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Hands-On With The Amazon Fire Phone | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | null |
Harley-Davidson Might Be Making An Electric Motorcycle | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | A mysterious video released on YouTube channel today shows a much quieter motorcycle zooming down Route 66, fueling speculation that this bike is electric. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7u9DTfE14M&w=560&h=315] Harley fans were already suspicious after the folks at leaked of one of the possible bikes on the set of the new Avengers movie a few days ago. The Harley is a symbol of the open road and the Hells Angels. This seems like a watered-down version of all that is Harley-Davidson and America . All of this is, of course, just speculation for now. The video title says “06.19.14.” Probably not coincidentally, the Harley crew is set to make a big announcement about its next hog tomorrow. The confirmed with TechCrunch today that Harley Davidson is, indeed, releasing an electric motorcycle. The LiveWire, an electric-powered cycle with a jet engine whirr, will be out in stores in about a year. Check out what this bike looks like below: |
This 21-Year-Old Dropped Out Of College To Test Our Knowledge Of Rap | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | Drake, Jay-Z, Kanye: Think you could name their songs in just a few seconds of audio? Twenty-one-year-old Danny Friday knows them by heart. He started coding when he was 12 and became obsessed with rap at the age of 14. He’s now dropped out of college and come to Silicon Valley to crowdsource the world’s biggest rap fans. Enter . The game went live just five days ago and already has 160K+ visitors to the site, playing over 620K games. “It got a tweet from NPR, and MC Hammer now follows me on Twitter,” says Friday. Someone from the Eminem fan group in Russia even contacted Friday to see if he could translate the site into Russian. “We knew we’d reached something critical when we had over 300 people playing in France in the middle of the night.” The “we” being fellow housemate Josh Indig and Indig’s friend in Philly, Chris Barrett. The game works like this: You pick your artist from a list of rappers, and then the site plays 15-second snippets of audio from which you must decide which song is playing. It’s supposed to be easy for anyone with a radio and an occasional listen to hip hop. (Side note: I couldn’t even pass the first level for Kanye. Friday assured me it’s probably just a bug, but I’m pretty sure he was being nice.) Anyone can play, but those looking to do battle can register via Twitter and then compare where they stand on the site’s leaderboard. Friday was almost weepy when we met at the Creamery in San Francisco’s SoMa. He’d been working around the clock to include a Tupac Shakur test on what would have been the legendary rapper’s 43rd birthday on Monday. He was also maybe a bit emotional both from lack of sleep and a recent tweet from Rap Genius co-founder :
Friday shakes his head as he stares at his phone. “That’s validation. Sorry, I’m emotional right now,” he says. He’s wearing a homemade T-shirt with Jay-Z lyrics on the front and back from “Somewhere in America.” The game seems simple and fun. But it’s not so simple, as Friday explains – and this isn’t his first attempt at something viral. The Rap Test is actually an iteration of . But Friday means to use his newest creation to disrupt the way record labels get their data. We’re not the stereotypical “fuckybergs,” says Friday, referring to his three-person developer posse. He explains what he means by that with a comparison to Nielsen ratings. Friday believes Nielsen has the corner on music data and that it’s too expensive and not as helpful as it could be for the record label industry ( also lends the industry data, by the way). Music-industry revenue from album sales has dropped off a cliff in recent decades with the rise of streaming services like Spotify and iTunes. “I’m not here to fix the music industry…what does that even mean? But I have something that works.” While the game seems fun, Friday is a pretty serious human. He’s the type to make spreadsheets of costs and he keeps a list of goals. And he’s willing to do what it takes to make it; the guy literally lives in a closet in a house in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco with a bunch of as roommates. He says that keeps him hustling. He also reads a lot and says he pays attention to what goes viral. He even waited a week to release The Rap Test to make sure he had all the necessary elements in place. The goal now is to bring on a dedicated Rap Test artist (rumor is, he’s in talks with someone big — you’d know him, but Friday can’t disclose yet) and to add more than just rap and hip hop. He’d also like to get some funding from someone who could appreciate what he’s built and the potential it has for big data. |
Here Is The Full Video Of Amazon’s Fire Phone Launch Event | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w95kwXy_MOY As you probably know, Amazon . Sadly, the company didn’t make a live stream available, so you had to make do with our . But it really takes video to get a feel for the phone’s main feature — — but as promised, Amazon has now posted the full video of the event on YouTube and we have embedded it above for your viewing pleasure. This will also give you a chance to see and all of the phone’s other features in action. |
Yo | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | It seems so simple. So mindless. It’s only slightly less boring than “Hey” or “Hi,” if only because of some perceived aggression or excitement attached to it. But Yo is anything but simple. If you haven’t been following along on Twitter, is the hottest new app that will leave you scratching your head. The entire premise of the app is to send other users a single word: Yo currently has over 50,000 active users, after launching as a joke on April Fools’ Day. Users have sent over 4 million Yo’s to each other. Without ever having officially launched, co-founder and CEO Or Arbel managed to secure $1.2 million in funding from a list of unnamed investors, except for co-founder, angel, and , who participated in the round. It might have started out as a joke, but the app has turned into something more universally enjoyable, and its brief popularity tells us something bigger about where the mobile social landscape is headed. We’re seeing the death of play out before us, with apps focused on merging the physical and digital worlds. Snapchat has ephemerality. Whisper and Secret have anonymity. And Yo has context. Let’s back up for a second. You’re at a bar with your best friend and a love interest. Both put a hand on your shoulder when they talk to you. From the outside, it all looks the same. But there’s a big difference between the comfortable touch of a close friend and the explorative graze of someone you may very well have sex with soon. The next morning, your friend and your crush send you the exact same text. It says simply “Hey.” From your old pal, “hey” just means hey. But from your sexy friend, “hey” can mean anything from “last night was fun” to “I’m still thinking about you this morning.” As with anything, a “Yo” can just be a yo. But you’ll feel a very real difference between a “Yo” you get in the morning from a friend and a “Yo” you get at 2 a.m. from a friend with benefits. Trust me. And that’s… supposedly… the magic. The context of the Yo says much more than two little letters. And this is more important than it sounds. There’s a common thread surfacing around the most popular social apps of today, and that similarity is an understanding of . The entire purpose of Snapchat is to bring the interactions on your smartphone as close to real life as possible. The photos disappear because moments in real life disappear. The window showing your own face during a video chat disappears, because when you’re talking to someone in real life, you aren’t normally looking at your face as well. Secret and Whisper are two other examples. People love them because the thoughts and emotions and jokes being shared on them are coming from a real place. These Secrets and Whispers are the feelings we have on the inside, not the beautified life we share on social media sites like Instagram and Facebook. Yo’s digital dualism play is far more understated, but perhaps more universal. Again, it comes back to context. In real life, a grin can mean the difference between a playful joke and a hurtful sarcastic comment. A call from your boss at 11 a.m. and a call from you boss at 11 p.m. can mean the difference between a simple question and a full-fledged professional emergency. A farewell hug at a crowded party has a very different weight to it than a farewell hug after a quiet night of TV and wine. These context clues are what makes life fun, and they’re what makes Yo more interesting than the joke it started out as. You may recall that Facebook . Despite its shitty UI and the fact that Facebook itself is , Slingshot does have one relatively exciting feature: Reciprocation. In order to see an inbound photo or video message in Slingshot, you must first respond to that message with your own photo. Forced friendship. In theory, it’s a smart idea, especially considering that among its users. But Slingshot is going up against an established user base on Snapchat, and essentially forces people to take pictures to enjoy the app. This is a big no-no. Consumers are a huge part of any social network’s user base. Not everyone has something to share, and not everyone feels comfortable sharing, but almost everyone can enjoy voyeurism on the Internet. The consumers depend on the creators and vice versa. Asking everyone to become creators — especially on a level as intimate as photos and videos — is like asking a sea full of various fish and coral to all become sharks. Yo pretty much tricks users into this reciprocation. When you receive a Yo, it appears in your Yo inbox as the sender’s name. When you tap on that name (presumably to open the message and see the “yo” contents), you just send a Yo back. In that way, Yo is much more representative of a Yo-yo. (You can actually send a Yo-yo on Yo by tapping a name twice.) The Yo’s go back and forth. They quickly become spammy. And still, it doesn’t really matter. With Yo, the frequency doesn’t make a difference and the content is irrelevant. There’s no infringement of personal space when I’m sent a Yo, and sending one back asks for nothing from me (the way a photo does). The app isn’t anonymous, but sending off a Yo feels even more lightweight than shooting off a Secret or a Whisper. It’s small. It’s the same for everyone. It’s nothing. It’s yo. Yo is actually a very interesting word. It seems that . Some say it comes from the 14th century, and others argue that it originated much earlier than that, across various continents like Asia and Africa before hitting Europe. Some say the word’s lineage began on the high seas, as a term that meant “present” or “accounted for” to sailors in the Navy, etc. Its popularization is often traced back to the community of Italian-Americans and African-Americans living in close proximity in Philadelphia during the 40s, as both groups adopted the term as a way to say “Hey you!” It’s a noise that is used in almost any language, and a sound that carries long distances. In some cultures, the term “yo” or “io” refers to the first person. Me. In others, it has a closer correlation to the second person. You. But in almost every case, “yo” is generally defined as a way of . “Hey you! Look at me!” It’s human connection. Beyond all the context clues and the multiple meanings of the word itself, Yo is about the connection between two people. “Yo already means different things to different people, and it can have a different meaning depending on who you say it to and how you say it,” says Arbel. “That ambiguity was exactly what we were looking for in an app that is all about context.” An app like this, while cute and convincing and addictive, will inevitably fizzle out if used solely for friends communicating with one another. And Arbel is aware of this. Right now, the app offers a free API that will let any organization get set up with a Yo account. The system is in place for the World Cup. If you send a Yo to WorldCup, you’ll get a Yo every time a goal is scored. Theoretically, TechCrunch could add a Yo button to the site for readers who want to know when the biggest breaking news hits the site. Our account would send a simple Yo, perhaps the most lightweight push notification of all time, straight to your phone so you’re in the loop. It’s that simple. “It’s really lightweight,” said Arbel. “You don’t have anything to open. The Yo is everything, it’s all there is. You don’t have a badge you need to remove or any hidden content. Just a Yo.” For now, the company is focused on acquiring more users, which includes getting as many developers on the API as possible. But the API could eventually turn into a source of revenue. And that’s not all. Arbel envisions a time when you’ll be able to buy Yo’s in celebrity voices to send to your friends or flings or foes. But beyond a shadow of a doubt, Arbel will never introduce the option to buy more words. Yo is all there is. Arbel is the only person working full time on the app, which has a fresh $1.2 million in funding, but he’s looking to hire Android engineers in the Bay Area. I’m going to go ahead and place my bets early , and say that Yo will have dropped out of our collective consciousness by next year. But that’s not to say we should write it off as a silly gimmick. The brief popularity of Yo is a signal of a larger trend. Software developers are today tasked with a bigger problem than convenience or accessibility or distribution. The line between our physical lives and the lives we lead in our minds, with our thumbs, on a touchscreen, is rapidly fading. Yo may be just a touch basic (bitch) to last for the long haul, or perhaps Yo is the beginning of a new era in push notifications. But apps that integrate pieces of our real-world lives are just settling in for a long stay. |
Hands On With Yo, The Absurdly Simple Messaging App | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | In certain web-obsessed circles, the word of the day today was definitely “yo.” is a ridiculously simple smartphone app that allows you to contact friends with one word messages that say, you guessed it, yo. The app launched on April 1st (no joke) but only really started to pick up viral steam in recent days — culminating in full-on fad status today after a feature which noted that Yo has received some $1 million in funding from high profile investors. For a significant part of today, many people in the tech sphere couldn’t take a look at their Twitter streams without seeing of Yo reference. My colleague Sarah Buhr has been hip to Yo for a couple of days now, which practically makes her an expert on the service. So I asked her to show me the ropes as I downloaded the app for the first time. See what it’s like to Yo by watching the video embedded above. In short, we downloaded Yo (and put it on video) so you don’t have to. My takeaway? It’s weird fun for a few hours, but definitely a fad. The fascination with it feels a lot like the fascination people had for that a few years back — it’s so stupid, you can’t quite believe it actually was made and put out for public consumption. You should also read Jordan Crook’s analysis of Yo and its rapid rise to fame . |
Funding Amendment To Curtail Warrantless Surveillance Proposed In House | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | A bipartisan group of Congress members have proposed an amendment to the aimed at reining in government surveillance. The amendment would ban the funding of government to either demand or request a “backdoor” into products built by technology companies. It would also ban the funding of searches of the data of US persons under the authority of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The amendment is similar to what offered in May to the National Defense Authorization Act. She , also to curtail funding for the weakening of technology products, and preventing the financing of Section 702 searches on Americans. Those amendments failed. Supporting the new amendment is Rep. Zoe Lofgren, again, along with , , , and , among others. Voting on amendments to the Defense Appropriations Act kick off today. Voting on this amendment should occur tomorrow. So why should you care about Section 702 reform? When the House recently , criticism of its final form was sharp, especially regarding 702 searches. Here’s the EFF : Further, the bill does not sufficiently address Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act. We are specifically concerned that the new language references “about” searches, which collect and review messages of users who do not even communicate with surveillance targets.Congress must include reforming Section 702 in any NSA reform. This includes stopping the NSA from searching illegally collected Americans’ communications, stopping the suspicionless “about” surveillance, and ensuring companies can report on the exact number of orders they receive and the number of users affected. The proposed amendment would defund searches of collected data, which would be real progress. In the case of backdoors, banning the use of funds to request or demand special access is at the root, leaving aside privacy implications — a security point. If you introduce weaknesses into technology, they are, of course, less strong. The amendment would ban the forced weakening of technology products that, especially in the current climate, need all the armor they can muster. Given that similar amendments failed quite recently, I’m not too optimistic this time around. But, that it has risen again and have attracted support from both parties shows that, despite passing a neutered NSA reform bill, the House isn’t done with the issue quite yet. |
US Marshals Accidentally Replies All To Anonymous Bitcoin Auction Bidders In Email Fiasco | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | In a magnificent show of technical ineptitude, today the U.S. Marshals revealed the identities of many anonymous bidders in its $18 million seized Silk Road Bitcoin auction by CC’ing them on an email thread. When one asked a question, the response was sent to 40 of the bidders, many whose names were attached or easily identifiable from their addresses, negating the whole point of the auction being anonymous. Smooth, government. These 40 bidders now know each other’s identities, so they may leak. Here’s the email a source sent us from the U.S. Marshals’ Bitcoins Department Of Justice email account to the bidders, but as we’re honorable chaps at TechCrunch, we’ve blotted out the names: The government seized 29,656.51306529 bitcoin when it raided digital black market Silk Road, which was known to facilitate sales of hard drugs, weapons and more. At , the stash is worth $18.08 million. Compared to bitcoin’s , the sum is minor. But, the government, as , is now in the business of selling the cryptocurrency, albeit temporarily. $18 million worth of bitcoin amounts to about 85 percent of the last 24 hours worth of trading. The auction drew interest, as it would allow someone to quickly pick up a bunch of bitcoin at once at a fixed price, rather than do a bunch of small deals where the price could rise in between. There’s also the potential for a slight discount on the market price. We can only hope this gaffe led to a zany chain of emails between the bidders over who had bought the craziest things with their magical Internet money. |
With Firefly & Dynamic Perspective, Amazon Just Opened Up All New Categories For App Developers | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | With the introduction of the Firefly and Dynamic Perspective SDKs, mobile app developers who have grown tired of iterating on activities like messaging, photo-sharing, socializing and more now have new ways to differentiate themselves from a growing number of app store competitors. With Amazon’s newly opened up visual recognition technology, developers will not only be able to make their existing apps smarter and more aware of objects out in the real world, they can potentially develop new kinds of applications entirely. And with Dynamic Perspective, they have a whole new way of navigating within those applications, too. Firefly – the company’s first-ever smartphone. Using a dedicated hardware button on the side of the phone, mobile consumers are able to identify almost anything they see or hear using the smartphone’s camera and other sensors, including text, products, movies, TV shows, books, games, CDs, business cards, web addresses, barcodes, QR codes and more. The feature is similar to that of Flow, a visual-recognition technology several years in development that . There’s also a bit of a Shazam-like function, with Firefly’s audio and video recognition capabilities. What’s interesting, however, is that Amazon is not just making Firefly a part of its smartphone software and hardware. It’s attempting to seed an app ecosystem with new types of apps and services that competitors Apple and Google won’t have. Third-party adopters of Firefly technology already include several popular mobile app makers, like StubHub, MyFitnessPal, iHeartRadio and Vivino. But Amazon isn’t just hoping for better and smarter versions of existing apps, thanks to Firefly. It’s looking for a whole new category to emerge. “The Firefly SDK is available starting today to use this advanced technology,” the announcement reads (emphasis ours). “Later this year, Firefly will include artwork recognition, foreign language translation, and wine label recognition powered by Vivino.” Most of the potential use cases for Firefly, from Amazon’s perspective, are all about driving more sales. See or hear anything, identify it automatically, and Amazon will help you acquire it instantly. Hear a good song? Push the Firefly button and buy. See some nice shoes? Buy. Drink a great wine? Buy. Naturally, one of the default built-in actions in the Firefly SDK is to point the end user to purchase the item in question from Amazon. But the SDK indicates that developers can add additional actions to that list, too, like pointing the user to a detail page within the developer’s own application or launching a website, for instance. Identification can also serve as just the first step in directing a user to more information beyond just the “what.” For example, a sample plug-in called “Exempli,” also described in the developer documentation, first identifies the musical artist behind a song being heard, then searches an external service to determine if there are any upcoming shows by that artist within a 50-mile radius of the user’s current location. To what extent Amazon will allow competitors to build on top of this technology is unknown. Can Netflix point users to its own movies, for instance? That seems iffy. (We asked Amazon to clarify this and will update if it does). Dynamic Perspective is clever, too. This new technology is about responding to how an end user holds and moves the phone. For instance, Zillow is using this to let users zoom in on pictures just by moving the phone closer to them. And they can move their head to peek around the corner in photos of a home’s interior. But the technology seems more promising in terms of game development. Just as video games evolved in the living room from mashing buttons to moving your body, Dynamic Perspective takes the next step from just tilting the phone back and forth — as the major platforms support today — to actually getting more of your body involved in the game. For example, Ezone.com created an “endless runner”-type game (think Temple Run, etc.), which has you navigate with just your head. There’s also a special flip you can do in one of its games that involves you flipping your head, too. The goal is to introduce a new way of interacting with on-screen content in a way that’s as remarkable as the “pinch-and-zoom” and swiping gestures were when the iPhone first debuted. (Whether Amazon has succeeded here remains to be seen.) In fact, both technologies are about moving away from the tapping and swiping and typing altogether. Dynamic Perspective is about movement and tilting and things you can do with one hand. Firefly, meanwhile, lets you find things without Googling, turning the real world into an Amazon search engine. These technologies can be combined, too — for example, a music app that lets you tilt to skip tracks, “hear” songs from the radio to build out a playlist and alert you to nearby concerts after listening. Amazon, of course, will be challenged in a number of ways with its smartphone debut. It’s not great that Fire Phone is currently limited to AT&T, and that it will have to compete with significant players, Apple and Google, in today’s smartphone ecosystem. But with these two additions, the company has clearly been thinking beyond the specs and the look and feel of its device. It’s been thinking about the biggest selling point for smartphones: the app ecosystem. These SDKs are not just user interface updates, they are new ways of using a phone. Maybe they will turn out to be new ways that nobody wants. Maybe these technologies will be too restrictive to third parties whose apps and companies compete with Amazon. Maybe they will be buggy and weird. Maybe developers won’t even bite. But at least Amazon has shown us something new. |
Facebook Slingshot Review: Crazy? Or Crazy Like A Fox? | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | ‘s core mechanic “reply to unlock” makes sharing a fun game or an annoying chore depending on how you look at it. The new standalone photo and video mass-messaging app is delightfully designed, but much of it still feels like Snapchat with a layer of polish — years late. The question is whether Slingshot holding content hostage will lure people in, or if the ransom is so high that we’d rather abandon the window into friends’ lives than work for it. Here’s our Slingshot review. thrives on curiosity. Not being able to see incoming photos and videos until you send one back makes you eager to share. The mystery of what’s behind that pixelated thumbnail incentivizes everyone to be a content creator, breaking the 1% rule of that says a fraction of users entertain rest. The app, released yesterday on and , also greatly benefits from critical mass, when sharing one photo or video you’ve shot unlocks tons that friends have sent you. If you don’t have enough friends to send shots to or enough waiting to be unscrambled, constantly creating content feels like too much work with too little reward. That’s why Facebook may need to play the promotion of Slingshot very differently. While it’s waiting to really nail the product design of its other standalone app Paper before it cross-promotes it, Slingshot may need a boost right off the bat. I’ve found that while there’s some pressure to be especially witty on Snapchat or only send send snaps to close friends, Slingshot is more free-flowing. It’s built around mass messaging, so you’re more likely to have something to look at since you’ll get slings from a wider range of friends. And the reaction feature is a great way to show appreciation for being sent something great. If it can hit early traction and prove its worth, Slingshot has a chance at becoming a new way we share everyday moments. It , or even really detract from it, but it could bring goofy, ephemeral sharing to a wider audience with the help of Facebook’s billion-plus reach. Unfortunately, reply to unlock introduces friction to the sharing process that will frustrate many. Facebook didn’t invent the mechanic, as others like and have played in the space, but its putting the feature (or bug, some say) into the spotlight. Facebook is relying on a gimmick to drive an ideal — that people should reciprocate when someone shares something cool with them. Some people will refuse to play this game, sidestepping Slingshot and just using text, a messaging app or Snapchat instead. Reply to unlock is a rocket that could propel the app or make it explode. If Slingshot can cultivate a large enough user base, the curiosity to unscramble shots will drag reluctant friends into the app. If it can’t get enough photos and videos flowing between friends, forced content creation erects a barrier to usage. It shouldn’t be long before its trajectory becomes clear. |
null | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 20 | null |
The Best Amazon Fire Phone Features You Won’t Get In Any Other Phone | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | Today, Amazon introduced the long-rumored . It has the killer 3D effects that everyone anticipated. But it also has a few neat features that you won’t see in any other phone out there… |
Amazon’s Shopping Phone Comes With Free Prime Membership For A Year | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | Amazon has just announced its head-tracking, shopping-focused $199 smartphone, the . And for those who might be wavering about shelling out top dollar (it’s $649 off contract) for a newbie smartphone, the company is currently throwing in a free year of its Amazon Prime membership service to sweeten the deal. A statement on an page notes: “For a limited time, Fire phone includes a full year of Prime.” So if you factor in the cost of Prime then a Fire Phone could be considered to cost your wallet $100 — at least until this offer ends. Those who are already Prime members can still get in on the deal — with Amazon saying it will extend Fire Phone buyers’ Prime memberships for a full year “at no additional cost.” And if you buy multiple Fire Phones with the same account, that account will receive free Prime memberships for the corresponding number of years. Prime Membership in the U.S. costs $99 per year and includes free two-day shipping on products sold by Amazon, as well as access to Amazon’s video- and music-streaming services and the Kindle e-book lending library. Free Prime is one way for Amazon to differentiate the Fire Phone, but it evidently does not yet feel it needs to make this a permanent feature of its debut smartphone. That of course may change, depending on demand for the device. Other (permanent) features of the Fire Phone that Amazon is hoping will make what is, at bottom, a forked Android phone stand out from the extant smartphone crowd include , thanks to quad cameras on the front of the device that watch where the user is looking; access to ; and a hardware button for accessing an app called that lets users point the phone’s camera at real-world objects to identify things they might want to buy or learn more about. Amazon is also throwing in a smattering of its virtual currency, , for early Fire Phone buyers. “For a limited time, Fire phone comes with 1,000 Amazon Coins (a $10 value) for apps, games and in-app purchases,” it says. It will be interesting to see whether Amazon ends up offering more lasting ecosystem incentives to try to drive Fire Phone sales — by, for instance, making a year of free Prime membership a permanent offer. Or giving away a more substantial quantity of Amazon Coins. That’s likely going to depend on how much demand it can drive with the existing feature set of the device and the prime promotional channel that is the front page of its own e-commerce website. |
Shasta Ventures Raises $300M Fourth Fund | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | Shasta Ventures, a firm whose investments include , and , announced today that it has raised a $300 million fourth fund. The firm has now raised more than $1 billion. Each Shasta fund has been larger than the one before it, and Shasta Ventures IV was no exception — back in 2011. In , managing director Tod Francis said the firm will stay focused on Series A and Series B funding, rather than chasing later-stage deals with hot companies: “There is a bifurcation in the market–there’s rocket-ship hot companies and there’s everyone else. There’s a lot of good companies not getting funded.” |
Facebook’s New Open-Source Data Switch Technology Is Designed For Flexibility And Greater Control | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | Today announced new modularized top-of-rack networking switch technology and a new Linux OS to control these switches. The company will eventually share this technology as part of its Open Compute Project. Jay Parikh, Facebook’s VP of Infrastructure Engineering, made the announcement at GigaOm’s in an interview with Derrick Harris. Parikh says there has been an effort under way for a number of years to disaggregate (or break down into smaller components) the main parts of the Facebook data center. So far, it’s been able to do this with compute, server and storage, but up to this point, the company has been using traditional top-of-rack switches. Today that changed when Parikh announced a new top-of-rack switch called Wedge. The idea he said was to break the hardware and software into component parts or modules making it easy to change any part of the system to give the company ultimate flexibility to make changes as its needs change over time. From a configuration standpoint, Wedge is a 40GB switch with 16 slots, expandable to 32, and fits in a standard rack. But IT pros can swap out components or change the way they configure each piece to meet a variety of needs. Parikh says that what makes Wedge different is the way it’s architected makes it operate more like a server. He says this will allow software developers and hardware engineers much greater flexibility in how they design and call the various components inside the box. FBoss is the new Linux-based OS that will operate Wedge. “One lingering block has been the network, which has been connected in a conventional manner: Buy this box, put it in the top, plug it in, configure it and go,” Parikh explained. But Parikh said using that appliance approach was really slowing them down and they have been looking for a solution that provided them more control. Matt Corddry, director of hardware engineering at Facebook, said that by breaking this down into component parts gives their software developers much greater flexibility to manipulate the different pieces of hardware programmatically in ways that just weren’t possible in the old fixed-appliance kind of approach where the hardware was just a black box. What’s more, hardware engineers can swap pieces in and out of the chassis to meet their needs. Corddry says for a company like Facebook, which has such a wide variety of needs from its network — whether it’s the main Facebook app, moving pictures with Instagram or chat with Facebook Messenger (and whatever comes down the road later) — this approach just gives them tremendous flexibility to configure the different pieces in the network, including the top-of-rack switch to meet their changing requirements. Corddry told me that the company doesn’t yet have a date set to release this new switch to open source, but it will continue to work on it and today’s announcement was the beginning of a larger conversation with the community at large. As Prikh said, Facebook will welcome the input when it comes. He believes if the community can make it better, cheaper or faster, then they will use that design. The company isn’t wedded specifically to its design, but at the same time, it needs to run its business, solve its internal problems and continue to build flexibility into its own data center even as it shares with the Open Compute Project. |
AT&T Will Sell Amazon’s Fire Phone For $199 On A 2 Year Contract | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | Given that Amazon’s newly announced Fire Phone is largely one gigantic portal for Amazon to sell things (there’s a dedicated hardware button just for recognizing products!), some folks were betting on the device itself being free — or at least really, cheap. Alas, no such luck. Based on product pages that have just gone up on AT&T, it looks like the Fire will sell for roughly the same price you’d expect any other phone to go for on a two-year contract. Meanwhile, product pages that have just gone up on Amazon’s own site detail the off-contract prices. As rumored, AT&T is getting this phone as a carrier exclusive. These prices may change as the announcement rolls on (Amazon still hasn’t officially confirmed the prices), but for now they’re looking accurate. Amazon has now confirmed the above prices. |
Amazon’s Mayday Service On Fire Phone Means It Might Be Able To Sell Its Unique New Features | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | Amazon has brought Mayday to the , it announced today. The Mayday service offers one-tap access to customer service agents who can talk to phone users via video chat, and take over the screen on their devices to show them exactly how to do something, complete with annotations. The service is available 24 hours, and service representatives will respond to requests within 15 seconds, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said on stage. It’s accessible from any screen on the Fire Phone via a simple pull-down of the menu from the top of the screen, in the same way you’d access notifications on an iPhone or Android device. Mayday is a big deal for Amazon, which recently shared stats about use of the service on its Kindle Fire HDX tablets. The company said that customer service agents generally respond in fewer than 10 seconds, which sounds like magic when you consider how long people generally have to wait on hold — often without even talking to a human — in most customer service scenarios. Mayday is available free to all owners of the device, but its cost may be built into the cost of ownership; AT&T is going to charge $199 for the entry-level 32GB version, which is right up there with flagship devices from top-tier Android makers and the price of Apple’s iPhone at launch, despite the fact that on paper at least, its internal specs have more in common with last year’s Android flagships than today’s Galaxy S5, HTC One and others. Fire Phone might need Mayday, too. It has a unique perspective-shifting 3D feature that makes it quite different from ordinary phones, as well as a dedicated Firefly button to let it identify products on the fly. These are not features that smartphone owners will be familiar with, and they could well require some explaining in order for new users to get comfortable operating them. |
VCs Don’t Think We’re In A Tech Bubble — Yet | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | At the in San Francisco this morning, managing partner argued that there doesn’t seem to be a bubble in tech. In a presentation that lasted a bit over 10 minutes, Kupor laid out a series of trends that indicate things aren’t quite as exuberant as some fear. Kupor argues that a lot of value creation today takes place in private markets rather than in public stocks. For instance, he brings up Microsoft’s market cap growth from the time it went public to today: a roughly 500x increase. Facebook, on the other hand, went — for it to have similar growth, its valuation would have to become larger than the value of the entire global public equity market today. Why is so much value creation taking place before companies go public? For one thing, they’re taking longer to go public in the first place. Between 1999 and 2012, the average time for a tech startup to go public has more than doubled, from four to nine years. Because they’re going public later, these companies are often already farther along in the metrics that matter for valuations. In 1999, 80 percent of tech companies going public pulled in less than $50 million in revenue; last year, that number had fallen to 20 percent. Along with better fundamentals, there are also fewer companies going public. Fifteen years ago, 350 tech companies went public, while in 2013 only 50 had: Tech companies are bringing in more revenue and have more reasonable valuations when they go public than they did in 1999. Following Kupor’s presentation, partner explained why there are more opportunities for tech companies to scale, which would allow for the high valuations we’ve been seeing lately — once they found a winning formula. As you can see in the slide below, the market that companies can address has gotten much bigger, has more capable devices, and is more willing to spend money than in the last bubble: "VC is a terrible asset class… if you look in the rear view mirror" says — Mattermark (@Mattermark) In a group session following their individual presentations, both Kupor and Suster agreed that we may simply still be in a pre-bubble phase. Kupor noted three factors to watch: that late-stage valuations are being driven up by the arrival of corporate investors like Google Ventures and Alibaba; hedge funds raising capital to invest in late-stage funds; and the fact that it’s been five years since the last bear market. As time goes on, the odds only increase that confidence will drop, which Kupor attributed to “the nature of these investment classes.” |
Amazon’s Fire Phone Uses Depth And 3D Effects To Stand Out | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | We’ve been hearing about head-tracking technology on phones for a long time now. Some have ventured into this territory already, with Samsung releasing camera-based head tracking in earlier generations of the Galaxy S phones. Today, Amazon is trying out its own version of the gimmick with new 3D effects enabled by four cameras on the front of the phone. (We , btw.) Bezos explained that, back in the 14th century, perspective changed the way we look at and create art. “There’s always more to see,” he said. “So what if there were a thousand artists standing by to redraw the picture every time you moved your head?” The 3D effects features will be present throughout the phone to not only offer a more life-like experience in various apps, but also to provide the opportunity for tilt-based gestures. It works by having four 120-degree, front-facing cameras on the phone, in each corner. At any moment, two of them are working to constantly know where you head is at any given time. Even if you’re using the phone at night, each camera has it’s own infrared light to shine on you so the phone knows what’s going on. Amazon is calling the tracking feature “dynamic perspective.” Amazon spent a lot of time developing this system so that the phone can always tell the difference between a picture of your face and your actual head. Paired with Dyanamic Perspective, Amazon has also introduced 60fps 3D effects, and they aren’t just for certain applications. Amazon is currently using them to provide interesting 3D lock screens, and the effects are littered throughout the UI. For example, icons in the user interface float above other layers of the screen to provide a parallax-like effect. Pairing these effects with tilt controls will let users switch between web pages and perform other commands, too, by simply tilting purposefully to the left or right. As we’ve seen with other phones, you can tilt to scroll through an article or web page vertically, as well. We previously reported that Amazon is using . A Dynamic Perspective SDK is available now to developers. We haven’t actually tested any of it out ourselves, obviously, but the folks in the audience at the event are certainly impressed. [gallery ids="1018159,1018157,1018108,1018097,1018099,1018087"] |
Watch This Film About Why Aaron Swartz Matters More Than Ever | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | was a young, bright genius who believed in the open Internet. A self-made millionaire by the age of 19, he co-founded Reddit, was part of the creation of RSS and became a political organizer and Internet hacktivist who was instrumental in the fight against . , a film first released at Sundance and now opening to the public today, follows the story of his life and his tragic suicide in 2013 at the age of 26. Swartz had been in a two-year legal battle for using MIT’s network to systematically download 4.8 million academic journal articles from . He was facing $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison. As Boing Boing’s put it, Swartz was being prosecuted for “taking too many books out of the library.”
Film director Brian Knappenberger, who crowdfunded the film on Kickstarter, believes this movie is more than just about Swartz’s life, tragic though it was. He says it’s a commentary on the system, the Internet and the challenges we as a society face to keep it free. “Aaron’s rallying the troops against SOPA. He’s talking to a lot of people and on TV, but at the same time he’s going through his own private hell, taking away his personal freedom, his own money. The prosecutor put all this pressure on him and he couldn’t even talk about that and it was really isolating,” Knappenberger, who previously wrote and directed “We Are Legion,” a film about hacktivism, happened to be on a panel with Wired reporter Quinn Norton about a week after Swartz’s death. Norton had just about the federal investigation into Swartz. “I began to notice this anger in the industry that was welling up from the net,” Knappenberger told me over the phone. Though he included a lot of moving parts in the story (Swartz was involved in quite a bit), Knappenberger said it was so striking to him that what had happened to Swartz was not uncommon in our criminal justice system. The story of Aaron Swartz is not just about being an activist caught up in the legal system. It’s a fight between government and hacktivism. It’s about exploring new territory and protecting freedom for us all. As Knappenberger put it, “[Swartz] symbolizes a kind of choice. He is the Internet’s own boy.” opens in theaters across the country and online today. You can also sign the petition to counter federal attorney misconduct. Tell the Department of Justice #NoMoreAarons by . |
Gov Oversight Board Will Weigh In On The Legality Of PRISM | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | On July 2nd, the (PCLOB) will release a report on the government’s use of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to execute surveillance. The NSA’s PRISM program, for example, is legally grounded in Section 702. The independent oversight group is part of the Executive Branch, and is notable for its of the government’s program under Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect the phone call metadata of U.S. citizens. Its called the program illegal and likely unconstitutional. The group promised to review both the 215 and 702 programs, releasing the 215 decision first, followed by its 702 verdict. So, the report is not a surprise. According to the PCLOB’s first report, it received deep access to the NSA, even being able to view classified opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and saw the Section 215 program in action. In short, they got to see the full stack, from legal foundation to technical execution. As , the PCLOB’s 215 report was plainly written and accessible. Provided that the board weighs against Section 702 programs — for more on a partial look into how wide those efforts are, — it could produce a paper laying out an inveighing that the average person could fully understand. That would be a boon to the nation. According to the board, its report will examine “Section 702 program’s development and operation, statutory basis, constitutional implications, and whether it strikes the right balance between national security and privacy and civil liberties, and will make recommendations for policy reforms.” The final clause of that indicates that at a minimum, the Board doesn’t find current government policy to be faultless, which is encouraging. Even more, as The Hill , the report will be released “as the Senate continues debate on legislation to overhaul the NSA’s operations and could provide ammunition to reformers looking for major reforms.” That’s reasonable analysis. To have the board decline to endorse current Executive Branch activity twice running would be notable dissent. Of course, it could propose modest reform amidst a broader agenda of inaction, which would represent a setback for the reform-minded. Either way we’ll know in less than a week. TechCrunch will cover the release of the document. For flavor, here’s the PCLOB’s paragraph detailing its constitutional worries regarding the Section 215 program: The NSA’s telephone records program also raises concerns under both the First and Fourth amendment to the United States Constitution. We explore these concerns and explain that while government officials are entitled to rely on existing Supreme Court doctrine in formulating policy, the existing doctrine does not fully answer whether the Section 215 telephone records program is constitutionally sound. In particular, the scope and duration of the program are beyond anything before confronted by the courts, and as a result of technological developments, the government possesses capabilities to collect, store, and analyze data not available when existing Supreme Court doctrine was developed. Without seeking to predict the direction of changes in Supreme Court doctrine, the Board urges as a policy matter that the government consider how to preserve underlying constitutional guarantees in the face of modern communications technology and surveillance capabilities. The July 2 report could be quite interesting. |
Android Wear Wars: The Moto 360, LG G Watch And Samsung Gear Live Compared | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | The first smartwatches aren’t yet available to consumers (though two start shipping July 7), but already we’ve managed to enjoy some time with each of the new devices, and while we can’t speak to things like battery life and durability over time, we can share impressions on the relative merits of each so far. Is the Moto 360, the LG G Watch, or the Samsung Gear Live the right smartwatch for your wrist? Read on to find out, and check out our video comparison above. First things first: If you’re looking for a distinct advantage from any of these in terms of software or functionality, you’re not really going to find any – Google has clearly designed Android Wear to look and feel the same on any device it powers, regardless of manufacturer. At least in these early days, it seems to want to avoid the kind of fragmentation that has resulted from allowing OEMs to customize the Android experience on smartphones and tablets. But what is very different are the approaches each manufacturer has taken to hardware design. Samsung offers a heart rate monitor, for instance, which works both with its own software and with Google Fit, the company’s new health-monitoring platform, and presumably it’ll be able to support third-party apps in the future, too. That’s potentially a benefit if you’re a really zealous health buff, but in truth most won’t really be affected by its inclusion. Comfort is another key factor. These are all light devices designed for all-day use, but the Samsung Gear Live has a fiddly clasp mechanism and proprietary bands, so if you don’t like rubber, you’re out of luck. But the watch does sit on the wrist very comfortably thanks to its scalloped back. The LG G Watch has replaceable straps if you don’t like the included silicon version (which is itself quite comfortable), but it has a more square back that can rest somewhat hard on the wrist bones depending on how tight you like your strap. The Moto 360 is surprisingly light, despite using stainless steel in its construction, and the circular display is big and bright. It looks bigger than the other two devices, but on the wrist it actually looks more appropriated on smaller arms because of the round edges. Even with the small sensor window at the bottom that unfortunately makes it not a perfect circle, it’s the most visually striking of the bunch, so if design is a priority, the Moto 360 is probably the way to go. In fact, based on immediate first impressions alone, the Moto 360 is my favorite so far, but that might be more a virtue of it being distinct from the fairly similar square designs from Samsung and LG. And unfortunately, the Moto 360 isn’t shipping until later this summer, with a price yet to be determined. Still, it might be worth waiting for the opportunity to give each a fair comparison unless you’ve got a strong need for some Android Wear right this minute. |
NSA Transparency Report Offers More Questions Than Answers | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | The Director of National Intelligence on Friday on about its NSA surveillance programs, releasing its . The problem is the transparency report wasn’t all that transparent. When reading the report, I was immediately struck by the revelation that under the bulk telephony metadata collection program, there were as few as 248 “known or presumed U.S. persons who were the subject of queries of information collected in bulk or who were subject to a business records application.” Since former government contractor Edward Snowden first leaked documents about the NSA’s programs last year, the bulk telephony metadata program has been the most controversial of the revelations. Only 248 people were queried when the U.S. is conducting such a massive data sweep. The NSA isn’t disclosing in its transparency report how much metadata it is actually collecting. Initial reports of the Snowden revelations assumed everyone’s telephone metadata was being collected. John C. Inglis, the deputy director of the NSA, told Congress in October there were no alternatives to the program, “It needs to be the whole haystack,” Inglis said. If the United States were looking for the communications of a terrorism suspect, he said, “it needs to be such that when you make a query you come away confident that you have the whole answer.” It seems in this case the best defense of Americans’ privacy rights is not the Bill of Rights, but stagnant government programs that can’t adapt as quickly as technology does. , the NSA is collecting less than 30 percent of all Americans’ call records. It couldn’t keep up with the rate that Americans are starting to use cell phones. When you pair today’s NSA report with the Washington Post report, it’s hard to argue this program can have effective national security applications that outweigh the civil liberties threats it presents. It’s ridiculous that the agency continues to collect almost one-third of Americans’ call data to search only a handful of people, especially since the government doesn’t even have the whole “haystack” it needs. A more effective transparency report from the DNI would have provided information about how much phone data the government has collected, and from how many individuals. What does it mean that the government is collecting less than 30 percent of all Americans’ call data? Is it possible that my number is altogether excluded or does the NSA only know about some of my calls? The report also really doesn’t get at how many people are actually affected by orders made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The report says 1,767 orders based on probable cause affected 1,144 “targets.” However, “targets” are an individual person, group or organization composed of multiple individuals. That means the total number of people targeted could be in the thousands or the millions. It’s similar to transparency reports we’ve seen from Facebook and Microsoft that give the number of users impacted by FISA orders in bands of 1,000, thereby making it difficult to know how many users were actually affected. These companies had to sue to get the right to disclose the data to the public this way. The government does not face the same restrictions. It’s great that the DNI is following through on that order that , but it’s disappointing that it continues to leave so many questions unanswered. |
Greenpeace And The EFF Flew A Protest Blimp Around The NSA’s Massive Utah Data Center | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | The cheek. The cheek! When the government is out building a massive data center so that it can store more of the data that it hoovers up from around the world, what do you do? Well you probably can’t get much in the way of a day pass, . And so Greenpeace along with the EFF and Tenth Amendment Center flew a blimp around the data center. According to , the flight was undertaken to “protest the government’s illegal mass surveillance program.” Check the clip: After a rather bad patch, the effort to reform the NSA has managed a few victories. Today the that wasn’t as detailed as we might have hoped, but it exists all the same. An amendment that would block the NSA from forcing backdoors, as well as block the financing of using Section 702 searches on U.S. citizens. And a bill aimed at passed the House but in an enfeebled fashion. There have been calls from the Senate and reform groups to patch it up. Most of the work remains out in front of those in favor of curbing the NSA’s surveillance efforts. |
Be A Mashup DJ With Turntable Founder’s Crossfader App | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | No Pro Tools, no record players, no DJ skills required. With , you just swipe between songs, pick two you like, and tilt back and forth to mix them into a mashup. This is Turntable.FM co-founder Seth Goldstein’s plot to turn legions of young ravers into creators. The was built by Goldstein’s team, which is pivoting from a dance music news site into a that houses what happens when you combine Tiesto and Miley Cyrus or Diplo and Missy Elliot. This week Crossfader released a radio feature, so you can rock a party yourself or just play others’ sonic Frankenstein’s monsters, both on mobile and the web. “How do you build a global remix community?” Goldstein asks. “First we had to build the instrument.” Thanks to its use of the iPhone’s accelerometers, that’s how Crossfader feels. Like it’s alive in your hands rather than an you’re with. To make a mix, you flick through regularly updated “packs” of the best snippets of songs, like the drums and hook of a Skrillex jam or the lyrics of one by Dr. Dre. Pick one on each side of the screen and they both play at the same time. Crossfader syncs the two songs’ timing, tempo, and key so they always sound good together. Keep your phone steady to hear them balanced in the mix, or tilt left or right to from one to the other in real time. You might accentuate the vocals as the hook revs up, then tilt over to the beat as the drop hits with a wall of bass. Then you can lean Crossfader toward you/up to kill the bass and leave the anticipation-inducing high end audible. Then tilt the phone forward/down to filter out the high end and just get the deep, low frequencies like you’re dancing underwater. Tire of either song and you can swap it out on the fly and Crossfader will make the transition happen smooth and on the beat. “This is about taste, not technique,” says Goldstein, explaining that a good ear for what sounds right matters more than the hand-eye coordination DJs need on traditional equipment. That’s not exactly true, though. Get jostled or forget what you’re doing and you might whiplash your audience by accidentally switching from one sample to the other. A steady hand is important unless you want to sound scatter-brained. If you want a more professional tool, , and are better choices. Beyond the instrument side of the app, you can customize a DJ profile avatar for yourself. If you find a pair of songs that sound awesome and you can lock them together as a Crossfade, save it to your profile, and share in the app’s feed where other people can re-remix it, or out to Facebook and Twitter where they’ll play in-line. Your creations could also end up on what was DJZ but is becoming a Crossfader content site. “DJZ goes away as a top-down editorial property and becomes a bottom-up remix community,” Goldstein explains. See, Goldstein’s last big startup Turntable.fm imploded in late 2013. It started back in 2011 as a site where anyone could DJ live over the web for the friends and strangers who were represented as little head-bobbing avatars in a virtual club. But Turntable fell into the chasm between being a passive radio site you’d listen to in the background and an active music-themed chat room. It didn’t stick and royalties were piling up, so it shut down. By then, Goldstein had already from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, and former Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter to make that was blowing up. But it turns out the kids just want to dance, not read, so Goldstein began developing , an interactive tutorial app that would teach users to DJ. But realized that rather than teaching the complexities of DJing, they should just make the art simpler. DJZ pivoted to build Crossfader with another $2 million in funding from Shawn Gruver and Telegraph Hill Capital, and big-name DJs like Diplo and Atrak are advisers. To succeed as a passive app where Turntable failed, Crossfader this week launched a . If enough people dig your mashup, it’ll wind up in Crossfader’s “Top Radio,” which automatically plays and smoothly transitions between the best remixes. You can also listen to a curated “Featured Radio” or discover “Fresh” song combos. Crossfader Radio means you can sit back and if you’re too lazy or busy to recombinate your own jams. And the whole thing is free. Each song clip in the app is just 30 seconds long, so it’s considered a “preview.” Tap through and you can buy the songs on iTunes. Whether this is perfectly legal is debatable. The length doesn’t determine if something is fair use. If the record labels view Crossfader as useful promotion that doesn’t cannibalize sales, they may allow it. But if they think people are listening to it instead of streaming or buying music where they earn royalties, Goldstein may be in for some legal trouble. He admits that Crossfader is in a gray area but says he feels good about their position as long it has short loops and buy buttons and doesn’t let you record. “All that being said, this is still an evolving space and so we will continue to work with rights holders to ensure that they feel like what we are doing drives discovery and promotion of their music, and over time drives monetization as well.” Crossfader hopes to make some money for itself too by selling premium sonic effects like flanger, which gives songs that robotic ‘shhheeeaaaaarrrroooooooooooo’ sound. In the end, is fun to play with, but the question will be whether it’s useful to keep digital disc jockeys coming back. Music-listening apps like Spotify could always integrate better DJing features, and they already have trouble finding consistent users. Traction for a music-creation app will be even tougher, though it is magnitudes simpler than its peers. “Instagram took 5 percent of the functionality of Photoshop and made it relevant to hundreds of millions of people,” Goldstein says. “There’s a bunch of apps out there like djay with the classic two turntable model, and we’re clearly not doing that. We seized on this idea of the crossfader as the minimal gesture of DJing.” |
Svpply’s Founder Is Building A New And Improved Social Shopping Site Called Very Goods | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | The news earlier this week about the , the social shopping and personal product curation site acquired by eBay nearly two years ago, was met with a fair amount of sadness. Svpply’s been known from the start for its clever design, user experience, and functionality, and many of its dedicated fans that there’s nothing out there to take its place once it’s gone for good. So Svpply’s founder and former CEO is setting about building it. Today, just 40 hours after eBay announced plans to shut down Svpply, Pieratt launched to fund the development of , a site that aims to “rebuild the Svpply experience and revert to the days when it was a private, passionate community.” Very Goods will be built by Pieratt along with New York-based web and iOS development firm . There will be a few key differences between Very Goods and Svpply, according to the campaign. There’s an element of exclusivity to making sure the community is passionate and engaged: The only way to become a member of Very Goods will be to have supported the Kickstarter, or be invited by someone who did. Very Goods won’t take on any VC funding, which will eliminate any outside pressures to rapidly scale or sell the company. In fact, Very Goods will explicitly be up for sale, which means that it will never be the victim of a corporate-ordered shutdown like Svpply’s. “We actually almost called the new site ‘Not For Sale,'” the Kickstarter page says. Pieratt will also not be the CEO of Very Goods, a point which the Kickstarter page says is “important.” Pieratt has been forthcoming in the past about while being the CEO of Svpply, and he’s staying away from taking that role this time around. So far, Very Goods has been met with a good deal of enthusiasm. As of this writing, just about , the Kickstarter campaign for Very Goods has raised nearly $25,000, almost half of its total goal. The “sunsetting” of beloved products in the months and years after an acquisition by a larger is not uncommon, but it’s always a bit sad. So it’s nice to see a founder who cares so much about an idea and a user base to tackle it again, and try to make it better a second time around. |
Google Hangouts Will No Longer Require A Plugin For Chrome Users | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | Has your distaste for one-off browser plugins kept you from using Google+’s group video chat service, Hangouts? That’s okay. I feel you. Plugins are the worst. What is this, 1999? Want me to install Shockwave, too? Hell, give me a couple sketchy browser toolbars while we’re at it. BONZAI BUDDIES FOR EVERYONE!!! What was I talking about? Oh, right. Hangouts. Good news! Starting sometime in the next few weeks, Google Hangouts will in Chrome. Other Hangout-compatible browsers (IE/Firefox/etc.) will still need the plugin — but Chrome will now have Hangouts support baked right in. Between the transition to HTML5, new cross-browser protocols , and even platforms like Unity , it’s going to be hard to convince users to install plugins moving forward — so if your big idea requires one, you’ll want to find another way. If you’re on Chrome Canary or another developer build of Chrome, the update is available now. Otherwise, the update should be coming your way in the next few weeks. |
Woot Founder’s Next Project Is A New Daily Deals Site Called ‘Meh.’ | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | You can’t keep down. At least not for long. And goddammit, if he wants to sell you one item a day at an unbelievably discounted price, and to accompany that item with irreverent and sometimes nonsensical marketing copy that will make you decide to buy it (or maybe not), then he’s going to do that. Rutledge, who founded e-commerce site Woot a decade ago and is generally considered the granddaddy of the daily deal, is back and ready to do it all over again. He and his team of returning to do another flash sales site which will have basically the same concept as that previous endeavor. But while the Woot! name carried all the irrational exuberance that came with what was once a daily online event centered around the commercial transaction involving one single piece of merchandise being sold, the new site — — reflects the feelings of an e-commerce veteran who has been on the inside and knows just how the sausage is made. (Note: Rutledge’s ‘Meh’ is not in any way associated with the currently being created by TechCrunch editor-at-large Mike Butcher.) “After going through the experience of being acquired by the largest and best online retailer, you see the worst of the industry,” Rutledge told me by phone. “The inside-the-industry view is not that enjoyable, and you don’t view the industry with the allure that you did once you’re in it.” Rutledge, of course, sold his baby to Amazon in a . That sale made him fabulously wealthy, but it also thrust him deep into the Amazon machine. And the view wasn’t pretty. (For more on that, check out this excellent in local publication .) For one thing, there was a fundamental lack of understanding about what Woot was, or tried to be… what made it work, why it attracted a million visitors a day. Its fundamental . And there was the way that Amazon kept trying to optimize the fun out of Woot, how it tried to make sense of metrics that Woot didn’t care about, how it kept adding more things for sale, and more ways to reach potential buyers. By the time Rutledge left Amazon — — Woot was a far cry from the site he founded. So he sat out his non-compete and eventually assembled a team, made up in part by some of the folks who . And they created a new company called “Mediocre Laboratories” focused on running a series of e-commerce experiments. Meh will be one of those experiments. But it will be one that the team is already pretty familiar with. In a lot of ways, it is a return to the founding principles behind Woot, but with the intent to keep it pure, to keep it from becoming bogged down by the pursuit of commerce. It will present one item for sale a day, nothing more, nothing less. Along with that item, Meh intends to host a video description of what’s for sale that’s designed to be brutally honest, including what’s good about it and what’s bad about it. Other than that, the Meh team doesn’t plan to do any marketing. No daily email newsletters, no posting on social networks like Facebook. If buyers show up at the website, it’ll be because they want to see what’s for sale, not because they were sent some crappy e-mail. “In many ways Meh is our own view of retail,” Rutledge said. It’s not going to be a site for everyone, but he tells me “we really like selling to reluctant shoppers or people who don’t like being pitched to.” You can probably expect goods for sale across a number of categories — not just consumer electronics. That said, there are no plans for Meh to launch a series of different verticals or subdomains in the way that Woot did. And hey, if they don’t want to buy something, there will be a “Meh” button to let them show their disinterest. And forums, for angry purchasers and non-purchasers to complain about whatever’s for sale on a given day. While the planning for Meh has been underway for a while, and the domain was purchased about a year ago for the sum of $100,000, the team still decided to do a short . With less than a day left to go, that campaign is now oversubscribed, although you can buy early access to the site for $1. Considering initial interest from Kickstarter, it seems likely that Meh could replicate that same success of Woot, even if Rutledge isn’t counting on it. “We’re taking a ‘build it and hope someone comes’ approach,” Rutledge tells me. The team is targeting a mid-July launch of Meh, which will help iron out some of the site’s bugs. “We want it to work at least in the half-assed state that we’re used to,” he says. It sounds like a plan, from someone who’s been there, and done that. But then again, what’s that thing they say about doing the same thing over and over again and ? |
Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC Raises $85 Million Fourth Fund | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | Last week, I went to a party celebrating the 10th anniversary of Jeff Clavier’s . What I didn’t know was that the partners were also likely celebrating the close of the firm’s $85 million fourth fund for investing in startups. Clavier began investing as an angel back in 2004, but was catapulted to so-called “ ” status in 2007 by raising his . In 2011, the SoftTech team — which expanded to — raised a . Those funds have produced a number of big exits over the years, including Mint, which was ; Mashery, which was , WildFire, which was ; and Gnip, which was . Other notable portfolio companies include Brightroll, Eventbrite, Fitbit, Sendgrid, Zefr, Poshmark, Coin, Postmates, Kahuna, and August. With its new fund SoftTech VC has raised $85 million, which brings the total amount under management to $155 million and should give the firm the flexibility to do more follow-on investments in startups. In a phone conversation, Clavier said the firm plans to write checks of between $500,000 and $1 million for between 7 percent and 10 percent of a company, and invest in 50 companies over the next three years. As a result, it expects to commit about $35 million in the new fund to initial investments, and then use the additional $50 million for follow-on rounds. The firm has already been making investments out of the new fund, including DocSend, Panorama Education, Halo Neuroscience, Niche, Stitch, Soldsie, and Sapho. |
CrunchWeek: Aereo Slammed By Supreme Court, GoPro’s IPO Win, Google I/O | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | Case in point is this past week, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Internet streaming startup , personal video camera company GoPro held a initial public offering, and Google touted a bunch of new things at its , including a ridiculous but apparently actually functional . Of course, this all gave Alex Wilhelm, Ryan Lawler and I a bunch of stuff to yammer on about at the big white table for this week’s episode of CrunchWeek. Check it out in the video embedded above. |
Less Than 1/4 Of Android Phones Work With Google’s New Smartwatches | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | Looking to pick up one of those fancy new Android Wear smartwatches? You’re not crazy. Even in this ultra early form, Android Wear is surprisingly slick. But you should know: as it currently sits, there’s a pretty good chance the watches won’t actually work with your phone. The problem is one as old as Android itself: a of Android phones currently in use are running out of date software. The vast majority, even. Don’t believe it? By , 13.6% of Android phones are running the latest public build of the OS, Android 4.4. And that’s not 13.6% of all Android phones ever sold, mind you. They’re not counting that old G1 you’ve got sitting in a shoebox somewhere. That’s 13.6% of Android phones, as counted on June 4th, 2014. Android Wear watches, meanwhile, require a phone running Android 4.3 or newer to work. Between Android 4.3 and 4.4, that’s a grand total of 23.9% of active Android phones that are currently Wear-friendly. In other words, less than 1/4 of the Android phones can be paired with an Android Wear watch. This number will go up in time, of course; most people buy new phones, sooner or later. But it won’t happen over night. Getting to 23.9% has taken Android 4.3/4.4 nearly a year. This puts the early Android Wear manufacturers in something of a tough spot — it makes it considerably less likely that any one of this first batch of watches will be any sort of smash success. They’re already battling for a slice of a relatively small pie (the people who will want/care about smartwatches this early on). Turns out, 3/4 of that pie came out of the oven burned. (It also makes it pretty damned hard to give an Android Wear watch as a gift, unless you know exactly which phone the recipient has.) Don’t get me wrong: it’s good that Samsung/LG/Moto/ASUS/etc. are getting in there early — we just can’t expect any of them to sell a zillion units right off the bat. Instead, we should probably consider this first batch of watches to be more like public-facing R&D. If you’ve got an Android phone and aren’t sure if it’s up to snuff, Google has an |
GoPro’s 14.6% Day 2 Rise Puts It Up 50% From Its IPO Price | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | GoPro of $24 to $31.34 yesterday in its first day of trading. Today the company built on that success, adding nearly $5 more to its share price, ending the day at $35.92, up 14.60 percent during regular trading. All told, GoPro is now up a total of 49.67 percent from its IPO price, making it more than a successful IPO. Its rapid ascent will surely be read by some that investors have shaken off their technology-stock jitters and are ready to put money into growing tech firms. Alibaba . Box will . Perhaps they will both benefit from GoPro’s tailwind. Every company is different, and what investors appear to see in GoPro is by no means an obvious convert to other companies, but there could be broad overtones that bode well for future flotations. How are other recent IPOs faring? Zendesk is still up nearly 100 percent from IPO day to $17.16. MobileIron has given up most of its , but remains up a modest 6 percent at $9.57. Arista Networks is up more than 40 percent to $62.55 . And King is to $17.85. A partially mixed bag, sure, but I think that when you add GoPro’s statistics to that mix, the overall picture is indeed positive. So, who wants to go next? |
Tech’s Toughest Battle Is Regulatory | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | For about a decade from Facebook’s founding in February 2004 to Twitter’s IPO last November, the tech industry’s most visible successes were in social networking, or purely web or mobile-based software products.” But today, the most interesting late-stage companies intersect with real-life services that have historically been both publicly or privately provided in a highly-regulated way. Think transit and housing. Uber is valued ( ) at $18 billion, and Airbnb recently , making it worth more than Wyndham Worldwide or Hyatt Hotels. The Ubers, Airbnbs and Lyfts of the world often get lumped together, but their approaches to regulation are actually fairly different. Despite the sometimes theatrical language, all of these companies have had to learn how to work with regulators. And if more startups intend to go into highly-regulated areas or if the tech industry wants to address the acute infrastructural and housing stress the San Francisco Bay Area is feeling, it will have to be active in both the public and private spheres.
One de facto way has been to find product-market fit when you’re small, then to approach regulation at scale. You could say that’s what Airbnb did. The company was founded back in 2008, way before there was any hyper-sensitivity or scrutiny around the tech industry. Unlike Uber or Lyft, Airbnb was accessible globally almost from the very start. In the beginning, it was just two guys who needed to find a way to make their rent and decided to set up air mattresses for strangers during a design conference back in 2008. But by the end of 2012, . Couch at the original Airbnb that Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia rented out. But even though they’ve been based in San Francisco for , they still haven’t been able to reach a consensus around the legality of short-term stays in the city. Technically, to offer residential rentals for less than 30 days. Part of the issue is that in Airbnb’s case there are just many more kinds of regulatory bodies, laws and interests involved in hospitality and housing than there are in ground transit, where the point of contact might be the taxi commission and the primary opponents are the taxi medallion holders. In highly desirable cities like San Francisco and New York, there’s also about 100 years of regulations and programs around building codes, public housing, inclusionary zoning and rent control that make housing something that’s somewhere between a privately-provided good and something that’s a resource for those who live and work in a community. Taken as a whole, these regulations aren’t necessarily coherent, but each component has its own rationale from providing affordable housing to maintaining scenic views or sunlight. As the whole process has dragged on, Airbnb’s regulatory efforts have become more politicized and less predictable. In fact, as the company or . That could challenge that $10 billion valuation if some of the company’s most lucrative markets reach their natural size limits. Right now, the company is actually facing two competing sets of possible regulation in San Francisco. One set of rules , who is the current president of the city’s board of supervisors and is also running for a seat in the state assembly. It limits stays to 90 days per year and doesn’t supersede existing lease agreements, meaning that if a tenant hosts in violation of their lease, they can still face consequences like an eviction. There’s a , put together by a former planning commissioner and affordable housing activists. Under , hosts would have to register with the city, offer proof that the unit’s owner allows short-term stays and have insurance that covers at least $250,000 per incident. They would be listed in a public registry and hosts would have to follow the city’s existing zoning codes, which could end up constricting Airbnb to a more limited set of neighborhoods in the city. . opponents, supporters rally at S.F. City Hall. — SF Chronicle (@sfchronicle) A recent San Francisco Chronicle report scraped the site for listings and . Most of these listings appear to be occasionally rented out, but the Chronicle did find about 160 homes or apartments that appear to be on the platform full-time. As I’ve explained before, and have very little to do with Airbnb. Yet services like Airbnb do add pressures on the margins, especially when San Francisco is at . The company appears to be holding its potential tax revenue, which it’s starting to pay this year, . But given the fractious climate around housing right now, the company may be facing a showdown in its own hometown this November. The downside of waiting so long and getting big is that regulation becomes so politicized it becomes intractable. Uber and Lyft, in contrast, have had to roll out market by market, and work (or butt heads) with regulators from nearly the beginning. With a service like ground transportation, you can’t be global from day one because you have to carefully calibrate real-time supply and demand in every city. Just three months after launch, Uber, then called UberCab, Lyft later launched peer-to-peer ridesharing and also faced a cease and desist. It which are called . But regulation is continuously changing. In the wake of a couple high-profile incidents including , the state legislature is now stepping in on top of the CPUC. There are , but aren’t carrying or going to pick up a passenger, and strengthen background checks and alcohol and drug testing requirements. Lyft and Uber say these new insurance requirements are orders of magnitude larger required for all drivers, and that they’ve already stepped in with $100,000 of coverage when drivers have the app open but aren’t carrying or going toward passengers. They also have $1 million in liability coverage for when a car is either carrying or picking up a passenger. The city of San Francisco, which doesn’t have jurisdiction over Uber and Lyft, is still tallying the financial impacts of the emergence of TNCs. from the airport and up to $500,000 in lost business license revenue because drivers aren’t registering with the city as independent contractor businesses. The city also because there simply aren’t as many vehicles available. Those issues seem like they should be fixable, but there are deeper tensions with drivers who are if they get a poor rating and declining fare revenue. I suspect as drivers get more organized, Uber and Lyft will be pressured to find new compromises. But again, the difference in their case versus Airbnb’s is that they can operate legally, even if that regulation evolves over time.
If you look at a hundred and fifty years of transit history in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s a mix. There are big projects like BART and the Golden Gate Bridge that could have only been done with public money, and then there are many areas where privately-held companies have led the way. It was . Similarly, it was a that connected San Francisco to San Jose during the Gold Rush. It cost $32 and took nine hours for a one-way trip. The plaza at Clay and Kearny streets where the stagecoach between San Francisco and San Jose left during the Gold Rush. . Then less than 15 years later, a peninsula railroad opened that cost $2.50 for a 3 1/2 hour journey. It was then consolidated under the politically powerful Southern Pacific Railroad and then a century later, it became Caltrain. From around 1915 until the mid-1970s, there were also That’s why I generally view this younger wave of bus startups like , and favorably. MTA is , in part because the city isn’t able to stand up to car owners and remove the requisite parking spaces that make dedicated bus lanes possible. A bus rapid transit line on Van Ness Avenue In contrast, it . Unable to finance a full metro system, for more than a decade that handles 1.9 million passengers per day. And yet, the history of California at various inflection points in transit technology bears enormous lessons about the consolidation of power among private entities and its long-term, unforeseen consequences. Southern Pacific, a transit monopoly from a previous age in California. Leland Stanford, its one-time president, went on to found Stanford University after the death of his own child. He said, “The children of California shall be our children.” Why, for instance, does California have this unique tradition of direct democracy through the ballot initiative, referendum and recall? It was a political response in the early 20th century against the consolidated and corrupt power of the railroad barons, . Why, for instance, are corporations considered persons under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment? One of the cases it dates back to was . Yes, that’s Leland Southern Pacific. The East Bay and Oakland used to have streetcars under the old Key System until National City Lines, a company backed by General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tires, converted them to bus routes. Key Transit eventually became the publicly run AC Transit when they were bought out. Then if you fast forward a half-century to the rise of the automobile, a company backed by General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone Tires called , and the Los Angeles Railway. It’s debated whether this was conspiratorial or just in line with changing consumer tastes; cars were considered a more democratic technology at the time. The general lesson is simply to distrust the consolidation of power, whether it takes form of the Big Four railroad barons, the Big Three automakers, the taxi cartels or even MUNI, which If we assume the partnership between Uber and Google, with its self-driving cars, represents another major technological shift in transit, there are lots of reasons to be wary even if the intentions are good. What will decreased car ownership and then self-driving cars do to patterns of urban and suburban development? Will it encourage sprawl? Will it increase , the roughly one-hour commute that urban planners think residents can bear? With Google’s self-driving car and its investment in Uber, what does the future hold? The broad point is you can’t resort to ideological shortcuts around regulation versus de-regulation. It changes over time depending on the size the players, whether they are public entities, regulated incumbents or newcomers. In Peter Thiel and Blake Masters’ forthcoming book, “Zero to One,” the famously contrarian venture capitalist argues that competition is a distortionary ideology. “Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.” He goes onto explain that what entrepreneurs really want to identify is a creative monopoly. Moreover, he says that monopolists are ultimately incentivized to lie about their true nature. So when companies trot out rhetoric about stifling innovation and competition, it’s hard to know when that transitions from something that’s genuinely in the public interest to something that obfuscates rent seeking. In certain markets like San Francisco, TNCs appear to be dominant and deserve greater scrutiny around how they treat drivers and handle pricing. In other newer markets throughout the U.S. and continental Europe, they’re merely just one competitive choice among many and should be welcomed. In certain markets where the housing supply is severely constrained, it makes sense to limit Airbnb rentals to a fraction of the year to disincentivize hosts from taking entire rent-controlled units off the market that were intended for long-term housing. In resort towns that are heavily dependent on tourism revenue, it should be more relaxed. But what troubles me about the discussion I sometimes hear from the tech side is that it resorts to easy tropes about deregulation and competition. I hear criticism of government from people who don’t vote or participate in the public sphere at all. the 12% of SF that bothered to vote this week should be the only people allowed to complain about housing prices in the city. — Sam Altman (@sama) Uber, Lyft and Airbnb have had to learn how to work with regulators over the last several years. But now that more of Silicon Valley is venturing into increasingly regulated areas, the broader community needs to engage in both the public and private spheres. In short, if you want to solve real-world problems, you have to live in the real world. |
Gillmor Gang Live 06.27.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Benedict Evans, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today. . . |
SF Parking App Warned By SF City Attorney Open-Sources Its Code | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | Parking app has open-sourced its code this morning in an effort to solve the parking crisis in San Francisco. The free, open-source project, called is open to any developer willing to work on solving parking problems for the city. City Attorney Dennis Herrera called out Sweetch in a cease-and-desist letter it sent to MonkeyParking. The specifically warned Sweetch and , both of which the city believes “…similarly violate local and state law with mobile app-enabled schemes intended to illegally monetize public parking spaces.” These parking apps could also face $300 fines per violation, and both companies are potentially liable for civil penalties of $2,500 per transaction for illegal business practices under the California Unfair Competition Law, according to the letter. This may be why the Sweetch founders have now changed direction on their approach and opened up their code. Sweetch users pay a flat rate of $5 for a spot and get paid $4 for notifying another driver when they leave their spot, whereas works more like an auction. If someone accepts your bid for their spot, you get the spot. It’s unclear how ParkModo’s model will work, but recent Craigslist postings show they may be planning to pay drivers $13/hour to squat on parking spaces in order to save them for users. However, Police Code section 63(c) states: “It shall be unlawful for any person, firm or corporation to enter into a lease, rental agreement or contract of any kind, written or oral, with or without compensation, for the use of any street or sidewalk.” Sweetch addresses section 63(c) on its most recent blog post about the issue: The San Francisco Transportation Code about parking spots. That’s why the City Attorney doesn’t cite the Transportation Code. Instead the City Attorney claims authority to issue fines under Section 63 of the Police Code – but that code section actually pertains to “Obstructions on City Streets and Sidewalks,” and doesn’t regulate parking at all. If you read that part of the Police Code, what it’s directed at preventing is the obstruction of streets or sidewalks with litter, potted trees, debris and so on—not with legally parked cars. And even if it was a parking regulation statute, it prohibits rental and leasing agreements; it doesn’t prevent people from sharing information about when they are going to leave parking spots. There’s simply no law on the books prohibiting this and the City Attorney is overreaching to say that there is. All three parking apps contend they are not selling space, but simply information. MonkeyParking, meanwhile, to halt operations in SF. Sweetch founders say they hope the open-source offer makes city officials reconsider any actions they may want to take against them. Whether this is enough to curb any further action for at least one of the parking apps remains to be seen. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 18 | null |
New Website Captures World Cup History | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | If watching the 2014 World Cup just isn’t enough for you, a company based in Germany that allows users to experience the history of the game back to the 1930s. The “visual journey” through the World Cup allows users to select any competition from the past 84 years. Users can then watch video from the games, view pictures and read interesting facts. All of the information is , ranging from Wikipedia to FIFA. Javier Rincon, , built the site with his team in just a few short weeks. They got the idea to put all of the information on one site when looking for answers to questions they had about the games, they realized information about the games was spread out over so many sites. He said their drive to complete the website was simple — that they loved the World Cup and knew other people did, too. Rincon and his team are originally from Spain, and completed the website while watching their own team, the defending champion, . “We understand it is a positive competition,” Rincon said. “We wanted to share what’s behind it with everyone else.” |
Apple Updates Final Cut Pro X, Motion, Compressor And MainStage Pro Apps | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | In what is surely a release timed (at least partially) to reassure pro users that Apple is still paying attention to them, the company has released updates to its , , and MainStage apps. Earlier today, Apple , its pro photo editing app, in favor of the Photos app in the upcoming OS X Yosemite release. As a part of the apps being updated, and emphasis on continuing pro support, Apple also timed a release from Scripps about the Final Cut Pro X workflows across all of its TV stations nationwide: Ray Thurber, vice president of engineering at Scripps shares that in field tests, Final Cut Pro X beat Premiere Pro in speed, flexibility and ease of use. Ray plans to unify Scripps’ TV and digital workflows by rolling out Final Cut Pro X in all of their 14 stations, noting,“Our plan is to go wherever people are getting their news, and with the Mac and Final Cut Pro X, we’re well equipped to do that.” Apple told TechCrunch earlier in the day that it was committed to supporting the rest of its pro apps outside of Aperture, and a release of those apps timed to hit just as the news of rolling Aperture customers into Photos on the new OS X is probably a good way to reinforce that. Here’s what’s new in the apps:
What’s New in Version 10.1.2
What’s New in Version 5.1.1
What’s New in Version 4.1.2 What’s New in Version 3.0.4 |
Amazon Turns On Prime Music Streaming, Sans Current Hits | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | There have been a of that Amazon would turn on a new music-streaming service this week, and it looks like that’s just what it quietly did a little while ago. A link to , if you are an Amazon Prime subscriber that is, now takes you to a page heavy on playlists, promising over 1 million songs ready for your streaming pleasure, on top of the downloading service that Amazon already offered. And Amazon has also relaunched its on iOS with a new name: It’s now called Amazon Music instead of Amazon Cloud Player, which now also features access to Amazon Prime Music. Amazon has now Amazon Music. But unless Amazon is going to add more features before an official unveiling, I’m not sure that what we’re seeing right now is quite a Spotify killer. The service as it is appears to be missing the most current releases; and you have to go through several steps, including adding music to your library, before you can actually stream tracks. On a search results page, you still get the option to listen to an excerpt of a track. It’s hard to tell who is the target audience for Amazon’s service. If it’s a consumer mass market play, there are still some big gaps. For example, consider current hits. Out of the top 10 of the , nine songs are not available for streaming at the moment, although Fancy from Izzy Azalea can be purchased and downloaded. And there is also a big gap — a Universal-sized gap. As the and others reported, the service right now does not appear to offer hits (six months old or otherwise) from artists represented by that label. A , for example, brings up only purchasing options, no streaming. (The NYT reports that the service is a culmination of a six-month-long negotiating process with music labels, with a lot of tension specifically over financial terms. For one-year rights to music, Amazon offered smaller labels a share of a $5 million royalty pool, with Amazon setting the proportions based on market share. Bigger labels were offered a $25 million pool, the NYT said. ) But hey! You can stream the greatest hits from ! In all, there appear to be around 90,000 albums listed right now as options for streaming, working out roughly to the 1 million tracks Amazon promises. As a point of comparison, Spotify has around in its catalog. This could be one reason that Amazon is heavily promoting its streamed playlists, which it says number in the hundreds. In a selection curated (read: pre-selected) by Amazon, the user may overlook what is lacking. Similarly, there is also some logic to why Amazon is forcing users through an Ikea-like check-out maze before they can consume their streamed selections. This way, it can offer users a single place where they can listen to streaming alongside tracks that they downloaded. The catalog of songs you can download is bigger, and therefore it can complement the streaming catalog. In other words, Amazon appears to be trying to make lemonade from its lemons. My colleague Fred points out another possible reason for why Amazon is not letting people stream directly from the page where they first find a track: It may have something to do with the massive technical debt Amazon has incurred over the years, he says. “Making even small changes to those pages would probably break a million things.” The timing for Amazon turning on the service is key. It comes after the e-commerce giant recently upped the price on Prime subscriptions — which offers video streaming, free shipping for physical goods and other extras for loyal Amazonians — ; and a week before the to unveil its first foray into smartphones. The iOS app, meanwhile, gives you the same option to select and add tracks to your library, although at least on iOS you still need to separately navigate to the library in order to play them, as you do on the web. So far I have not yet seen the same Amazon Music app appear on Google Play (although in the UK Google is its own music-streaming service on the Play homepage). What it does have here is , updated June 11 but without any apparent reference to Prime Music. Amazon says that Kindle Fire HD/HDX devices will get Prime Music in an automatic, over-the-air update. It will be interesting to see whether Amazon makes the user experience a little less bumpy for its own devices — be they Kindle tablets or their (alleged) smartphones. Despite whatever Prime Music shortcomings there may be, there is still a huge opportunity here for Amazon, one that it would have had to jump into sooner or later. The company wants to be the go-to place for how people purchase and consume all digital media, and the fact that Amazon didn’t have a streaming music service there to complement its downloads and other streaming products like video was a distinct hole. On the other hand, the company has a big (“prime,” you could say) opportunity for itself to pick up more loyal users. Amazon that today it has over 244 million “active customer accounts,” defined as people who have used the service in the last 12 months. But it’s estimated to have only 20 million Prime users. The more sweeteners they add to Prime, the more attractive it will become to those hundreds of millions who are not already giving Amazon a steady $100 each year before they’ve even bought anything. Music streaming is a sweetener. And remember, Spotify, the biggest of the music-streaming companies, has : the bar here for becoming the “leader” is not that high. You might also argue that in fact by launching streaming music, Amazon has instantly become the world’s biggest streaming music company by paid users. Lastly, on a mass-market level, you could see how Prime Music, minimum viable product as it might appear to tech people or big music fans, may actually be just enough for mass market users. I’m talking here about people who are not early adopters already paying Spotify or another music-streaming company for a service, but quite like the idea of having some easy-to-access, ad-free music-streaming option rolled in with a bunch of other media offerings. |
TechCrunch Tokyo 2012 Winner Whill Launches Kickstarter Campaign For Its Personal Mobility Device | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 11 |
, the mobility device maker that , has that will raise funds needed to fine-tune the final version of its flagship product, the Whill Type-A, and develop its companion app. Though the Type-A was , the startup, which was founded by former Sony, Olympus and Toyota engineers, does not refer to it as a wheelchair because “we are focused on personal mobility for everyone,” director of business development Atsushi Mizushima told TechCrunch. The Type-A, which received a Red Dot Design Award honorable mention for product design, has a turning radius of 28-inches, a four-wheel drive so it can handle a wide range of terrain, and incline capability of about 10 degrees. If the Kickstarter campaign, which has already raised more than $10,000 out of the $30,000 it is seeking before July 12, is successful, Whill will use the funds to develop a smartphone app that will integrate with the Type-A and allow users to remotely control their devices, find the nearest charging station, and send feedback along with hardware diagnostic reports to the company in case of problems. To get a Whill Type-A, you have to pledge $9,500 or more, but a pledge of $100 will get you a trip to Whill’s headquarters and tech shop in Silicon Valley. |
Learning Platform Declara Raises $9M, Sets Sights On Asia | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | , a startup that focuses on building tech for personalized learning tools, has raised $9 million from Linden Venture Fund and Singapore-based EDBI. This brings its total Series A funding to $25 million. The company first secured $16 million, led by GSV Capital, in April, and it plans to open an office in Singapore as part of its plan to distribute Declara’s platform to Asia.
Declara’s technology includes customized learning tools for individual students by combining semantic search, predictive analytics, and machine learning to build a learning platform that it calls the “Cognitive Graph.” It looks at how users interact with data based on their Internet activity, including searches, interactions on social networks and content that they read. The platform then creates a “learning map” with personalized course material for each person. It is based in Palo Alto and currently has offices in Boise, Idaho, and Mexico. The company’s platform is currently used by several schools, universities and organizations to supplement courses. These include Educational Services Australia, which uses Declara to help teachers learn new skills; Snidicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE), Mexico’s largest teacher union, which is using Declara to help train 1.6 million teachers and administrators; the University of Pennsylvania; and Genentech. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Google I/O, GoPro IPO, And Aereo | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | It was a big week for gadgets, with , , and . We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by . |
Google Makes Glass Play Better With Your Smartphone | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | The most interesting thing Google announced as part of its software update for Google Glass was an update to the MyGlass app for Android. Photos taken on Glass now instantly sync to your device, where you can apply filters and share via whatever photo-sharing services are available on your phone — not just the options built into Glass. As someone who owned Glass for several months, that sounds like a huge improvement on the user experience of sharing photos from Glass itself. While Glass would automatically back up your photos to Google+ when connected to Wi-Fi, sharing to Facebook or Twitter required tapping through multiple layers of the interface and dictating the captions you wanted. Whenever I would try, I’d get to that last step and wish I had access to a keyboard. With this latest update, that’s not an issue, and you get filters, which would have been a pain to skim through on Glass’s display. There are actually quite a few places in the Glass user experience where access to a more complex interface is helpful. For instance, navigating with Google Maps on Glass is great, but searching isn’t, especially when you don’t really know where you’re going. But if you do a Google Maps search on your Mac that happens to be signed into your Google account, a card will show up in the Glass interface giving you the option to navigate to that address. It’s pretty neat to walk out the door, put on Glass, and instantly know where you’re headed. It’s when Glass best leverages the other gadgets you use throughout your day that it really feels like you’re getting the most out of the device. There’s certainly incentive for them not to: One could argue that having functionality require the use of a smartphone makes using Glass redundant. That ignores the advantages that come with Glass, such as visual notifications (that contain more information than what you can fit on a watch face). With a software update released last week, you can see your notifications . When I asked Google if it worries about making the features on the MyGlass app “too useful,” Steve Lee, Glass product management director, said: We want the user to have the best experience possible. Period. There are experiences that are just naturally better on Glass, like capturing moments while living them. If it enhances the user experience, we want to make sure those experiences can extend to other platforms regardless of whether it’s iPhone, Android or desktop. When it comes to photo editing — cropping, filtering, etc. – that’s clearly easier on a phone. This functionality is something that our Explorers have asked for, so we wanted to be sure to deliver it to them. In a recent column on Wired, Mat Honan argues that . Google Glass is already there: Everything you can do on the device is accessed through a notification-like card. Maybe that’s why people don’t “get” Glass yet. They’re used to navigating to a specific app to do a specific task or reach a particular piece of information, not responding to contextual updates as they happen. Perhaps the notification-based interface on smartphones will get people used to that mindset by the time Glass is ready for consumer release. If Google can get developers on board with making it as easy as possible to transition from seeing a notification on Glass to acting on that notification on a device better suited for the task, the device might start making a lot more sense to a lot more people. |
500K Women Gave Up Their Boob Data To Build This Bra | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | , the e-commerce startup that aims to bring us the perfect fitting bra, took data from a million boobs to build its own line of intimates — in an effort to truly support your bust. The company, which formally launched and received an extra chunk of just this last year, upped the ante this week with the promise to personalize the perfect fit with the introduction of its line of comfortable intimates. Using 7 million different data points and gathering information from 500,000+ women for the last two years, the company has identified over 6,000 different types of boobs. Its data scientists then arranged all those different shapes, sizes and angles on a color-coded system they call . Think of it like a color wheel you’d find in a paint store, but for all the various boob types. This solves a major problem for many women with more unique bust sizes. Women with smaller rib cages but fuller curves at the top of the boob have to work to not have a cup that “runneth over”. Ladies with a more shallow chest but larger cage often find fits that are too tight and underwires which scratch and make wearing a bra painful. This is especially useful for those with full breast curvature but a smaller rib cage — a seemingly impossible type to get the perfect fit. Women with a 32 measurement and below, but D cup and above with a more full curvature complain the most about strap digs, side spills and the “ ” effect. True&Co has already worked on perfecting a suggested fit, but with this kind of weigh-in from this many women, it proves the complexity of a woman’s bust and helps those on the margins get the literal support they need — and have complained about for since the of the brassiere. “You would not believe the amount of data our system has to deal with in real time. It knocks us on our butt sometimes,” says CEO . She says the data algorithm is the key to the future of not just bra shopping, but the way women will shop in general. The biggest mistake retailers make, according to Lam, is not trusting customers to know their own body. The True&Co True Spectrum relies on an algorithm that is based on customer feedback about the unique shape of their own body. True&Co isn’t the only ones asking questions and making assumptions on bra type, though. Victoria’s Secret started to help them find their perfect fit just a couple months ago. The quiz on their site is to the one True&Co had already created. and others have also jumped on the trend to tap into personalization in the estimated $12 billion lingerie industry. There are 8 different color categories a woman can be assigned to in the True Spectrum, based on size, shape, fit and especially curvature. Celeb Rachel Ray’s boobs, for instance, are shallow and round and thus would be considered Violet. Citrine, the more full and round type of boobage is the most common, with 28% of women falling into this category. Curvature is the most important component of the boob, and the one retailers, until now, have left out, according to Lam. “We were the first to start looking into how this affects fit. Now every retailer talks about it.” She says this plays an important role in how True&Co suggests different bras on their site, even for two different women with the same size. Some women have more of a pokey sternum, which means a wire band can hit it and cause a lot of pain. The data showed this to be a top complaint among many women. It doesn’t matter the size here, if your boobs have a more shallow bottom curvature, you are considered an Azure and will be more comfortable in a plunge bra, for example. Uniform is not True&Co’s first foray into building a bra line. It took all that fresh funding and tested out previously collected data with a smaller collection that actually ended up accounting for over a quarter of their revenue last year. According to Lam, more data points from hundreds of thousands of women helped the company realize it needed a much bigger line to account for the 6000+ body types that it currently knows of out there. “You need a bra that makes you feel like a million bucks and we’ve worked really hard to build this data and infrastructure to personalize this brand,” Lam mentions right after a deep discussion on the emotional investment women make into their bra. The algorithm isn’t perfect though. Lam disclosed True&Co is currently satisfying 8 out of 10 women with just the self-reported data. But the company doesn’t have a good bra for the “Mulberry” type, which suits “women with full sides” and accounts for 3% of the population, admits Lam. In other words, women with smaller curvature but who still bust out of the side of their bra still don’t have much of an option here. She believes that as the company gets more data from more hundreds of thousands of women who take the quiz, True&Co will discover even more body types and be able to help either create a bra just for them or suggest the right type of bra already on the site to truly support many more unique boobs. “This is just the beginning of the future of shopping,” says Lam, “and True&Co has only just scratched the surface on its goal to deliver on the perfect fit,” she insists. It has started adding in items beyond just the bra — including panties and lingerie and the company could see a future in other types of clothing. But Lam says satisfying women with the perfect bra is her aim for now. And it’s definitely the toughest. “Retailers have made all these customized clothes for men, but women will be their biggest customers in the future of online shopping because of our curves. We are 3D.” |
Google Updates Flight Search With New Search Options, “I’m Feeling Lucky” Button | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | Google is updating its with a number of new tools. Most of them center around finding potential trips within a given budget and even include the return of Google’s iconic “I’m feeling lucky” button. About a year ago, Google launched an experimental feature that highlighted fares to destinations in a given region on a map. Starting today, it is rolling this into the main Flight Search interface. Say you are looking for a trip to the Caribbean and are pretty flexible about where you want to go. With this feature, you just zoom in on the map and see what flights to the different islands would cost you. Maybe flights to St. Martin are pricey right now, but thanks to the vagaries of airline pricing, a trip to Aruba is significantly cheaper. One nice aspect of this search is that you can still filter by price, flight duration, airline alliance and number of stops. If you have a specific region or country in mind, you can also use the standard Google Flight Search engine and use them as your destination instead of a specific city or airport. If you have absolutely no idea where you want to go and just need some inspiration, the Flight Search map also features an “I’m Feeling Lucky” button — just like the Google Search of yesteryear. Just give it a price or time limit and it’ll suggest a destination for you. Other new features include a personalized — and highly visual — list of potential destinations right on the Flight Search homepage, which now also highlights your previous searches. Google, of course, isn’t the only flight search engine that offers these features. Kayak, for example, offers a similar map-based view. What has always made Google Flight Search stand out, though, was the speed at which Google displays its prices. Instead of a relatively long wait, Google takes a second or two to give you your prices. So far, that was always Google’s big advantage, but even so, Flight Search mostly flew under the radar. Maybe that’s changing a bit now with these new features. |
This Is Dave Goldblatt, A Facebook Employee And The Newest Valyrian In Westeros | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | Remember when I told you that you could , replete with your own name, a station in life, and a grisly death? If you don’t, here’s a quick refresher: To benefit a wolf sanctuary in his home city of Santa Fe, as well as a local Food Depot, series author George R.R. Martin promised to name a character after the first man and the first woman to donate $20,000 to these charities. Well, a Facebook employee named . His character will be Valyrian, because “for whatever reason, I thought the Valyrians were cool,” he said. The female winner has chosen to stay anonymous, perhaps not realizing that eventually her name will appear in the books, and anonymity will not really be an option. For now, however, all eyes are on Facebook Dave, the Valyrian. I wonder how he’ll die. Maybe from ? |
Fly Or Die: Swarm | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | is foursquare’s latest iteration of the check-in based location service, with a whole lot more social baked in. The idea of Swarm is to give you a sense of who’s near you, who be near you, and some ideas for things to do. It’s , which is a lot coming from me, as I’ve never even dabbled at the original foursquare. Still, that’s not to say there are no caveats. For one, people who don’t live in densely populated cities won’t have a super great experience, simply because their network of friends is too spread out. Also, if you have too many friends hooked into your Swarm network, you can end up with a lot of useless information at your fingertips. In the end, it’s a game of balancing people and places that are important to you, and cutting everything else out. John isn’t as impressed as I am, but that may be related to his general lack of friendships. I, on the other hand, for the app if foursquare can find that easy balance between structured information and serendipity. |
The Seattle Pitch-Off Is Tomorrow, So Hurry Up And Grab Tickets! | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | What up, Seattle? TechCrunch has officially arrived to rock the socks off of the Seattle tech scene, and more importantly, to be rocked ourselves by the startups blossoming out of the Northwest. We’ll be hitting up , during which time we’ll have an always-fun, rapid fire pitch-off competition where a few early-stage startups will have the opportunity to pitch their product to a panel of judges and a fine audience in under 60 seconds. It’s a blast to participate in, and potentially even more fun to watch happen, which is why you should if you haven’t already. 21+ please. At the end of the day, these meetups are a great opportunity to network with local investors and entrepreneurs, to recruit potential developers or engineers for your company, or to simply have a great night focusing on what we all have in common: a love for technology. So show up. I’ll be looking for you. |
Facebook 11.0 For iOS Peddles Location Sharing With Nearby Friends Search And Invites | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | Facebook slid some new location sharing features in its today, despite saying “What’s New” was only reliabity and speed improvements. I dug through the app and found Facebook is trying to get more people opting into and using its new tool by adding a search box and invite button atop the screen. Facebook may be attempting to grow Nearby Friends quickly in an effort to box out its new direct competitor . After I asked, Facebook confirmed that these new features exist, but that it only puts things in What’s New if they’re available to everyone. Nearby Friends is still rolling out and is US-only. in mid-April. It lets you constantly share the current neighborhood where you are and the approximate distance between you and your friends or whoever you authorize. It also lets you share your exact, real-time location with specific friends for a few hours or indefinitely. The feature is designed to make it easy to meet up with friends. [ : I advise a college friend’s stealth social location-sharing startup codenamed ‘Signal’.] Since the Nearby Friends feature has major privacy implications, Facebook did the right thing by making it opt in so users have to purposefully activate it. The problem is that Nearby Friends is already buried in the More menu of the app, and then gated behind the opt in. These are surely hindering growth. To give the feature a boost, Facebook now displays a ‘+’ sign in Nearby Friends that you can tap to invite friends to activate it. Recipients receive a push notification asking them to turn it on. Facebook likely hopes that social proof and friend-to-friend recommendations will convince people feature is worth giving up some privacy for. Once people are signed up, Facebook wants to make it easy to find specific friends whose locations you want to see, so it’s added a search bar. Typing in a name brings up their approximate location, distance, and option to give them your exact location if they’ve opted in, and a button to send an invite if they haven’t. These new features highlight how Facebook’s troubled history around privacy is coming back to bite it. Had it been less cavalier in the past with auto-sharing features like Beacon or changes to privacy settings, it might have been able to get away with making Nearby Friends opt out. Instead, it was with 20 years of privacy audits and a requirement that new features that change privacy controls be opt in. You might call that privacy karma. |
Uber Accelerates In Europe As Incumbent Powers Stamp Their Feet | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | As many European countries see protests of scale against the popular, and controversial-to-some, ride-share service Uber, the company is seeing massive interest in its offerings. Media coverage of the strike indicated that Uber wasn’t being punished in the least: , and Uber . What’s causing that? Likely a combination of general interest (“What the heck is being protested?”) and convenience (“If the cab drivers aren’t driving, I’ll just get an Uber.”). AppFigures, an app store ranking tool, that illustrates the rise of Uber on the iOS App Store over the past few days. It’s quite telegenic: It looks a bit too neat, or rounded, for my taste, so let’s dig up some to get an hourly breakdown of what we’re looking at. The UK (seven-day, hourly chart): Spain (seven-day, hourly chart): France (seven-day, hourly chart): Italy (seven-day, hourly chart): Germany (seven-day, hourly chart): Holland (seven-day, hourly chart): From the above, we can see conclusively that Uber is having a damn fine time in Europe, precisely when the incumbent forces that are opposed to it are lining up for battle. Consumers are voting with their feet. I’m not sure what the participating cab drivers were looking to get our of their strike, but helping Uber grow likely wasn’t it. |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 27 | null |
New Ride-Sharing App Hitch Tries To Pair You With A Driver… And Other Passengers | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | There’s no shortage of ways to get around San Francisco: Uber, Lyft, SideCar, taxis and Muni; and if you’re like me, you’ve used all of them and also bike around town a lot. And now there’s , a new on-demand ride-sharing app that hopes to compete on price by using a smart logistics engine to maximize the number of passengers it can get in a car. The Hitch app isn’t that different from Uber or Lyft in that you open the app to request a ride and a car comes to pick you up. But Hitch differentiates itself from the rest of the pack by making more efficient use of all the seats in a car, which lowers the cost for users when compared to other services out there. The team has accomplished this by creating a logistics engine built around picking up multiple passengers and dropping them off at different points along a route. So if you request a ride, you might be the first person to be picked up along a route, or someone else might be picked up first. When you request a ride, rather than telling the app where to pick you up, you tell it where to drop you off. (The app uses GPS to determine your starting point.) You can also tell it how many passengers will be riding with you, so that the app knows how many seats your party will need. And it will give you a cost estimate up front. If another passenger has requested a ride at the same time nearby or along the way, the app creates a route based on start and end points for both of you. And it allows passengers sharing a ride to learn more about one another by showing each other’s mutual Facebook friends and likes to give them something to talk about. At the end of the ride, passengers can rate their driver and each other. That data gives Hitch a better idea of which riders would be best suited to ride with others. It also allows the community to police itself for bad behavior. Ultimately, it might take a bit longer to get where you’re going. And you’ll have to share the car with someone else. But you’ll pay less per ride than if you were by yourself. Like other transportation apps, Hitch conducts criminal and driver background checks, and has a $1 million commercial insurance policy for when passengers are in the car. Hitch was founded by the guys who built the last summer, which sought to show available rides from multiple different local transit providers. That app scraped data from ride-sharing apps like Uber, Lyft and SideCar, while also showing public transportation times. It didn’t take long before by those other services. But founders Snir Kodesh and Noam Szpiro learned a lot about traffic and movement patterns during that time and have applied some of that learning to their own endeavor. Ultimately, though, the company will rely on its own ride data to improve the logistics of the service as time goes on. The service is still limited to certain times of day, as it’s concentrating its efforts on getting people home from work during their evening commutes or getting them home after hanging out at a bar in the evening or on the weekends. Hitch is currently available in San Francisco Monday through Thursday from 5:30 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.; Friday from 5:30 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.; Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m.; and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. |
Amazon Launching Streaming Music Service As Soon As This Week, Says NYT | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | E-commerce giant Amazon is planning a streaming music service of its own in order to join the ranks of virtually every other tech company in existence, according to the . The streaming feature would give Amazon Prime subscribers free access to a library of thousands of songs, sans any advertising. It won’t include new releases, however, and Universal Music Group artists will be left out, according to the report. Those are big conditions on a streaming service, especially if it’s designed to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Rdio, Spotify and the just-acquired Beats Music, all of which include Universal Music Group, all of which offer new releases (though some are occasionally omitted), and all of which offer millions, not thousands of songs. But Amazon doesn’t have to compete directly with these services; instead, its streaming offering will likely operate as an add-on incentive for Prime subscribers. Amazon recently increased the price of an annual Prime subscription from $79 to $99. The price increase comes with expanded offerings, however, including HBO titles available to Amazon Prime Instant Video users. The reason Amazon’s streaming service will be more limited is said to be due to a failure to come to terms in licensing negotiations, since the music companies considered Amazon’s rate offerings too low. The financials for Amazon included the opportunity to share in a $5 million royalty pool for smaller labels, and larger one-time payments for big publishers like Sony and Warner Music, in exchange for a year of access rights. It isn’t clear what the final cost to Amazon for licensing fees ended up being. Amazon currently has somewhere around 20 million Prime subscribers according to the company’s own statement from late last year. It’s a big-margin business for Amazon, so growing that segment makes a lot of sense, and small incentives can help the overall package look far more enticing, even if viewed in direct comparison to other paid streaming services, Amazon’s doesn’t sound like it will stack up all too well. |
Audibly Turns Multiple iOS Devices Into A Wireless Surround-Sound System | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | A team of three young coders has come up with a way to turn your iPhone’s speakers into a wireless surround-sound system, thanks to a mobile app called . The app, which is perfect for parties or for blasting music when decent speakers aren’t readily available, uses technology found on newer devices (running iOS 7 or higher) in order to sync songs to multiple people’s iPhones or iPads simultaneously, effectively turning them into an ad hoc surround-sound system. Audibly’s co-founders first met last year at WWDC 2013 after receiving one of the many scholarships Apple gives to student coders who would never be able to otherwise afford the ticket prices. In 2013, 150 students to attend its annual developer conference, but this year, it expanded that to 200. Explains Audibly co-founder Veeral Patel, a 17-year-old high school student from New Jersey, one of the best things about attending WWDC was meeting other like-minded people. “We hadn’t known any developers in our area, and WWDC gave us the chance to make friends that were just like us,” he says. Patel and the remaining team members, Nick Frey and Chris Galzerano, were sitting in a WWDC session on multi-peer connectivity — then being introduced in iOS 7 — when they came up with the idea for the app. In fact, they were so excited to get started, they didn’t even finish the session. Instead, they ran to WWDC’s Labs to get help from Apple engineers as they began to code. By the end of the conference, they even had a working prototype of their idea in place. Over the course of the next year, the founders, who were all attending high school in separate states (Frey in Iowa, Galzerano in Pittsburgh), continued to refine their idea. They chatted over Facebook Messenger, taking some breaks along the way to focus on school. Initially, they had the app actually transferring the entire song from one phone to the next, but found that took far too long. So they settled on streaming the song instead. In other words, the person who has a physical copy of the song saved on their iPhone can use Audibly to stream it to their friends’ devices by tapping the “broadcast” button in the app. Those who want to receive the stream will launch Audibly, and tap on their friend’s name to connect. The person streaming then approves the request and – – makeshift wireless speakers. Patel admits the system, which relies on peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, isn’t always perfect. If you don’t have a good signal, for example, a stream could get out of sync for a second. And they haven’t really “stress tested” how far apart the devices can be for this to work. (But those in the same room together should be fine, he says.) Plus, when you’re listening to a shared track, you can favorite it with a heart. Later, you can return to your list of favorites to play those again in Spotify or Rdio, or buy the track for yourself on iTunes. Now that Audibly is live, the team is working on what comes next: integrations with more services. Now you have to have a physical copy of the song to start the stream, but they’re looking to tap into APIs for other services, like Spotify or Beats, to share tracks via cloud music services, too. They’re also working on YouTube integration, which would let one person paste a YouTube URL to allow recipients to hear the audio stream for that video. The co-founders also just met up for a second time at this year’s WWDC 2014, where they’ve now learned another handy trick: making money. In a future release, they’ll implement an affiliate model, allowing them to take a percentage of the iTunes purchases made through their app. In the meantime, Audibly is . It works reliably with up to 6 devices, we’re told, but you can use more. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rLITnBzvk] |
Poll Indicates Broad Support For Email Privacy Overhaul | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | While we argue about how to best curtail the NSA, and precisely what constitutes meaningful reform, a gaping privacy hole remains open regarding our email: of 1986 allows for email that has been stored by a user for more than 180 days to be accessed without a warrant. No, this issue still isn’t resolved. A shows broad support for reform, unsurprisingly. Polling by Vox Populi Polling , including Georgia, Colorado and New Hampshire, as well as the city of Los Angeles, more than 80 percent in each support changing the law. That’s a huge margin across ideologically distinct areas. Sixty-four percent think that the issue of digital privacy is “increasingly important” following the now year-long saga of NSA revelations, and 72 percent indicated that they would be more willing to vote for a candidate who supports reforming the ECPA. There is a lot of ground to cover when it comes to better overseeing the NSA and its brethren. Patching the ECPA so that email is given the same basic protection as other private correspondence is just common sense. The poll was sponsored by , which is pushing for the adoption of legal measures to reform the ECPA. |
Beats Solo 2 Review: Great Looks, Now With Better Sound | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | Dr. Dre’s headphone company is now Apple’s headphone company, but the Beats Solo 2 were unveiled just after the acquisition and clearly developed long before . Still, the sequel to Beats’ flagship product is more than just a footnote to the acquisition story – they’re a huge improvement on the originals and a good reason why the latter-day Beats became an appealing target for Cupertino. Design is where Beats excels, and the Solo 2 headphone is no exception. They borrow some design cues from the Studio line, which got an update last fall, and look dramatically better than the Solo HD, with smoother lines and more uniform color schemes. They’re also quite light for cup-style headphones, and they feel comfortable on the ears and head, even when worn for prolonged periods. [gallery ids="1014956,1014957,1014958,1014959,1014960,1014961"] If anything mars the Solo 2 design, it’s the included audio cable. It just feels a bit cheap compared to the overall quality of the Beats 2 headset itself, with a button response that’s not ideal either. That said, the cord does seem thick and decently sturdy, despite the plasticky feel of the inline remote and cable housing, so hopefully it’s long-lasting. The ability of the Solo 2 to fold up and the included soft carrying case make these fairly portable, too, but the lack of a hard case means while you’re able to carry them with you, you might not feel perfectly comfortable throwing these into a backpack with assorted heady items. For $200, you expect a more protective case, especially given that competitive devices including the special Star Wars edition Street by 50 offer that. Overall, though, Beats leads the pack when it comes to design. At this price point, you won’t find a better looking pair of cans. Of course, with headphones, hopefully sound plays a more important role in your buying decision. And that’s where Beats hasn’t fared so well in the past – previous versions of the Beats Solo I’ve tried out have left me unimpressed with their overall sound quality. The Beats Solo 2 actually represent a significant improvement in terms of audio quality, however. I had the chance to try out the Beats Studio Wireless headphones earlier this year, and those come very near to closing the gap between them and the industry leading Bose noise cancellers. The Beats Solo 2 also inherit some of the audio improvements made by the company in its latest generation of headphones. Don’t get me wrong: I use a pair of Sennheiser HD 598 open headphones at home and the difference in quality is astounding. But open headphones aren’t really usable in public unless you feel like being rude and making everyone else listen to your jams. Plus, the Sennheisers are ugly as sin, with actual wood burl finish and the worst yellow-white color you could ever imagine. But Beats isn’t after that market, and what they have done with the Solo 2 is continue to offer headphones with solid fashion appeal and social cache, but they’ve improved performance to boot – which I honestly don’t think they actually even needed to do to get them flying off shelves. If you’re looking for everyday walkaround headphones, the Beats Solo 2 are hard to beat. They’re good-looking, they sound plenty good enough for most users, and they’re very comfortable. A variety of color options sweetens the pie, too. If you don’t care about fashion, you can find cheaper headphones that offer similar performance, but Beats has done an admirable job of earning up to their popularity this time around. |
Investment Outlook Is Sunny In The Cloud Capital | Christine Magee | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | Tomorrow in the cloud capital to showcase some local talent in Seattle’s startup scene, where venture capital deals are on the rise. In the last quarter, Seattle-based companies raised over $500 million in venture funding — the highest amount raised in a single quarter to date — . In the past year, the region has seen a significant increase in larger and later-stage venture deals, as outside investors take notice of what Seattle has to offer.
Not surprisingly, a good chunk of these deals are in biotech. Cancer immunotherapy developer tops the charts as Seattle’s most highly funded private company, with $176 million raised in the past year alone. Genomic immunology company follows closely behind, recently announcing a $100 million Series D round in April. But the distinction between biotech and IT deals is becoming less clear. “Biotech and IT are starting to become heavily interlinked, although they are very different disciplines … so I think it is useful to talk about it in aggregate,” says Madrona Venture Group’s . A new wave of startups is introducing an IT approach to the biotech and healthcare sectors, utilizing big data and analytics platforms to impact research, data collection and doctor-patient relationships. , for instance, a cloud software company focused on democratizing access to government data, has created a platform tailored to healthcare data specifically. For healthcare providers, pharmacy automation company provides software to help manage the flow of medications in hospitals and clinics. And on the consumer side, apps like help families organize and share medical records. Red Russak, founder of StartupSeattle and organizer, says he’d guess that on average only one out of every 10 applicants to a Seattle accelerator program has a biotech focus. But “if it’s a platform for consumers to access knowledge or access data, it’s a big play — if they’re dealing with data, they’re cool,” says Russak. Seattle is well-equipped to host this emerging healthcare IT industry. Building on the historical success of local biotech firms, the University of Washington and the City of Seattle are taking steps to encourage and support entrepreneurs. The recently purchased , an online hub for the startup community. Seattle’s OED also launched its own initiative to boost the local startup scene, working with the university, business owners, and other city departments to make Seattle more appealing to founders. Part of this initiative, says StartupSeattle director , includes constructing additional office space in the university district and ensuring that zoning types accommodate the needs of biotech labs, as well as startups that may need to expand and contract rapidly.
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TweetDeck Taken Down To Assess XSS Vulnerability | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | , a popular tool for Twitter power users, has announced that it has that took place this morning and that users should log out and log back in to complete the fix on their end. A security issue that affected TweetDeck this morning has been fixed. Please log out of TweetDeck and log back in to fully apply the fix. — TweetDeck (@TweetDeck) A cross-site scripting vulnerability makes it possible to trick your browser into running outside code. The only option available to protect yourself was to close out of the TweetDeck web app (or Chrome extension), which forced power users to make a tough decision: ugh I dont want to use OR get hacked on tweetdeck ugh — Sam Colt (@scranecolt) The vulnerability was mostly used to force pop-ups onto people’s screens as in the image above. But had the vulnerability remained open long, the hacker taking advantage of it could have taken over user accounts. We’re keeping an eye out, but so far we haven’t seen any evidence that accounts were actually compromised in the attack. |
Expedia Now Accepts Bitcoin For Your Crypto-Vacations | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | Another day, another company accepting in an attempt to cash in on the craze. This time it’s the travel booking site that’s accepting the virtual currency for hotel bookings. They’re working directly with to accept and then convert the BTC into dollars as soon as they hit the travel agent’s coffers. “While they haven’t officially announced anything aside from hotels, Expedia does plan to eventually expand bitcoin payments to its other lines of business including flights, activities, car rentals, etc as well,” wrote an Expedia spokesperson. “The biggest question is really just around when – and the timing all depends on how well it goes with hotels to start.” Expedia chose to support hotels first because they saw the “most demand” in the space. It was good starting point because Expedia already allowed customers to pay for hotel rooms on the site rather than at the hotel, making it easier for the site to accept bitcoin and then pass the cash on to hotel owners. Like PayPal before it, these bitcoin announcements are a way of showing that a company is hip and “with it.” Bitcoin fans, on the other hand, see this adoption as proof their coins are gaining traction. However, what’s really happening is that the companies are using bitcoin as a lure for early adopters and folks who might not want to transmit their credit card numbers over the Internet. The plan is to add flights later if the feature becomes popular. Expedia follows Overstock.com and Dish Network as the third major company to accept bitcoin. |
New 3D Print Head Makes It Easier To Print Nutella | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | As a man who loves things that come out of tubes, I am excited about the Discov3ry Extruder. Designed as an add-on to popular 3D printers, the system is essentially a plunger connected to a nozzle that squirts out pastes of various types including icing, Nutella, spackle, and silicone. The product just launched on and has surpassed its goal of $30,000. The extruder itself should work on most major 3D printers including RepRap machines and Makerbots. The extruder itself attaches to the standard extruder tip of the printer and then you have to set the specifications for various substances, including the aforementioned Nutella. The extruder costs $249 for early birds and uses disposable syringes to hold the pastes. Rubber tubing carries to paste to the machine which is then pushed out like the standard plastic filament normally used by these printers. Created by Charles Mire, John Mardlin, and Andrew Finkle of Waterloo, Ontario, the product is a reaction to the dearth of usable paste extruders. “Paste printing is a difficult problem. Many attempts at an affordable paste extruder have been made previously,” they write. “By focusing on reinventing only the parts of the printer that are involved with the delivery and extrusion of the material means that we’re able to move faster, and develop a better product.” The product will ship in October. Full disclosure: I would totally 3D print a big blob of Nutella and eat it.
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Globo Buys Sourcebits In Push For U.S. Mobile App Development Market | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | , an enterprise mobile messaging and device management and application development software developer traded on the London Stock Exchange’s small-cap AIM Market, has bought the mobile application development service . Founded in 1997 as a content management company, went public on the AIM in 2008 as it transitioned from content management into mobile device and messaging management for the enterprise. With the Sourcebits acquisition the company does two things according to chief executive Konstantinos (“Costis”) Papadimitrakopoulos — gets more of a foothold in the U.S. market and adds to its mobile product suite. “Sourcebits is one of the leaders in mobile application development,” says Papadimitrakopoulous. The company was generating revenues of roughly $8 million, with earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization coming in at $1.8 million. Meanwhile, Globo saw year end revenue of Euro 72 million and Euro 35 million (roughly $98.6 million in revenues and $48 million in EBITDA). Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but as service providers typically trade for 1.5 times to two times their revenues, which would put the Sourcebits deal at or below roughly $20 million. The Sourcebits acquisition is just the first step in Globo’s transition to become a more North American-facing business — so venture investors be prepared. “We are going to execute several acquisitions in the U.S.,” says Papadimitrakopoulos. “The company is shifting to more of a U.S. centric technology company.” Specifically, Papadimitrakopoulos says his company will seek businesses developing new security and mobile development applications. One reason for the move to the U.S. is the company’s desire to list on one of the U.S. exchanges, according to Papadimitrakopoulos. Globo is considering jumping from the AIM to potentially the Nasdaq as it rolls up more businesses in the U.S. “Shifting from AIM to Nasdaq… we consider to be much more favorable,” says Globo’s chief executive. “U.S. tech investors are much more knowledgeable. Having a fairer valuation against our peers will give us the ability to compete on a much more equal basis.” That could be welcome news for investors like Sequoia Capital, which invested alongside IDG Ventures India in a $10 million financing for . “The evolution of the mobility space is so massive it will create different spin offs on top of the platform business that we’re building today,” says Papadimitrakopoulos. |
The Numinous Veil Of Ignorance | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | I seem to be on the wrong side of the Facebook experiment issue. I’m referring to the news which broke recently that Mark Zuckerberg himself (no, not really) conducted an experiment in 2012 to test whether influencing what a user sees in turn affects what they post. If they were shown more negative material, for example, did they become more negative? . The conclusion? Facebook seems able to influence our moods (well, sort of). The news has resulted in many folks being up in arms. They feel invaded, manipulated, spied-upon or otherwise violated. This always happens with this kind of news though. A large degree of technical ignorance pervades our society which, when occasionally punctured by a meme like this, tends to react from the hip. The naturally Orwellian among us foresee terrible futures. The professionally outraged seize their chance to explain why the news is yet another tech industry travesty. Where some data scientists manipulated an algorithm and saw users respond with a couple of grouchier posts than normal, those who fear the worst see the worst and cry havoc. I’m on the wrong side of all this because I don’t take it seriously. Because this stuff happens all the time, yet the sky conspicuously does not fall on our heads. It’s called metrics, analytics, finding product/market fit and increasing engagement. You and me and everyone we know (in the tech world) are largely in the business of increasing engagement and that means to some degree we are in the manipulation business. Take, for example, Buzzfeed. From the title through to the word/image count, Buzzfeed articles are constructed to elicit laughs, and thus bring more visits and shares. There are clear formulae being used, and those would have been tested to see what worked. Take, for another example, Google. Google spends a considerable amount of resources tweaking and shaping its famously secret search algorithm to get better results. Why? Because if users feel Google is better then they will always come back to Google. But do you really think that the company that split test isn’t doing secret user tests all the time to see how the quality of results affects usage? Take, for a third example, Amazon. Amazon legendarily stores huge amounts of data about its customers and uses that information to try and build a better shopping experience for them. The result is better service, selection and prices than its competitors, which keeps customers coming back. But to do so Amazon has clearly had to experiment with its users along the way to know for sure what the right path is. Arthur C Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and for most of us this is true. We live in an age of wonder in many respects, of devices and services that bring new kinds of joy into our lives, yet with little clue as to how they actually work. Tools that all of us use many times a day are essentially black magic boxes powered on dreams and fairy dust and fueled by . The results can seem numinous. In games are the gateway to the experience, that unique sensation in interactive entertainment where immersion verges on belief. The numinous quality of technology also fuel the sense of possibility. From Oculus Rift through to smartwatches, we always seem on the verge of the truly limitless. We animatedly discuss what it will be like in five years time when we’re all hooked up to Internet III and traversing the datum planes. We’re excitedly looking at glimpses through the veil of ignorance and speculating on what might be. But equally the results can feel ominous. Trust and powerlessness become big issues. In the surveillance society, especially so. It’s all to see to make the leap of believing that there are entities behind the glass, great and powerful Ozzes manipulating the big head toward darker ends. Programming takes on the air of high sorcery. Silicon Valley becomes a technocrat idyll that must be resisted before it turns the rest of us into automata. The great and powerful Zuck is stealing our emotions with his flying data monkeys… The difference in this case is that whereas most of the time said research is confidential. Had it not, you might argue, Facebook’s veil of ignorance would have remained intact. Rather than opening their Top Stories feed this morning and eyeing it with newfound suspicion, users might have laughed at those latest baby photos that their sisters uploaded, or sent birthday wishes to their friends. And otherwise carried on none the wiser. It is a little weird to be arguing for obfuscation, but I appear to be. What I’m talking about here is not whether it’s right or wrong to be transparent, but rather how knowing affects customer relationships for better or worse. Customers “see” a product in a different light once they’ve had a peek behind the curtain (or think they have) and often they never view it the same way again. In games particularly it’s important to realize that: You can be too transparent. Game companies experiment with their users all the time. They have to. Players are a moving target so developers always have to change their approach, but nevertheless they are still trying to entertain. So game makers are heavily invested in trying to affect players’ emotional state for many reasons. Perhaps the game maker wants to encourage her players to be , to give them a fun experience or to suck them into her lair and then make them pay to stay. Mostly it’s simply because she wants them to keep playing. Game companies work hard to get the emotions that they need (whether for good or evil) by studying players closely. They listen, observe, measure, adjust and redeploy. Whether they do so through judging the response to big graphics trailers, data science or even simple playtesting, the player is always a sort of scientific subject in the maker’s psychological lab. But if players become aware of how much they are toyed with, their game is often ruined. For example, to walk the halls in is to walk in another world and to see and feel as the older sister terrified that her sibling has done something to herself. The very fact that most of us don’t know how the game works gives it this power. becomes so much less of an experience when you grok that it’s just a level with a few triggers and text assets that don’t really affect your progress. Games lose their magic when players fully comprehend how they work, robbing them of their mystery. Apparently so do social networks. |
Sidecar Tests Out Shareable Rides, So Passengers Going In The Same Direction Can Split The Fare | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | Since launch, has always been about . Now the startup is taking sharing one step further, with a new feature that is designed to match users not just with drivers willing to take them where they want to go, but with other passengers heading in the same direction. Sidecar’s new “shareable rides” feature is another way for the company to offer an alternative to Lyft and Uber, by offering much lower prices than its competitors. The company’s efforts to differentiate itself took shape earlier this year, when it that enables drivers to set their own fares for rides, while giving passengers the ability to choose a ride based on price, ETA, or quality of the car. Now, users will also be able to choose whether or not they’d like to save a few bucks by sharing their ride with another passenger. The startup introduced the new feature in a promotional email sent to its users in San Francisco this weekend, promising big discounts for those who are willing to get matched up and travel with someone else in the car. The below copy explains how the feature works: “To share your ride, open the Sidecar app and select a car with the “Shareable Rides” icon and we’ll match you with other riders nearby going your way. If matched, the app will split the price with other riders and you will save up to 50%!” Sidecar didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on how big the test of shareable rides is, although a scan of the app showed multiple cars available that would allow passengers to share a ride and split the fare. The new feature, of course, is designed to offer users another reason to use Sidecar, as opposed to some of its competitors. And it makes some sense, considering that Uber and Lyft continue to compete on price in many markets. Sidecar isn’t the only ride-sharing startup that has built in the ability to share a ride with other passengers. Hitch, which , is also designed to offer cheaper rides by matching up users who are heading in the same direction. In both cases, Sidecar and Hitch claim that passengers will pay half of what they would if they were traveling alone. |
Mobile-Only Bank Osper Raises $10M To Aim At UK Youth Market | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | , a new UK startup, has come up with an innovative way to create a banking service than can be used by children, combining prepaid debit cards and smartphone apps controlled by both them and their parents. The approach could potentially reach a market underserved by most banks, but which may also be embraced by parents keen to educate their children early on about how to manage money. The startup has also announced it’s closed a $10m (£6m) funding round, led by London’s (which has backed SoundCloud and Etsy among others). Previously Osper had raised a seed round of £800,000 in June last year as an alumni of the accelerator. The cash will be used by founder Alick Varma to launch the service out of beta, roll out in the UK and eventually expand abroad. It’s also enrolled the backing of major UK TV celebrity, Davina Mccall. Other investors include Horizons Ventures (Li Ka-Shing’s venture capital arm – investor in Spotify, Facebook and Skype); Peter Jackson (CEO of Travelex), and Darren Shapland (ex-Chairman of Sainsbury’s Bank); as well as the entrepreneurs behind businesses including Streetcar, Lastminute.com, Jawbone, SoundCloud, Skyscanner and Funding Circle. Aimed at the UK’s seven million 8-18 year olds (a 43 million-strong market in the US) Osper is a mobile-only, branchless, banking service. Its pre-paid debit card is ratified and backed by MasterCard and comes with a simple mobile app (Android or iOS), which has separate logins for the young person and their parents. The accounts have no credit or over-draft so the child or teenager can only spend what they have. The Osper Cards are free for the first year, and then cost £10 per year thereafter. The distinct orange card can be used in stores, for cash withdrawals at ATMs and for online purchases and service subscriptions such as Amazon and iTunes. Because they can see how the money is spent, parents can hand over more of the decision-making to the child, who then – hopefully – gets smart about how to manage their money. It means parents no long need to hand over cash or lend their own credit card for online purchases. The is key, because, as founder Alick Varma says, research has found that less than 30% of young people with a bank account use online banking and instead reply on cash or credit cards from parents. This is in the UK having a bank account. In other words, they need a new kind of service to encourage them to actually use a banking service. (Assuming they aren’t already on Bitcoin of course). “There is a need to reinvent banking for young people; they should have the tools to build self-confidence to manage money from a young age,” says Varma, an entrepreneur who formerly trained as a maths teacher but went on to work at M-Pesa (the mobile-payments platform in Kenya), and Spotify. The card and the app has several features that are likely to attract parents to the idea, such as the ability to monitor and manage Osper Card remotely, instant loading of cash, SMS alerts for transactions declined and card lock for stolen cards. The company plans to make money via revenue from the ‘interchange’ when a transaction is made, the interest on deposits and the annual subscription fee. It’s likely that Osper could do well in the UK, although it’s possible that a much larger incumbent bank could launch and market a competitive product. In the US the ‘Simple’ bank – which makes a virtue of its simplicity – might well be watching this startup with interest. |
Microsoft’s Top Lawyer Calls Supreme Court Cellphone-Warrant Case “Seminal” | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | It’s been a busy week in the realm of policy and technology, with the Supreme court on a several issues impacting the industry, and the government releasing regarding a portion of the NSA’s surveillance practices. The unanimous Supreme Court caused a stir because it set new precedent regarding digital privacy: To search a cell phone, the court ruled, the government must procure a warrant. The decision will set the tone for future legal action regarding technology, data, user privacy, and Fourth Amendment protections. I’d like to highlight some commentary on the decision from a perhaps unlikely source, Microsoft. Microsoft, in the past week, has become a leading voice for user privacy and a less active surveillance state. The company’s de facto spokesperson on the matter, its top lawyer Brad Smith, recently in which he called for the end of bulk surveillance, warrant reform, and more transparency in the FISA court. He also called on the Senate to strengthen the somewhat gutted USA FREEDOM Act that recently passed the House. When Smith speaks, under his official title, he’s speaking for slightly more than himself. Capping the week with a this weekend, Smith called the decision “seminal.” Continuing, the lawyer wrote that the decision will have “positive implications both for smart devices and the storage of personal information in the cloud.” Correct. Microsoft and a number of other technology companies have banded together under the auspices of a group called . Constituent companies have spoken out, of course. Google most recently to the NSA’s transparency report, for example. Smith, viz Microsoft, has been the most outspoken. It’s pleasant when corporate interests align with user interests. In the case of pervasive surveillance, the profit motive is lashed to privacy: Corporations and individuals alike won’t flock to the cloud as quickly as they might if their stored data is open to wanton exploit. Recall that Smith directly name-checked the cloud. That wasn’t an accident. It would be nice to see other technology companies being more publicly articulate on the issue. For now, though, it’s been a generally positive week for those who view NSA reform as vital, and privacy paramount. There’s still more to do. |
The Morality Of A/B Testing | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | We don’t use the “real” Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Google, Yahoo, or LinkedIn. We are almost all part of experiments they quietly run to see if different versions with little changes make us use more, visit more, click more, or buy more. By signing up for these services, we technically give consent to be treated like guinea pigs. But this weekend, Facebook stirred up because one of its data science researchers published the results of an experiment on 689,003 users to see if showing them more positive or negative sentiment posts in the News Feed would affect their happiness levels as deduced by what they posted. The impact of this experiment on manipulating emotions was tiny, but it raises the question of where to draw the line on what’s ethical with A/B testing. First, let’s look at the facts and big issues: Check out itself or read for a great breakdown of the facts and reactions. Essentially, three researchers, including one of Facebook’s core Data Scientists , looked to prove whether via online social networks. For a week, Facebook showed people fewer positive or negative posts to people in News Feed, and then measured how many positive or negative words they included in their own posts. People shown fewer positive posts (a more depressing feed) posted 0.1% fewer positive words in their posts — their status updates were a tiny bit less happy). People shown fewer negative posts (a happier feed) post 0.07% fewer negative words — their updates were a tiny bit less depressed). Here you can see that the experiments only reduced the usage of positive or negative words a tiny amount. News coverage has trumpeted that the study was harmful, but it only made people ‘sad’ by a minuscule amount. Plus, that effect could be attributed not to an actual emotional change in the experiment participants, but them just following the trends they see on Facebook. Success theater may just be self-perpetuating, as seeing fewer negative posts might cause you to manicure your own sharing so your life seems perfect too. One thing the study didn’t find was that being exposed to because your life isn’t as fun, but again, the findings measured what people posted not necessarily how they felt. Facebook only did an internal review to decide if the study was ethical. A source tells Forbes’ it was not submitted for pre-approval by the Institutional Review Board, an independent ethics committee that requires scientific experiments to meet stern safety and consent standards to ensure the welfare of their subjects. I was IRB certified for an experiment I developed in college, and can attest that the study would likely fail to meet many of the pre-requisites. Instead, Facebook holds that it manipulates the News Feed all the time to test what types of stories and designs generate the most engagement. It wants to learn how to get you to post more happy content, and spend more time on Facebook. It saw this as just another A/B test, which most major tech company, startups, news sites, and more run all the time. Facebook technically has consent from all users, as its people automatically agree to when they sign up says “we may use the information we receive about you…for…data analysis, testing, and service improvement.” Many consider that to be a very weak form of consent, as participants didn’t know they were in the experiment, its scope or intent, its potential risks, if data would be kept confidential, and they weren’t provided any way to opt out. Some believe Facebook should ask users for consent and offer an opt out for these experiments. So the negative material impact of this specific study was low and likely overblown, but the controversy vaults the ethics question into a necessary public discussion. Sure, there are lots of A/B Tests, but most are pushing for more business-oriented results like increasing usage or clicks or purchases. This study purposefully sought to manipulate people’s emotions positively and negatively for the sake of proving a scientific theory about social contagion. Affecting emotion for emotion’s sake is why I believe the study has triggered such charged reactions. Some people don’t think the intention of the experimenter matters, because who’s to know what they really want, especially when it comes to big for-profit companies. I think it is an important factor for distinguishing what may need oversight. Either way, there is some material danger to experiments that depress people. As notes, the says 9.5% of Americans have mood disorders, which can often lead to depression. Some people who are at risk of depression were almost surely part of Facebook’s study group that were shown a more depressing feed, which could be considered dangerous. Facebook will endure a whole new level of backlash if any of those participants were found to have committed suicide or had other depression-related outcomes after the study. That said, every product, brand, politician, charity, and social movement is trying to manipulate your emotions on some level, and to find out how. They all want you to use more, spend more, vote for them, donate money, or sign a petition by making you happy, insecure, optimistic, sad, or angry. There are many tools for discovering how best to manipulate these emotions, including analytics, focus groups, and A/B tests. Often times people aren’t given a way to opt out. Facebook may have acted unethically. Despite its constant testing to increase engagement which could fall into a grayer area, this experiment tried to directly sway emotions. A brand manipulating its own content to change someone’s emotions to complete a business objective is simpler and expected. A portal manipulating the presence of content shared with us by friends to depress us for the sake of science is different. You might guess McDonalds, with its slogan “I’m loving it” is trying to make you feel like you’re less happy without it, and a politician is trying to make you feel more optimistic if you vote for them. But many people don’t even understand the basic concept of Facebook using a relevancy-sorting algorithm to filter the News Feed to be as engaging as possible. They probably wouldn’t suspect Facebook might show them fewer happy posts from friends so they’ll be sadder in order to test a theory of social science. In the end, an experiment with these intentions and risks may have deserved its own opt-in, which Facebook should consider offering in the future. No matter how you personally perceive the ethics, Facebook made a big mistake with how it framed the study and now the public is seriously angry. But while Facebook has become the lighting rod, the issue of ethics in A/B testing is much bigger. If you believe toying with emotions is unethical, most major tech companies as well as those in other industries are guilty too. So what’s to be done? The variety of companies that run these tests range from large to small, and the risks of each test fall on a highly interpretable spectrum from innocuous to gravely dangerous. Banning any testing that “manipulates emotions” would cause endless arguments about what qualifies, be nearly impossible to enforce, and could often slow-down innovation or degrade the potential quality of products we use. But there are still certain companies with outsized power to impact people’s emotions in ways that are tough for the average person to understand. That’s why a good start would be for companies running significant tests that manipulate emotions to offer at least an opt out. Not for every test, but ones with some real risk like showing users a more depressing feed. Just because everyone else isn’t doing it, doesn’t mean big tech companies can’t be pioneers of better ethics. Volunteering to provide a choice as to whether people want to be guinea pigs could bolster confidence amongst users. Let people opt out of the experiments via a settings page and give them the standard product that evolves in response to those experiments. Not everyone has to be put on the front lines to find out what works best. Consent is worth adding a little complexity to the product. As for providing users some independent protection against harmful emotional manipulation on a grand scale, the Federal Trade Commission might consider auditing these practices. The FTC already has settlements with , , , , and more companies to for ten to twenty years. The FTC could layer on ethical oversight for experimentation and product changes with the same goal of protecting consumer well-being. Unfortunately, it’s also settlements with the FTC that says companies can’t take away privacy controls that incentivize them not to offer any new ones. At the very least, the tech companies should educate their data scientists and others designing A/B tests about the ethical research methods associated with having experiments approved by the IRB. Even if the tech companies don’t actually submit individual tests for review, just being aware of best practices could go a long way to keeping tests safe and compassionate. The world has quickly become data-driven. It’s time ethics caught up. |
Apple’s New iPhone Pitch To Parents | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | In my line of work I’m often called on to think critically about the usability of both hardware and software, especially smartphones. One of my big touchstones, and one that’s ignored by a surprising amount of designers — is that stuff doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If your goal is to have thousands, or millions, of people use your thing then you’ve got to consider how it works when you’re riding on a crowded bus or subway, jammed between sweaty angry people. Or how easy it is to use in blazing sunlight, or a car, or while doing something with your other hand. My appreciation for these ‘hardship usage scenarios’ only increased when I had a kid. Everything you do is ten times harder when you’re trying to help something learn, eat, sleep and just generally not die. That, I feel, is still a strength that the iPhone has over many other devices. I have and enjoy devices based on other platforms like Android, but Apple’s heavy focus on clear, accessible design in both their hardware and software has given the iPhone an edge when it comes to being friendly to the busy, harried, tired and overtaxed. When you’re juggling one, two or ten kids and just trying to get things done, having the ability to twiddle around with your operating system at a system level just doesn’t feel as important as having things work That’s the premise Apple is tapping with the latest spot in its ‘more powerful’ series of iPhone ads. The ad, entitled Parenthood, airs this afternoon for the first time and focuses on parents doing parenty things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmTpgSMJ96c The iPhone stars, of course, taking on a variety of kid tasks like baby monitoring, learning to brush your toofers, party games, monster defense and exercise. One interesting thing I noted: the spot doesn’t show the iPhone being used to passively entertain. The apps are all carefully chosen to show things being , not something that positions the iPhone as a surrogate parent. The song in the spot is ‘Life of Dreams’, by Julie Doiran and the apps featured, in order, are , , , and . iPhone connected devices featured in the spot include the , , , and plant monitor. Note that I’m not saying you can’t do this stuff on an Android device. I can do most of these things on my Nexus 5, but they’re not nearly as easy or foolproof. It’s also a good thing, I think, that Apple is focused inward in these spots, on showing what their devices are capable of. Contrast that with this grating and tone-deaf spot Samsung posted this week — which also has a ‘parental’ angle — bagging on the iPhone’s camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4JqKIkdIzo&feature=youtu.be The tone comes off as harsh and defensive, and doesn’t even show the supposedly better camera in action. And, given that the , with over 515M sold, it’s also not attacking a weak point at all. The Apple spot, once again, focuses directly on what the iPhone can do for you and not on competitors. Usability is a deep strength of the iPhone and Apple knows it, and that usability is held dear by parents more than most other groups. I also like that the simple LED gets its day in the sun because who hasn’t used that thing as a flashlight. Overall, to quote my wife, “it’s pretty cute.” |
Facebook And The Ethics Of User Manipulation [Updated] | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | [This post has been updated to include comments from Adam Kramer, the Facebook employee who coauthored the study, and new information from Cornell indicating that the study was funded internally. ] A recent conscripted Facebook users as . The study set out to discover if the emotional tone of a users’ News Feed content had an impact on their own emotional makeup, measured through the tone of what they posted to the social service after viewing the skewed material. Nearly 700,000 Facebook users were shown either more positive, or more negative content. The study found that users who were given more positive news feeds posted more positive things, and users who were given more negative news feeds posted more negative things. Surprising? Doubtful. Yes. Bear it in mind that the impact of the study wasn’t contained merely to those it directly manipulated. It notes that around 155,000 users from the positive and negative groups each “posted at least one status update during the experimental period.” So, hundreds of thousands of status updates were posted by the negatively-induced user group. Those negative posts likely caused more posts of similar ilk. Contagion, after all, doesn’t end at the doorstep. We won’t know if the experiment did any more than darken the days of a few hundred thousand users for a week in 2012. But it could have. And that’s enough to make a call on this: Allowing your users to be unwitting test subjects of emotional manipulation is beyond creepy. It’s a damn disrespectful and dangerous choice. Not everyone is in a good emotional spot. At any given moment, a decent chunk of Facebook’s users are emotionally fragile. We know that because at any given moment, a decent chunk of humanity of emotionally fragile, and Facebook has a massive number of active users. That means that among the negatively influenced were the weak, the vulnerable, and potentially the young. I’ve reached out to Facebook asking if the study excluded users between the ages of 13 and 18, but haven’t yet heard back. Adding extraneous, unneeded emotional strain to a person of good mental health is an unkindness. Doing so to a person who needs encouragement and support is cruel. The average Facebook user has something akin to an unwritten social contract with the company: I use your product, and you serve ads against the data I’ve shared. Implicit to that is expected polite behavior the idea that Facebook won’t abuse your data, or your trust. In this case, Facebook did both, using a user’s social graph against them, with intent to cause emotional duress. We’re all manipulated by corporations. Advertising is among the more blatant examples of it. There’s far more of it out there than we realize. The pervasiveness of the manipulation makes us slightly inured to it, undoubtedly. But that doesn’t mean we can’t point out things that are over the line when we are shown what’s going on behind the curtain. If Facebook was willing to allow this experiment — lead author of which, according to the study itself is a Facebook employee working on its Core Data Science Team — what else might it allow in the future? I am not arguing that Facebook has a moral imperative to make news feed content more positive on average. That would render the service intolerable — not all life events are positive, and the ability to commiserate with friends and loved ones digitally is now part of the human experience. And Facebook certainly tweaks its news feed over time for myriad reasons to improve its experience. That’s all perfectly reasonable. Deliberately looking to skew the emotional makeup of its users, spreading negativity for no purpose other than curiosity without user assent and practical safeguards is different. It’s irresponsible. Here’s the response from Facebook’s Kramer: OK so. A lot of people have asked me about my and Jamie and Jeff’s recent study published in PNAS, and I wanted to give a brief public explanation. The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. We didn’t clearly state our motivations in the paper. Regarding methodology, our research sought to investigate the above claim by very minimally deprioritizing a small percentage of content in News Feed (based on whether there was an emotional word in the post) for a group of people (about 0.04% of users, or 1 in 2500) for a short period (one week, in early 2012). Nobody’s posts were “hidden,” they just didn’t show up on some loads of Feed. Those posts were always visible on friends’ timelines, and could have shown up on subsequent News Feed loads. And we found the exact opposite to what was then the conventional wisdom: Seeing a certain kind of emotion (positive) encourages it rather than suppresses is. And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal amount to statistically detect it — the result was that people produced an average of one fewer emotional word, per thousand words, over the following week. The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service. Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety. While we’ve always considered what research we do carefully, we (not just me, several other researchers at Facebook) have been working on improving our internal review practices. The experiment in question was run in early 2012, and we have come a long way since then. Those review practices will also incorporate what we’ve learned from the reaction to this paper |
Google’s Principal Designer For Search And Maps Explains Material Design | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | was center stage at I/O this year, from the keynote through sessions and things being demoed on the show floor. The changes run across Google’s range of devices and platforms, and embrace a new set of design principals grouped under the central concept of ‘Material Design.’ I spoke to Jon Wiley, Principal Designer of Search and Maps and Google, about the process of changing the company’s design language across its platforms and products. Material Design doesn’t necessarily throw out Google’s existing design work, according to Wiley, but it does represent a comprehensive new way of thinking about software interaction in the context of modern devices. “It’s definitely an evolution, although I do think at this point that we’ve also pushed it farther, and we’ve been working pretty hard on that,” Wiley explained. “We talked [during the keynote] about [how] material is the metaphor, and there were actually two metaphors that guided us in terms of thinking about how we could design specifically for high-density displays with touchscreens.” Touchscreens, combined with high resolution screens with very high pixel-per-inch counts, have conspired to give device users very different expectations around what software should feel like in use. We no longer stare at crudely rendered green text on a black field, after all. “That affords kind of a new dimension of interaction and interactivity – you’re physically interacting with software interfaces, and so I think that people have far greater expectations,” Wiley said. “They have all the expectations that they have with beautiful, functional, useful design in the physical world that we’ve had for a very long time, they’re bringing those expectations to the software that they’re interacting with because of the nature of the medium.” “Mouse and keyboard dominated the input/output mechanism with computing devices for quite some time, and we’ve only had widely available touchscreens and high density displays for a few years,” he added. “We initially saw a lot of interface design that was ‘well, we’ll go take what we know, and we’ll jam it on these smaller screens, just kind of jam it on there.’ And we started […] over a year ago, really thinking about if i’m someone who uses software and i’m coming to the table with all of these expectations about the physical interaction of things and how they behave, all of that is informed by some basic rules and underlying physics.” That’s where Material Design comes in; the entire system is engineered to mimic real world analogs, without going all the way and becoming what we know as ‘skeuomorphic,’ where interfaces try to offer up almost photorealistic renderings of analogous surfaces in the real world – like a Moleskine for a notebook app, for instance. “The Material metaphor cuts through a lot of this – we say, ‘what is this made of, what are some of the basic physics of this material?’,” says Wiley. “What’s nice about software is that it doesn’t have to be completely constrained by real-world physics, but you do want to set up an environment where it’s internally consistent.” Building these physically sound worlds allows Google’s designers to create interface and interaction heuristics that users grow accustomed to and recognize across platforms. Which means that for users, intuiting required behavior becomes much easier. “It’s actually an imposed set of constraints, but by imposing constraints it enables you to creatively solve within an internally consistent framework of how things work,” Wiley explained. “That way, as you use the software, you’re doing the task on one device, then you’re doing the task on another device, and you’re using multiple applications to solve whatever problem you have, that it doesn’t feel like you’re jumping around from one universe of physics to another universe of physics – that everything feels consistent in terms of how you interact with it.” Material Design talks about real world analogs like paper and ink, but Google also considered another metaphor to guide its new animations and transitions, which are a big part of its visual and interactivity overhaul. “The other metaphor that’s driven us quite a bit […] comes from Fred Gilbert, who’s a director of design for Google+, is that software has followed a metaphor of film and television editing, where each interaction is a series of jump cuts and this is amplified on touchscreen devices,” said Wiley. “The actual world and software design and interaction is probably better suited to a metaphor of theater, where you’ve got almost a proscenium that you’re seeing things happening on. A bad play would go ‘Scene.’ and then a curtain would come down and then you’d wait a while and the curtain would come back up and there’d be something completely new.” To counter that, Google wanted to pin down a visual language that would not just entertain with flourishes and animated shifts, but that would also inform a user, providing contextual information about how you might interact with the incoming interface as its being set up. “We were looking at all this software and that’s what’s happening – you’re doing these really important things, and you’re interacting with the software and it’s doing these jump cuts, where you do this and it does this other thing and it’s actually really jarring,” said Wiley. “So we started thinking about how we can actually convey a sense of continuity, where you’re going from one state to the next and it’s done in a thoughtful, composed fashion.” While Google made Material Design seem like a brand new revolution in software aesthetics during the show, it’s actually something the company has been working on for years, which pops up across its range of products. Wiley says that it’s also the product of Google’s unique approach to product development, where teams from distinct projects talk to each other all the time, and in this way they arrived collaboratively at the new principles. As Wiley said, it’s still relatively early days for high density displays and touchscreens, but it’s far enough along that any efforts to help deepen our experience of interacting with them is worthy of praise. |
Extortionists Are Using Bitcoin To Steal Cash From Business Owners | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | Extortionists are going completely anonymous thanks to social media and bitcoin. just posted on a number of pizzerias that received anonymous letters asking for one bitcoin in order to keep the owners from receiving bad ratings on Yelp, the Better Business Bureau and the like as well as to keep the extortionists from “SWATing” – calling the police to report violent crimes or drugs on the premises. After the deadline the price goes up to three bitcoin – a few thousand dollars – and then the badgering begins. This also includes denial of service attacks and vandalism. Thanks to , however, the extortion is vilely effective. The pizza places have until mid-August to comply, the time lag added to presumably allow the non-techie owners to open a account. “At first, I was laughing because I thought it had to be a joke,” Alhilo said in a phone interview. “It was funny until I went and posted it on our Facebook page, and then people put it on Reddit and the Internet got me all paranoid.” Krebs notes that these extortion attempts are coming up against a major adversary – the US Postal Service. Because the letters came through the mail, the federal government can and probably will use its resources to see exactly where these letters came from and what identifying characteristics can be discovered from the postmark and physical pages. The fraudsters could also be caught when they try to cash out their bitcoin, a major consideration when trying this sort of scam. Recent extortions have included Domino’s in France which refused to pay $40,000 to prevent the release of 650,000 pieces of private customer information. Considering these pizzerias have very little in the way of value – except their cash – this is more of a low yield, short-term scam. Here’s hoping these guys get caught and that the community helps bring them down. After all, extortion is a bad way to introduce bitcoin to small businesses. |
#Love: Pride | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | since I was… well, born. At seven years old, I knew something was different when I felt an overwhelming affection for my 19-year-old basketball coach, Cathy. By the time I figured out how sex worked, I had also learned that my Southern Baptist private school and religious community weren’t cool with the whole “gay” thing. At 13, despite truly believing that my feelings were wrong, I looked myself in the mirror in my bathroom, (checked around the corner to make sure no one could hear me,) and said it out loud: “Jordan, you’re gay.” Six years and two girlfriends later, I would cry as I told my parents, who smiled and said they already knew. My history with technology hasn’t been as difficult or as determined as my coming out story. Like most late-80’s babies, I had a Nokia phone and chatted on AIM in middle school, got a Myspace and a Xanga in high school, and jumped on the iPhone and Facebook in college. I took typing and computer history classes in junior high (and now I wish desperately I had paid more attention). With ease, I set up wireless routers for my parents and troubleshot my mom’s printer issues. But I never really thought of myself as someone who was “into tech”. I actually went to college to become a writer. I wanted to write fiction books and non-fiction books and articles in media publications and short stories. Across as many formats as possible, I wanted to write about human culture — the undefinable oddities that make people so fascinating. When I was younger, I didn’t realize that the most interesting part of human culture is how it changes, and why. Turns out, tech has a pretty big role in that. So here I am, all gay and “into tech” and rambling on like a bad writer, but I’m not the only gay who was raised on a healthy diet of technology. The gay rights movement and the technology industry grew up together, and they wouldn’t be the same without each other. The gay liberation movement sprung up around the in 1969, but the acceleration of gay rights progress in the last 10-15 years is astounding. Up until 2004, no state in the United States allowed same sex marriages. Up until 2011, the military’s anti-gay policy was . Today, same-sex marriage is legal in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Change that fast can really only be matched by our very own tech industry, which has taken us from printing out MapQuest directions to having the internet in our pocket in a few short years. Soon, we’ll have self-driving cars and wear computers on our faces. Geography has, of course, played a big role in the relationship between technology and the gay rights movement. Silicon Valley is the hub of innovation in the United States, and it also happens to be next door to the gay mecca of our great country, San Francisco. Despite the fact that we celebrate pride on the anniversary of Stonewall, a clear look at history shows you that the , which is where some of the in the history of the gay movement have taken place. The mindset of the tech industry, to always think beyond this moment in time, is the same mindset that keeps hope and determination in the minds of marriage equality advocates. And pride, the heartbeat of the gay movement, is the same thing that lets a young entrepreneur stand up in a room full of suits believing that his idea is worth their money. But it’s not just the mingling of cultures that has married these two movements. The internet allowed gay people from small towns to connect with other people like them, despite the limitations of geography. It’s pretty hard to be motivated for a war unless you know you have an army behind you. One of the first groups to ever send out regular email blasts was the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination, which asked recipients to call or email them when entertainment companies portrayed gay people poorly during the mid-90s. And even before that, tech companies were some of the first to openly support the gay rights movement. Apple had a gay employee group all the way back in 1986, and Lotus was one of the first companies to ever offer health benefits to the partners of gay employees. “The first generation of tech companies — Microsoft, Apple and IBM — were some of the earliest adopters of LGBT benefits,” HRC Workplace Project deputy director Deena Fidas told . “And the second-generation companies — Google and Facebook — not only ensure equality internally, but they’ve turned around and spoken up for issues. For the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, for instance, we saw very strong leadership right out of the gate from the tech world.” Of the 200 companies that signed an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in opposition to Prop 8, were tech companies. Jeff Bezos and his wife pledged $2.5 million to Washington United for Marriage in an effort to legalize gay marriage in Washington State, the same organization that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer each pledged $100,000 to. But beyond the money and the political action, these tech companies — that have grown up over the course of this fundamental shift in our country’s stance toward marriage — do something that is perhaps much more valuable. Facebook not only has an option to be listed as gay or lesbian or bisexual, but there are now for LGBTQ individuals who identify as something other than male or female. In fact, users can choose up to ten different self-identifying options, with pronouns included. Google includes gay couples in their Google Doodles and gets , even when it comes to . and have both aired commercials featuring gay couples. These companies are trusted brands with loyal followings who are pushing the agenda of the gay rights movement into the mainstream. And meanwhile, smaller companies like Grindr and Hornet and Dattch look to serve a relatively underserved group of people looking to find love. Or sex. That’s not to say that the tech industry’s relationship with gay rights doesn’t have its shortcomings. Stereotypes are still at play. Some people in tech are still afraid to come out of the closet. But the role that the tech industry has played in the history of the gay rights movement can not be understated. So today, on the anniversary of Stonewall and the eight anniversary of “Jordan goes to Pride”, I want to tell a quick story. When I was a kid, I was more of a tomboy than you can imagine. I had short hair, played sports, and I wore the clothes that I begged my mom for — the ones in the boys section of Gap Kids. In third grade, our teacher went around the room and asked everyone what they wanted to be when they grew up. I said I wanted to be a talk show host on TV like Oprah. “Hmm,” said Mrs. Gallagher, pausing to examine my blue and white-striped polo, short blond hair and long khaki cargo shorts. “You’re going to have to learn to put on a dress,” she said before moving on to the next person in class. I was pretty devastated. I started to realize, at the young age of 8, that I was automatically limited in what I was going to be able to do with my life. Forget childhood dreams of being a model or a singer or an actress. No fame and fortune for me, the girl who refused to wear dresses. I couldn’t even imagine what I’d wear to work in an office like my dad worked in. A suit, maybe, but I wasn’t sure that would be allowed. As I grew up, I used the internet to figure out my sexuality just like the next guy. I connected with friends who didn’t go to my stupid Christian school who understood what I was going through. Who told me I wasn’t alone. By the time I had come out and started college, I didn’t feel quite so limited. had just started. Ellen Degeneres had returned from the dead to be one of the most brilliant, talented, and dearly loved talk show hosts ever. Today, I host a TCTV show called Fly or Die. I host our TechCrunch regional meetups and our major conference, Disrupt, live on stage. It’s not a talk show on TV, but I get to write, and I love my job more than anything. And without tech, I wouldn’t have it. Oh, and Mrs. Gallagher, I still don’t wear dresses. |
Nest Brings Back The Protect At $99, But Waving Is Still Disabled | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | The Nest Protect is now available following its two-month hiatus after it was pulled for safety concerns. The smoke detector and carbon monoxide detector is now only $99, down from its $129 launch price. The Nest Protect is available store starting tonight. However, one of its key features is still disabled. Nest originally pulled the Protect from shelves on April 3rd following the discovery that Nest Wave, the feature that allowed owners to wave their hand under the sensor to silence the alarm, did not function properly. Nest issued an over-the-air update disabling the feature in existing units and allowed customers to return their Protect for a full refund. The Nest Protect will also ship with this function disabled although a company spokesperson told me that the company is “still looking into a solution.” Even without Nest Wave, the Protect still offers a unique feature set that’s unmatched in the space. The Protect sits in-between dumb smoke detectors and connected detectors monitored by a third-party service. The Protect can notify a smartphone when your house is on fire but not call the fire department. At its launch, Nest bragged about the so-called Nest Wave feature that allowed owners to silence notifications by simply waving their hand under the beeping alarm. That feature was novel, but currently a moot selling point as it’s still disabled. Nest is also leveraging the data collected by Protects installed in customer’s homes. The company just released a white paper on carbon monoxide, which it calls the largest of its kind since it used real world data. The company also releases findings from data collected from Nest Learning Thermostats. |
Google’s Dart Programming Language Is Coming To The Server | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | A few days ago at its I/O developer conference, Google quietly announced that it is working on bringing its to App Engine soon. This implementation will use the company’s recently launched managed virtual machines and the service’s custom runtime support. Because custom runtime support is still in private beta, however, the Dart team isn’t able to release this to the public just yet, but Google provided a sneak peek to Dart developers at I/O of what this would look like. Most developers look at Dart as a JavaScript competitor. In many ways, that’s fair, given that it is clearly geared toward similar use cases and that Google offers a version of its Chrome browser with the Dart virtual machine built-in. Google also offers a Dart-to-JavaScript compiler and plenty of tools for web developers. The ambition behind Dart is much bigger, though, so it maybe shouldn’t have been a surprise that the team is bringing its runtime to App Engine and other servers, as well. I was able to sit down with and Kasper Lund, the two Danes who together invented Dart (Bak also developed Google’s V8 JavaScript engine), to chat about the news and the state of Dart — and its future — in general. They noted that the original idea behind Dart was always to create a general purpose programming language. When they started the project, they didn’t just want to create some variant of JavaScript. The idea was to create a dynamically typed language that developers could pick up pretty easily and that would increase developer productivity. Because of this, the team always focused not just on making the language accessible, but also on the other tools that developer need to be productive in a language. These include the , the main IDE for Dart and a large number libraries that extend the language. In addition, the team also recently launched a developer version of the Chrome browser for Android that has built-in Dart support. Lund also noted that the Dart Editor comes with a number of tools that help developers monitor their programs during runtime. At I/O, the team also showed how Dart can play nicely with Google’s Polymer web components project and its new Material Design user interface language. At I/O, Google announced that developers can now also deploy Dart on its Compute Engine infrastructure using Docker, but by also soon supporting it on App Engine, developers get easier access to Google’s Data Store, cloud monitoring services and caching services. The other thing Dart developers have long been asking for is built-in Dart support in Chrome. When I asked Bak about this, he gave me a knowing smile and said that the team would have more to announce about this soon. Built-in support in Chrome would obviously give Dart a major boost. While the Dart-to-JavaScript compiler works very well, the Dart VM can execute the code significantly faster. It would also give developers a bigger incentive to pick up Dart, given that Google isn’t likely to remove Dart support from its browser once it has included it. Looking ahead, Bak told me that the team is also looking at how it can bring asynchronous code to Dart through concepts similar to JavaScript’s . Since the team launched , it has also worked on creating an (just like JavaScript is based on the EcmaScript standard). As Bak argued, no good programming language has ever been created by committee, so it was important for Google to get Dart to the 1.0 milestone before it started this process. Now, however, it wants to involve other industry players, too, and the team hopes that other browser will integrate it. Being able to write both the front-end and back-end code in the same language is something the Dart team believes will make for more stable code and will make it easier for developer teams to work together. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 11 | null |
Startups And The Un-Banking Of America | Rebecca Lynn | 2,014 | 6 | 29 | Historically, when looking for opportunity in the financial industry where technology can have the greatest impact — for investors and entrepreneurs — the best place to start has been with one of our oldest institutions: banks. However, while critical to our economy, banks are generally inefficient, have high fixed costs and don’t exactly elicit happy thoughts from the average consumer. It’s for these reasons, among others, that the biggest opportunities in the financial world revolve around the disintermediation of these banks and core financial services. Given this backdrop, it’s not hard to imagine that a majority of the people in the U.S. could be “banking” with startups, in one form or another, in the next three to five years. It’s been happening for some time, but the pace and volume of business taken away from banks by startups in the last few years have been significant — and this trend will continue to grow. For starters, we have to look no further for evidence of the inefficiency of our banking system than during our most recent recession. In 2009, the credit crisis was at its peak, and it was practically impossible to get a loan, even for prime borrowers. Interest rates were low, with consumers receiving 0.25 percent on a savings account and prime borrowers paying upwards of 18 percent annual percentage rate. The spread was huge, and so was the opportunity. The credit crisis showed the tech industry that one of the biggest areas of opportunity for startups was in re-imagining consumer lending. People were looking to alternative forms of lending for answers and thanks to the problems above, interest in solutions like peer-to-peer lending were on the rise. Not surprisingly, a cohort of companies emerged to take advantage of these trends, beginning with Prosper, which was soon followed by Lending Club and a litany of others. At the core of this emerging market was the desire to take banks out of the equation and connect investors directly with those in need of capital. In other words, disintermediation. Furthermore, investors looking for options in a down economy wanted stability, transparency, shorter duration and less credit risk, while maintaining solid returns. Compared to traditional options like high-yield bonds, peer-to-peer lending had appeal. Today, companies like Prosper and Lending Club continue to thrive. Prosper has $145 million to date from a host of investors, including Sequoia and DFJ, and projects that it will hit $2 billion in loans originated this year. Lending Club had issued $4 billion in loans by the end of March 2014, and became cash-flow positive in 2012. Of course, it wasn’t an easy road for either company. Both had to survive significant regulatory scrutiny and approval by the SEC, and investors were understandably wary of newer lending models, like peer-to-peer. As a result, it took Lending Club five years to issue $1 billion in loans (2007-2012), but once it passed regulatory scrutiny and both consumers and investors alike came around, these companies grew quickly. It then took the company only one year to top $2 billion (2013). By the end of the first quarter, Lending Club had reached $4 billion, and part of the reason that both it and Prosper have continued to see steady growth is that they made peace with taking their time and built measured growth into their DNA. In Lending Club’s case, it took time to set the table — to register with the SEC, earn real trust with consumers and lenders, and achieve growth while avoiding sub-prime borrowers. They had to be measured in their growth strategy and each step had to be completed and in place before they could move on to the next. The other factor that has led to Lending Club’s success and plays into the theme of disintermediation we’ve been seeing over the last five years is that it has looked to differentiate itself from traditional lenders (and other startups) by adopting a model that has been used by many other successful tech companies, like and , for example. Few have talked about it, but Lending Club and Prosper’s key differentiator is that they are marketplaces. Most other lenders aren’t. They have to borrow money either by going after warehouse lines of credit or they loan out equity capital. Lending Club and Prosper, however, connect buyers and sellers through peer-to-peer lending marketplaces. And as a result, and this is key, it doesn’t have the same balance sheet risk as other traditional lenders might have. Of course, the opportunities for disruption at the hands of disintermediation extend beyond lending. The smartphone and increasing mobility of our world is changing the game. The consumerization of the enterprise and the “BYOD” (bring your own device) trend within businesses mean that phones and tablets are becoming entrenched features within the corporate and consumer worlds. Companies like Intuit, eBay/PayPal, Mint.com started the ball rolling when it comes to disintermediation, and today a new generation of companies like Square, Braintree, Dwolla, Simple, Venmo, InDinero and Check are taking it to the next level. But it’s not just startups . Consumer brand giants are leveraging both startups and the reach of the new mobile phone network to edge into territory that has traditionally been controlled by banks. to be the main processor at thousands of locations is just one of many notable examples. While banks have traditionally owned the small business space, platforms like Square, Intuit and PayPal — and even Amazon and Groupon — are playing the “disintermediator” and are putting credit card processing in the hands of SMBs (small and medium businesses) and consumers. Not only that, they’re bundling in other services with processing and targeting them at SMBs. The growing mobility of the average consumer has allowed businesses to spring up and grow by assuming roles traditionally reserved for banks. Check is one of these businesses trying to do an “end-around” on banks by giving consumers the ability to aggregate and manage all of their critical banking information and bills in one place — on their smartphones. Rather than consumers being forced to go to their banks’ websites, their utility company’s website and so on, it put all of these services in one place. And again, the first generation of financial technology companies (and banks) have taken notice, and one doesn’t have to look far for examples: in February for $117 million; in 2012 for $26 .2 million; last September for $800 million; and in May for $360 million. With a loss of faith in the banking system, mobility on the rise and SMBs beginning to take back some control, we’ve also begun to see an increasing number of people not only turning away from traditional banks, but begin to embrace virtual marketplaces. Just as Lending Club and Prosper took advantage of the limited access to banking capital that begin during the Credit Crisis, marketplaces like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Venmo, Crowdtilt, and Fundly are giving people and businesses an easier way to test, build and fund their products, invest in businesses, pool money, pay friends and facilitate microtransactions. Disintermediation is also beginning to seep into other “older” financial services markets, like wealth advisory. Not unlike banks, wealth advisory is an inefficient cottage industry that traditionally comes loaded with fees and a total lack of transparency. Companies like Wealthfront, Betterment, SigFig, FutureAdvisor and more are looking to help consumers minimize fees and maximize returns. As people start to rely less and less on the institutions that have traditionally acted as sole providers of those services and have maintained a vise-like grip on market share, we’ve begun to see disintermediation arrive in complementary financial services — to the second tier, if you will. And if the last five years is any indication, it won’t stop at second-tier services. So, as we look forward, at all the possibilities inherent in crowdfunding, microfinance and microlending, we’re seeing new potential for companies to provide the next generation of those payment rail systems — the kind for which people have traditionally relied on from banks. As we all know, money transfer is far from instantaneous — and even further from being free. That’s why bitcoin and the latest forms of cryptocurrency are so exciting. Digital currencies like bitcoin have the potential to drive down transaction fees in a big way. Say, for example, you sell electronics or operate a business where profit margins are slim, say under 5 percent. In this case, the traditional 2.5 percent payment fees eat up half of your margins. But with bitcoin, companies could see a significant reduction in transaction fees and, as a result, a boost to their bottom line. What’s more, many small businesses struggle with accepting international payments, but with a distributed, decentralized digital currency, international borders and monetary systems decrease in importance and relevance. It also could be hugely beneficial for micropayments, especially on mobile platforms, and a digital currency of record could become the micropayment system for the web, allowing publications, for example, to accept fractions of a cent for every article a reader consumes. It opens up a whole new set of monetization options and alternatives to the traditional paywall. Of course, while the prospect of a digital currency becoming a sort of free rails for moving money is exciting, interchange fees still exist today with bitcoin, and regulation, true anonymity and volatility still remain question marks. But the world of digital currency remains an exciting area of opportunity. Other areas that are prime for disruption by startups include underwriting and risk scoring; both areas are being reinvented today through the availability and abundance of new data types. From the rise of peer-to-peer lending models, mobile wallets, digital investment advisory, to the bitcoin revolution, today’s digital disintermediation comes in many forms – all of which challenge banks to innovate. To those startups that aim to fundamentally change the way we transact for the better, we’ll be cheering you on. |
RapidMiner Scoops Up Radoop For Hadoop Analytics Processing | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | , a big data analytics startup, purchased former partner giving it Hadoop processing and access to the Radoop team’s Hadoop expertise. They did not share the purchase price. RapidMiner enables customers to create a data-analytics workflow and grab data from a variety of sources without scripting using built-in connectors, then process that data to see patterns that might require action. It then offers a more detailed view to see possible solutions to issues that arise. For example, if it’s analyzing data from a CRM tool, says RapidMiner CEO Ingo Mierswa, it might learn from the data that the customer can expect a 30 percent churn rate in the next year, but it doesn’t stop there. He says it will then start analyzing each customer and predicting the likelihood it will churn to provide predictive actions at a detailed level. After RapidMiner completes the analysis, customers can send the results to a business intelligence package, or deliver results as part of the workflow design. Until purchasing Radoop, RapidMiner processed the data in-memory or executed directly in the database. With Radoop, customers now have the option of processing on a Hadoop cluster, so instead of being limited to a single machine, they can add multiple nodes, giving customers the ability to process much larger data sets than they could before (without using a partner product like Radoop). Radoop fills in a key piece for RapidMiner, says Mierswa, and gives them access to Radoop’s expertise around Hadoop processing. “Big data is changing fast, and it’s difficult to keep up with the pace [of change] and to really develop new technology necessary for complex topics like predicative analytics without true experts.” He added, “We are getting [Hadoop] expertise and this is important because more companies are moving to Hadoop.” Mierswa said the company started as open source and has been able to scale its user base to around 250,000 users. A found that almost 40 percent of respondents were using RapidMiner, up from 26.7 percent the year before. Mierswa said they are looking for the most efficient and modern ways to process data, and if it’s Hadoop, RapidMiner wants to be able to give it to them. This purchase gives customers that option. As Mierswa pointed out, it was possible to do this before by buying the solutions separately, and as partners they were working closely together, but by combing forces, RapidMiner now offers a comprehensive solution from a single vendor. |
@WalmartLabs Grabs Its First “Silicon Alley” Startup With Acquisition Of Fashion App Stylr | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | , the retailer’s Silicon Valley-based R&D and innovation center, is today announcing its 13th acquisition — and its first from New York’s “ ” — with the acquisition of fashion app . The app, which helps consumers find clothes they love in nearby stores, will be shut down. It will be pulled from the iTunes App Store by the end of this month. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we understand it was more of an acqui-hire related to bringing the talent of the founders, Eytan Daniyalzade and , to Walmart. Stylr was a smaller company, with only the two founders at the time of the acquisition. The company was backed by $20,000 from DreamIt Ventures, but had no other outside investment. Both founders are Stanford-educated engineers, and have a history of working in the technology industry. Stylr CTO Atikoglu previously worked at Cisco and Facebook, and Daniyalzade has experience at Adapt.tv, Chartbeat, Microsoft and McKinsey. As for the itself, Stylr offered the experience of flipping through a rack of clothes on your smartphone. It pulled in inventory from local stores, letting you find what you want, in your size, then reserve it at the store directly from the app’s interface. The company had grown to include thousands of products from a number of well-known retailers, including Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel, American Eagle, Banana Republic, Coach, Gap, Guess, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Steve Madden, The Limited and others. The technology Stylr developed won’t be integrated into Walmart’s own mobile apps, but Walmart says it will “leverage best practices and insights” that Stylr learned, and that there are “a lot of synergies” between the companies in terms of combining digital capabilities with physical retail. That could imply that Walmart is working — more broadly speaking — in the direction of better tying up its online presence with its retail stores in new ways. For now, Walmart says Stylr’s co-founders will be tasked with “developing enhancements to the in-store experience.” Today, the company reports that over half of Walmart smartphone users have used their devices while shopping in the store, and 80 percent of its customers under 35 own a smartphone – and that’s a rapidly growing figure. What really impressed the Walmart team about Stylr in particular was how quickly the team built the app, the overall experience of using it, and the founders’ passion for combining physical and digital retail. With the app’s shutdown, Stylr’s founders will now be joining @WalmartLabs in San Bruno, Calif. |
A Drone Map That Delivers You Anywhere In The World | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | Drones deliver to our hotels and to our bellies, and promise to follow our . Now a new site delivers us via drone to over 1,500 destinations using an interactive map. Switzerland-based developer Jan Hiersemenzel launched in April to give us a bird’s-eye view of the world using drones. The site is basically a database of YouTube videos that users upload and pin to a location on an interactive Google Map. Hiersemenzel is obsessed with all things drone. He’s worked with drone aerial videography for over a year now, making and looking at hundreds of videos, and jots off the names of the best ones for getting good video — the being a favorite. But he says he couldn’t find a database where all the videos of all the cool places there were to see in the world existed. “I remember when Street View came out. I was obsessed and so were my friends. I would look all over the world and travel to new places. I thought, okay, we can do that, but now with drones,” says Hiersemenzel. There are some really cool aerial shots of various places on the site (I could personally spend hours going through them). Hiersemenzel tinkers around a bit on the site’s search bar while we are on a long distance call: “Oh, I have to show you the one where the guy flies his drone almost straight into a volcano!” Here’s the shot he was talking about, just off of Fiji (the volcano erupts just as the drone flies away and it’s amazing.): [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-shWVW1UBc&w=560&h=315] And here’s another one at sunrise going over the Twin Peaks neighborhood of San Francisco: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuKUx7ygT5o&w=560&h=315] Drone enthusiasts send Hiersemenzel and his team of four about 100-200 drone videos on a daily basis. Right now, he or someone on the team has to vet them all for quality. Anything military-related is automatically banned (Hiersemenzel wants to keep the negative side of drones out of it). He also vets for anything low quality or too commercial, though there are a few GoPro and other ad videos that have slipped through. There are a lot of videos in some parts of the map and a total lack in others, like North Korea where YouTube is banned. But with more users adding to the site every day, Hiersemenzel hopes to fill in a lot of gaps. We chatted a bit about my own home state of Utah and a lack of video there. “Add some!” he tells me, and points out the several National Parks videos already on the site — although those are tough to get. Some parks are from flying over and taking shots. However, the site definitely has legs for a lot of armchair travel and education about the world. A drone recently discovered some ancient petroglyphs in Southern Utah. The petroglyphs can’t be seen from hikers on the ground. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6J_6KL03s8&w=560&h=315] TravelByDrone is just a website right now. There’s no funding except for a banner ad at the bottom, and sometimes the site is kind of slow. But Hiersemenzel and his team are working on an app and some other upgrades to make it better. The site, according to him, gets around 60K views a day from all over the world. |
Rendor Turns Your Single-Camera Smartphone Into A Real 3D Scanner | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | Using a piece of paper with a specially printed grid and a regular smartphone, Rendor may have just cracked the 3D scanning code. The system allows you to create a 3D scan of almost any object simply by taking video of it from every angle. The program interpolates the shape of the object based on how it is positioned on the grid and then generates a usable 3D file. Although it’s not quite ready to ship just yet, it looks to be one of the best 3D-scanning tools I’ve seen. There are others out there, like the and Autodesk’s app, but Rendor uses computer vision in a very specific way to create more accurate models. Built by , the program uses only a single camera to render the object. As you can see from the video below, the front of the object was very nicely rendered, but because they didn’t spin around the back, the object is “connected” to the background. However, thanks to the printed sheet, they should be able to get a 360-degree view of the object and allow the system to assess bulges, creases and other aspects of 3D objects. Plus it looks cool. The app should be ready in July, but you can sign up for . [vimeo https://vimeo.com/97247039] |
Congress Set To Permanently Ban Taxation Of Internet Access | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | What has 214 co-sponsors in the House and is probably going to become law? More popular than ice cream, the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act would forever ban taxation of Internet access and “discriminatory” taxes on “electronic commerce.” You’ll note that the bill is called the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act, and not the Internet Tax Freedom Act. That’s because former law, which set in place the rules to begin with, expires this year. Here’s the : And here’s : Simple. According , the House Judiciary Committee will mark up the bill this Wednesday morning. Guess what the Senate named its version of the bill? The . These Congressional types and their witty names. The Senate version . All aboard! Barring something dramatic, we could actually pass something this Congress. |
Swatch’s Sistem51 Rethinks The Mechanical Watch | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | I have a soft spot for mechanical watches, which is why the so-called Sistem51 (Swatch calls it the shouty ) is so near and dear to my heart. It is, in short, one of the most interesting developments in mass-market micro mechanics since the invention of the quartz Timex. It is a mix of cool high-tech and ridiculous, Tamagotchi-like old tech, and it’s interesting that it hasn’t been covered more. First, some background. Swatch (which, under the Swatch Group umbrella, owns a number of major watch brands, including Jaquet Droz, Omega, and Breguet) makes most of its money off of the sale of low-end watches. In 1980, the Swiss watch industry was in turmoil. The first quartz watches were hitting the market and buyers were snapping them up — even though one of the first Seikos cost more than a Toyota. As prices fell, however, mechanical Swiss watches fell by the wayside, considered staid and boring by a new generation of buyer. Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller, two engineers inside the Swatch Group, noticed that no one wore a watch to the beach even though many watches had been waterproof for years. The company had also created a very simple, very thin quartz movement — the guts of the watch — and had nowhere to put it. The pair stuffed the quartz movement into a plastic, ostensibly waterproof case, and called it the Swatch. Swatch, which was an elision of “Second Watch,” became a fashion item and gave the company a massive base customers who may have looked in askance at a fancy gold or steel dive watch.
These low-cost, high-design timepieces are what prop up the massively expensive and extremely complex manufacturing operations that produce some of the most beautiful watches in the world. And now the SISTEM51 is here to improve that range with a mechanical movement that doesn’t use a battery, is simpler than any before and, thanks to a hermetically sealed case, requires almost no maintenance. This is important because, thanks to research into materials, lubrication and manufacturing, Swatch has been able to create the Platonic ideal of a timepiece: It works for a long time without maintenance, it does exactly what it is supposed to do, and it is as simple as possible. It’s also important because where the watch industry goes, so goes high-tech. For all the talk of the little Swiss watchmaker at his bench, the reality of Swatch is far more technological. These are mass-produced items that require a great deal of quality control to get right. Each gear and gimbal has to work perfectly in order to function and, like a PCB inside a new phone, the parts have to work with the whole to maintain accuracy and control. Watch companies were using sapphire glass and liquid metal, as well beveling, long before Apple was and they were branding mass-market technology to the world long before Samsung thought of it. In short, these are the first items of desire with techno-guts. The watch began shipping in but is now reaching stores (and airport kiosks) near you. Priced below $200, these fashion watches may look cool, but remember the movement inside is the real triumph of compression, mechanics, and design. |
The Middle Finger, Coming Soon To An Emoji Keyboard Near You | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | You can say a whole lot with just a few emoji. Want to ask a friend if they want to go for a bike ride? Bam. Want to ask what you should bring home for dinner? Bam. Want to say that you and Jack are taking the bus to see Prince perform Purple Rain, and you’ll be home by 9:30? Bam. If you have 400 hours to dig through all of the available emoji instead of just typing a message with words like a human, the possibilities are Unless you want to flip someone off. That… you can’t do. The Unicode Consortium to add 250 new emoji symbols to the Unicode Standard. Amongst others, some of the new symbols include a chipmunk, a thermometer, and the vulcan salute. Oh, and a lil’ ditty they like to call “ “. A mockup, as made by the fine folk at the aptly dubbed : For context, in case you’re not sure what we’re talking about here: when you send a friend a text message with those little cutesie pictographic icons that are built into your phone — be a ghost or a cat or a or whatever — you’re using a standarized system called Emoji. The Unicode Consortium gives phone manufacturers (Apple, Google, etc.) a big list of icons they should implement, then it’s up to the phone maker to decide what each icon should look like. As of this morning, that list just picked up 250+ new icons. Now, to be clear: doesn’t have 250 new emoji icons on it just yet. If the phone manufacturers embrace this expanded list, the new icons will take a while to design/implement — and even then, each icon’s design/implementation is at the whims of whoever is making the OS. It’ll be fun to see how (or really, if) Google/Apple/et al. implement the ol’ middle finger. If they don’t, people will just see a string of text or a blank box where the icon should show up. If they do, they risk some parent somewhere flipping out and suing because their kid’s phone has a middle finger icon built into it, and everyone knows that cartoon middle fingers are a gateway drug to Grand Theft Autos and loitering. Perhaps some middling, tongue-in-cheek implementation would do; an upside down bird icon, perhaps? |
Microsoft Brings Penny Arcade Artist To An Engineering Team To Work Out Surface Pro 3 Issues | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | Microsoft is gearing up to begin shipping its Surface Pro 3 tablet, and many have already had a chance to test out the latest in tablet/laptop hybrids. One early tester is Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik (aka Gabe) who was a huge fan of the Surface Pro 2, because with the stylus, it was an awesome digital artist tool for hand-drawn creations. Gabe with the Surface Pro 3. He said it introduced some lag into the equation for menu navigation and drawing (I’ve tried it myself and I found the same thing), and which put the home button in a new, much more inconvenient location. Microsoft took this feedback to heart — so much so that they brought Gabe in to a team of Surface Pro 3 product engineers and designers. He offered his thoughts on the home button placement, general performance issues and the way the pressure sensitivity feels “off.” The team took vigorous notes while they were doing this, and presented Gabe with a sampling of the various Surface Pro 3 hardware configurations. After about a week, they came to the Penny Arcade offices and showed him some modified devices that included fixes, such as a temporary disabling of the Windows Home hardware button when the pen is in use on the screen. The Surface team also built an app that could change the pressure curve to suit an individual artist’s style, which is impressive work for just a few days’ time. From basically every review I’ve seen so far, and my own hands-on experience, the one thing holding the Surface Pro 3 back from being a standout device for dedicated digital artists were these flaws, most of which I’d assumed were the result of going from tech provider Wacom to N-Trig, and dropping from 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity to just 256. Microsoft seems dedicated to helping even this small niche market find the best experience possible with the Surface Pro 3, and that’s impressive in a mass-market economy. Plus, if Microsoft is serious about tackling niche buyers, it can continue to charge a premium for its devices, since professionals consider it worth the extra expense. The creative pro market is also the group upon which Apple built its early reputation, before it gained the popularity that it currently enjoys with a wider audience. Microsoft paying attention and delivering a specific service to that group signals a strategy that involves not just winning customers, but also building an image around Surface hardware that encroaches on territory long-held in esteem by its rivals. That, or it just cares about making a nice piece of hardware, both of which are respectable goals. |
iBeacons Usher In The Contextual Shopping Era | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | If the writing was not on the wall already that the use of proximity-aware beacons was the future of retail, now we have some data to back it up. According to a study by , the use of beacons ( , and has already shipped millions of capable devices) in retail stores caused a 19x increase in interactions with advertised products, a 16.5x increase in app usage in-store and a 6.4x increase in the likelihood that a shopper kept an app that sent them a beacon message on their phones. Those stats are incredibly impressive. inMarket says it measures interactions in that customers are picking those physical products up and scanning barcodes. There’s no info about raw numbers, of course, but if those improvements could be tacked onto existing mobile efforts, marketers have a huge opportunity here. InMarket, an ad platform that now focuses on mobile and beacons, rolled out one of the biggest networks of these proximity-sensitive devices to retail shoppers earlier this year and has continued to expand its installs. InMarket conducted the study in a controlled sample of 25,000 shoppers over 30 days in April and May of this year, using apps that had its Mobile to Mortar framework installed. Beacons installed inside retail stores like Saks or grocery outlets can send proximity-based alerts to shoppers at the precise moment — and location — that they’re enabled to make a decision on a purchase. This is the holy grail of retail advertising, which normally takes a scattershot approach to ‘pre-advertising’ shoppers or tries to guesstimate when they’re in the vicinity of a product. When a beacon knows you’re within a couple of feet of a Zatarain’s rice mix and sends you a coupon, that can be much more effective than trying to mail you a coupon a month earlier in the off chance that you might be in the mood for creole. These initial inMarket statistics are enormously promising for retailers anyway. “This is the first data gleaned from a beacon rollout at scale that proves beacons WILL become commonplace and accepted by users when implemented correctly,” inMarket CEO Todd Dipaola said in response to questions from TechCrunch. “There will be some winners and losers in rolling out successful beacon strategies. The winners will help your phone behave like a concierge with personalized answers and advice just as you need it. Others who try to make phones into a used car salesman and send pushes just because they can, will have trouble reaching an audience.” This idea that you don’t have to hunt around proactively for coupons or deals I’ve — that contextual data pushed to users is the future of mobile. The precision that beacons offer, combined with data from advertisers, manufacturers and retailers, will make this stuff more effective and less annoying. Rather than smashing you with notifications just because you may be near a store, the laser precision of a beacon notification uses contextual signals to talk to you when it matters the most. Note, of course, that I’m talking mostly from the viewpoint of an advertiser or marketer here. I’m not completely comfortable with the extent of the data and context advertisers will have on me within the next couple of years. Nevertheless, the ‘pro’ of it is that you’ll get bombarded less with crap that doesn’t really matter. And if you’re concerned about your location being tracked then you should probably stop carrying a smartphone. I’m sure that consumer advocacy groups and Congress watchdogs will have a lot of work to do regulating this field over the next few years. Dipaola notes, in keeping with Apple’s , that moving off of WiFi tracking (which has no privacy controls) and onto beacons actually has some distinct privacy benefits. “For retailers, beacons not only improve the shopper experience, but allow privacy by design store analytics. iOS 8 will end wifi in-store analytics, in favor of opt-in solutions like beacons.” Anyhow, back to where this could lead us. We asked Dipaola to describe what a store experience might look like in a context-aware beacon-ready future. Let’s go grocery shopping in 2020 for a moment. It’s just 5 ½ years away, but it could be dramatically different. You walk into the store, let’s say the produce section, and are reminded about which apples are in season and are ripest this week, how much they weigh and how much they will cost. Since you previously favorited a recipe for apple pie, an inMarket beacon pings your device with a personalized offer for pie crust. You head over to the freezer aisle and pick up ice cream — where your BLE fitness app informs you that because you did 4 miles on the treadmill that morning, you can fit a few ounces of vanilla into your daily calorie budget. As you head over to the cereal aisle, thanks to proximity, your list/pantry app informs you that your wife added Special K to the list this morning. Oh, and watch out for X cereal because you’ve indicated you’re allergic to nuts. Finally, you exit the store through EZ-Pass-style payment lanes that use BLE payments to debit your card, so no more waiting on line. Just show your receipt as you walk out the door. DiPaola says that everything described is possible with beacons and mobile hardware, and that inMarket’s data shows that shoppers actually want that stuff. And it’s not just retail stores, either. are blanketing the Cannes Lions Festival — an atavistic tribute to marketing manipulation held in France this week — with beacons that will trigger polling and surveys from the festival’s . The app will also enable attendees to keep track of each other in real-time with the ‘Around Me’ feature in the culmination of a thousand ‘local social’ wet dream concept apps. The heavy presence in the app and at the event is no accident, of course. Beacons are considered the next frontier for marketers, and demonstrating their precision and power at the hot industry event of the year is savvy for companies like Eventbase and Urban Airship, who are tapping into the field. I’m not sure how okay I am with the way that the contextual shopping era is shaping up, but it’s coming. |
Motorola’s Amazing Budget Smartphone Is Now Available With 4G | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | The Motorola G is , and it just got better. The budget phone is now available in the U.S. with 4G for just $219. Unlocked and not tied to a carrier contract. And that’s awesome. You should buy five. The Motorola G is the firm’s budget handset that will not break any benchmark records or win design awards. Yet it packs all the goods needed to qualify it as a quality handset. It’s without question one of the best phones on the market . The non-4G version costs $179, which is less than you’ll pay for many phones locked to a carrier. But now, for a few dollars more, you can order a version with a 4G LTE option. The new version of the phone in white or black. The Moto G and Moto X are the silent underdogs in the mobile game right now. Both offer a lot even when the price is not considered. But when the price is considered, the phones should shoot up to the top of most shoppers’ lists. Since both are available unlocked at a fair price, they’re available directly from the and can be used on any carrier operating GSM networks — like AT&T. This strategy closely matches Lenovo’s long-standing carrier-agnostic viewpoint. If anything, now under Lenovo’s care, Motorola’s products should maintain their low price points while offering more competitive hardware. |
Inside Jobs: How Alice Lee Blends Art And Tech As An Illustrator At Dropbox | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | It might not seem like artistic pursuits have much of a place in multi-billion dollar software businesses. But as you can see in this week’s episode of , creating art is a full-time job for Dropbox’s . As an illustrator and product designer, Lee spends her days designing, doodling, and drawing, helping create the visual images that represent Dropbox and all to the outside world. Lee describes the work that she and her colleagues do as a form of storytelling without words. It was really interesting to hear her talk about what she does in more depth, and its unique challenges:
“You’re showing your view of the world in some way to somebody who will immediately be able to interpret this visual thing that you’ve produced… I feel like illustration is about creating stories and usually metaphors. So at Dropbox, a lot of our product concepts are very abstract. So we need to, especially in user education, explain, ‘What is a sharing a file?’ That’s not a thing that really exists in the real world in the way that it exists in the digital Dropbox world. …It’s like finding the seed to the flame. What is at the center of an emotion or feeling that you have that compels you to use this product?” Watch Alice Lee talk about that and much more in the video embedded above. Producing, shooting, editing, sound, and lighting for Inside Jobs is done by . Production coordination and creative direction is done by . Original logo design by . Motion graphics and graphic design by . |
Job Hunting Bags Millennials New HR Apps | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | With an overwhelming number of millennials still out of work despite a slowly recovering U.S. economy, venture capital firms are rushing in to back new recruiting and human resources tools to make the job hunt a bit easier. The unemployment rate in the U.S. is , according to a June 6 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but for the millennial generation (18-29 years old) the number is higher. According to a from the advocacy organization, , about 15.5 percent of millennials are currently unemployed. With hiring, employee retention and career planning becoming more important for businesses, and with so much demand for new jobs in the economy, it’s no wonder venture capitalists have boosted their spending on apps targeting human resources and recruitment. In the second quarter of 2014 alone, investors spent $294 million on new human resources software and services, according to CrunchBase. The biggest rounds went to companies like and , but a number of companies are beginning to emerge and gain traction, offering services to millennials and new college graduates.
“If you look at the [human resources] market, this is a very big market that’s grown very quickly,” says Mike Zappert, a principal with Adams Street Partners, which invested in the most recent financing for the human resources and workforce analytics toolkit, Visier. “This is at least an $8 billion market.” While job retention, career training and advancement represent one end of the market, tools to attract new hires, represent another significant slice of the employment pie. In recent months, companies have staked out various strategic partnerships as the market for millennial mind share starts getting crowded. , a company backed by institutional investors and , recently connected with DirectEmployers — a — to provide exclusive opportunities for its network of candidates. “College recruiting is a big pain point for all of the DirectEmployers members, and collegefeed is going to be the solution for that,” says chief executive officer Sanjeev Agrawal. The DirectEmployers channel is a huge win for Agrawal’s nascent startup. “Colleges in our world are getting a lot more ‘with it,’ where the provost and the career center are waking up to the fact that parents and students want employment after college,” says Agrawal. In some ways, he says, collegefeed is a way to dilute the power of the old-boy network and get qualified candidates in front of companies without the old-school country club networking between parents’ contacts. “It is the nature of the millennial audience that is being attracted to sites like ours,” Agrawal says. “They are sick and tired of the of the world. Given the choice between a new software as a service platform like collegefeed and LinkedIn, which is their parents’ network, they’ll choose the SaaS site.” Agrawal isn’t alone. Sites like and are both trying to connect graduates with employers, although Raise Your Flag has a somewhat different approach. Rather than take on college graduates, the company is looking to link high school graduates who don’t intend to pursue a secondary education with employers and career paths that can help them succeed. “Almost half the kids in North America aren’t going to college after they leave high school,” says Ryan Porter, the co-founder of Raise Your Flag and a motivational speaker. Porter never attended college himself, instead becoming a motivational speaker on the subject of pursuing your dreams without a college education. A graduate of the program in Toronto, Raise Your Flag has also gained some initial customers among big companies that are looking for access to potential employees. “They are promoting their company, their culture and their career paths on the site,” says Porter. “They want to make sure that when employees start with those entry-level positions they know there is a bright future for them down the road.” In all, investors have backed hundreds of entrepreneurs looking at ways to solve the recruiting, hiring and retention problems that bedevil the creation and retention of a modern workforce.
Entrepreneurs aren’t the only ones grappling with these issues, either. In April, the White House to providing grants to high schoolers to pursue college education and employment opportunities. The White House established 24 Youth CareerConnect awards providing $107 million to local partnerships with education agencies, workforce investment boards, institutions of higher education and employers to redesign the teaching experience and provide students with industry-relevant education to receive post-secondary education or registered apprenticeships. |
As Teacher Tenure Degrades, New Opportunities Emerge For Startups To Remake Education | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | One of the most notable court cases of the year for startups was officially revealed last week, and there was . Last week, , arguing that tenure disproportionately harms the education of students from poor and minority school districts, and is thus unconstitutional. The case was brought by , which was financed by a Silicon Valley technology executive, . While the decision has been stayed pending appeals to higher courts, it represents the first vulnerability in school workplace rules that have blocked needed reforms of our education system for decades. It also represents a key opening for startups to begin thinking about grade school in a post-tenure world, and the opportunities that will shortly exist to improve education. Much like taxi medallions and hotel occupancy laws, teacher tenure rules were perhaps once required in the market. to ensure a minimum level of service and safety for passengers in cabs. By restricting entry into the market, taxis could afford to maintain their vehicles and to secure a more consistent income. Hotel occupancy laws were designed to protect consumers from issues like fire by requiring hotels to have adequate escape-route signage and ensure that occupancy levels are safe. They also help to establish the duties of guests and hotel operators to ensure a fair transaction. But all of these sorts of consumer protection laws eventually started to work against consumers. Governments began to rake in substantial profit from medallion sales ( ). Hotel occupancy taxes, which are assessed on guests, represent an easy way to secure revenue from tourists and other visitors who lack political representation. As these policies affected such important industries as hospitality and transportation, lobbying dollars began to flow to politicians, as well. We see much the same story with teacher tenure rules today. Teacher tenure laws have a number of theoretical uses. They are designed to give teachers curricular freedom, such that a biology teacher can teach evolution even at the protests of parents. They are designed to prevent administrators from unfairly targeting some teachers for punishment, or to fire the oldest teachers simply because they are the most expensive. Ultimately, the goal of these rules is to ensure the quality of education by the group that has dedicated their lives to that task. It’s hard to see those idealistic goals in the cynicism of today’s system. Teachers can be protected by tenure despite poor performance or, worse, creating a hostile teaching environment. Tenure for grade-school teachers is offered at surprisingly early levels of experience, sometimes as little as two or three years. Compare that to professors, who may receive tenure after 5–9 years in a PhD, 3–5 years in a postdoc, and seven years as an assistant professor. It’s entirely possible today that a teacher two years out of college has a guaranteed job for life. While many commentators have noted that teacher unions face an uphill battle in the court of public opinion to maintain their rules, few have focused on the role that startups are playing in changing these rules. Course sites like Khan Academy are now used by millions of students per year, and in some cases, parents have totally supplanted in-school teaching through homeschooling using such tools. Much as Uber and Airbnb forced governments to reconsider misused regulations, we need a startup to come forward and be the change-bearer in education. Today’s edtech startups were built in a culture that accepted tenured teachers as the gatekeepers of revenue, leading many startups to either reinforce the power of teachers or to position their products to students and parents outside of school. While tenure hasn’t disappeared, it is clear that there is a serious opportunity for a startup to come in and reshape the actual schools themselves. I don’t know where this startup will come from, but I want to offer a couple of possibilities for founders to think about as they consider ideas in the education space. First, and perhaps most obviously, what kind of teacher marketplace can we provide? Teachers represent one of the largest true professions in the United States, , or more than 1 percent of our population. With weakened tenure laws, there is now a need for teachers to display their credentials, demonstrate their teaching techniques, and build a network of contacts across schools for everything from curriculum design to seeking better employment. Like Uber and Airbnb, a marketplace could be the driver needed to guide students to better teachers, creating a virtuous cycle that improves education while eroding antiquated regulations. Marketplaces don’t have to be the only option, though. Another path is how to judge the performance of teachers. This is an extraordinarily hard topic, and I am sympathetic to teachers who complain about the focus on a handful of exams as proof of performance. How can we create software tools that simultaneously help students achieve more, while providing real-time feedback to teachers on their own performance? Obviously, there are a number of startups working on this problem, but now they may be able to use a more aggressive go-to-market strategy as unions and administrators become more receptive to tools to improve performance. Another approach is going to come from the structure of grade school education. While charter schools have their place in our education system, it is clear that if we want to have an impact on the lives of the majority of students, we have to empower our public schools to adapt their structures to best work with kids. What would happen if we had an even more decentralized model for education, such that teachers could be part-time, or that students could accelerate or decelerate in subjects as their interest and abilities allowed? It is totally believable that we could do a fundamental refactor of education using the Internet as the new organizing principle. Finally, startups may look into teacher education itself as a potential avenue for rebuilding education. , with low standards and little focus on classroom preparation. Much as Khan Academy changed the way we view student education, we could build the next-generation platform for pedagogy. For once, teachers would have access to real professional development, which may not just improve education, but may also increase retention of high-achieving teachers in the process. No matter what the avenue may be, startup founders need to remember that real students are affected by the products and services we design. We have an obligation to carefully test and evaluate the efficacy of our various startups, and adapt as quickly as necessary to ensure that our children have an opportunity at a great education. The good news is that the American education system has refused to do this for decades, and there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. The bad news is that students have deeply suffered along the way. With teacher tenure now in the crosshairs, we finally have a chance to make things better. |
The Tesla Model X SUV Is Coming In Early 2015 With Gull-Wing Doors | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | Reservation holders for the Tesla Model X today that the electric SUV will hit the production lines early next year. Best of all, Tesla confirms in this email that the gull-wing doors will make the production model and all models will feature all-wheel drive and there will be an option for a third row of seating. These are big updates, but they shouldn’t come as a surprise. Because, you know, Tesla. Tesla is the master at under-promising and over-delivering. Generally, in the automotive world, car companies load concept cars with pie-in-the-sky features — like gull-wing doors — and then remove them from the production model. But not Tesla. With the Model S, the company showed off rear-facing seats and few automotive pundits expected the option to be available on the production model. Yet they are. And now, with the Model X, the gull-wing doors were the marquee feature of the concept car and, surprisingly, will be the marquee feature of the production car. What wasn’t announced is when the Model X will ship, only that models for reservation holders will be produced in early 2015. Historically, Tesla has taken a conservatively approach to manufacturing as the company was much more lean when the Roadster and Model S first hit the lines. Still, spinning up a manufacturing facility to full capacity takes time, so the Model X might not be available for general purchase until much later in 2015. But gull-wing doors! |
Bannerman Delivers Bouncers On Demand | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | It looks like this is going to be the year of the “Uber for things that aren’t rides” in Silicon Valley. While the market for similar services — like or — is already starting to develop, the concept is starting to move onto totally unrelated markets. , for instance, is a startup in the Y Combinator Summer 2014 class that sounds a lot like “Uber for security.” With Bannerman, you can visit their site, give a date, address, and the number of security guards you need, and within 30 minutes they’ll have everything set up. Not quite Uber-level speed, but way less of a hassle than trying to find and arrange similar services through a private security company. That’s not me regurgitating what I’ve been told by Bannerman’s cofounders. Two years ago, I was in charge of arranging events for a student organization at Berkeley, where we were encouraged to bring in security for events of a certain size. Researching private security isn’t a trivial task. Most people have no idea what any of the certifications companies claim mean, or how to do a background check, or even where to start the search. My fellow organizers and I would often decide to simply scale back our ambitions for events rather than potentially bring in a sketchy security guard. That’s not an option for professionals tasked with putting together events for their employers or the causes they care about. So they’re forced to either go for the high-end firms that guarantee a certain level of service, or risk going with a less reputable security provider. With its $35 per-hour, per-guard flat rate (paid after an event has gone on without a hitch), Bannerman is shooting right for the middle of those two markets. That gets you a lot of what the pricier firms on the market provide, like guaranteed background checks through the California Department of Justice and the FBI, insurance for the guards on duty, and the assurance that guards have received a minimum of 40 hours of training. Oh, and of course Bannerman promises that guards will have “physical presence for visual deterrence.” Translation: these guys are huge. That doesn’t come as much of a surprise, as co-founder Johnny Chin told me last week that most of the guards that Bannerman has recruited are veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. The company describes itself as “a website that makes it possible for anyone to book security on demand for business or personal use.” It’s almost odd to hear a startup describe their service as “a website” in this era of mobile-first development, since most young companies in the Silicon Valley tech scene have found that targeting the device that’s always on you is rather lucrative. In this case, it makes some sense. If you’re organizing an event, you’re generally dealing with mass emails, some kind of online registration system, interacting with caterers, and maybe even arranging shuttles for people. While organizing a shindig at your place might be feasible on your phone, getting tens of people to go to an office party or an art gallery requires a bit more digital heavy lifting. With that said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bannerman release an iOS app before they’re done with Y Combinator. While I can definitely see how Bannerman is a huge improvement over the security options event organizers have today, it’s difficult to predict just how big the market is for getting security guards to a particular event quickly. The company sent me an eye-popping estimate for the size of the global security market in 2016: $244 billion. But a quick look at shows that it includes lucrative services like armored transport and private prison management, so unless Bannerman is already planning on vastly expanding the services it offers, it should probably find a better figure for the size of the pie from which it’s trying to get a slice. With that said, history has shown that the strategy tends to not only capture a large portion of a market, but also expand the size of the market for a good or service. Just as Uber making it easier to get a ride leads to people getting more rides, it’s possible that making it easy to get security will lead to people getting security for more events than they would have in the past. Considering the startup is only operating in San Francisco for now, they have room to figure out who might be interested in additional security before expanding to other markets. Right now, notable customers include and , but I could see techies using the service to provide security for their wildly opulent private parties and bars using it to add a couple bouncers after a particularly rowdy Giants game. |
This Chocolate Drone Will Fly Directly Into Your Distended Belly | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6lRbiHswho] Look: you and I both know what’s going on here. This is either a viral ad for Milka or a riff on Üter Zörker at the Springfield Chocolate Factory but let’s retract our marketing antennae for a moment and just revel in the idea: this is video of a quadcopter made of chocolate. The body is made of chocolate. The motors, obviously, are metal and the propellers plastic, but the rest of the darn thing is chocolate. If that doesn’t tickle your choco-bone, I don’t know what will. The build was simple. The “chef” (we’re still getting the names of these folks) took some baking chocolate and some Milka and melted them. Then she poured it into a simple cross mold with the motors intact and then froze the whole thing solid. A few hours later you have a delicious quadcopter that is ready to take flight in the verdant pastures of some distant Teutonic summer village, the scent of cocoa nibs flitting through the grass as the rotors spin and jazzy music plays. What more could you ask for? Plus, the project totally worked. As one wag on noted, “On the upside, the next time I’m tuning the controller and a crosswind destroys my quad, I can literally eat the devastation.” Next up, the “Chocolate Copter” team of Michael and his girlfriend are working on an . Welcome to the future, where everything is Schokolade. |
MakerBot Now Shipping Massive Z18 3D Printer | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | When announced the Z18 printer last January at CES, there wasn’t much of a shipping date. Now, however, the company has begun shipping the massive 3D printer to customers who have pre-ordered thus far and expect to ship from their Brooklyn factory in six to eight weeks for new orders. The is most notable for its 18-inch build height, allowing you to print surprisingly large items including life-sized helmets and cohesive industrial prototypes for vehicles and the like. It is part of the new MakerBot line-up which also includes the and the standard Replicator. Who needs a Z18? Designers of large-scale items, obviously, as well as engineers and anyone looking to prototype large objects without having to snap them into smaller pieces in software and then glue them together. It is still one of the least expensive large-format printers available (although there have been some ) but the MakerBot includes a heated and closed build environment as well as a camera for watching the print in action via desktop or mobile app. That said, if you have seven large to drop on a large-format printer, this might be just the thing you need to build your Iron Man/Hello Kitty mash-up cosplay armor. Let us know how it goes. |
Secret Finally Lets All Your Freaky Friends Have Their Own Feeds | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | No more “I love my wife” or “I love my husband” posts from Montana for those of us using Secret on iOS. iPhone users can finally separate the hum-drum secrets of Midwestern life from their freaky friends involved in the Silicon Valley tech scene. The update, which happened this morning, allows iPhone users to separate their Secret feed into a “Friends” post for friends and friends of friends contacts, as well as an “Explore” posts feed for all the other posts. The Android version of the app with this feature already built-in, but the request originally came from those on iOS — a good majority of the Secret user base. They are the first adopters and make up about 70 percent to 80 percent of those posting on Secret, according to cofounder David Byttow. Complaints pour in on a daily basis in the form of posts on the app from people sick of reading about Silicon Valley, polyamorous orgies or workplace sexcapades. This update might help cut down on some of the complaints…although if you have any ties to San Francisco you are probably going to get this sort of post almost exclusively (my own feed seems to contain much more tech gossip and hangover posts than the “Explore” feed). Some might even argue this is why the app is so addicting for those of us in the Valley. |
Dropbox Has Quietly Acquired Parastructure, A Big Data Startup In Stealth | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | has been to help it expand the services that it can offer to consumers and enterprises beyond cloud storage. But the company — which has and is among the larger tech startups — is also making strategic acquisitions to help keep its own house in order. We have found out that Dropbox has quietly acquired a company called , a startup still in stealth that builds data-analysis software on top of open source infrastructure. TechCrunch has confirmed with a reliable source that the acquisition was in the “lower eight figures,” which could be anything from $10 million up to $50 million. Neither company would confirm the deal to TechCrunch. “Thanks for checking – we don’t have any comments however!” a spokesperson told me. Parastructure did not respond, and the startup took its site offline shortly after I started contacting the two co-founders, Salik Syed and Ryan Noon, asking questions. A reliable source close to the company, however, confirmed that the acquisition is a “done deal” and also confirmed the general range of the price. : Parastructure’s website now redirects to Dropbox.com. :-) So what exactly is Parastructure? According to the company’s LinkedIn profile, and its (now-offline) home page, it builds “beautiful data analysis software powered by cutting-edge open source infrastructure.” give some clues as to what that data-analysis software was tackling, with areas covering Spark for cluster computing; Phoenix, a SQL skin over HBase; CrunchBase; and so on. “They had phenomenal business prospects going forward,” our source says. “They found a product-market fit and customers and were solving relational database problems no one else is tackling.” Although Dropbox is making , it seems that while Parastructure is an enterprise service, Dropbox is not intending to deploy it internally, and not as a product — not initially at least. This may be one reason why Dropbox is keeping quiet: It simply shows the company’s hand too much. “Why tell potential competitors about what you are doing?” our source points out. When you consider that the company has now , is now managing both enterprise and consumer content and a host of services that move Dropbox beyond being a storage provider, and is looking to scale up even more, it’s no surprise that it’s beefing up its infrastructure with more database firepower for faster and more reliable performance. Parastructure, based in San Francisco, has been around since 2012 with the co-founders both alums of Stanford. The company didn’t make its list of backers very public. On LinkedIn it notes it is “venture funded and backed by several notable angel investors.” A look on shows that those investors include Amr Awadallah, the co-founder and CTO of Cloudera; other signs point to in the company. |
The Supreme Court And Your Software Patents | Michael Gulliford | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | The Supreme Court recently issued its long-awaited opinion in , known more affectionately in many circles as the Supreme Court case deciding whether software is patentable. Although the Supreme Court did not tackle that broader question in its June 19 opinion, it did address whether CLS Corp. should be allowed to patent the concept of mitigating settlement risk implemented in software. And the Supreme Court’s analysis of that issue should have important implications for anyone with interests in software patents. Alice Corp. owns several patents related to computerized schemes for mitigating “settlement risk” — i.e the risk that only one party to an agreed-upon financial exchange will satisfy its obligation. Although the practice of risk mitigation had existed long before Alice Corp. sought to patent the software version of doing so, Alice Corp. argued to the Supreme Court that it should be able to patent the process of implementing risk mitigation so long as a computer implemented that process. The Supreme Court disagreed. It has long been recognized that “abstract ideas” are not patentable. Although difficult to ascertain the line between a patentable software invention and an unpatentable abstract idea, the Supreme Court provided the software industry with guidance. When analyzing whether a software patent relates to nothing more than an impermissible abstract idea, the Supreme Court says that you should look at a patents’ claim, i.e. the part of the patent that defines the metes and bounds of the invention. If a particular software patent’s claims can be distilled to a general concept that was in existence long before someone thought to implement the concept in software, there is a good chance it is an unpatentable abstract idea. Examples would include playing cards, ways of doing business, and even activities like auctions. After all, these are concepts that existed long before computer programmers wrote code to implement them in a program. And according to the Supreme Court, the only way to convert these otherwise unpatentable abstract ideas into a patentable invention is to show something else in the patent’s claims that make it a new invention. Such “newness” does not result simply by using a computer to implement a concept that has long since been around. It could result, however, when the software patent achieves some new result not previously attainable, requires novel computer operations to operate or improves the functioning of the hardware itself. Are things still murky in the patent software space? Unquestionably so, particularly since most software can be distilled to an abstract concept and the Supreme Court does not believe that simply implementing such a concept with a normal computer will qualify that subject matter for patentability. What is clear, however, is that the weapon of many non-practicing entities (more commonly known as “patent trolls”) — the business-method software patent — is likely dead. Why? Because these patents generally relate to the use of known computer methods to implement known ways of doing business — the hallmark of invalidity under the Supreme Court’s new decision. Also at risk are software patents directed to concepts that occurred in real life, before being implemented in software. Above we provide the examples of gaming patents, but the list goes on and on. In light of these developments, CEOs and inventors without unlimited budgets may be well-advised to proceed with caution before incurring the tremendous costs associated with seeking software patent protection. Unless the underlying technology improves the functioning of the hardware, is implemented by novel computer operations or relates to a concept not already generally known, the risks and costs of seeking patent protection may far outweigh the questionable rewards. |
Unscaling The Healthcare Economy | Hemant Taneja | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | Healthcare delivery has always been among the top targets for founders seeking to dramatically improve our lives while building great businesses. Yet, with very few exceptions, most founders find it difficult to build scalable software-defined businesses for providing high-quality care. It is obvious that we are hitting the scale limit of our present system, while virtually bankrupting our nation in the process. The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other nation in the world. And according to the CDC, there are 210,000 active general practitioners in the American health delivery system and they will handle about 555 million patient visits. This impending healthcare crisis is finally forcing us to think differently, and we are witnessing some of the most out-of-the-box developments in healthcare delivery I have seen in the past decade. Changing our approach to chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity could save hundreds of billions of dollars alone if we move to software-defined health delivery. I will go on record and say that we can reduce our costs for managing diabetes in America by at least $100 billion if we move to software-defined health delivery. There are really two fundamental shifts that are leading us to software-defined healthcare. First, consumers are starting to play with mobile health apps and wearable devices, partly due to curiosity and partly due to rising healthcare costs. This is a profound cultural shift. Even and is starting to pay more attention to this area. For too long, the American health care system has prioritized fixing acute problems over managing long-term well-being, largely due to the fee-for-service model at the heart of our insurance system. We are finally moving beyond expensive treatments when we become ill to a model that places our lifestyle at the core of health delivery, including the foods we eat, our physical activities, and our social lives. The second fundamental shift broadly spans our economy, not just the healthcare sector. Founders now have a comprehensive set of platforms on which they can build massive companies without the talent and resources required in the past, a concept I have written about previously called . Whether it is accepting payments, handling shipping logistics, or storing data in the cloud, companies can now do in a couple of clicks what used to take a team of office workers several weeks. That’s great news for founders, since software-based consumer engagement is among our strongest skills in Silicon Valley. We need to provide people just the right information and actions at the right time to guide them to choices that will give them healthier, happier lives. This might sound challenging, but this is precisely what Twitter does when it sends us a push notification that a tweet has been retweeted by many people. We are starting to bring the same engagement expertise to healthy living that we bring to games and social, and hopefully more will be available soon. Apple, Samsung and other companies are leveraging mobile phones and consumer devices with sensors for bio-measurements to bring information to users in real-time so they can act on it at the right time. Software-defined healthcare will first manifest itself in helping the compliant health consumers who understand their health needs and are looking to adopt solutions to stay healthy. Think about the 26 million Americans who suffer from diabetes, and the additional 80 million people who are pre-diabetic. Healthcare-related costs for the diabetic population are approaching $250 billion per year. To manage their conditions, consumers with diabetes need to carefully monitor their nutrition intake, exercise regimens and blood glucose levels. Based upon past data, a startup could custom-tailor this treatment for each patient through an app, adapting to new information over time to ensure that a consumer is always receiving the optimal treatment. If the response isn’t effective, the consumer could be put into immediate contact with a nurse or doctor through the same device they had just been using. There are interesting companies being built that are devoted to addressing each of those areas, allowing consumers with diabetes to enjoy healthier living, including Lose It!, Blue Apron, NatureBox and HelloFresh . Some critics are concerned that startups are experimenting with the lives of patients by using tools like machine learning that are unproven in the context of health delivery. Is it better for a patient with diabetes to use an imprecise system based on population averages, or a personalized system with proper safeguards? This year alone, 140,000 people will be hospitalized for Diabetic ketoacidosis, a severe complication often caused by missed insulin treatments. If we can cut that rate down significantly using personalization and engagement, we have a moral obligation to consumers to do so. We have a real opportunity to improve our collective health while also saving large amounts of money for our society. Today, a small group of entrepreneurs can improve the health of more consumers than an entire hospital system can by designing software-defined solutions for staying healthy. This is truly a tipping point for healthcare, one that will change the way health care is perceived, delivered, and financed, for the benefit of all of us. |
The Most San Francisco Wedding Happened, Thanks To Uber | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | Friends and family gathered to witness CTO marry his sweetheart of three years this afternoon. Only this was no ordinary wedding. Begbie and his bride-to-be, Lacey Shaw, sent a message and earlier today, asking all their friends to meet them in Alamo Square Park to see them get hitched on . Begbie and Shaw had lightly discussed eloping the last couple of weeks, but decided today was the day to take advantage of an Uber intended for SF’s Pride Week. The problem was that a lot of other couples had the exact same idea: This particular wedding party had been desperately trying to get an Uber Wedding car to come their way for going on two hours when I came upon them. While some in the party seemed a tad delighted they now had a reporter in their ranks, most were more focused on the fact that I had a phone with a good amount of battery left. “Oh, ya, you can help us keep trying Uber. Perhaps if they see enough activity from here they’ll send a car,” said wedding guest JK Ogungbadero. She knew the happy couple when she worked with Begbie at Slide, before Google bought it. I wasn’t quite sure that’s how it worked but I thought “hey, why not,” and joined in. I even started tweeting on their behalf, hoping to get Uber’s attention:
But we continued to sit in the windy afternoon. For hours. Still, I had hope that the Uber car would soon be free and these two kids would be happily married by the end of the day. Uber promised to deliver flowers, candles, cake and champagne – even girlfriend would be there to serenade with violin, all free…if we could just get the Uber Wedding car to come. However, just one car was assigned to these wedding duties for the whole city. Each ceremony, according to Uber, would take up to 45 minutes. Do the math here and that’s maybe 5 to 6 weddings total possible for the day. And while we had no idea how many people were trying to request the same thing, we could at least, that some couples had actually started to make it through. Unfortunately hope faded for our party after a good 3 hours of waiting in the sun. That’s when Shaw’s sister began making other plans online. The couple had met online and they were going to get married online. A few minutes on her phone and a form filled out on the website and Shaw’s sister was now a legal, ordained minister. “Wait…is that really all it takes?” I asked. Begbie then shot back with a grin, “Ya, California’s an amazing state.” While it wasn’t the Uber Wedding they’d originally planned on that morning, Mr. and Mrs. Begbie still tied the knot at about 4pm this afternoon – and in true tech fashion. Begbie then admitted he was partial to anyway. |
Yo! Hackathon Attempts To Show How Yo Can Grow | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | The something-like-a-phenomenon app of the moment, , held a hackathon today in San Francisco in an attempt to prove that there can be more to Yo than just the Yo, yo. One hack that’s already climbed the charts to the number one spot on is YoServerIsDown — created by programmers and . The app, which will send a yo to notify a subscriber when a server goes down (hence the clever name), is one of several mods that are attempting to move Yo from a messaging diversion that’s just silly to something more substantial. Cowboy Ventures partner , who attended the event, posted a few of his other favorite hacks to Product Hunt including a “YOaster”, which would send a yo when bread finished toasting in a hacked toaster and Yo Radio, which bookmarks songs playing on the radio so a user can access information about the song later from a computer (I think that last one is called ). [Update: Yo Radio’s co-creator Santhosh Kumar Bala Krishnan has written to us with a few more details about his hack (which won the hackathon). As opposed to waiting for an app like “Shazam” to listen and recognize the song that’s currently being played on the radio, when you YO to say “WHAT1015” from the YO app, “YO Radio” bookmarks the song that’s currently being played on 101.5 FM and associates it with your username. You can view the bookmarked songs and youtube links to the song from the “YO Radio” app anytime later. We are using YO as a medium to send a notification to our app with some context (“101.5 FM” here) so that we can bookmark the song from that radio station. So consider me standing corrected.] as the latest evidence that technology innovation has been degraded to an inside joke for programmers and developers — who can raise real money for an app developed for nothing more than shits and giggles. Meanwhile, (perhaps too many hundred words) on an ontological quest to get to the heart of Yo. Venture investor (and husband of one of the world’s ) Marc Andreessen calls yo an example of — a message that only exists as itself. There is no meaning — . What’s refreshing is seeing Yo at least try to move beyond the conversation its detractors and supporters are having by promoting applications that can add additional value. As any startup can tell you, success is never just about the app — it’s about how people ultimately use it. |
IAC Putting A Ring On Dating Site HowAboutWe | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | Looks like is adding Brooklyn-based as another notch in its dating site acquisition belt. It already owns , and a majority stake in . According to obtained by Business Insider, founder Brian Schechter addressed employees about the acquisition, confirming that many HowAboutWe employees would be losing their jobs: Indeed, we are still finalizing a deal and zero final decisions have been made. That a deal is even a possibility should remain completely confidential. I know this is a bumpy – and let’s face it – a weird moment but we should proceed in a manner that is really smart, graceful, and empowering for everyone. A weird moment, indeed. HowAboutWe snatched up Nerve.com earlier this year to take on competition from IAC. However, some had already started to leave earlier this month. According to a staffer, Schechter and co-founder Aaron Schildkrout pulled aside a number of employees in closed door meetings on Thursday and Friday to let them know they could be let go. However, the founders also texted 3 employees that they were definitely keeping their jobs. That is until one of the three got a text asking them what their current salary was. Schechter allegedly recanted the offer to let that particular employee stay when the staffer reminded Schechter they’d recently received a raise. Many were reportedly upset at the way the news has been handled thus far. Here’s the full email sent to : Subject: Quick touch base Hi Everyone, I got an email from someone in the media industry asking about “What’s happening with layoffs at HowAboutWe?” They specifically asked about the edit team. If you get this question, it should be denied. It’s inaccurate. We have not laid anyone off. Indeed, we are still finalizing a deal and zero final decisions have been made. That a deal is even a possibility should remain completely confidential, as well. The company being in control of the message is the best thing for everyone to be well set up for next steps, and that means keeping things truly in confidence and not telling anyone about this exciting next step may at HowAboutWe, etc. [sic] I know this is a bumpy — and let’s face it — a weird moment, but we should be sure that we proceed in a manner that is really smart, graceful and empowering for everyone Thank you. Please don’t hesitate to reach to me with any questions or concerns. I’m available. Brian |
The Rise Of The “Social Professional” Networks | Jon Bischke | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | Back in the mid-2000s, many espoused a theory that there would emerge social networks for different types of people. It sounds a little preposterous now in the age of Facebook dominance, but at the time you had smart people like Marc Andreessen founding companies like that followed this thesis. I was the co-founder of a now-defunct social network called that you could think of as “Facebook/MySpace for the Whole Foods set.” We competed with the likes of , a company run by the pre-Zynga Mark Pincus, and were acquired in 2007. Fast forward a decade and much of the personal social networking activity has consolidated on Facebook. Sure, there are fast-growing sites like Snapchat and Tumblr that deserve recognition and respect. But in terms of metrics they’re still quite small compared with the juggernaut that is Facebook (this gap only grows if you consider Instagram and WhatsApp to be part of Facebook). But there’s an area where signs are emerging of “different networks for different types of people”: professional networking. We’ll start with the obvious. LinkedIn is the dominant professional social network. It has become the system of record for the online resume for many professionals. And the growth of LinkedIn as a blogging platform shouldn’t be underestimated. That said, it’s interesting to note some recent fundings of companies that could reasonably be called “LinkedIn for X.” , a company that recently announced a $50 million dollar funding round. and play in this space, as well. None of these networks are exactly like LinkedIn, which is kind of the point. What doctors want and need (HIPAA compliance anyone?) is different from what other professionals want and why a site like Doximity might resonate with them more than LinkedIn. Consider another area for professionals: People with previous military experience. RallyPoint is billed as “ ” and . Once again, they aren’t the only game in town, as startups like are entering the fray. While LinkedIn has made admirable strides toward assisting veterans in finding employment (witness ), the growth of these vertical networks speaks to a market need. Finally, there’s a group of individuals where LinkedIn has struggled to find product-market fit over the years and it’s a big one: college kids. A notable vertical network here is Piazza, from Khosla Ventures. Piazza now has nearly a million college students leveraging its Quora-style Q&A platform and has very compelling engagement metrics. The notion of a social network for every type of employee might be far-fetched, though. It’s not as if coffee baristas have a compelling need to join a network of other coffee baristas. Vertical professional networks are likely to be the most attractive to highly skilled knowledge workers. Think software engineers ( ), mechanical engineers ( ), data scientists ( ) and academics ( and ). These networks are far from “niche.” GitHub has well over 6 million registered users and Academia.edu boasts more than 10 million users. Large funding rounds both speak to the growth of these networks and should help to accelerate further growth. In addition to Doximity’s mega-round, Spiceworks, a community for IT professionals, and GitHub raised $100 million back in 2012 from Andreessen Horowitz. Social professional networks serve as a place for people to “do” things that other networks might not cater to. For example, GitHub revolves around the capability to commit code and Academia.edu offers the capability to share research papers. Indeed, content creation and sharing are central use cases for these networks. While a “GitHub for marketers” may not exist yet, websites like and may be the places where something like this may gestate. But perhaps this trend won’t really take off until there’s a network for journalists so the people writing stories can see this trend first hand. What? That site is called ? Never mind… |
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