting price and do the hard work of reselling it. So there’s really only upside to listing your item. FOBO doesn’t want to be a Gazelle-like reseller — it’s mainly just guaranteeing sales prices to seed the marketplace with good stuff. Getting the supply side of a marketplace rolling is the hard part, after all. And it seems to be working: FOBO sold 92 percent of items listed in its 1,000-person beta run over the past few months. There are other advantages to listing with FOBO, other than just getting a guaranteed amount for a consumer electronics device in 97 minutes. Buyers pay for the good in-app, which means there’s no haggling once they show up to pick up the device. And they agree to meet at a time that works on the seller’s schedule. On the buyer side, FOBO also makes things easy. When you first sign up, you’re prompted to subscribe to certain types of electronics. And then you get notifications when they go on sale. The team had raised $1.6 million in funding from Index Ventures, Greylock, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Y Combinator, and a few others. |
Google Maps Mistakenly Labels Berlin Square After Hitler | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | Google lets anybody suggest changes to its maps, and on January 2, an anonymous user suggested that shouldn’t be named after Germany’s first federal president but after Adolf Hitler. Google uses a small army of volunteers and its own moderators to check all submissions before they go live, and whoever checked this one apparently thought the submission was correct. So for the next few days, the square was called “Adolf Hitler Platz” in Google Maps. LandkartenBlog, which first detected this issue, Other users quickly noticed the change and another moderator then after they remained online for a few days. In many ways, this is just another example of crowdsourcing getting something wrong and then correcting itself. It also shows, however, that Google doesn’t necessarily vet all of its Maps moderators to the degree it should – or works them so hard, that mistakes like this are inevitable. Either way, Google has issued an apology and Google Maps now shows the right name again. |
JayBird Bets On Intelligent Tracking For The Reign, Its First Foray Into Quantified Fitness | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 10 | Bluetooth and sport headset company JayBird is venturing a little outside of its comfort zone with the new fitness tracking wristband, a device unveiled earlier this week at CES 2014. The JayBird Reign goes beyond most existing devices like those from Fitbit, Withings, and Jawbone, tracking different types of fitness differently instead of just lumping them all in together. There’s also a little bit of intuitive prognostication built into the Reign; JayBird says that it can actually recognize when your body is ready to get active, even if you can’t. It can then prompt you to get up and get moving even when you might not feel like it, to help you make the most of those times your body is ready to go for the most possible return on your workout investment. Conversely, it also tells you when you need more rest thanks to built-in sleep tracking. The sleep tracking not only tells you when you’re sleeping heavily and when you’re sleeping light, like many other trackers, but also provides advice about how much sleep you should get the next night in order to feel as rested as is possible. The Reign uses Bluetooth to communicate data with a companion app for iOS and Android, and should be available sometime this spring for $199. That’s pricier than many entry-level fitness trackers on the market, but Jaybird is hoping people are willing to pay more for a device that automatically recognizes what kind of sport or activity you’re doing and switches its tracking rhythm accordingly. It’s also light and comfortable with a highly flexible band, an a simple LED notification light for communicating basic info. Few device categories are growing faster than the health and fitness tracking gizmo market, and an increasingly crowded space means more companies competing for the same pool of potential buyers. At least JayBird hasn’t just thrown its brand on something that simply matches what’s already out there, but we’ll still have to wait and see what kind of tolerance consumer demand has for a growing number of suppliers. |
Uber And Disruption | Contributor | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | Usually an industry’s disruption happens faster than anyone anticipates. Things look like business as usual to the slow moving incumbents, who often have not faced a real market threat for a while. Then the incumbents’ business undergoes sudden, cataclysmic collapse. Uber and Lyft are in the midst of causing this pattern to eat away at the taxi industry. Below are the typical phases of disruption: As the disruptive companies emerge, the incumbents view the new entrants as that could never threaten their decades-old franchise. This is the time for the incumbents to take action and innovate, but instead they usually ignore the new entrants, or often try to delay them with regulatory actions, such as . Uber and Lyft’s early skirmishes with regulatory bodies are good examples of this standard tactic. Similarly, Airbnb has been pursued by the Sudden realization that things have changed. Realization is typically sparked in the incumbent through a drastic turn of events – e.g. the incumbent unexpectedly misses a quarter in a big way when its business evaporates faster than anticipated. A sharp collapse in its business is often the singular signal that the industry has hit a tipping point and an irreversible downward spiral kicks in for the incumbent’s business. This is happening right now with Uber – more taxi drivers are switching to Uber, which means there are more cars on Uber, which means more people use Uber and fewer use taxis, which means more taxi drivers switch to Uber. To quote a on this: “The San Francisco Cab Drivers Association (SFCDA) […] reports that one-third of the 8,500 or so taxi drivers in San Francisco — over 2,800 — have ditched driving a registered cab in the last 12 months to drive for a private transportation startup like Uber, Lyft, or Sidecar instead.” These sorts of downward spirals start off slowly (so the incumbents ignore them early on) and then hit a phase transition and shift into overdrive – often over the course of just a few months or a year. In Uber’s case it is a network effect that drives fast compounding for itself, and a rapid phase shift/cliff for the incumbents. Incumbents try to take action but often don’t do enough quickly enough. For example, the SFMTA and cab companies in San Francisco are to increase taxi numbers in San Francisco, but it is probably already game over in the long run. This and other actions (such as building their own on-demand taxi app), should have been taken a few years ago when Uber first appeared on the scene as a black car centric company. Instead, the taxi companies responded by forcing Uber to drop the word “cab” from its name and lobbied extensively on the regulatory side. Incumbents may survive for many years post collapse, but are no longer really relevant (e.g. BlackBerry). Instead they suffer from ongoing layoffs and downsizing of their companies with a subset going bankrupt early. In the taxi example, the individual drivers will thrive as they move to Uber and Lyft, while the taxi companies themselves will suffer. For the next years, people will still order Yellow Cabs and other taxis. There will just be fewer and fewer drivers and customers for these traditional services. Eventually, branded taxi companies will become an “old lady use case,” i.e. only a small subset of the most conservative prior generation of users will continue to use the dramatically downsized incumbents. BlackBerry is a good example of this. Some enterprises still buy BlackBerrys for their employees so the company has not completely disappeared. However, its relevance continues to decline as its market share slides. Old incumbents may continue to exist for years or even decades in a much reduced form after the new entrants take most of the pie. I am sure there is still a horse whip and buggy manufacturer somewhere, despite society’s shifts to automobiles decades ago.
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Index Leads $870K Seed Round For Resource Guru’s Cloud-Based Team Scheduling App | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | has led a $870,000 seed round into , a London-based startup that wants to disrupt companies’ use of spreadsheets to manage staff, equipment and other resources — and replace them with its cloud-based team scheduling software. “Most managers still rely on complicated spreadsheets or cumbersome software to manage their teams and resources, neither of which makes allocating resources particularly easy and efficient,” said Robin Klein, partner at Index Ventures, in a statement. “We’ve been impressed how Resource Guru tackled this problem with its simple to use online tool that leads to huge time savings and increased productivity.” Prior to this round Resource Guru, which was founded back in May 2011, had raised money from friends, family and angel investors. Other investors in the seed round included both existing and new names but these have not been disclosed. Its total funding to date stands at $1.14 million. Resource Guru said it will use the new funding to “accelerate hiring, product development and customer acquisition”. The startup launched its scheduling app in May 2012 but is not currently breaking out customer numbers (although it name-drops Saatchi & Saatchi, Vodafone, Intel, Roche, ASOS and National Geographic Channel as among the unknown number). It also says users of its platform have created more than 296,000 bookings on over 31,000 projects, so make of that what you will. One thing to note is it’s not gone down the freemium route, but rather charges a subscription fee for all users of its software. This starts at $19 per month for a “mini” offering (for up to 10 people), rising to $99+ for a “premium plus” offering that covers 80+ users. When you’re trying to convince companies to ditch spreadsheets and switch to a dedicated scheduling tool, your biggest differentiator is undoubtedly the relative slickness of the user experience. So that’s where Resource Guru says it has focused its energies. “When we designed Resource Guru, there was no reference point — apart from the spreadsheets people were using. We started from scratch and re-thought the whole process,” says co-founder Andrew Rogoff. The software includes a booking section for visualising how resources are being used at given points, a “clash management engine” to prevent over-booking, and a waiting list feature so in-demand resources don’t get hogged by the same early bird from accounts. The availability of people and resources can be filtered — based on factors such as skill-set — so users can locate the right person for a given job within the required time-frame. The software also generates “utilization rates” — so you can identify under- and over-used resources (or staffers), as well as tracking how much time is being spent on which projects/clients, and who’s been working on what. In other words: keep tabs on your staff. It’s a feature-set that overlaps somewhat with time-management software offerings — such as — although Rogoff rejects the comparison, saying Harvest is focused on “timesheets and the past” whereas Resource Guru targets “forecasting for the future”, adding that that “has been a severely under-served area until now”. In terms of direct competitors, aside from spreadsheets, he names the likes of and ‘s Resource Planning offering as having “scheduling as part of their overall solution”. But again he rejects any direct comparison. “We don’t really consider them to be direct competitors because they are expensive, clunky and bloated with unnecessary features,” he adds. |
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The Frustrating, Impossible Beauty Of ‘The Perfect Setup’ | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | Others with gadget addictions will know these feels: Most of my life is spent questing for the Perfect Setup. That means different things at different times to different people, of course, and especially when it comes to tech, the goal posts keep moving. But it can still happen, and when it does, it can make the whole frustrating journey seem worth it. Recently, I achieved a kind of overarching, macro-level Perfect Setup, marking the first (and likely last) time I’ve ever done so. That means that it’s not just my office that’s ideally outfitted: the whole house, my car, everything about my tech life is exactly how I need it to accomplish everything I want to get done. Hitting that kind of perfection is an odd thing – in many ways I’d come to accept that my quest was quixotic, and couldn’t actually culminate in anything resembling satisfaction. The gadget over will know that there’s a process of looking for product reviews on Amazon, , and everywhere else on the web that arises for each new component or ingredient you find you need for your setup, and that new needs arise based on satisfying old ones, as each new piece of the puzzle opens up a new possibility tree with branches that themselves multiply when addressed and so on. At least for a given person at a given time, however, I realized that it’s possible to answer all needs and not have any new ones, and at first of course it felt deflating: Pursuit of ever-better gadgets isn’t a quest taken lightly, and generally at best achieving perfection in one area (aka home office) just means refocusing on another (aka portable office). Also, it’s possible that the standards of the quester in this case changed, making perfection more achievable. But whatever the case, after the momentary panic of boredom, I took stock and found nothing lacking It won’t last. Anything could upset the balance – a new product launch, a slight shift in job description and requirements, an unpleasant experience with some portion of my current setup. I’m okay with that, since the quest itself has been kind of the point for a long time. But I’m also increasingly comfortable with this new thing called satisfaction: Here’s hoping it sticks around for a while. |
Fly Or Die: 3D Systems Sense Scanner | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | If you followed along with , you know that one trend that emerged over the past couple years is here to stay. If you haven’t made your peace with the 3D printing revolution, you should. One company that’s taking the 3D-printed bull by the horns is 3D Systems, an incumbent in the space. The company revealed the , a hand-held 3D scanner in November that is meant to compete with Makerbot’s Digitizer and Occipital’s Mobile Structure Sensor. The Sense, which is about as big as a staple gun, can scan objects with your help. Unlike other scanners, the Sense is meant to be held and circle the object its scanning. This means that it can be difficult to get a perfectly accurate reading, since human error becomes more of a factor. However, the price point ($399) is pretty amazing for what it does, and when used properly, it’s incredibly accurate. John’s impressed. I’m impressed. What do you guys think? |
Valve Expects Virtual Reality To Be Awesome Within 2 Years | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | Virtual Reality is coming. As in, actual, good, user-friendly virtual reality. The stuff sci-fi has promised us for decades. Don’t take my word for it. Valve — easily one of the most revered and admired companies in gaming — has gone deep on virtual reality R&D, and they believe that amazing, consumer-friendly virtual reality is but a couple of years away. If you’re looking for an excellent weekend read, check out of a Steam Developer Day talk given by Valve’s own Michael Abrash. Abrash, an industry vet with code in everything from Windows to Quake, now works for Valve (after Valve’s Gabe Newell convincing him to join) on their Virtual Reality research team. No time to read the whole thing? You should still find time — it’s really a great read into the mindset of people who are aiming to change the face of gaming. But if you can’t, If you’ve been paying attention, Valve is by no means the only industry pillar that’s already all aboard the Virtual Reality train. Industry legend John Carmack (as in, the creator of Doom), quit his gig at the company he founded (iD) to be the CTO at Oculus. Having already spent a fair amount of time with the Oculus Rift, I’m already quite convinced that it’s amazing. It’ll only go truly “huge” once the technology starts playing friendly with consoles – but as Abrash notes, the PC is the best platform in these early days as it’s better for prototyping and rapid development. Check out a video of our own Anthony Ha taking a spin with the latest-and-greatest Rift prototype below: |
As Google Shoots For The Moon, Microsoft Praises The Virtues Of Open Research | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | A few days ago, Google unveiled its latest moon shot: a contact lens . As far as Google[x] projects go, the lens is right up there with flying and (though maybe not quite on the same level as self-driving cars). There is an interesting twist to this whole story, though: the researchers who are working on this project at Google . In 2011, and were still at the University of Washington and published a case study ( ) with on how they built a prototype lens that can monitor blood glucose levels. In the paper, Microsoft describes the collaboration as being ‘close’ and going back several years. “At the time I met Babak, he was starting to work on the functional contact lens, putting displays, or LEDs, into the contact itself, to create displays that sat on the surface of the eye,” Desney Tan, who was then a senior researchers at Microsoft Research, wrote at the time. “He was having a slightly hard time selling the idea, both in terms of feasibility, but also in terms of vision. What we added to the equation was basically a set of needs in all computing environments or in our projections of future computing environments that gelled very well with a particular technology.” Tan, it turns out, is still at Microsoft Research, and in a somewhat unusual move, he took to the day after Google’s announcement to talk about Microsoft’s role in all of this. Clearly, Microsoft wasn’t going to let Google get all the praise for a project that was incubated with its support. Like a good researcher, Tan is quite restrained in his words. He profusely praises the work of Parviz and Otis, but he also notes that Parviz, Otis and the team at Microsoft Research “tackled numerous hard problems around miniaturization, wireless power, wireless communications and biocompatibility.” The really hard questions around this project, he seems to imply, were answered with the help of Microsoft and not at Google[x]. Between the lines, he also sets up the difference between Microsoft’s and Google’s approaches to research in the context of what Google is doing with [x]: “Our open research and deeply collaborative model allows us to work with the best academic and industrial researchers around the world,” Tan writes, “and we will continue to do so as we certainly believe in the philosophy that ‘we’ is smarter than ‘me.'” While Google[x] works in private and doesn’t openly cooperate with others, Tan seems to imply, Microsoft Research helps to push basic research forward by working with researchers around the world. He goes on to list some of the projects Microsoft is involved in (HIV vaccines, brain tumor diagnostics, tuberculosis treatments etc.), but the overall message here seems clear: Microsoft does a lot of basic research and doesn’t often get the credit it deserves. While most of the projects at Google[x] happen in private, though, it’s also worth noting that Google does quite a bit of work . Most of this is focused on its own core competencies and focuses on search-related technologies like natural language processing, machine learning and data mining, as well as basic computer science research. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c_8iyflEVG0 Google’s Moon Shot approach may yield some breakthrough products in the long run and the smart lens project could improve the lives of millions of people. There is something to be said for participating in the larger research community, though, and Microsoft definitely does this more effectively than Google[x]. At the end of the day, though, Parviz and Otis decided that the best place for their research was at Google. If nothing else, that speaks to Google’s ability to convince researchers that they can have more impact at [x] than at their research universities and more easily bring their ideas from the lab to the real world (and Google[x] probably pays pretty well, too…). |
Skimlinks Says Its Affiliate Linking Technology Drove $500M+ In E-Commerce Sales Last Year | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | , a company that helps online publishers make money through affiliate links, says that it had a record year, driving more than $500 million in e-commerce sales. A spokesperson told me that three quarters of Skimlinks sales go through affiliate networks that report e-commerce sales value, and they reported $402.3 million in sales driven by Skimlinks in 2013. However, since there are other networks that don’t report sales value, the company is estimating that it drove more than $500 million total for the year (more specifically, based on historical analysis, the company says the number was probably between $502 million and $536 million). That’s about double the sales from last year. Skimlinks’ technology includes the ability to convert regular links and relevant words into affiliate links (in other words, links where the publisher is paid a commission for driving purchases). Recent additions include , a browser plugin that allows publishers to compare the current affiliate commission rates across different merchants. In a conversation with CEO Alicia Navarro before the launch, and in follow-up emails with a company spokesperson, Skimlinks emphasized that the Editor product is the first step toward “intelligent linking,” i.e., links that are automatically updated and don’t require any work from the writer, editor, or publisher: “They won’t have to find products or list prices; and readers won’t be faced with dead links or redirects or outdated pricing.” Navarro acknowledged that providing monetization data may be seen as a risk to editorial integrity, and she noted that in some cases, publishers have chosen to hide the actual commission rates from editors. At the same time, she said, “There’s a very strong feel that publishers are realizing that if they keep doing what they’re doing, they’re going to become obsolete. … [and] that it’s not a dirty word, making money from something.” Navarro added that that 2014 will involve building a lot more of that intelligent linking infrastructure. One thing that doesn’t seem to be a big priority is mobile. While that seems to be where a lot of publishers and startups are putting their energy nowadays, Navarro said that when it comes to actually making purchases, there doesn’t seem to be much traffic from mobile, “So I don’t think we’re missing out on too much yet.” |
Bitcoin’s Recent Price Stability Could Point To Growing Maturity | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | The nearly boozy Bitcoin rallies and crashes of 2013 led to endless media coverage, rising mass market knowledge of its existence, and piece by piece, the growing maturity of its underlying network. No asset that regularly loses or gains 50% in a day can be treated as anything more than a speculative tool, and an incredibly risky one at that. However, in the new year, as the media firestorm has mostly abated around Bitcoin and its network of buyers and sellers has continued to improve and expand, something interesting has happened: Bitcoin has found and stuck to a trading range. Now, compared to more traditional currencies, Bitcoin still moves around too much for the good digestion of those close to it. At the same time, over the past nearly two weeks, it has shown remarkable flatness, meaning that those wishing to use and accept it for commerce have had a period in which they could trust their sales and purchases to not swing to wild profit or loss by whim of the market. The remains as humorous as ever (in this case, D1 means that every chart point represents one day’s trading): But taking a look at of the recent history, and you will note that following the imposed vertical white axis, Bitcoin has essentially behaved itself. That marks shown is the 7th of January, past which Bitcoin has managed a real interval of lucidity: Compare the preceding and following sections of that chart — it almost feels like we are looking at two difference substances. Price stability has been a Bitcoin bugaboo for as long as you can recall because the rise in the currency’s value was often correlated to news stories regaling its surges. Upward momentum and all of that. But instead if Bitcoin was to become a medium of exchange more so than a store of speculative hype, it needed to calm down. This, as you have seen has, lead to a denouement of media coverage of Bitcoin, even from your humble servant. If you’ll allow the indulgent self quote, : Bitcoin needs a more stable price, which can only come to fruition after its network becomes large enough to have validated the price of Bitcoin at a certain level. And for that it needs to attract more retailers, which are kept out by its price swings. This is all simple in summary: The utility of Bitcoin as a currency and its value as an equity depend on its network, which provides the market opportunities for Bitcoin to behave as either. Right. And, as retailers such as Overstock.com have come on board, so too has Bitcoin fallen from the media’s eye and managed a decent run of stable pricing. A change in the winds? |
What Games Are: Sports And Video Games | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | Though I was never a big fan of sports as a kid I’ve often found them to be valuable as a lens to interpret video games. Traditionally a big difference between sports and video games is that most sports are played multiplayer, but most video games are played single player. To some it’s only a matter of time before that happens but personally . There isn’t and never will be a pressing need for a game like to go multiplayer. The world is not crying out for to become a team sport. However another traditional difference between sports and video games is slowly disappearing, and that is whether they are watched or played. Sports have long been a spectator activity, whether in guise of physically going to see a match or watching on TV. But video games were supposed to be about the playing rather than the watching, and so were a private activity. Who would really want to watch you play through a game? Well it turns out the answer to that question is “everybody”. Live streaming, speed runs, , spectator matches, social video sharing and so on have all quickly become big business. According to figures , 12 billion minutes of video game coverage was watched on their service in 2013, doubling 2012’s number. 45 million people tuned in to watch video gaming. 6 million videos were broadcast on their service. And, perhaps most incredibly, the average viewer spent 106 minutes watching. Anecdotally I see people all across my Twitter feed talking about games they’re watching or broadcasting. Just as soccer fans often share best-goal clips on Youtube, it’s become a thing in video games to share around best-run clips from games like or big battles from . I know several friends who have streams open all day long, for example, almost like listening to the radio while they work, and what’s even more fascinating to me is the degree to which their conversation around the games they watch is starting to look like sports chatter. Streaming of video games creates all sorts of legal gray areas (if I stream-play a narrative-driven game and essentially share the story with 100 other viewers, has the game maker lost 100 sales?) there’s no denying its appeal. But there’s still a distance to go before the participatory culture emerging around video games crosses over into the mainstream. Even though Twitch.tv’s numbers are very impressive, for example, they are dwarfed by real-world sports. Video games have not yet built to that level. For example this weekend the streets of Seattle are filled with an urgent hope. Thousands of flags are flying high, everyone’s wearing indigo-and-green sports jerseys and a chant can be heard in every pub and bar. It starts with one person shouting “Seeeeaaa” and the crowd responding “Haawwwks!”, and then again and again. The big game has come against the rival 49ers (boo hiss) and the winner gets a shot at the Super Bowl. There’s really no video game equivalent to that kind of cultural ubiquity. Not yet. One missing piece is television. Sports are so influential because they’re on TV, and TV is in homes and bars and everywhere else. TV is focused through channels and so mass attention can still be harnessed through it. Indeed sports are one of the few kinds of programming that can still do that. And while some sports ( ) start to evolve from pure TV shows into more rounded services, TV is still the primary point of access. Digital game streaming has gained a foothold on TV through devices like gaming consoles and media streamers. They also have tablet apps and so can get to TV via technologies like AirPlay or Chromecast. But as yet there’s no serious coverage on regular TV (in the West at least), no dedicated channels on cable, nothing that could conceivably be easy enough for a sports bar to show. While arguably certain parts of the TV model of doing business are going away anyway, the easy access that TV can provide is still not quite in-reach as of yet. Another missing piece is familiarity. The NFL is so popular in the U.S. because of its deep roots in schools and communities that keep the passion of the game alive. The same is true of soccer in Europe and many other sports in different parts of the world. People grow up with these sports and so are inducted into their culture from a very early age. Video games are very different in that respect. For one thing they’re still seen as outsider-enough by the people who don’t consider themselves “gamers” (but play in bed every night) and still believe that games rot the brain despite all the evidence. Set against that backdrop can be hard to see how they cross the gap into acceptance, but in reality those kinds of attitudes are increasingly held by the minority. We’re all geeks about one thing or another these days and we’re slowly allowing ourselves to admit it. Finally the third piece is the pace at which video games change. Sports are vast and relatively unchanging rule sets that transcend the generations, and their rules often become colloquial terms of reference. A home run is a home run, same as it was 100 years ago, and that has cultural value. Few are the video games whose appeal lasts five years, never mind 100. There are always new hits, new innovations and new genre kings. This years’s big first-person-shooter becomes last year’s with great regularity. And so to really enjoy a service like Twitch you arguably need to know something about video games in general, to be a part of the constant ever-evolving culture. So there’s an accessibility gap of the kind that TV has great difficulty with. But surely that’s only a matter of when, not if. and new entrants to broadcasting emerge that don’t play by its rules, it’s entirely conceivable that those blocks will just go away. Will a day come, for example, when Twitch offers a subscription service to gamer bars rather than sports bars, where the establishments themselves change to get in line with where the viewers are going? Of course it will. One day, maybe sooner than you think, the fans in the streets will be cheering for their digital teams. |
Blinkx Founder Chandratillake Becomes Balderton Capital Partner, As Maloney Steps Back | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | The London VC community has been buzzing with rumors since the end of last year about one particular firm and its next moves. That firm is , considered one of the few, large VC firms in Europe, with more than $1.9 billion of committed capital. Balderton was one of the main beneficiaries of the $850 million exit of Bebo to AOL, and now counts firms such as Tictail, Qubit and Vestiaire Collective in its wide portfolio. Balderton’s last fund — Fund IV — closed in 2009 at just over $480 million. In its VC peer group, Accel Europe raised €359m in 2013 and has €1.5bn funds under management, while Index Ventures has €2.5bn under management and last raised its €350m fund in 2012. These funds are playing up and down the spectrum, from early to late stage. The question was, what was Balderton’s next play? Well, tonight it confirmed the rumors: one partner is taking a step back, another joins and the firm is now ‘doubling down’ to become a ‘mainly Series A’ VC in Europe – an equity gap which badly needs filling. , founder of internet media company , will join as a General Partner. After 10 years based in Silicon Valley, UK-born-and-raised Suranga (36) will return to live in London and help lead early-stage investments in the online media and enterprise sectors. Suranga founded blinkx, the intelligent search engine for video and audio content in Cambridge in 2004, later taking the company to San Francisco. It IPO’d on the London Stock Exchange in 2007, valued at $250 million (£125m) and was one of the best performing companies on the FTSE AIM 100 in 2013. Its now valued at over $1.3 billion (£855m) and is one of a small number of home-grown UK technology companies to have exceeded the $1 billion market capitalisation. Blinx generates revenue from online advertising and has 171 million users a month. Back in 2012, Suranga stepped back from day-to-day management of blinkx to become the company’s first Chief Strategy Officer. effectively this was like becoming the Chairman, but he focused on strategy and product. . He’ll continue in this capacity and remain a director on the Board of blinkx, alongside his new position at Balderton. Before founding blinkx, Suranga was the US CTO of Autonomy, which sold to Hewlett Packard for $10.2 billion. Chandratillake said: “Balderton is a natural fit for me. They are a smart, lean and driven team that makes high impact decisions and has the flexibility of thought and action that fast-growing technology companies need from their partners. The firm also has a strong Silicon Valley heritage, complementing my own experience, and can bring the US mindset to European venture exceptionally well.” In a phone in interview he told me he “really loves” developing early stage companies and was approached by Balderton about the role last year. “The VC industry has not changed as much as the entrepreneur community so I’m excited to be a rare commodity as a former entrepreneur, now a VC,” he said. He added that he is excited by the potential for European startups. The second piece of news is the confirmation of the widely-mooted move of the firm towards Series A rounds. This was first indicated by (which has €800m under management and last raised a €265m, largely science-based, fund in 2012) to join Balderton as a General Partner, focussing on early stage investments in the software and internet sectors. The focus on Series A appears to have been coming for a while. Looking at Balderton’s . It’s done a number of Seed and Series A rounds, with a smattering of participations in Series Series C. But Techcrunch understands that the firm now wants to be known “as a pure-play Series A VC” and “usually the first institutional investor in early stage funding rounds” (said a well-placed source). This means Balderton is, to some extent, returning to its original roots – before it went independent – as the European arm of Benchmark Capital, which operates in a similar manner in North America. However, these latest moves fully refresh Balderton’s team. Chandratillake, like his new fellow General Partner Bernard Liautaud, has managed to be one of the few to lead a European tech firm towards a $1 billion+ valuation. Liautaud co-founded Business Objects in August 1990 and led the company until it was acquired by SAP in 2008 for $6.78 billion. Liautaud, general partner of Balderton Capital, said in a statement: “As the architect of one of the UK’s most successful internet technology companies, Suranga will be a great addition to our team as well as an invaluable mentor to the companies in our portfolio. He understands what it takes to create global and long-lasting businesses… Suranga’s commitment to returning to London after a decade in Silicon Valley signals how closely he shares our confidence and enthusiasm to identify and back the next generation of European entrepreneurs.” Thirdly – while the firm is remaining coy about this move – TechCrunch understands that General Partner (who previously led deals in companies such as Bebo, Rebtel and more recently Vivino) is effectively stepping down from the firm, while at the same time remaining an active adviser and board member with the firm’s existing investments. It would appear to be a natural move. Over his 12 years at the firm Maloney (formerly the CEO of Esat Digifone, Ireland’s second largest GSM mobile operator, later acquired by British Telecom for IR£2 billion) was best known for dealing in telecoms-style investments rather than the early stage online media and enterprise investments Balderton now looks to be focusing on. Balderton has invested in over 100 companies, principally across Europe. Notable realised investments include Betfair (the online betting exchange, 2010 IPO), LOVEFiLM (the home entertainment subscription service, sold to Amazon in 2011), MySQL (the open-source database software, sold to Sun Microsystems in 2008), YOOX Group (the online retailer of leading fashion brands, IPO in 2009). Yoox is now worth $2.5 billion. TechCrunch understands Balderton is looking to take three to four of its portfolio companies onto a public listing this year. Another investment, The Hut – the online retailer of clothing, gifts, beauty and home products – could well IPO, for instance. The current portfolio includes innovative companies such as 3D Hubs, Globoforce, Kobalt, Natural Motion, Openet Scytl, Talend, Wonga, Wooga and WorldStores. |
Revisiting Mobile Identity, TouchID And Beyond | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | TechCrunch About three years ago, , an early product designer at Facebook and Quora, : “The first company to fully execute on embedding your identity into your phone (making a truly first class experience) wins the next decade.” The tweet was widely-circulated, and given Cox’s experience, provoked thought. A day later, she expanded on her tweet by writing a longer post on Quora, titled “ .” It’s an excellent post and worth reading, as she explores the intersection of mobile, identity, and permissions to interrupt — it’s deeper than what I’ll write about here today (I’ll focus on iOS), because for now, the building blocks for mobile identity remain to be seen. It’s cliche yet true, today’s mobile phones are quite personalized to us. We download the apps we want, arrange them according to our tastes, and dispose of them at will — all with the press and quick tap of the fingertip. Yet for those initial years, our ability to obtain these apps and interact with them often required personal account creation — on iOS, we need an iTunes account, which requires a credit card, to download free and paid apps, many of which require us to create usernames and passwords as a proxy for identification. More recently, the big social networks offered a login alternative, such as “Sign In With Facebook,” a seemingly lower-friction onboarding flow which came with the promise of exporting standardized data across apps and sending more data to the application developer who, in turn, could theoretically build a better offering. While many people remain comfortable (or lazy) to still sign in with Facebook, many people have grown weary of sending too much personal data to Facebook or are fearful of autoposting mishaps. (Some apps offer to sign in with Twitter, though those are often less about identity, and more about connecting services for sharing. Tangentially, a system like Uber could grow big enough to its own purchasing-related mobile sign-ins as well.) In 2013, Apple unveiled TouchID as a fingerprint-reading technology built into the phone’s home button. TouchID allows iPhone users to unlock the phone (instead of using four-number passwords) and interact with iTunes stores (touch to buy instead of constantly inputting the same password). Though TouchID isn’t for everyone today, it remains to be seen if the system improves over time (this is v1) or if it goes the way of Siri, a technology that even the most ardent Apple fanboys admit has been a big disappointment. Certainly, if TouchID grows more reliable, it could be a for third-party developers with easier downloads and in-app registrations and purchases. But, that’s what “could” happen — we don’t know if it will. We don’t know if our phones will use the front-facing camera to quickly scan, record, and match our retinas instead. Or, maybe that solution would take too long to be worthwhile? Or, maybe technologies like Siri (or others) could advance to the point where our devices would recognize our voices, a sort of “Open Sesame” type of world. Or, maybe our devices will become intelligent enough to know its owner is holding it simply based on how the device is held, the pressure used, the motion in which we hold and move those devices. Those all sound nice and futuristic, but TouchID seems the most plausible route, and while it’s early days, it will be exciting to see it get better (hopefully) and proliferate beyond unlocking phones and purchasing content from iTunes or the App Store. Yet, all this said, the deeper vision laid out by Cox — a mobile future in which we fully control the permissions for others to contact us and take away our attention — seems further away now, especially with recent changes in how iOS handles notifications. If Cox is right, that the company which nails mobile identity will win the next decade, it would appear that the fight is too early to call. Apple squeezed most of the handset (and tablet) profits out of the market, Android has blanketed devices worldwide across many platforms, Facebook’s “Home” may have be in its early days, Asian players like Xaoimi are sneaking up on the west, and community of Android developers have rallied around CyanogenMod as a new type of mobile OS sitting on top of Android. So, when it comes to true mobile identity, the future (for now) may be out of arm’s reach. / |
CrunchWeek: Google’s Nest Buy, Yahoo Management Changes, And The Threats To Net Neutrality | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 1 | 19 | It’s that time of week for an episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few TechCrunch writers together to chat about the most fascinating stories of the past seven days in tech. In this week’s episode, Ryan Lawler, Alex Wilhelm and I talked about Google’s of connected device company Nest, the firing of and last week’s news that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the , a blow for net neutrality. Check out the video above for more! |
How Cryptocurrency, Crowdfunding And A Little Internet Altruism Saved Jamaica’s Hopes For Bobsled Gold | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | Just in case you missed it, a heart-warming story unfolded this week involving an unlikely combination of bobsled, Jamaica, virtual currency, crowdfunding and generosity. It has all the makings of an — er, an inspiring Disney sequel. Last Sunday, out that a two-man bobsled team from the island nation of Jamaica had qualified for the Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. The country’s official Twitter account for the 2014 games announced the news that the team had qualified, including an image that appeared to be a reference to , the John Candy-led cult film that loosely chronicled Jamaica’s debut in bobsled for the 1988 Olympic Games in Alberta, Canada. The world apparently loves a sequel. In a plot twist seemingly right out of Cool Runnings, despite qualifying for the 2014 Olympics, team captain Winston Watts that the team hadn’t been able to raise the necessary funds to make it to Russia. Watts said that he had essentially been self-funding the team’s efforts thus far, and had even dug into his personal savings to fly the team to the U.S. for the bobsledding qualifiers. Nevertheless, after finding little help from the Jamaican Olympic Association or private investors, the team was forced to turn elsewhere. In the world of bobsled, and perhaps sports in general, there has never been a more quintessential underdog story. First of all, the Jamaican bobsled team is from, well, Jamaica. Second, the team is competing against teams with some financial backing (and actually hail from more arctic climes). Not only that, Winston Watts came out of retirement to lead the 2014 bobsled team, and if the team were to compete in Sochi, Watts would be second-oldest bobsled pilot in Olympic history at age 46. Luckily, the citizens of the Internet are sympathetic to an underdog story and were not about to let the team sit this one out due to lack of funding. And that’s when Jamaican bobsledding had its first introduction to the altruistic power of both virtual currency and digital crowdfunding proponents alike. Fittingly, it was a joke currency — or a virtual currency inspired by a dog meme — that came to the rescue. Yes, the very peer-to-peer cryptocurrency loved by Lassie, the world’s pooches and geeks alike, and the very currency that began as a joke but has potential successor to Bitcoin: The noble, . In a , the Dogecoin Foundation seized the opportunity to promote its virtual currency on the world stage and help send the Jamaican bobsled team to Sochi. Over a matter of days, the Dogecoin community raised over 27 million Dogecoins, the equivalent of $30,000 for those without a canine cryptocurrency analyst on hand. That, in and of itself, is something to behold, but the Internet wasn’t done yet. Just as the Dogecoin campaign began to hit full steam, word of the Jamaican bobsled team’s plight got to the founders of Y Combinator-incubated, group-funding platform, . A Jamaican bobsled fan to pool funds for the team from sympathetic fans and, before long, the startup got wind of the campaign, as did the team’s president, Chris Stokes, and founding member of the original “Cool Runnings” team, Devon Harris. The team made the Crowdtilt effort its and the Crowdtilt founders worked with the Dogecoin Foundation to convert the $30K raised in Dogecoin (from 1,600 Dogecoin supporters) into Bitcoin and then combine it with the money raised on Crowdtilt. As one might expect, the campaign quickly surpassed its goal and then some. After three days live, the campaign raised just under $130K ($129,587, to be precise) — more than 12 times the campaign’s goal — including the contribution from the Dogecoin community. Crowdtilt co-founder James Beshara tells us that it was one of the fastest campaigns to reach its goal in the platform’s history and there were points when as much as $3,000 was donated in 60 seconds. The average donation was $34.60, with nearly 3,000 individuals contributing to the campaign from 50 states and 52 countries. Because of the outpouring of support, the Jamaican bobsled team will now be able to make its flight to the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi. In a message posted to Crowdtilt, Devon Harris said that the money raised will be used to “cover training expenses (food, board, traveling, track fees, etc), and equipment purchases as the team completes its final preparation for the Games … And funds will also be earmarked to ship the sled and related equipment to Russia.” This is the kind of stuff that makes one proud to live in a world where generous people from all over the world can leverage digital currency and crowdfunding — and technology in general — to help those in need. It’s just one example of millions of underdog stories out there deserving of our time and consideration, and hopefully it becomes an example to a whole new generation of the tools we now have at our disposal — and how they can be used to benefit the greater good. Or at least give bobsled a story that’s worth following … Either way, we look forward to seeing Cool Runnings 2 come to theaters near us in 2015. After all, it’s clearly the follow-up to The Social Network that we’ve been waiting for. |
Popular Political Writer Ezra Klein Announces Move From Washington Post To Vox Media | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | [tweet https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/427597525302784000] The political blogosphere lit up earlier today when 29-year-old Ezra Klein he was leaving The Washington Post to build his own news site with (publishers of The Verge and SB Nation). Klein quickly rose to fame in policy circles with his explainer approach to wonky policy topics and eventually grew his own team on The Post’s “Wonkblog” channel. But, after the The Post’s leadership, including new owner Jeff Bezos, rejected Klein’s plan for a new media venture, which reportedly cost somewhere in the eight-figure range. in a post on , his unnamed media venture will focus on explanatory journalism and somehow be a clearinghouse for information on new topics. The venture’s job-announcement webpage on Vox explains its mission: “We’ll have regular coverage of everything from tax policy to True Detective, but instead of letting that reporting gather dust in an archive, we’ll use it to build and continuously update a comprehensive set of explainers of the topics we cover. We want to create the single best resources for news consumers anywhere.” Klein further to , “We really wanted to build something from the ground up that helps people understand the news better. We are not just trying to scale Wonkblog, we want to improve the technology of news, and Vox has a vision of how to solve some of that.” The one notable product that Klein built while at the Post was “ ,” a scrollable, graph-friendly newsfeed that encouraged users to click deeper into explanations and explore their curiosity. Presumably, Klein will be building out more sophisticated versions of this product which allows readers to learn as much as they want about a topic, rather than trying to squeeze all the necessary information into the story itself, or scattered links. It’s also unknown how Klein’s “Project X” will cooperate with Vox media’s other properties, most notable, . Over the past year, The Verge has quickly expanded from tech to general news, including of the Grammy’s tonight. If Klein does, indeed, create a successful venture, it will be the second missed opportunity for The Post. The founders of Politico their hyper-political blog site to the Post before starting what is now essential reading on Capitol Hill. There was hope that when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post that he would inject so much needed web-savvy into the old media veins of the struggling print establishment. Still, +10 million dollars is a big investment; Wonkblog around 4 million unique page views a month and doesn’t have a lucrative events series that bolsters other digital properties, such as Re/code (formerly AllThingsD) and your humble tech blog, TechCrunch. The New York Time’s David Carr : “Organizations like BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Vice and Vox, which have huge traffic but are still relatively small in terms of profit, will eventually mature into the legacy media of tomorrow.” The difference between BuzzFeed and Klein’s venture, however, is that Klein doesn’t traffic in, well, traffic. Many household name media properties fish a huge audience with gossip and shareable listicles. Even Politico, for all its success, isn’t entirely an oasis of reasoned dialog and nuanced explanations. D.C. has its own versions of people and gaffe-watching. For the most part, Wonkblog has stuck to serious news, however friendly it was to scanning. If Klein can bring in big bucks and traffic with a formula that leaves the American people more informed, he will have made an important contribution to the 4th estate. If he fails, it might prove that the future of political media might just need more “ “. |
PricePanda Raises $3M From German Retail Group Tengelmann | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | , the Rocket Internet-backed price comparison site, has raised $3 million in new funding from the German retail major . This new funding will be used to expand PricePanda in other South Asian markets, the company said. Rocket Internet and AB Kinnevik are among existing investors. E-commerce is booming in Asia, especially with more . Many of them are increasingly turning to sites like PricePanda to look for deals and, because the price comparison infrastructure is not yet robust, there is still room for smaller entrants. Since it was launched in 2012, PricePanda has redirected 1 million users to buy online from other partner sites. Earlier this month, the startup’s co-founder Christian Schiller said the growth of mobile commerce in South East Asia was the key. “This year, we can expect to scale rapidly and reach further milestones. And converting one million people to our partner shops is just the beginning,” Schiller had said. PricePanda did not share the total funding received before raising the latest capital from Tengelmann. But , PricePanda was rumored to be backed with $12.8 million when it was launched in 2012. |
Google Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind For More Than $500M | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | Google will buy London-based artificial intelligence company . reports that the acquisition price was more than $500 million, and that Facebook was also in talks to buy the startup late last year. DeepMind confirmed the acquisition to us, but couldn’t disclose deal terms. The acquisition was . Google’s hiring of DeepMind will help it compete against other major tech companies as they all try to gain business advantages by focusing on deep learning. For example, Facebook recently hired NYU professor Yann LeCunn to , IBM’s is now working on deep learning, and to lead its new deep learning group. DeepMind was founded by neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, a , Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman. Skype and Kazaa developer Jaan Tallin is an investor. This is the latest move by Google to fill out its roster of artificial intelligence experts and, according to Re/code, the acquisition was reportedly led by Google CEO Larry Page. If all three of DeepMind’s founders work for Google, they will join , who was hired in 2012 as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing. Kurzweil has so advanced that it could act like a “cybernetic friend.” After it acquired Nest earlier this month, critics the smart device maker would share with Google. The company’s also sparked confusion about . Google looks like it is better prepared to allay user concerns over its latest acquisition. According to The Information’s sources, Google has agreed to establish an ethics board to ensure DeepMind’s artificial intelligence technology isn’t abused. Re/code reports that Founders Fund and Horizons Ventures are both major investors in the startup. DeepMind was started about three years ago, according to LinkedIn profiles. |
Fly Or Die: Fitbit Force | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | Personal fitness trackers and sleep trackers are officially mainstream, but deciding between the various devices out there can be tough. That said, let me direct your attention to the , the latest and most full-featured product from the quantified-self makers. The , unlike the lower-end Flex, has a nice little display on it that shows steps taken, flights climbed, calories burned, as well as sleep information. It even shows the time of day. Even better, the Force pairs with Fitbit’s nutrition app, letting you input food-intake information to track your health over time. In our experience, there’s nothing on the market that is more accurate or robust. However, the band isn’t my favorite. It’s caused , whom Fitbit refunded. Plus, it’s simply not as well-designed as something like the FuelBand. But hey, you win some and you lose some. The goes for $129 and comes in slate blue and black. |
Kantar: Android Accounted For 70% Of Smartphone Sales In Q4, But Samsung Is Now “Under Real Pressure” | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | Android continues to be the most popular mobile platform, with its share of smartphone sales climbing in every major market in Q4 2013, now accounting for 69.5% of all sales across 12 key markets versus 23.7% for number-two Apple, according to figures out today from , a market research subsidiary of WPP. But the story is shifting when it comes to looking at what the engine is behind that growth. Samsung, the handset maker that has led the charge for Google’s OS, is “now coming under real pressure in most regions” as it faces stronger competition from local players in markets like China. There, Xiaomi led in sales for the last 12 weeks of 2013, and other Chinese handset makers like Huawei also continued to gain ground. It’s still Android, but delivered in different, more locally focused packaging. Elsewhere, although Apple has seen overall declines — losing a proportion of sales in each of the 12 big markets tracked by Kantar, in fact (the for some time now) — its new iPhone 5 models continue to lure in users at the high end, and in certain key markets, if not all of them. In the U.S., Apple lost nearly 6% of sales compared to a year ago but still accounted for just under 44% of smartphone purchases in the holiday period (Android came in at nearly 51%). The continuing appeal of Apple among high-end users also remains a driver of sales for the company in Japan, where Apple is the biggest player of all with nearly 69% of all smartphone sales. Kantar says that a large reason for that “unarguable success” has to do with NTT Docomo, the largest mobile carrier, now finally selling the iPhone. In Q4 it accounted for some 58.1% of all smartphone sales at Docomo, a nice boost to the 92% of sales at Softbank (yes, 92% of sales) and 64% at KDDI. Kantar says the effect of competition on Samsung resulting in the Korean OEM taking 40.3% of sales across the big five markets in Europe (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain) — that’s down 2.2 percentage points. In the key market of China, Samsung accounted for only 23.7% of sales — flat compared to a year ago. The decline in sales for Samsung, particularly for high margin devices, has been matched also by a . “It’s no surprise that everyone is concentrating on high growth China, but currently local brands are proving clear winners,” Sunnebo writes. He says that in December, Xiaomi overtook both Apple and Samsung and is now the top selling smartphone in China, “a truly remarkable achievement for a brand which was only started in 2010 and sells its device almost exclusively online. The combination of high spec devices, low prices and an ability to create unprecedented buzz through online and social platforms has proved an irresistible proposition for the Chinese.” Important to note that Samsung appears to still be the biggest mobile phone maker in China over the whole of last year, and globally it accounted for 32.2% of sales across all 12 markets in the last 12 weeks of 2013. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform continues to take a minor third position, with 4.4% of all smartphone sales globally, according to Sunnebo. Bu in contrast to Apple, it is in a continued phase of growth — with Latin America the only region where its sales declined compared to a year ago. Still, Windows Phone’s portion of sales remains small. Its biggest market in terms of market share was in Europe, but its performance was flat on a year ago, with Windows Phone accounting for 10% of all smartphone sales. “Windows Phone has now held double-digit share across Europe for three consecutive months,” Sunnebo says. “Unfortunately for Nokia the European smartphone market is only growing at 3% year on year so success in this market has not been enough to turn around its fortunes – reflected in its recent disappointing results.” Last week, Nokia announced that it sold about 8.2 million Lumia devices — its handsets built on the Windows Phone OS. That was a decline on the previous quarter, especially bad given that it was the holiday sales period. Windows Phone, moreover, is still only doing a bit better than Kantar’s generic “Other” grouping. This category would include lingering Symbian purchases, and it accounted for 2.4% of all smartphone sales, Sunnebo tells me. BlackBerry continues to show up on Kantar’s league tables but with a miniscule proportion of sales. It declined in all 12 markets tracked by Kantar and didn’t manage to break through 4% in any market. The UK was the best-performing market for BlackBerry, with the device maker taking 3.2% of sales. But then again, the UK it seems has a wider love affair with smartphones. Penetration in the country now — that is, the number of mobile phone-owning consumers that are using smartphones — is now nearly at 70%, with 85% of all handsets sold in Q4 smartphones. Although Samsung may be hitting tougher times, it’s still going strong in the UK, where it accounted for 31% of all smartphone gifts in December, with Apple trailing at 28% and Nokia at 18%. |
Microsoft’s Latest Windows Phone Update Sees Paced Uptake | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | This weekend , an advertising platform for Windows applications, that according to its tracked data, Windows Phone Update 3 is now installed on 15 percent of Windows Phone 8 handsets. Microsoft tore the wrapping off of Update 3 — also known as GDR3 — in October, detailing to the media what it would include, and providing notes on its delivery schedule. Developers could get their hands on the code sooner, but the average user, as , would “get the updates between the Fall, and the early parts of 2014. Carrier considerations, testing, and the like will determine when precisely your handset gets the bump.” To see a mere 15 percent of the Windows Phone 8 pool of handsets have the update as January comes to a close is slightly disappointing. We could, perhaps, see a surge of firmware updates come in the next few months, but it’s safe to say now that the pace of upgrade from firmware announcement to installation on a plurality of devices is a long cycle in the Windows Phone world. I had no benchmark in mind of how far along Update 3 should have been at any given moment, but I do think that it is reasonable to say that 15 percent after a quarter is a slower uptake pace than we might have hoped for given that the software is free for consumers. Carriers, presumably, are the sticking point. If Microsoft wants to more quickly move its new code to extant Windows Phone consumers, it will need new strategy. Unless, like with Android, Microsoft is content with fragmentation that will see its user base stratified across versions, hampering developers and not maximizing the strength of its own user experience. Kicked to the above is the fact that Windows Phone 8.1 is on the way — likely in April. If carriers don’t get out-of-the-way, some users may end up moving to 8.1 before Update 3 trickles down to their handsets. |
Samsung And Google Bury The Apple Hatchet, Sign 10-Year Patent Agreement | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | Some breaking news in the patent world. Samsung, the world’s biggest handset maker, has that it has signed a 10-year patent deal with Google, the maker of Android, the world’s biggest mobile operating system, covering all current and future technology patents. There are a few key reasons why this is an important piece of news: First, the deal will bolster both Samsung and Google’s patent positions against patent infringement allegations and subsequent litigation from competitors, and specifically Apple, which has been involved in acrimonious, multinational patent battles worth against Samsung for years now, over Samsung’s Android-powered range of Galaxy smartphones and tablets. Second, it is a sign of how Google continues to put the patents it gained from its $12.5 billion to good use across the Android ecosystem. The ecosystem part is key here. I personally wouldn’t be surprised to see deals like this one appear with other OEMs. Third, it makes clear that even if Samsung potentially starts to look at ways of breaking away from Android for more control of a mobile platform of its own (something it is ) it will continue to coooperate with Google. The tone of the short statement from Samsung and Google, which does not outline the financial terms of the agreement, is one of make-tech-love-not-war. “This agreement with Google is highly significant for the technology industry,” said Dr. Seungho Ahn, the Head of Samsung’s Intellectual Property Center, in a statement. “Samsung and Google are showing the rest of the industry that there is more to gain from cooperating than engaging in unnecessary patent disputes.” It’s a sentiment echoed by Google, too. “We’re pleased to enter into a cross-license with our partner Samsung,” said Allen Lo, Deputy General Counsel for Patents at Google, said in the statement. “By working together on agreements like this, companies can reduce the potential for litigation and focus instead on innovation.” In addition to Google, Samsung now has deals in place with , and . Full statement below. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Google Inc. today furthered their long-term cooperative partnership with a global patent cross-license agreement covering a broad range of technologies and business areas. The mutually beneficial agreement covers the two companies’ existing patents as well as those filed over the next 10 years. “We’re pleased to enter into a cross-license with our partner Samsung,” said Allen Lo, Deputy General Counsel for Patents at Google. “By working together on agreements like this, companies can reduce the potential for litigation and focus instead on innovation.” With this agreement, Samsung and Google gain access to each other’s industry-leading patent portfolios, paving the way for deeper collaboration on research and development of current and future products and technologies. “This agreement with Google is highly significant for the technology industry,” said Dr. Seungho Ahn, the Head of Samsung’s Intellectual Property Center. “Samsung and Google are showing the rest of the industry that there is more to gain from cooperating than engaging in unnecessary patent disputes.” |
Read The Sonnet Co-Authored By Shakespeare, An MIT PhD Student & A Machine-Learning Algorithm | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | [ of authoring interface by ] Machine-learning as a technology is, without doubt, the force that will be shaping our digital world for years and years to come, making it smarter and more autonomous, and sometimes taking our breath away in the process with its apparent agency. This branch of artificial intelligence is already doing that now, whether as the special sauce behind Nest, , or the core of a non-profit startup project attempting to . The basic premise is this: feed a machine-learning algorithm with particular data-set and its predictive powers can become startling. Happily, humans aren’t excluded from this process. Machine learning remains a collaboration between man and machine — with the input of each enhancing and extending the other’s powers. So these algorithmic overlords don’t look like the type that want to . Unless you count harvesting the human brain’s ability to make decisions and process selections. Below is just one example of machine-learning technology that has the power to startle and delight — not least because it involves a (posthumous) collaboration with the greatest writer in the English language: William Shakespeare, to create a new sonnet in the Shakespearean style. Also involved: U.K. startup ‘s machine-learning powered word prediction engine. And a living human mind with an ear for poetry. How was the new sonnet composed? SwiftKey’s engine was trained on the sonnets of Shakespeare, and one of its early staff members, — now doing a PhD at MIT Media Lab — wrote a new sonnet choosing words purely from the next-word suggestions generated by the algorithm. SwiftKey’s keyboard software can normally be found helping (mostly) Android mobile users type faster by learning their slang, syntax and writing style — and applying that learning to populate tailored three next-word predictions. Give the SwiftKey keyboard enough time to get to know how you write and, provided your writing is not akin to James Joycean streams of consciousness, the algorithm will quickly get very good at guessing what next few words you’re likely reaching for. But — fed with a particular data-set, and with the addition of a poetically minded human agent — this machine-learning engine can evidently be applied as a creative writing tool capable of creating pastiche writings in the style of the author whose original works you first fed to it. As well as using SwiftKey’s engine, Matias also built a visual authoring interface (pictured above visualising word suggestions in the style of metaphysical poet John Donne) that extends the core machine-learning technology to specifically aid poetry creation. He called this project ‘ ‘: aka a set of statistical experiments in “machine-learning-assisted poetry composition”. “To write good poetry, I needed to know more than what words might come next. I needed to anticipate — what predictions would be made later if I choose this word over that? So I created to visualize future predictions for poetry writing,” Matias tells TechCrunch. The result? Multiple new works (co-)created in the style of various authors — including the following ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet (which depicts a scorned lover struggling with the disconnect between his ongoing love for the outward appearance of the object of his desire, with the knowledge of rejection/betrayal that belies this surface beauty): When I in dreams behold thy fairest shade Whose shade in dreams doth wake the sleeping morn The daytime shadow of my love betray’d Lends hideous night to dreaming’s faded form Were painted frowns to gild mere false rebuff Then shoulds’t my heart be patient as the sands For nature’s smile is ornament enough When thy gold lips unloose their drooping bands As clouds occlude the globe’s enshrouded fears Which can by no astron’my be assail’d Thus, thyne appearance tears in atmospheres No fond perceptions nor no gaze unveils Disperse the clouds which banish light from thee For no tears be true, until we truly see The work has no single author. It’s a collaboration whose only living human agent, the aforementioned Matias, also now a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University — whose mind was responsible for the final word selections, and thus also for assembling (and dissembling) the poem’s core meaning — describes as requiring an acknowledged role for each of its different agents (i.e. both human and machine). “The idea of the author is a well known myth within writing and publishing. Just like startups that promote the myth of the genius founder, we reward individuals for collective projects,” Matias tells TechCrunch, when I ask what sort of authorial ratio he would assign to the work. “The economic and social impact on people’s lives is a core motivation of my work at the Media Lab and the Berkman Center. Together with my collaborators, I’ve been doing large scale data analysis and experiments to and women’s visibility in online media. I’m also trying to .” “There are two related issues in your question,” he continues. “Who do I acknowledge and who holds copyright. I personally acknowledge all of us. Just like John Kani and Winston Ntshona get recognition with Athol Fugard for , I think that all three of us should be acknowledged. I tend to avoid ratios and talk instead about roles. Shakespeare supplied material for inspiration, SwiftKey clustered it, making suggestions. I made the final choices and arrangement.” Matias concedes that copyright is a “trickier” question — owing to another disconnect between this type of co-creation — and more broadly between language as a shared communication medium rich with intentional and subconscious linguistic resonances echoing down through the ages vs the rigidity of the legal system. “Bots already hold copyright and legally serve people for copyright infringement. According to of Robot Robot & Hwang, copyright and patent trolls sometimes use algorithmically generated shell companies to pursue these claims and minimise risk to themselves. Tim, who’s one of the fellows at the new , is trying to map out these bots and figure out ways that the legal system can account for and respond to them,” he says. “Even inside our heads, we write with other people’s words in mind,” he adds. “‘Words belong to each other,’ says Virginia Woolf in . She once said that she couldn’t think of the phrase ‘multitudinous’ without also thinking of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who wonders if trying to wash his hands of guilt might make ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine.’ (Maria Popova has ).” On the flip side of Matias’ algorithmically aided poetry, are bots and algorithms that search for found poetry online. “Now that we have large amounts of human text available on the Internet, we’re also seeing search bots that try to poetry in large datasets. The finds haikus in New York Times text, and the finds ,” he points out, adding: “Algorithms that search for poetry are the reverse of my work — they’re looking among ordinary text for unexpected poetry that has already been written. “My work with Swift-speare looks among existing poems for probable poetry that has not yet been written.” Matias says he is currently collaborating on a “stealth art project” that involves another area of computer-assisted creativity known as “human computation”. “Human computation is a third area of computer assisted creativity. at Stanford has pioneered a kind of writing that asks humans to perform writing tasks that we might ordinarily ask an algorithm. It’s a fascinating area,” he adds. Does Matias believe an algorithm could ever become a poet in its own right? Meaning without any human agent involved in word selections, and without taking a brute force approach to composition — i.e. by writing infinite numbers of poems to stumble, by accident, upon a few good ones? “I think I’ll see a successful automated poet in my lifetime. It won’t be easy: a poet is more than someone who makes poetry. Yet that doesn’t rule out algorithms,” he says. “It’s true that Western audiences want the stories of writers as much as we want their work. Especially at a time when readings are such an important part of poetry, it would be difficult for an algorithm alone to do everything. “But people were disappointed when they learned that wasn’t a bot, and is popular in Japan despite being a humanoid persona in front of a voice synthesizer.” As for machines taking the “sweating labour” route to composing poems — writing everything and letting people pick the poems they like — well, why not, argues Matias. Arrange enough words, and some of those configurations will resonate with someone, somewhere. “This is the Internet; why not generate all the possible poems and see what turns out to be popular? This is how some of the online t-shirt sellers work. When it doesn’t , it seems to work well. Why not poetry?” [Sonnet reproduced with kind permission of J Nathan Matias, SwiftKey — and, well, we couldn’t ask William Shakespeare but we hope he would approve] |
Enterprise Mobility: Devices, Security, Design, And Distribution | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | TechCrunch Every Sunday for this column, I write on something to mobile. To date, it’s mostly been about consumer-facing apps, , , tactics like , and a range of other topics. However, I have yet to dig into mobile for more business-facing, enterprise-oriented users and considerations. That’s partly because I do not work at a large company nor too closely with others. Yet recently, in some of my conversations, the topic of mobile apps for enterprise environments has resurfaced. In 2013, I also moderated a panel at a mobile event organized by , a venture capital firm which focuses on SaaS and . While much has been written on the topic, I wanted to write this post with few or no assumptions, from first-principles, and share my thought process about what founders and investors could look for in these kinds of mobile products. Mostly, however, I’d like to learn from you all about what it will take to win in these environments, so please comment or tweet or reach out to me with your thoughts. I’ve heard every angle here. At some large companies, employees can bring their own devices to work. The company will support what the employee wants. But, this becomes more difficult as the number of devices increases quickly, device turnover happens faster, and newer devices hitting the market (especially non-iOS) fragment the ecosystem. One founder remarked to me he believes we’ll see a shift from BYOD to CYOD, or “Choose Your Own Device,” where the employer pre-selects a controlled group of devices from which employees can choose. These conditions will certainly be different at each company, depending on what policies they adopt. Even prior to NSA revelations, enterprise security is obviously a big deal. This may be why, for instance, larger companies could move to a CYOD world. Companies are concerned about client-side and cloud-based data security, and this is likely heightened today with the latest batch of handsets allowing different forms of filesharing which don’t require traditional data sources to power them. On the employee-side, I’d imagine many may opt to keep their own personal phones active and thereby carry two phones, partly to keep a separation from work and life outside work, and partly because they are concerned about privacy. This is the debate around whether the enterprise needs specific app solutions, or whether it’s more likely consumer-focused apps (or one’s that draw from consumer-level principles) are more likely to win. I don’t know what the answer is here, and it seems like there isn’t just one path to success. Products like Box are designed for enterprise-level customers, products like Yammer draw on consumer-level design principles, and products like Mailbox, as just one example, could help its parent Dropbox spread its own suite of apps through the employee ranks at larger companies. Beyond this, we may also “ ” in enterprise settings, as well. And, here’s the important one for me… This is the one I wrestle with when I see new teams forming and building new products. I don’t know what the best approach is. The way the world is moving, it would seem, at first, logical to assume workers will start to use consumer-level apps and some will “cross-over” into their work, igniting the spark needed to make it grow among colleagues. This is how apps today get huge and become breakout level. Yet, in a company-setting, there may be a case for employers mandating workers use specific apps, and use them daily. That could force everyone in a company not just download and install a specific required app, but to set notifications, allow location tracking, and use the app multiple times a day. Today, the top-rated and grossing “business” apps are mostly from legacy providers (like Adobe), apps built on top of enterprise giants (like Salesforce), a few new entrants (like Square), and a slew of small-business related tools, such as scanner apps, and so forth. Perhaps one of my next columns will focus on apps for small businesses, but for now, I’d like to hear your opinions on what enterprise-level apps are doing well, where the opportunities are, what the security concerns will be, and who will be driving distribution. It’s certainly a huge opportunity, and with mobile distribution to tens of thousands mobile developers, the conditions inside large companies could present attractive opportunities. / Creative Commons Flickr |
Imaginism Studios On Building Niko And The Sword Of Light, Reimagining Digital Narrative | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | Back in February 2013, Toronto’s launched an for a new type of app that combined full-scale animation and comic books for a novel, mobile-device-oriented kind of storytelling. is the app that was built using the funds from the successful Kickstarter campaign, and it earned a featured spot on Apple’s App Store as well as strong global download numbers on iOS, Android and the Amazon Appstore. Imaginism’s Niko project was a bit of an experiment for the studio, since it generally does character design and animation work for external clients, which include Disney, Blizzard, Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures Animation, Dreamworks and many more. The Imaginism crew is currently working on character design for an upcoming blockbuster feature, and has already created some of the characters you’d likely recognize, including those from Disney’s live-action adaptation. Niko has opened the door for Imaginism on a number of tie-ins and other opportunities for the young firm in terms of creating and growing its own intellectual properties – the meticulous, hand-drawn animation used in the creation of the original app clearly has a lot of appeal. Imaginism may soon get a chance to show off its animation skills to an even larger audience, as it has just entered into an agreement to option Niko to Amazon Studios for the creation of a series based on the character and world introduced in the app. Imaginism is a perfect example of what a small startup (consisting mostly of friends who went to school together and didn’t know what to do once they graduated) can do by satisfying an industry need that many don’t even know exists. The studio has made itself indispensable to some of the biggest creative brands in the world, and now they’re using that positioning, as well as innovations like crowdfunding, to build the things they always wanted to do for themselves, too. If you haven’t experienced Niko and the Sword of Light, it’s definitely worth checking out, especially now that the brand could be on its way to becoming the next big thing. |
Funny, I Don’t Feel All That Fatigued With Twitter | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | In , Jenna Wortham says she’s becoming fatigued with Twitter. Basically, she uses all the Twitter discussion around Justin Bieber’s arrest as a springboard for a broader argument about how the service has become less about finding useful, relevant information and more about competing for attention. As you’d expect, the piece saw its share of . The most common critique seems to be some variant of, “Dude, just unfollow people who are annoying,” but as and have noted, that’s easier said than done, because it can be embarrassing or awkward to unfollow someone, even if you’re really tired of their tweets. There’s another reason why the “just unfollow” argument falls a little flat for me. Wortham is, I think, careful to use the word “we,” particularly in the article’s best passage: It feels as if we’re all trying to be a cheeky guest on a late-night show, a reality show contestant or a toddler with a tiara on Twitter — delivering the performance of a lifetime, via a hot, rapid-fire string of commentary, GIFs or responses that help us stand out from the crowd. We’re sold on the idea that if we’re good enough, it could be our ticket to success, landing us a fleeting spot in a round-up on BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post, or at best, a writing gig. But more often than not, it translates to standing on a collective soapbox, elbowing each other for room, in the hopes of being credited with delivering the cleverest one-liner or reaction. Much of that ensues in hilarity. Perhaps an equal amount ensues in exhaustion. In the ensuing discussion, “we” seemed to get transformed into “other people” — sure, Jenna, can be annoying on Twitter, so why don’t you unfollow them? The default assumption that it must be other people who are Doing It Wrong on Twitter is … interesting. Personally, I found the article valuable because I immediately recognized the behavior that Wortham was talking about, and not just in other people, but in myself. I suspect that my default mode on seeing a broader conversation on Twitter is, “How can I say something funny so that everyone will talk about meeeeeee?” (Note also that Wortham isn’t condemning this behavior outright — she admits that it can be entertaining, but also exhausting.) So as a description of personal experience, I found Wortham’s words to be a valuable reminder to try, at least, to be less self-promotional and less self-absorbed. On the other hand, as a broader description of “Twitter’s Achilles’ heel” I found the article to be less convincing. As , Wortham is a reporter who follows nearly 4,000 people and has more than 500,000 followers, so her experience is almost certainly atypical. She actually addresses this in the article itself, arguing, “I think the number of followers you have is often irrelevant,” but I’m dubious. With my own , the dynamics changed as my audience grew, even if the change wasn’t quite as dramatic as I’d expected, and ditto the amount of noise as I started to follow more people. Yes, Wortham is absolutely making some very interesting anecdotal points, but her piece suffers in my eyes from trying to transform those points into a Big Idea. Has Twitter become less informative and more self-promotional? In my experience, it has always been a mix, and I’m not sure that mix has changed all that significantly. But again, we’re just mashing random pieces of personal experience together and pretending it means something about the company as a whole. That way lies madness. (And by “madness” I mean “ “.) But hey, since we’re sharing about anecdotal evidence, I will offer this: Where did I first hear about Wortham’s article? And where did I first see most of the ideas, pro and con, expressed in this post? On Twitter, of course. [ ] |
What Games Are: Generation Gygax | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 1 | 26 | Although I haven’t played a tabletop roleplaying game since I emigrated from Ireland in 2002, it’s no exaggeration to say that I owe my entire career to Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Between them they created probably the most influential game for an entire generation of game makers, . 40 years of rolling dice, leveling up, scoring critical hits and making saving throws. Much as the early activities of the Homebrew Computing Club led to the technology industry, grew out of innocuous beginnings. Gygax was just a wargame nerd from Wisconsin who liked making medieval battle games. The actual idea for grew out of those roots, beginning life when its designers had the idea that some combats needed a moderator (a “dungeon master”) to hide information and lay out encounters. It’s unlikely that either Arneson or Gygax knew just how influential their game would be. It was the first of what we would later look back on and recognize was not just a genre, but a medium. would lead to a proliferation of games, far beyond just clones or imitators. Games like , , and branched out from the fantasy-war trope and expanded on the core philosophy of the medium. Some of them even became culturally influential in their own right. The central innovations of were (1) the bringing of games and stories together, (2) the idea that a game’s action could happen in an imaginary space rather than needing a board or map, and (3) the idea of creating and developing a character as an outward persona of the player, one with which they would develop . Those three ideas inspired a also continues to inspire cutting edge video game design thinking. Although video games tend not to have a dungeon master to moderate their action and drive their story, for many digital game designers that kind of player-game relationship is the goal. Designers foresee a point when AI will perhaps be smart enough to be the player’s personal dungeon master, to create elaborate narratives that respond to the player’s contextual mood as well as just being systems of rules. The idea that v The third edition had pioneered the idea of licensing out its rule set in an open-source-ish sort of way (called D20) that led to many games being developed and published under a collective banner. But the fourth edition tried to lock things down once more. It also tried to simplify many signature aspects of the game, often interpreted as a response to the generation. Why? Well because the kids of today just didn’t seem to want to play tabletop roleplaying games any more. The net impact of the 4th edition was to alienate many core fans of the franchise while the kids continued to not care. Another game called While my generation of game designers owes an enormous debt to the ideas that drove , it isn’t necessarily the case that our successors will be inspired by those ideas in the same way. D&D was a formative influence for many of us, but one that grew as much out of a context as of what it was. In a sense we’re Gary Gygax’s generation. Perhaps the next generation will find games like to be the equivalent influence for them, but if so I wonder how that will shift their perspective over what games are and what they might be. |
Tuniu.com Is The Latest IPO To Rise In The East | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | The initial public offering for Chinese online tour booking website may not carry the heft of the impending IPO juggernaut ( ), but it is a sign of investors’ continuing demand for public offerings from Chinese tech companies. The Beijing-based tour site has selected Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley to run the offering process for its expected $100 million IPO, according to several sources with knowledge of the company’s plans. In the clearest public sign of the company’s intentions, one of its investors, Gobi Partners, that Conor Yang, the architect behind the public offering of both and , had been hired as Tuniu’s chief financial officer earlier this year. Group tours are a huge business in China, where the government regulating how guided tour companies operate, according to an October story on CNN. As the CNN story notes, 100 million Chinese will travel abroad by 2015 and as of 2012 the Chinese had already overtaken Americans and Germans as the biggest spenders on the international travel scene. A record $102 billion was spent by 83 million Chinese tourists on international tourism, CNN reported. Online travel in China has already netted venture investors big wins. , which went public in November 2013, was backed by Mayfield Fund, GSR Ventures Management, Tenaya Capital, GGV Capital, Hillhouse Capital, and the Chinese search technology behemoth , which shelled out $306 million for a massive stake in the company in 2011. That public offering netted the company $167 million, well above the $125 million target Qunar.com had set in its initial offering documents. Although Qunar.com ended Tuesday’s trading below its offering price, the company still has a market capitalization of over $3.05 billion. Investors in Chinese technology companies have also been buoyed by the performance of Chinese public offerings throughout the back half of 2013. Since 2012 and through to November of 2013 nine U.S. IPOs from China had produced an average return of 203%, including the 1,127% return for . That online retail company, which is now trading at over $107 per-share – up from an initial offering price of $5.50 in March 2012 – has been a huge win for early investors like DCM and Sequoia Capital. Investment banks are also winning with these Chinese public offerings. Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. acted as the joint bookrunners for the highly successful Vipshop offering, while Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and Citi were bookrunners on the IPO of , “the Craigslist of China”. Shares of that online classified ad marketplace are up 73% from their opening price of $24.12. On Tuesday shares of the company closed at $41.89. |
Docker Raises $15M For Its Open-Source Platform That Helps Developers Build Apps In The Cloud | Alex Williams | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | The shift to scale out architectures and an app-centric culture has turned out well for and its lightweight open-source “container” technology designed for developers to quickly move code to the cloud. That’s evident in today’s news that the company has raised $15 million in a Series B round led by , with minority participation from and existing investors and . Also participating is Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang, who has participated in previous rounds. Docker will use the funding to push toward the general availability of the Docker environment, develop commercial services that pair with the open-source technology and build a team to support the growing community. The technology path is similar to the one VMware followed in its early days when IT managed their corporate-owned infrastructure. These were state-of-the-art data centers that had to be optimized to run enterprise software. For these IT managers, VMware became a critical part of the equation so multiple virtual machines could run on its hypervisor and server environment. VMware is lauded for the excellent job it did in managing its technology so the end-user was not impacted and the IT manager could manage the infrastructure effectively. The similarity to VMware in its early days and the excitement that Docker has generated made it an attractive investment, said Jerry Chen, a general partner at Greylock who joined the venture capital firm in August. It is Chen’s first investment since joining Greylock. “One of the things we learned at VMware is be as frictionless as possible,” Chen said in a phone interview today. “Docker has that ability as well.” Docker also can be scaled from scratch. It can grow to multiple apps or be used on public or private servers, Chen said. And it can be scaled out in seconds, moved anywhere and all done without having to re-configure all over again. Docker faces the challenge of making its technology easy-to-use with features that make it effective for a developer or a DevOps professional. For this new DevOps pro, Docker has to consider the management and orchestration of apps that are continuously updated using the Docker environment. For example, Docker will develop both public and private registries for developers to store their containers. It also plans to build management and orchestration tools that are needed as people and their organizations manage more and more Docker containers. And then there is the community, which continues to grow at scale. Docker is now one of the world’s fastest-growing, open-source efforts. There have been more than 9,000 stars given to Docker on as well as more than 1,320 forks. To manage that growing community will take investment that the company will need to manage with product development. It’s that community that helped Docker gain acceptance with Red Hat, which is , its PaaS environment. It has also been adopted by Google Compute Engine. eBay, Yandex and a host of other companies are using Docker in production environments. Docker is the result of a pivot led by Solomon Hykes, who originally launched the company as DotCloud in 2009. Originally designed as a platform as a service (PaaS), Docker showed promise for its flexible capabilities in providing developers with a service that supported multiple programming languages. But the competition from companies like Heroku and VMware’s Cloud Foundry made for a challenging market, further exacerbated by the lack of a widespread market acceptance for the benefits that PaaS providers offered. But developers did need a way to move their code to cloud services in a lightweight way without the tax of heavy virtual machines that were difficult to move and required a degree of manual integration. The problem stemmed from the virtualization technology itself, which sits below the operating system. It virtualizes the server, not the app. And because of that, the operating system has to move in order to run the app wherever it might be transported. Once delivered, it has to be booted up and configured to run with the database and the rest of the stack that it depends on. With Docker, the container sits on top of the operating system. The only thing that moves is the code. The developer does not have to boot and config. Instead, the container syncs with the cloud service. Hykes launched the open-source effort last spring and the acceptance has been almost unprecedented. “I have never seen a technology take off as quickly as Docker and get the type of broad-based adoption that it is getting,” said Dan Scholnick of Trinity Ventures in a phone interview last week. “If you look at the absolute numbers — the number of Docker containers downloaded, the number of docker containers created — they are off the charts. What is more interesting, the adoption is not just coming from startup or certain types of companies. The adoption is across companies of all sizes and industry verticals. It is a combination of high-growth and broad-based adoption that is really amazing.” There really are no equivalents to Docker. There are alternatives to it but as a Linux container it is the most widely used in the market. Its deepest competition will stem from VMware and virtualization providers that market to developers. And that’s not it. Cloud Foundry has its own form of a Linux container, which raises a question about how Docker fulfills its promise as a technology platform. The container is one part of the puzzle. It’s the foundation, but there are tool developers who can seize the opportunity to develop technologies that compete with Docker while also participating in its ecosystem. |
Snapchat Makes You “Find The Ghosts” To Keep Hackers From Stealing Your Phone Number [Update: But It Fails] | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | Snapchat now verifies new users aren’t robots by making them choose its ghost mascot within images. It’s an attempt to keep out hackers who could steal phone numbers by exploiting a leaked database of details on 4.6 million accounts. proved he could do just that by finding the number of Snapchat CTO Bobby Murphy, but now he says Snapchat has patched the holes he harnessed. [Update: But the “Snap-tcha” solution doesn’t seem very secure as another hacker built a workaround in under an hour.] , a high school sophomore from Dallas, Texas has on Snapchat security. He tells me he began experimenting with Snapchat’s undocumented API over the summer. He built a tool that could determine if a string of numbers was actually a phone number connected to a Snapchat account, similar to the exploit when it detailed Snapchat’s security holes. An independent hacker group then used Snapchat’s Find Friends feature to create , a database of 4.6 million usernames and the first 8 digits of people’s phone numbers. After getting , Snapchat said it was open to security tips from researchers and patched the hole Smith used by accounts to one Find Friends API call per hour. But Smith soon discovered hackers could simply set up a new account for each API call. He reached out to Snapchat about it, and a spokesperson said the company was “willing” to work on the problem. A few days later, Smith writes he had seen no sign of Snapchat fixing the problem so he used his exploit to find Snapchat CTO Bobby Murphy’s phone number and text him. Smith says Murphy responded telling him to send an email and he’d look into the problem. A week later Smith found another hole. Snapchat had to require new users to verify their phone numbers, but Smith discovered there was no server-side check to see if accounts were actually verified before they used Find Friends, so his past exploit still worked. Murphy acknowledged the lack of a server-side check on January 13th, and by the 17th Snapchat was actively requiring a user’s phone number to be verified for them to use Find Friends — an until-now unreported fix of a serious security flaw. But Smith wasn’t done yet. He built a script using free SMS service TextFree that could automatically verify new accounts he created, allowing them to use the Find Friends exploit. He predicted Snapchat would have to add a Captcha system to bar bots like his, but a Captcha answers can be bought online. So today, I found that Snapchat has added its own proprietary form of Captcha I’m calling “Snap-tcha”. Rather than spell out blurry words, Snapchat’s user flow now has a roadblock explaining “Just making sure you’re not a robot. Select all images containing a ghost.” You then pick from nine images, some with the Snapchat ghost mascot, some with white birds, eggs, hearts, and other shapes that could fool machines. Though sufficiently advanced machine vision or object recognition algorithms might be able to beat the Snap-tchas, so they may be more of a stopgap solution. At least the puzzle is easy to solve and fits Snapchat’s brand so it shouldn’t be too annoying to users. [Update 8pm PST: Snapchat has confirmed the new security features to me and provided this statement:
“We appreciate the efforts of those who help identify vulnerabilities in our service and we continue to make significant progress in our efforts to secure Snapchat.”] With the server-checked phone number verification and “find the ghosts” roadblock, it will now be harder for hackers to use SnapchatDB or other exploits to find usernames or phone numbers and blast them with spam or scams. [Update 1/22, 12:45pm PST: The “Snap-tcha” system is being called a joke by security researchers, and one hacker named says he’s already built a way to bypass it. Because the Snapchat ghost mascot is consistent shape, Hickson was able to use a combination of that can automatically identify the ghost as shown below. Hopefully for users, the Snap-tcha system was only meant as a temporary solution and an improved or different security feature will be implemented soon.] Still, Smith has some harsh words for Snapchat that he shared with me over a series of Twitter DMs. “Snapchat is doomed forever as far as security. Even if they fix this once and for all. They have the wrong idea. They don’t work well with outsiders. Overall it was a terrible experience. And I will never work with Snapchat even for a ridiculous sum of money.” Those certainly sound like the hyperbolic words of an emotional teenager. As a hot tech startup suddenly thrust into the security spotlight, you can bet Snapchat is re-doubling its efforts to protect its service and users. But the improvements like its new Snap-tcha system can’t come fast enough. While its young user base isn’t too risk-averse and growth seems undaunted by the account details leak, Snapchat doesn’t want to find out how many hacks is too many. |
See Twitter’s Founders As Nesting Dolls By The Creator Of Fail Whale | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/recklessabandon/nesting-twitter-a-startup-story-told-through-nesti width=640] Remember Fail Whale? It might be hard to recall now that Twitter is a public company with a $34.7 billion market cap, but a few years ago, the site had frequent outages as it struggled to scale up. The appearance of a placid-looking white whale borne aloft by eight birds was source of irritation amusement for Twitter’s users, and the image by artist . Twitter survived, of course, and now that pay homage to the “five personalities behind Twitter that have become mythic archetypes in public imagination.” The set’s Kickstarter page just went live and if it reaches its $30,000 funding goal by Feb. 20, you can cradle Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Ev Williams, and Dick Costolo within a mother doll that represents all Twitter users. Called Nesting Twitter, the set was conceptualized by a team called (DoRA). Though the dolls are not officially affiliated with Twitter, members of DoRA are friends with several of the company’s founders. In fact, Thor Muller, DoRA’s founder, is also one of the co-founders of Valleyschwag, which hosted the party where the site, then called Twittr, was .
Nesting Twitter “tells the story of Twitter’s growth by nesting its founders inside one another.” Like any work of art, the set is open to interpretation. As its Kickstarter page puts it: “Depending on your angle, you’ll see the doll as reflective, snarky, revolutionary or traditional. This Matryoshka Doll really does contain multitudes. The rear of the doll reveals a bird cradling a miniature of itself, a paradoxical twist that should get you thinking about the meaning of it all. Who is supporting whom in this complicated web of relationships?” Even if your reaction to Nesting Twitter is one of pure, unmitigated revolutionary snarky horror, the project is a good chance to check out other pieces by Lu, who is based in Sydney, Australia. Her portfolio of interactive art includes QR codes turned into lush watercolor paintings. [vimeo 43246515 w=640 h=424] The Nesting Twitter set’s early bird price is $60 and its artwork is also available as stickers or limited edition prints. The dolls are scheduled to ship in March if the project is successfully funded. |
Forbes: “Should Microsoft Acquire Yahoo For $53 Billion?” | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | null |
IBM’s Shares Slip After Its Q4 Revenue Falls On Weak Hardware Performance | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | This fine Tuesday, IBM reported its and was greeted with raspberries from investors with period revenue of $27.7 billion and earnings per share excluding items of $6.13. Using GAAP, IBM earned $6.2 billion, or $5.73. Off nearly a percent in regular trading, IBM eased another 2.5 percent in after-hours trading. Investors had expected IBM to earn revenue of $28.25 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $5.99. So IBM beat on profit, but faltered on the top line question. As , “IBM missed its revenue targets every quarter in 2013.” Zing. Right, so what’s going on? Well, the company’s hardware business had a terrifically terrible fourth quarter. As , “IBM’s systems and technology segment, also known as hardware, saw sales fall 26%, as pre-tax earnings fell by $768 million to $200 million.” Yes the hardware market is rough for incumbent players, but IBM’s decline in the category rivals the beleaguered PC OEM market. Revenue from hardware totaled $4.3 billion. IBM’s services group’s revenue fell 3.6 percent to $9.9 billion. The company did have a ray of sunshine to report, with software revenues up 2.8 percent to $8.1 billion, performance that a “bright spot.” It’s worth noting that IBM had fourth-quarter revenue of $29.3 billion in 2012, so the company contracted on a year-over-year basis despite an improving economy. The downward swing in IBM’s share price was perhaps somewhat sedate compared to what we see in younger technology firms, but following a number of preceding misses, there was little optimism premium built into its valuation. Still, another disappointment from Big Blue. Short-term profitability can keep your stock afloat, but it is out of revenue growth that future net income is born. |
SF Approves Tech Bus Pilot Program Despite Public Dissent | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | The shuttles, often referred to as ‘Google Buses,’ have become frontline in an increasingly bitter argument between the younger, newer and wealthier technology workers that call San Francisco home, and long-time residents concerned about the balkanization of the city’s less well off. Toss in a still weak job market for most sectors, spiraling rent costs, and tax incentives to wealthy tech firms to stay local, and the miasma begins to boil. Shuttling employees south instead of forcing them to commute has ecological benefits: Fewer cars means less congestion and a lowered carbon footprint. But for private companies to use public spaces in flagrant violation of the law has many up in arms. The meeting room was packed. Also, the proposed one-dollar-per-stop fee that Google et al will pay is viewed by many as little more than a perfunctory donation, given that the folk of the city pay more for a bus ride inside the confines of their own area code. Frankly, tech companies have played their hands poorly: Instead of apologizing, offering to pay a fee for past transgressions, and a more reasonable tax per stop, they have offered little and placated no one. Still, they got their pilot program, so they won. The cleaving of San Francisco into two camps — those who think that Google is a public benefactor, and those that view it as a public menace — is not healthy for our little community. But then again as an Uber taking, young tech-related bastard, I’m probably biased. Whatever the case, the shuttles will continue to run. The pilot will proceed, and following something more permanent will take its place. That’s where we are now. |
HiddenRadio Hits The Crowdfunding Path To Make Beautiful Music | John Biggs | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | HiddenRadio was one of the first crowdfunding successes. The nearly hit $1 million on Kickstarter in 2012 and spawned legions of fans. The creators, John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen and Vitor Santa Maria, built a small Bluetooth speaker that offered excellent frequency response and acceptable bass with a very cool design aesthetic. Now they’re back for more. is the pair’s latest creation and it’s already well on its way to funding. The new model offers surprisingly rich sound out of a case that is about as big as soup can. However, unlike a soup can the HiddenRadio looks great and will remind some of the new Mac Pro with its staid styling, touch-sensitive top, and simple setup. I got a chance to sit down with Van Den Nieuwenhuizen last week and heard the new HiddenRadio in a nearly empty bar. He compared it with a few popular speaker systems including the Jambox and I was duly impressed. While we couldn’t set it too loud, you could definitely hear a nice presence in the HiddenRadio 2 and excellent bass. The pair have also added some new features to the device including a far better port placement as well as a way to connect two $119 HiddenRadios together to create a stereo pair. None of their competitors have these features. That is has a noise-cancelling microphone and can act as a speakerphone are just gravy. The design is very impressive. The outer shell is chromed and there is a touch-sensitve top that allows you to spin a finger to control the volume or tap to turn the music on and off. A single tap will also raise the lid off of the speaker grill for listening. It’s fascinating to watch mass CE products like this make it in Kickstarter. Whereas the really geeky stuff tends to take off – watches and boards are surprisingly popular – the interest peters out once you enter into speaker territory. However, with high-design and low cost items like HiddenRadio you can definitely see a move in a more general direction. I’d love it, for example, if Sony or Samsung put a product up for crowdfunding. It would show a definite interest in the audience and could be a very successful move. A guy, as they say, can dream. [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2107726947/hiddenradio2-bluetooth-multispeaker width=640] |
Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Comcast Ventures’ Dave Zilberman | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, Comcast Ventures’ is joining us in the studio to talk about enterprise IT investing and more. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. Zilberman, who joined Comcast Ventures in 2006, focuses on enterprise IT and digital media investments and has backed DocuSign, CTI Towers, Divide, and Vox Media. Prior to joining Comcast Ventures, he was a business development manager at Flarion Technologies, which was acquired by Qualcomm. Zilberman is going to share his enterprise predictions for 2014. And we’re curious what his thoughts are on the future of digital media. Please send us your or put them in the comments below! |
Apple Sends Out iPhone Survey, Seeks Feedback On Android, Touch ID And More | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | Apple has reached out to us to let us know that there’s nothing new about these surveys, and that they’ve been running them since the launch of the first iPhone. The nature of the questions change depending on what’s new in each generation, but that’s the only difference in terms of their content. The story below has been updated to reflect that, and we regret the earlier error that conveyed this version of the survey was more unique. Apple is sending out a survey asking shoppers who have recently purchased an iPhone to provide some feedback about their purchase and their experience with the device. TechCrunch ran through the survey, providing sample answers to determine the outcome, and found that there were a few areas in particular Apple wanted to hear more about from its customers. The survey is relatively long, taking around 10 minutes to complete (probably a bit longer if you’re really focusing on the answers). One area that indicates what Apple might be looking to divine with this questionnaire is the section that you get into if you tell the polling process that you considered buying an Android phone before settling on an iPhone. As you can see below, Apple is very interested in finding out why you might be considering going over to the Android side. Apple also asks which Android OEMs that survey participants considered buying devices from, and in a later section, what features and smartphone characteristics (design, build, battery life) were important to their purchase decisions, as well as how influential they were. An tells how Apple conducts surveys on products frequently for “high level” internal use, and has done so on multiple past products. Apple also asks about iPhone 5s-specific features, feeling out what particular part of the iPhone 5s resulted in a purchase decision over other models in its lineup. Essentially, it lists the same key elements that it does both on the iPhone 5s feature page on its homepage, as well as those it drove home during its iPhone launch event last September. One area it pops out for additional feedback is Touch ID, the fingerprint-based unlocking mechanism that operates via the iPhone 5s home button. Since the iPhone 5s launch, there have been reports of , sometimes tied to seasonal shifts and other possible causes. But Apple always asks about new features on this survey, and it’s likely looking primarily to figure out what areas related to Touch ID it can improve to boost customer satisfaction with the tech in the future. Apple also asks for feedback about the iPhone 5s camera, for example, and there are few complaints about that area of its tech. The survey in question was sent to someone who bought an iPhone on December 6, and a MacRumors user after a purchase last month as well, so recent purchasers might want to check their inboxes to see if they’ve also been selected to take part. Check out the whole thing in its entirety below if you’re curious. [gallery ids="944516,944515,944514,944513,944512,944511,944510,944509,944508,944507,944506,944505,944504,944503,944502,944501,944500,944499,944498,944497,944496,944495,944494,944493,944492,944491,944490,944489,944488,944487,944486,944485,944484,944483,944482,944481,944480,944478"] |
Why Warren Buffett’s Billion-Dollar Prize To Predict The Perfect NCAA Bracket Matters | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | By this time next year, the world could see one more geeky billionaire. Investment mogul Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway company is backing a billion-dollar prize to predict the perfect NCAA tournament bracket. “We’ve seen a lot of contests offering a million dollars for putting together a good bracket, which got us thinking, what is the perfect bracket worth? We decided a billion dollars seems right for such an impressive feat,” Jay Farner, President and Chief Marketing Officer of Quicken Loans, whose company is partnering with Berkshire Hathaway to fund the monstrous endeavor. The prize is interesting not because world peace has been held back by sub-optimal prediction algorithms, but by the testing of a very important scientific hypothesis: We can pay for innovation. If the billion dollars induces a winner, it will suggest that the big innovations can be overcome with enough people thinking about the problem. have become a major strategy for startups and governments alike, since the X Prize foundation successfully kicked off a new cottage industry of commercial space flight with a $10,000,000 bounty. The (re)popularized a national innovation strategy over a century old. Since then, it has become more commonplace among the nation’s tech companies. In 2009, Netflix $1 million to a programmer, who improved their recommendation engine (though it never ended up implementing it). Fueled by the momentum of the strategy, the White House is now a fan of promoting innovation through , a clearinghouse for prize-based competitions. Prizes often seed a total amount of investment more than the award. Each team, regardless of whether they win, has to fund a certain amount of hours. Moreover, the teams often spend , because they’re in the competition to win or because it could kickstart a lucrative business. The competition is seen as an investment. and . Potentially, a massive purse could just bulldoze out all of the difficulties in conducting a successful competition. Anyone over the age of 21 is eligible to be among the 10 million registered participants. Winners will receive $25 million a year, or enough to buy a house in San Francisco. The odds are not in people’s favor, however. of predicting 63 perfect games is 1 in 9.2 quintillion (that’s 18 zeros). For math fans, here’s a university professor explaining the calculation. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Smkv11Mj4&w=560&h=315] The fun starts March 3rd. [ ] |
“Pressure-Free” Car Buying Service CarWoo! Shuts Down | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | Today is the day for shutdowns, it seems. Joining and as the latest to dive into the Deadpool is CarWoo, a service that aimed to make buying a car “pressure-free”. CarWoo allowed would-be car buyers to work with auto dealers semi-anonymously, theoretically freeing them from high-pressure deals by allowing the buyer to walk away at any time. Buyers would enter details about the sort of car they were looking for, and nearby dealers would make their best offers. Buyers could then make counter-offers — still without ever letting the dealer know who they were working with. Only once a buyer accepted a deal would the dealer get access to the buyer’s information. According to CrunchBase, CarWoo had raised just shy of $11M since launching at the end of 2008. The company closed its doors with the end of yesterday’s business day, with a “small group” of employees heading on to competitor (which the CarWoo team admits ended up being the superior product). The team posted the following announcement on their site this morning: CarWoo! was founded with a mission to deliver the best car buying experience possible. While CarWoo! is shutting its doors, our commitment to that mission remains as strong as ever. To that end, a small group of us will be joining TrueCar, the negotiation-free car buying platform. CarWoo! helped hundreds of thousands of car buyers get a better experience. In the spirit of transparency, we believe TrueCar came up with a better way and has emerged as the dominant force in helping to reshape automotive retail. I see an incredible opportunity in this moment in time to take our successes and, equally important, our entrepreneurial learnings and apply it to what we believe will be the brand that forever changes how people buy cars. I am personally proud to join the stellar group of innovators at TrueCar. Thank you to everyone that gave their heart and soul to CarWoo!. Our passion for building the best possible buying experience lives on. Tommy McClung
President and CEO, CarWoo! |
Hands-On With The New Basis Sleep Tracker | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | One of the most popular wrist health trackers, the , has added sleep cycles to variables it automatically tracks. I got my hands on an early beta version (which is now publicly available) and have been comparing it for the last week to other popular sleep trackers on the market. The upshot: of all the consumer-grade sleep trackers, the Basis is easily the most sophisticated. It tracks light, deep, REM, and sleep interruptions, and conveniently displays the totals in a daily dashboard. Waking up feeling refreshed is one of the best things in life. Quality of sleep may be just as vital to peak cognitive performance as the duration. Relatively uninterrupted sleep with long bouts of rapid-eye movement (REM) may be important in , good memory, and . Basis claims its sleep tracking system is be more accurate than the competition, such as the Jawbone Up and Fitbit, because it can track resting heart-rate, which is known to correlate with various sleep states. “We aren’t making a claim we can replace sleep labs or can be as accurate,” Basis representative Damon Miller . “But we feel we are in a good proximity for a consumer product.” So can your heart rate really tell Basis how well you’re sleeping? Yes and no. “Heart rate is not the same as brain waves. And brain waves tell us what stage of sleep we’re in,” said Dr. Lisa Meltzer, a sleep researcher at National Jewish Health hospital in Denver. That said, compared to the competition, Basis did give me a more nuanced view of my sleep cycle, which could be quite valuable. Last Monday, Jawbone says I got 4:15 of light sleep, compared to 3:08 with Basis. Combined REM and deep was 2:53, compared to 2:05 total deep with Jawbone. Basis claims I woke up two times, with Jawbone claiming I woke up once. There are a few important caveats. With the Basis, all of this is automatically recorded. With the Jawbone, I had to manually input my sleep times after the fact, which is just something I could remember to do on a regular basis. I also have to remember when I fell asleep. On the other hand, I was up for about 20 minutes early on Martin Luther King day, before drifting back to bed for another hour. Basis says this next bout was 100 percent light sleep, while Jawbone says I got another 20 minutes of deep sleep. I could get neither device to recognize my afternoon nap. Now, it’s hard to know which device is right, and they both could have a slice of the truth. I also tested out a new sleep tracker, , that uses a Polar heart-rate chest strap to measure stages of sleep. Sleeprate claims I was waking up dozens of times per night, especially during my REM cycle. Sleeprate also records noises throughout the night, and can correlate loud street sounds and snoring with sleep interruptions (note: this was tracked on a different night and the right image is the same app, scrolled down). Which one of these devices is the most accurate? I don’t know and it may depend on each user. I’m going to go to a sleep lab to see which of these devices is most accurate for my sleep issues. Each person may have their own idiosyncratic sleep cycle, so if you’re really into the quantified life, or want to diagnose a problem, it’s worth shelling out some money for a diagnosis. The first step in improving sleep could be done with most health trackers or : set a consistent bed time and increase the duration of night time rest. If that doesn’t improve your workday, try tracking deep and REM sleep with the Basis or Sleeprate. Consult a doctor to ensure that your self-experimentation has some basis in medical science. I’ll report back once I’ve done some more thorough testing. For now, the Basis is my go-to sleep tracker. |
Think Software Keyboards Don’t Work On Smartwatches? Check Out Minuum’s New Video | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA6ey1SzHdM&w=1168&h=657] As smartwatches become a device category that most major hardware makers are turning their attention to, there’s a question of how much smartphone utility we’ll be able to translate to the wrist. One big convenience hurdle is making it possible to reply to texts and emails quickly from the wrist, and that’s where ‘s go-anywhere software keyboard comes in. The Minuum keyboard from Toronto-based startup Whirlscape is an alternative input method originally prototyped on smartphones that makes it easier to type naturally without using much of the screen. It launched previously in beta on Android, and has done well on smartphones, according to user reviews. Whirlscape had always designed their keyboard to be usable on , the founders told me in the past. Today, they’ve got proof: As you can see in the video above, Minuum running on a Galaxy Gear smartwatch manages text input much more conveniently than you might imagine possible from a screen so small. It was filmed in a single take, too, according to the Minuum team, without any fancy camera tricks. For now, Minuum says this is just an “in-house demo,” at least until Samsung opens up the Gear platform, but the company also tells me that it’s already in talks with other smartwatch manufacturers who can put the software on shipping devices “in the upcoming months.” |
Yahoo Acquires Mobile Marketing Startup Sparq | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | Mobile marketing company announced on its site today that it has been acquired by Yahoo. The company did not disclose the purchase price. Yahoo declined to illustrate the deal’s financial details. Sparq’s team will be joining Yahoo’s Sunnyvale campus. Before it was acquired, Sparq raised a total of over several small rounds, most recently picking up more than $650,000 last year. According to a Yahoo spokesperson, the company’s technology helped users “jump from app to app to discover, consume and engage with content.” Or, put more simply, it helped users take in more total mobile content. The fit with Yahoo is quite plain: Yahoo needs to monetize its mobile user base if it wants its mobile-first strategy to drive lacking revenue growth. Picking up a firm that specializes in that space is reasonable. And, given how little the company raised, it was likely a cheap pick-up for Yahoo. Given Sparq’s focus on inter-app movement, Yahoo might be able to deploy its technology to help its users move between its own stable of applications. It isn’t clear if the company’s assets will be used in that fashion. However, if Yahoo could lash its apps together in a more cohesive fashion, it could bolster its engagement per user, and presumably its revenue per user. For a company that is forcing Wall Street to remain patient in the face of its slipping top line, such increases would be welcome indeed. |
Game Maker Kabam Doubles Its Annual Revenues To $360M | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | , the San Francisco-based social and mobile game maker , said it doubled its . That gives another revenue benchmark for top-grossing game makers. Kabam, which made a hard pivot from Facebook to mobile a few years ago, has two games in the top grossing 50 on the iPhone in the U.S. For comparison, other top mobile game makers like Supercell reported making $2.4 million per day early last year. About 70 percent of Kabam’s revenues come from iOS and Android, while the remainder is from Facebook and a destination site at Kabam.com. While the company is profitable, it’s not clear how profitable they are. They ended last year with $70 million on hand in cash, . But they also made some acquisitions too, like Exploding Barrel Games out of Vancouver, Canada. The company is touting these numbers at an interesting time in the gaming industry. (Maybe this is for recruiting? To attract buyers? To keep investors aware of the brand if they ever decide to go public?) Since Zynga went out to market in a late 2011 IPO and saw its valuation decline by more than half, no other big social gaming companies in Western markets have tested the waters with public investors. There have been rumors that European gaming company King is exploring an IPO, but we haven’t heard about additional progress on this front. Meanwhile, Supercell found a very lucky and unusual deal when it sold more than half the company to carrier Softbank and Japanese gaming company GungHo for roughly $1.5 billion last year. But most everyone else has decided to stay private. So there are several profitable, self-sustaining companies like Kabam and Kixeye waiting in the wings. To give its employees liquidity, Kabam held a secondary offering that let current and former employees, along with early investors, sell $38.5 million of their holdings. The company, which has raised more than $125 million in venture funding, was valued at $700 million in this last round. |
Nexmo Locks Up $18M At $100M+ Valuation As It Forecasts 100% Revenue Growth In 2014 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | , a quickly growing telco API firm that provides SMS and voice services, has locked down $18 million in fresh capital in a Series C round of funding that values the company at more than $100 million. The new capital was led by Sorenson Capital, with participation from previous investors, including Intel Capital on a pro rata basis. That Nexmo raised this tranche of capital is anything but surprising. It that it was raising, making the timing of this news in line with a reasonable funding schedule. The most interesting part of Nexmo has been its rapid growth. According to CEO , from 2012 to 2013, Nexmo grew its revenue by 350 percent. It promised investors around a 100 percent year-over-year revenue growth rate in 2014. Jamous told TechCrunch at the time that the company is currently generating revenue at a run rate of around $50 million on an annual basis. Growth of 100 percent would put the company at around a $100 million annual revenue run rate by the end of 2014. This mirrors my prior projections for the company: Extrapolating from the [company’s $4 million] August revenue figure, assuming that Nexmo grows at 5 percent monthly – a reduced pace, but one that I think is a reasonable projection – Nexmo would generate just under $9 million in top line next December. That would put it on a nine-figure yearly run rate. Jamous told TechCrunch today that the company is seeing revenue growth at a pace closer to 10 percent monthly, which would put it over the $100 million run-rate mark before the end of the year. Nexmo intends to deploy its new capital into marketing efforts and expand its sales team. The company has run surprisingly lean thus far, with a staff that only grew to 40 from 30 in late 2013. Jamous expects hires of around 5 per month for the first half of the year, or a 75 percent bump in its staff size by the middle of 2014. Unlike its traditional rival Twilio, Nexmo will not spend its marketing dollars directly reaching out to developers. Instead, it will continue to sell to larger enterprises. Jamous calls that sort of client his niche. The man has a point: Nexmo has grown on the back of the growth of the OTT market, where a few players dominate with massive volume. Some context for scale here helps. Box had , and recently raised $100 million at a valuation of $2 billion. Nexmo instead had total revenue of around $40 million (aggregate, not run rate) in the year. Box grew its revenues 100 percent in 2013. Nexmo expects to do at least that growth rate in 2014. Assuming Nexmo ends the year at a run rate of $100 million and, say, aggregate revenue of $80 million, what is it worth? Provided the market continues to value private technology companies as it does, Nexmo could be an odd bargain at its current valuation. But if Nexmo’s revenue ramp slips, its fortunes and its valuation could find a very different trajectory. I’ll check back in with the company at mid-year to see how it is performing. |
Outbox Shuts Down Its Mail Digitizing Service | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | Mail startup just that it’s shutting down its current service. The company has one of those ideas that’s both intriguing and slightly crazy sounding — it sent people by your home to pick up your physical mail, then it digitized that mail, all for $4.99 a month. After a pilot program in Austin, a year ago, and it led by Floodgate over the summer. The company itself isn’t going away. Instead, the blog post says it’s “focusing our team and resources on a totally new product.” Outbox says there just weren’t enough people signing up to pay for the service, at least given the company’s costs: However, after an extensive email marketing campaign to our waitlist, total yield from the waitlist was under 10 percent. And as we started marketing outside of this network, we had difficulty finding a repeatable and scalable acquisition channel. Across all of our efforts, our acquisition numbers were over $50 per lead. As our marketing efforts lagged behind schedule, our density numbers remained consistently flat, causing us to spend about double our projected cost to service each customer. Even our most dense routes cost us approximately 20 percent more than our break-even target. After several months of testing and refining, we reasonably concluded that we were executing well and collecting good data—it told us that there wasn’t enough demand to support the cost model. That may not come as a huge surprise to the who found the idea impractical or downright creepy. I tried it out myself for a few months, but eventually canceled my subscription. I wasn’t bothered by Outbox employees opening my mail, it just wasn’t as useful as I’d hoped, and it was a pain for me to coordinate with a roommate who didn’t subscribe. As for current customers, they will be able to download a copy of their digital archives until February 28. For nostalgia, if nothing else, here’s a video we made of the actual mail pickup service. |
Google Launches AdSense Direct, A New Tool For Direct Ad Sales | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | Google today AdSense Direct, a new tool for publishers who – as the name implies – want to sell ads directly and aren’t large enough to make dealing with the complexities of worth their while. This puts it into direct competition with , and other services that make it easier for smaller publishers to sell ads directly. This also marks Google’s first foray into this area of the advertising business for small publishers. AdSense, after all, has always been about programmatically choosing ads to display on a given site based on the content on the site and Google’s knowledge of what a specific reader is likely interested in. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mUEzAozB5gw With AdSense Direct, which is currently only available in the U.S., publishers can make deals with individual advertisers – no matter whether the publisher is on AdWords or not. Publishers can simply give potential advertisers a link to their AdSense Direct page and all the publishers have to do is upload their creative and pay for the ad. invoicing There are no upper or lower limits for the number of impressions served through one of these campaigns, by the way. Advertisers simply buy the space for a given day or longer time period, though campaigns . |
Yahoo Girds Its Loins For The Battle Over Your Home Screen | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | The home screen as it stands cannot last. In reality, what we’re looking at is the end times for the traditional grid of icons that we’ve become so familiar with since the iPhone was introduced in 2007. There is simply too much context available via the sensors, camera, radios and other inputs we carry around in our pockets not to take advantage of it. The icon grid design was used in many early smartphones running Palm and Symbian and Windows Mobile. But the iPhone really launched that design into the public consciousness and then Google cemented it with the launch of the first touch screen Android device. I’m not here to argue about firsts, but Apple was essentially responsible for making the grid the ‘standard’ in the eyes of a lot of people — both iPhone users and people who picked up other smartphones running on other operating systems. But, seven years later, the choices made by Apple to honor the grid demand re-examination. The thought process is relatively simple to disassemble. The grid had been used by other smartphone makers and even Apple’s Newton. It was simple, easy to understand and friendly to people who were being introduced to multitouch — which was for most people a brand new way to interact with touch screens. This was the same process which led it to utilize real-world allegories like bookshelves, page curls and ‘buttony’ buttons. But that home screen belongs to a bygone era. We’re acclimated now and any new users of smartphones have the collective installed user base to help them along. Now is the time that the home screen begins to take advantage of the thing that we’re going to be hearing an absolute junk ton about in 2014: context. I have a ton more thoughts about why 2014 will be the ‘year of context’ for mobile software and hardware, but for our purposes it’s enough to point at a few recent trends. Among those are Google Now, Apple’s ‘Today’ section in Notification Center, Facebook Home, Cyanogen Mod and home screen customization companies like Everything.me and, yes, Aviate. These various products are all efforts to leverage the contextual signals that our mobile sensor platforms are able to collect and transmit. Where we are, who we are, what our intent is, what our environment looks and sounds like and what we do when we’re there. That context can be used to customize the way that our devices look, feel and work based on our own personal signals. At this point, a home screen that customizes itself to you, personally, feels as inevitable as a well-worn pair of shoes. TechCrunch columnist MG Siegler noted a . The ‘first app you open’ in the morning is becoming more important real-estate than your home screen. In reality the first app you open when you turn on your iPhone is ’springboard’, the home screen. But up to this point it has remained relatively static, with only a couple of minor nods to active icons like the clock and calendar. Android home screens have always been more malleable, allowing for personalization and customization on a deeper level. Which is why some people really like Android. But this isn’t just about customization, it’s about reaction and organization on a contextual basis. Which brings us back to . Aviate is a for Android that interprets signals from you, the user, to present you with the apps, content and alerts you want right when you need them or even before. It groups apps into automated collections. This makes the home screen simple and clean. It also has elements of app discovery, says Aviate’s Mark Daiss. Aviate will look at the apps that you have and use the most and suggest more like it. The goal for the first run at Aviate was to cover roughly ’80%’ of a user’s day, says Daiss. That includes the major components like getting up, traveling, working and going to bed. From here on out it will be about fleshing out the moments in between. Daiss credits Facebook Home for creating an awareness of what a launcher was and how a customized home screen could change the experience. Despite the fact that Home didn’t exactly turn out well, Daiss notes that other efforts like have seen success, with that offering currently clocking in at over 100 million installs on Google Play. One of the reasons I believe Facebook Home’s initial try failed was that it was too insular. Even the most dedicated Facebook user needs more than just one network’s worth of information. That’s why I was curious about Yahoo’s plans for Aviate. Yahoo SVP of Mobile and Emerging Products Adam Cahan says that the company isn’t interested in turning Aviate into some sort of ‘all Yahoo apps’ portal. For now, it will expand the beta program and get more users checking it out. “Think of this as an extension of [Yahoo] Search,” Cahan says. The extension of search metaphor is an apt one, as contextually aware home screens will be all about using anticipatory ‘searching’ through our apps, habits and use cases to provide us with better experiences. Aviate will now be able to tap deeply into Yahoo data like search, weather, maps and more to inform contextual experiences. But, Daiss is careful to note, Aviate will still choose the best, most definitive data source possible — even if that’s not from Yahoo. With the best data comes the best experiences. Daiss lays down the core components of what he feels a contextual computing experience are. First, it needs the right input signals, then it needs the information that’s pertinent to the situation and then it has to provide the right user experience. Part of what they’ve discovered at Aviate is that this experience often involves offering information and context from inside the apps right out on the home screen. But this isn’t a one-shot widget, this is a continuously personalized experience. One of Aviate’s more popular features is a ‘swipe down’ screen that can offer you context from inside various apps at any given moment. Swipe down at a restaurant and you might get information about what’s good to eat there from Foursquare or Yelp. Swipe down at home and you’ll get alarm settings, a do not disturb toggle and a schedule of meetings. If you’re an iOS user and this is sounding familiar, yes, this is why . Because its swipe down ‘today’ section has the seeds of this kind of contextual computing, but it needs a lot of water and care to grow. Control Center and Notification Center need to grow up, quickly. (It’s also, I feel, one of the major reasons Apple changed its design so drastically with iOS 7 — it needed a more flexible framework to build within.) Aviate and other intent-based home screens are champing at the bit to offer people a better experience. And Google Now has an immense amount of head start simply by virtue of the enormous amount of data it has from its users. Unfortunately, once you start talking about how much these intent-based systems know about us and can anticipate our needs, the spectre of the NSA and government spying programs rears its head. Yahoo, Google and Apple were all targeted for data collection and that’s unlikely to go away. There are some incredibly complex and sticky moral quandaries headed our way with this new contex-heavy world, but that’s probably a discussion best handled in a focused chat about the trend. For now, we have Yahoo acquiring Aviate in order to make sure that it has a hand in this new world of context-based software. It has the resources to juice the back end with user data, and it’s going to be a big platform for Aviate as a (relatively) agnostic prototype of the custom home screen. And if it’s as much as it appears to be on mobile, Yahoo is very interested in how this battle for the home screen turns out. What’s intriguing about this is that it’s very much a ‘technology company’ move. So much of the confusion about Yahoo and its new direction — I feel — has been rooted in the inability by some to come to grips with the fact that Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer is comfortable thinking of the company as both, and so are her new lieutenants. Yahoo has an enormous amount to prove still. No amount of hot young talent Botox is going to magically turn the company around. But I don’t find the company’s investments in technology confusing. In this new contextual computing age, if you’re a media company not investing in your own technology, you’re probably not being…anticipatory enough. |
Algolia Provides ‘Spotlight’ For The Web With Its Turbocharged Real-Time Search API | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 1 | 21 | French startup provides a real-time search API that makes the search function on your website sexy. Now Y Combinator-backed, it’s faster than anything you’ve seen before — everything happens in real time, and results change with each keystroke. “We first started with an offline search engine that would work well on mobile,” co-founder and CEO Nicolas Dessaigne told me in a phone interview. “It worked but wasn’t a success. Many people wanted us to run the search queries on our servers, so that’s what we did.” Algolia is a developer-friendly hosted search engine for database objects. It will suit your needs perfectly if you run a sport results website, an e-commerce store, a movie database, a CRM, or any website that relies on small chunks of text (not big pages of text like Wikipedia or TechCrunch). Until now, there wasn’t any framework or API that was optimized for this kind of a database — Swiftype, Searchify and others all rely on big data-oriented Elasticsearch. The installation process is very reminiscent of integrating Stripe for credit card payments — adding Algolia’s search engine is just a matter of adding a few lines of code. You can see all that in the . But how do you get data into the search engine? Algolia works with JSON-formatted queries. After your first setup, you can update your data whenever you want. For example, if you want to order your results by the number of likes on videos, you can easily update those likes to keep your search engine up to date. Configuring takes a matter of minutes, as well, as Algolia already handles search and typos by default. All you have to do is say what attribute is the most important one. You can choose other ranking criteria, such as popularity, geolocation data, tags, dates, etc. After that, your users can start searching right away. They will interact with Algolia’s servers without ever leaving your site. With two different data centers in the U.S. and Europe, Algolia tries to make the experience as responsive as possible for its users. While the installation process is easy, switching to Algolia is mainly a matter of greatly improving the user experience. On most websites, search is a painful process. You don’t know what query you should type. When you hit enter, your browser takes you to a separate result page. Most of the time, what you were looking for is not even on this page. At this point, you reluctantly turn to Google and type your query followed by the name of the website you were browsing. Search on the web has been broken for a while, and Algolia knows that. That’s why the company even created , a way to grade your search engine based on a series of factors. YouTube is at 88 out of 100, Facebook is at 75, Yelp is at 62. Even well-known websites that rely a lot on search have a pretty bad rank: Airbnb gets a 48/100, and Vimeo only gets 31. Compare your average website to Algolia; it’s night and day — Algolia feels like using OS X’s Spotlight feature on the web. You can also use the service to power your search feature in your mobile app. The user experience is pretty similar. Algolia customers include and . Soon, the Pebble appstore will use Algolia as well. When it comes to pricing, the startup uses a traditional quota and tier system. It starts at $19 a month and can cost more than $449 per month if your website gets a lot of traffic. Here’s the full breakdown: So far, the company has raised $1.6 million (€1.2 million) from Index Ventures, Alven Capital and Point Nine Capital. A member of Paris accelerator , Algolia was also recently accepted into Y Combinator’s latest batch. The next step for the company is probably to fine-tune its product in order to attract big-name customers. Y Combinator will help it get in front of many big Silicon Valley clients. Finally, here’s a hack called — it does exactly what the name suggests. But it works much better than the default user search feature on Twitter, probably because the company couldn’t find a good open-source database object search framework. In the end, it’s all about using the right tools for your needs — and Algolia provides an important missing tool for developers. |
Apple Beefs Up Its Retail Presence In China With A New Store On Alibaba’s Tmall | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 1 | 7 | Apple has set up , the marketplace operated by e-commerce behemoth Alibaba. Tmall is currently the world’s second largest online retailer and is set to overtake Amazon’s top position by 2015, says . The Cupertino, California-based company already has 10 Apple retail stores in four Chinese cities and its own , but using Tmall gives it a major new channel, as well as several new marketing tools. As the , expanding its retail presence in China is important because, as in the rest of the world, the iPhone’s market share there has declined as it faces competition Samsung and other Android device makers. Setting up shop on Tmall gives Apple access to Alibaba’s new social networking tools, which Alibaba developed after inking a strategic partnership with Sina Weibo, the highly influential microblogging platform with 50 million daily active users. Yesterday, the two companies , which integrates with Sina Weibo and helps users to engage in a “social shopping” experience. For example, when someone shares an item, a “buy” button now automatically appears that lets his or her followers view product details and purchase it using Alipay, Alibaba’s payment platform. Weibo Payment also gives Apple a new CRM tool as it localizes it marketing efforts for China. For example, its Tmall store is currently getting ready for “Red Friday” promotions on January 10, an annual promotional event by retailers to herald the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday. Other Western tech companies that operate official Tmall accounts include Microsoft, which . |
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