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Gillmor Gang: The Other Shoe | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Benedict Evans, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor — finally have a full picture of the two major mobile platforms. Google I/O certainly lived up to expectations as a checkoff of the major food groups: wearables, carables, set top boxables, and so on. Android L and iOS8 conspire to reflect the convergence around the notification bus, each effort spurring the other on to maintain a culture of innovation. The speed with which last year’s model (Glass, Plus, and iPod) is being jettisoned may be difficult for the media to consume, but it sure makes for a protein-packed Gang. @stevegillmor, @kteare, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @benedictevans Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Aereo Shutters Its TV Streaming Service… For Now | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | In less than an hour the streaming TV service will “pause” its operations. In an email sent at 9 AM Eastern Saturday, Chet Kanojia informed customers that because of the , the company would temporarily halt its operations at 11:30 Eastern as it consults with the court to plan its next steps. is encouraging its customers to sign up for updates at , and is ensuring they will be refunded for their last month paid. Here’s . The full letter follows below. A Letter to Our Consumers: Standing Together for Innovation, Progress and Technology – An Update on Aereo “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.” –Charles Kettering, inventor, entrepreneur, innovator & philanthropist A little over three years ago, our team embarked on a journey to improve the consumer television experience, using technology to create a smart, cloud-based television antenna consumers could use to access live over the air broadcast television. On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision in favor of Aereo, dealing a massive setback to consumers. As a result of that decision, our case has been returned to the lower Court. We have decided to pause our operations temporarily as we consult with the court and map out our next steps. You will be able to access your cloud-based antenna and DVR only until 11:30 a.m. ET today. All of our users will be refunded their last paid month. If you have questions about your account, please email support@aereo.com or tweet us @AereoSupport. The spectrum that the broadcasters use to transmit over the air programming belongs to the American public and we believe you should have a right to access that live programming whether your antenna sits on the roof of your home, on top of your television or in the cloud. On behalf of the entire team at Aereo, thank you for the outpouring of support. It has been staggering and we are so grateful for your emails, Tweets and Facebook posts. Keep your voices loud and sign up for updates at ProtectMyAntenna.org – our journey is far from done. Yours truly,
Chet Kanojia |
This Week In The Digital Panopticon: Google And The Right To Be Forgotten | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | The ongoing tug of war between data capture and individual privacy in the digital sphere involves myriad threads, usually moving in different directions. Getting an overview of and a handle on developments can therefore be almost impossible. It’s as if — ironically enough — this issue itself needs to be observed within a . This week has seen a particularly interesting development that embodies some of the nuances at play. Google has started removing certain types of information from search results in Europe — from private individuals for the removal of outdated or irrelevant information returned when a search is made for their name. This follows a by the European Court of Justice last month that has been loosely termed a ‘right to be forgotten’, but is in fact related to European data protection legislated that dates back to 1995. The ruling stipulates that Google must accept and process requests by private individuals to remove links to outdated information about them. So really it is a classic case of technology developments outstripping and circumventing legal structures that were fashioned in an earlier era. The basic problem remains that technology develops faster than legislators legislate. And also evidently faster than consumers’, politicians’ and even the judiciary’s ability to grasp how the implementation of a new technology might (or might not) be infringing on existing laws. Technology by its nature inevitably overspills the neat categories prior law was founded on. It creates new categories and processes whose fit within the legal status quo becomes questionable — allowing for wiggle room and disruption of an extant system of order. In many ways that’s how technologically driven progress happens. But it can also lead to problems of overreaching behaviour and a lack of accountability that tips the scales and disturbs existing checks and balances. The complaint that led to the ECJ requirement dates back to 2010. A Spanish citizen lodged a complaint with a local data protection agency, against a local newspaper and against Google, requesting the removal of information about him that dated back more than a decade. The data protection agency rejected the complaint against the newspaper, but upheld it against Google. Google attempted to have the decision quashed, and the Spanish high court then referred the matter to the ECJ — which handed down its landmark in May. And the rest, as they say, is European digital history. The ECJ specifically ruled that search engines like Google are data controllers, and are indeed required to adhere to European law if they have a branch or subsidiary in a European Union member state. It also crucially confirmed that individuals, under certain conditions, have a right to ask search engines to remove links to personal data about them. The conditions apply when the information is “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive for the purposes of the data processing”. So it’s by no means a right for anyone to have anything overwritten. The data in question has to be prejudicial to an individual and ‘beyond its sell-by-date’. Or just plain wrong. The court also ruled that the right to ask for something to be removed from Google’s search engine should also be balanced against other fundamental rights, such as the freedom of expression and of the media. So again it’s not carte blanche for individuals to whitewash their personal accounts. In essence, the ruling requires an assessment of each individual request that weighs up the sensitivity relating to the individual’s private life vs the interest the public might have in knowing whatever it is. It requires a nuanced, case-by-case judgement that an algorithm-loving business like Google is clearly going to object to. Building a algorithm that can fairly process those sort of nuanced considerations is obviously going to be a tough call. Now the ECJ ruling is undoubtedly controversial. It has been vocally attacked as “censorship of knowledge” by the likes of , who has since become a member of a Google advisory committee on privacy created following the ECJ ruling to help the company weigh the issues at hand. But even people you might expect to support a pro-privacy ruling have had misgivings. At times the hand-wringing has been almost audible. In , the privacy commissioner for Ontario Canada co-authored an article comparing Google to a librarian in charge of a catalogue of books — and the ECJ ruling as creating a “swiss-cheese of gaps and holes” in the library’s card index. So again an accusation of censorship. What is evident is that Google has been very successful at arguing it’s an impartial middleman in the data delivery pipeline. It’s not the publisher — it just points you to the published stuff, is what it says. But that’s something of a disingenuous argument when you consider how much power the Google pointer wields. And that that pointer is directed by an unquantified algorithm that works in the background to rank the information you are most likely to encounter. It’s also worth pointing out that Google has a massively dominant market share in Europe — circa 90 percent of the search engine market. If it’s a library, it’s a chain of commercial libraries with a branch in every European town. So combine hugely dominant market share with the reordering that Google performs on the information it indexes and its position, vis-a-vis controlling access to personal data, looks far more influential than mere middleman. Google’s algorithms are designed to process information and foreground certain bits in response to a specific query. Its processes structure others’ data and the resulting Google-created order becomes a hierarchy — meaning that certain pieces of information become more visible and accessible than other bits. The point is: Ranking information is always going to be a subjective endeavor, whether it’s a human doing it — or an algorithm.This is not an equal index. It’s designed to be far more useful to the end user than that — or else they’d have to wade through every virtual index card starting with the same letter to find whatever it is they are looking for. Google’s hierarchy of search results means the ‘shelves’ in its ‘library’ are not alphabetically ordered and equally spaced. Rather the books on these shelves are ranked and positioned for relative prominence based on factors such as popularity or timeliness or the number of other books in the library that reference a particular piece of information. The algorithms Google uses to order and create its hierarchy of information are of course proprietary and undisclosed. We don’t exactly know how Google determines what to foreground and what else to fade away. But however those algorithms work, Google’s ordering of search results effectively changes our relationship to the information we are looking for — by pushing some of it right at us, making it more likely that’s where our search will end. That’s not a library; that’s something very different. The reader walking into Google’s ‘library’ is directed to a shelf containing a single massive volume — located right at their eye level. If they don’t reach for the book being proffered, the volume on the shelf below is the next closest tome their eyes will fall on, and so on. It’s Google-curated hierarchy all the way down. That ordering of information does not mean Google is a publisher. But nor is it just a bystander. It has a crucial role to play in shaping what we click on and what we therefore discover. That’s the nuance that the ECJ ruling nails. Its judgement notes specify that Google is “processing” data by organizing it and making it available to users “in the form of lists of results.” And that processing and ranking of data absolutely makes Google a data controller — meaning the company’s search results should have to comply with existing data protection legislation: The Court further holds that the operator of the search engine is the ‘controller’ in respect of that processing, within the meaning of the directive, given that it is the operator which determines the purposes and means of the processing. The Court observes in this regard that, inasmuch as the activity of a search engine is additional to that of publishers of websites and is liable to affect significantly the fundamental rights to privacy and to the protection of personal data, the operator of the search engine must ensure, within the framework of its responsibilities, powers and capabilities, that its activity complies with the directive’s requirements. This is the only way that the guarantees laid down by the directive will be able to have full effect and that effective and complete protection of data subjects (in particular of their privacy) may actually be achieved. Google clearly has a massive impact on the things that are drawn to people’s attention. To the point where the ECJ is basically saying that if Google’s processes are allowed to be exempt from the data protection directive there is no way for individual privacy to be effectively protected. What’s very clear is that the concept of data protection needs to evolve to avoid trailing way, way behind the blistering pace of information technology evolution. That means that a court ruling which is sensitive to the nuance of Google’s position as both a data indexer and an information foregrounder makes sense, however much complexity it introduces by putting a requirement on a data indexer to balance considerations of individual privacy — in specific requested instances — with a possible public interest to know. (To be clear, the ECJ ruling refers to private individuals. Public individuals aren’t going to be able to use the ruling to personally edit search results in a bid to present a better public face.) In any case, to argue this is “knowledge censorship” also falsely equates Google with the sum total of knowledge on the Internet. Yes it’s a hugely dominate gateway to access digital information in Europe, but it’s not the same as the sum total of all the information out there. There are alternative avenues to unearth information, so removing a link from Google’s index does not mean the information itself is gone forever (indeed, the Spanish court specifically said the newspaper should not be required to remove the requested data — only that Google should stop flagging it up). The idea of personal data being able to have a sell-by date online, where there is the path of least resistance to discover it, frankly feels like a far more human implementation of technology than having your every action recorded and recoverable forevermore. Just because technology enables infinite capture and storage of granular data does not mean that that perpetual total recall is helpful to individuals or desirable for societies. Or that a corporate entity putting a public emphasis on whatever bit of your past personal history their algorithm determines is the most clickable is some kind of inalienable right. There are alternative ways of operating in the digital sphere. Let’s not forget these tools we have built, and are continuing to build, are highly capable and highly flexible. The technology can support nuance. And, unsurprisingly, people have an appetite for it. Just witness the interest in consumer products that allow information to be , or , or . Yes, there are aplenty to be had here. In earlier human societies knowledge was often mutable. History was oral. Information was handed down verbally, frequently in song, with ballad singers amending and adapting stories for the present age or even the present moment. The ‘social historical record’ evolved with its people. So while the ECJ ruling may put a burden on information indexers to respond to individual requests to update the relative position of their pointers, that’s perhaps as it should be. Because with great power comes great responsibility. The key paragraph of the follows below: Article 12(b) and subparagraph (a) of the first paragraph of Article 14 of Directive 95/46 are to be interpreted as meaning that when appraising the conditions for the application of those provisions, it should inter alia be examined whether the data subject has a right that the information in question relating to him personally should, at this point in time, no longer be linked to his name by a list of results displayed following a search made on the basis of his name, without it being necessary in order to find such a right that the inclusion of the information in question in that list causes prejudice to the data subject. As the data subject may, in the light of his fundamental rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter, request that the information in question no longer be made available to the general public on account of its inclusion in such a list of results, those rights override, as a rule, not only the economic interest of the operator of the search engine but also the interest of the general public in having access to that information upon a search relating to the data subject’s name. However, that would not be the case if it appeared, for particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life, that the interference with his fundamental rights is justified by the preponderant interest of the general public in having, on account of its inclusion in the list of results, access to the information in question. [ by via Flickr] |
Foursquare, Quora, Path: What Becomes Of The Underachievers? | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | Foursquare, Quora, Path. Each is (or was) a Valley darling; each has millions of loyal users; each has raised more than $50 million, albeit nontraditionally, and been valued at $400 million or more — and each has recently done something remarkable. Foursquare and Path pivoted, . Quora, bizarrely, joined Y Combinator. Are they just flailing, or is there method to this madness? Foursquare, which started life as “the check-in app,” is of its eponymous app and moving them to its new called Swarm. What’s more, it’s planning to start , which is much beloved by third-party developers (including me.) Which leaves it seeming more than a little unfocused. The main Foursquare app has essentially become a Yelp competitor. Swarm is now a side business, presumably because check-ins are no longer a growth industry, and haven’t been for some years now. Foursquare is allegedly on course to bring in $30-$40 million in revenue this year, which sounds good — but is not a lot for a company which has raised $160 million at valuations north of $600 million … its growth has slowed. Path, the mobile social network whose superb design wowed the Valley some years ago, before it began to look like a beautiful solution in search of a problem, has pivoted almost as dramatically. First they ripped a page out of Snapchat’s book and suddenly . A week later they . Again, an odd sudden change of direction for a four-year-old company which has . Everyone loves messaging apps today, in principle, thanks to WhatsApp — but the world already has Line, Viber, Kik, Snapchat, WeChat, Tango, etc, to say nothing of Facebook, Twitter, and Skype. It’s hard to see how (maybe) the sixth-place social network, which has struggled with and , benefits from branching out to become (maybe) the thirteenth-place messaging app. But Path has to do … its growth has slowed. Quora is the strangest case of all. Why join Y Combinator? I mean, it , and it’s nice that it’ll be “fun personally to participate” for Adam D’Angelo, but how is it anything other than a distraction? “We’ll have Sam and all the other partners to help us,” D’Angelo , without specifying what kind of help they want. I think we can all make a pretty good guess, though. Quora was recently valued at , but as Josh Constine : Quora has been cagey about its stats since forever, only talking in relative growth and vanity metrics rather than absolute user counts … This makes it tough to know exactly how popular it is, but the general consensus hovers around “known amongst Silicon Valley intellectuals” and “just not big enough”. Joining YC might seem weird or even desperate, but weird or even desperate is actually the right move for Quora … if its growth has slowed. You might be noticing a theme here. As Paul Graham : “A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup.” But, similarly, just because you’re “late-stage” — big, massively well-funded and relatively mature — doesn’t mean you’re a startup. A corollary of Graham’s definition is: if you to grow fast, then no matter how big you are, you’re still a startup … meaning you’re still extremely vulnerable. Foursquare, Path, and Quora don’t yet have mature business models . Meaning all three are still startups, and have no choice but to keep growing, fast. That’s a huge challenge. It’s relatively easy to double a userbase when it numbers in the thousands; much harder when it’s already in the , unless you benefit from network effects. Doubly so when you’ve lost your cool and become yesterday’s news, no longer the talk of the Valley’s chattering classes: Foursquare, Quora, Path and all that generation of apps are also gone from my iPhone (a few months ago, actually) — Antonio Altamirano (@antonio) Does it sound like I’m being hard on them? That is not my intent. All three companies have done genuinely extraordinary things. They have scaled from scrappy outsiders into significant players. They have millions of faithful users. While it’s true they have succeeded well within their founders’ wildest dreams, they are still among the best of the best, or they wouldn’t have gotten to where they are today. But the lesson here is that . Not if you stop growing before you start making money. Today’s tech industry will eagerly accept hypergrowth in lieu of revenue, but it will not accept neither. If you’re not yet raking in money, then you must grow, and growing, … or suffer and eventually die. And the bigger you are, the harder it is to keep riding the — and the harder you fall if you fail. |
Google Shuts Down TalkBin, A Feedback Platform For Businesses It Acquired In 2011 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 6 | 28 | , a customer feedback platform for businesses that was incubated at Y Combinator and then in 2011, is being shut down on July 31, citing “dwindling usage.” Enquiries sent to the company are receiving a brief autoreply saying that the service is no longer being maintained or supported, that it will be shut down effective July 31, and with suggestions of alternatives to Talkbin. A full copy of that note is below. One of those listed alternatives, Bellevue, Washington-based , has further elaborated on the story in a from its . He writes that his company had heard a few months back that TalkBin would be shut down. He also quotes a version of the note that TalkBin had been sending out to existing customers, which provides more detail about the shutdown compared to the note we received: “TalkBin usage has dwindled over the past 2 years, and we have decided to shut down the service on July 31st, 2014. Effective immediately, all billing has stopped for your existing locations in Talkbin. Talkbin will be completely shut down on July 31st, and all account data will be deleted shortly afterwards.” The note also says that existing users of TalkBin are no longer being billed for the service and they are able to archive the records of existing conversations on the TalkBin platform. A copy of that note is at the end of this post. Google had acquired TalkBin for an undisclosed amount about five months after the startup had launched, initially as a mobile-only app. After shutting it down briefly, Google re-launched TalkBin with expanded web functionality, and kept it running as part of its Google Local operation. For , per location, TalkBin provided what it described as “like buying a data plan for customer feedback.” Subscribers received their own TalkBin messaging numbers, signage for their businesses such as window decals and sales support. You could think of it as a less-social kind of social media, or an extension of customer feedback features for brick-and-mortar, smaller businesses. Washam (whose Talk to the Manager service is $29/month after the first, free month) tells us that Talkbin’s main market was restaurants although it also worked with other local business, too — similar to his own startup, which has been investing to diversify its self-serve model to approach merchants via large resellers. Even if TalkBin may not have been the primary beneficiary, Google has continued investing in building out services for the local business segment — specifically with features catering to restaurants, as witnessed by its , a website building platform for restaurants. By coincidence, Appetas also went through in same Seattle incubator, SURF, as Talk to the Manager. But it is also no stranger to the delayed shut-down of acquired services. Others have included local recommendations app (acquired December 2011, shut down July 2013) and mobile ad aggregator (acquired November 2009 as part of AdMob, shut down June 2013). It’s also not afraid of sometimes-controversial, of its own, home-grown operations. The full messages are below: TalkBin is no longer being maintained or supported, and the service will be shut down on July 31st, 2014. We suggest you find another service for your customer feedback needs. Several other services exist that provide similar functionality to TalkBin, including the following (all unaffiliated with Google):
+ OwnerListens, http://ownerlistens.com
+ Talk to the Manager, https://talktothemanager.com
+ Quibble, https://quibble.it If you wish to stop using TalkBin immediately, you can cancel your account with the following steps:
1) Log in at http://talkbin.com
2) On the upper right, click “Settings”
3) On the upper right, click “Delete my account”
4) Click “Yes, please delete my account” And the more detailed version: |
Microsoft Cuts The Price Of Its Now-Dated Surface Pro 2 Tablet Hybrid | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | Here’s a non-surprise: Microsoft is by $100 to $200, configuration depending. When Microsoft , a device that has received stronger reviews by the media than its predecessors, we asked if it would continue to sell the Surface Pro 2. The company replied with : “Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 remain great options and will stay in market at this time.” However, given that the Surface Pro 2 was selling for a higher base price than the Surface Pro 3, which is currently available for pre-order, I predicted that the company would reduce the price of the now-dated, second-generation device. I award myself five analyst points. Given that the company has long known that the Surface Pro 3 was coming, it being is progenitor and all, let’s hope the company slowed production of the Pro 2, and thus doesn’t have much inventory to get rid of. I often forget that Surface is a money-losing venture thus far. In Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2014, that’s our calendar fourth quarter 2013, . The cost of that revenue . In its third fiscal quarter, our calendar first quarter, Surface revenue totaled $494 million. Cost of revenue: $539 million. Those cost figures don’t include marketing costs and so forth. Microsoft didn’t reply to a request for comment by the time of publication. |
The 250 New Emoji? Here’s What They’ll Look Like | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | Yesterday afternoon, the Unicode Consortium published a list of 250 new Emoji that they hope Google, Apple, Twitter and the rest will all come to embrace. Spiders! Middle fingers! “Man in business suit levitating”! The problem? Except for a tiny handful of exceptions, the list of what’s to come was just a pile of text sans visual examples. When we’re talking about emoji, who wants to see a big ol’ list of words with their dumb ol’ letters? What are we supposed to do with that? ? This is the future! Reading is for squares! We demand all media in the form of 12 second looping videos and GIFs! The Unicode Consortium generally provides Apple/Google/et al. with example icons, and they’ve just updated their example library with all of the new characters. These example charts have two purposes: to serve as an inspiration/foundation for any artists tasked with creating icons for each of the newly proposed characters, and to explain what the heck the characters with ambiguous names like “Three Rays Right” or “Right Anger Bubble” might be. For the rest of us, though, it’s just an easier at-a-glance look at all of the new emoji. You can see . The newly added Emoji are those highlighted in yellow.
(Also interesting to note is that, unlike with the previously published list, the example chart provides secondary descriptions and reasoning for some of the more random-seeming icons. The “Man in business suit levitating” we’ve all taken a few cracks at, for example, was introduced because there’s no good emoji for “jumping”.) |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 16 | null |
Is Facebook Slingshot Third Time’s A Charm Or Strike Three? | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | launched strike three against Camp Snapchat with . As with many of Facebook’s recent products , Slingshot is an already-proven idea dressed up in an expensive UI with an established distribution network of . Despite the fact that most social apps fail, it should be a home run. But it won’t be. And not because it’s different from Snapchat, and not because it’s the same. Not because it’s prettier, and not because it has the cool “reciprocation” feature. The reason Slingshot will flop, just like Paper and Poke and Camera and whatever else, is because of Facebook. Slingshot marks Facebook’s third attempt in two years to capture the Snapchat audience. It’s an undefined group, but assumed to be young — ranging from teenagers all the way up to 35-year-olds who are “keeping it real.” It’s a coveted group of trend-setting future spenders, and it’s the same group that has slowly migrated off of the almighty Facebook platform. The company’s endless attempts at ephemerality, and to attract that magical trend-setting demographic, are clear… There was , and for a hot minute, and then the rumored . So far, . Facebook is 10 years old. We’re no longer watching Zuck wade into the wide world of advertising. Facebook is a major global corporation. Just look at the company’s in the past few years: Facebook pays for being behind Google in wearables and VR. Facebook pays for not having a mobile OS. Facebook pays to make sure it’s the center of the world’s photos. I don’t see world-changing ideas playing out. I see one of our in the midst of . So, when we laughed at Facebook’s first punch (or should I say Poke) at Snapchat, Zuckerberg loosened up the purse strings and reportedly made a . To be fair, an acquisition isn’t technically an attempt to “clone,” but the intent remains the same. When Facebook couldn’t half-heartedly clone Snapchat the first time around, it threw money at the problem. Fast forward to today, and we all have front-row seats to Facebook’s third at-bat to win over the Snapchat crew. And as it so often does, history will repeat itself once again. Admittedly, Unlike Poke, which feature of Snapchat down to a T, Slingshot tries to be . Slingshot promises reciprocation by forcing you to respond to a message before you can see the content inside. It’s a clever trick to differentiate, but hardly a new idea. did something similar long ago, and an app called launched recently in Los Angeles with the same core feature set. And so you might think, now that Facebook’s assault on Snapchat includes a new weapon, maybe the fates will smile on blue instead of yellow. But no. I’m placing my bets now: . See, the problem isn’t timing. It’s not that Snapchat beat Facebook to ephemerality, although of course that plays a role. It’s also not ephemerality itself, or photos or videos or text messages. The problem isn’t that Poke was too similar to Snapchat, or that Slingshot is too different. The problem isn’t even reciprocation, despite how attractive that is as a feature. The problem is Facebook. The group that Facebook is chasing is a group that will never rest easy being a part of the majority. There is a reason the “Snapchat demographic” is so valuable: They set trends, which are then followed by the rest of the world. I’m not just talking about teens, though teens do play a vital role in this group. I’m simply talking about the category of people that are intrinsically rooting for the underdog. The people who hate Starbucks and Apple just because they’re Starbucks and Apple. The people who want to try something different. And when that something different also appeals to a group of people obsessed with fitting in (like teenagers), you’re really in business. But how can a group of people set trends without going against the incumbent? If everyone blindly (lol) went to LensCrafters for their whole life and never even thought to look elsewhere, there would be no Warby Parker. But because there are a group of people who are willing to try something new and different, companies like Airbnb and Tom’s and exist. The evidence of this trend setters’ exodus from Facebook is anecdotal. But the sentiment is over and over again: , . Facebook even last year. The world of technology moves fast, and that’s a lazy understatement. Without blinking an eye, Facebook went from a homegrown, underground, exclusive social network to Coca-Cola. To Merrill Lynch. To the man. The same kids that were desperate to turn 13 just so they could get a Facebook profile now understand the complexities of what’s happening. Their friendships, photos, locations, relationships, age and everything else about them is being used to sell ads to them. They watched as . They saw stories about billionaire Zuck wearing a hoodie. They witnessed the $1 billion Instagram acquisition and the $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition. The subtlety of the business isn’t so subtle anymore. But Snapchat doesn’t feel like a business yet. Remember the original Snapchat? All ugly and bubbly? It looked like the first draft of something, and still, as Snapchat’s user numbers grew and the company found itself in features in the New York Times, the ugly UI remained. The company left the app rough around the edges for a reason: It made users feel like they were in on the ground level of something. Eventually, the app outgrew its childish UI (sort of), and eventually it will outgrow the hip and cool demographic. Every trendy new thing does. Slingshot, unfortunately, will probably not get that chance. |
T-Mobile’s CEO Is Pissed That The Amazon Phone Will Be Exclusive To AT&T | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | T-Mobile’s John Legere, ever the Un-CEO, has thrown yet another tantrum in the wake of rumors suggesting the new Amazon phone . Because he’s crazy. But he’s also right, as such exclusive deals hurt both the consumer and the industry. The WSJ broke the news this morning that , which is widely expected to be announced tomorrow, will only be available on AT&T. As the CEO of the other big GSM carrier in the States, Legere would know if his carrier were getting the phone. His lengthy rant seemingly confirms the WSJ’s report: If you want the Amazon phone, you’re going to have to use AT&T. The iPhone launched on AT&T. The Lumia 900 launched on AT&T and the Facebook phone launched on AT&T. Only one of those exclusive deals worked out, but even the iPhone took some time to become a hit. And the iPhone didn’t see explosive growth until Apple’s deal with AT&T ended. Exclusive phone deals limit consumer choice. Likewise, it limits the market of a phone. As , the only downside to the phone was that it was exclusive to AT&T. At the time, in early 2012, AT&T was still struggling to build out its network and often saw horrible connectivity, especially in urban areas. The network has improved since then, but as a happy, overpaying Verizon subscriber, I’m not willing to switch carriers for any phone — including the Amazon phone. Legere tweets that he hopes the Amazon phone will last longer than the Facebook phone. But I think that’s a joke. At this point I don’t think he really wishes Amazon any goodwill. Whew! doesn’t know what they just signed up for. Remember the Facebook phone? — John Legere (@JohnLegere) When ( ) and ( ) get together, the industry feels a whole lot smaller. — John Legere (@JohnLegere) Really, ? What happened to home-town pride? — John Legere (@JohnLegere) Exclusivity sucks for customers. Exclusivity on sucks for the industry. — John Legere (@JohnLegere) Let's hope doesn't fall victim to the curse that is the facebook phone. — John Legere (@JohnLegere) Remember when the facebook phone was discounted to 99cents? So like, the whole time it was available on .. — John Legere (@JohnLegere) It's not about failed phones, it's about . Remember their issues with iPhone exclusivity? Let me help you: — John Legere (@JohnLegere) |
Virtualizing Wide Area Networks, VeloCloud Rings Up $21 Million | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | Add networking to the list of technologies that are moving to the cloud. Long the purview of networking giants like Cisco and Juniper, wide area networks can now be delivered as a service thanks to companies like , which has launched from stealth mode with $21 million in financing from some of the venture capital industry’s heaviest hitters. The Los Altos, Calif.-based company sells services that optimize network usage for businesses. The technology allows mobile users and branch offices to use their networks in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible, according to VeloCloud CEO Sanjay Uppal. “There are two areas that Moore’s Law has not yet reached… batteries and the wide area network,” Uppal says, referring to the maxim that computing power basically doubles every two years. While private networks cost roughly $200 per megabit per second per month, the cost of internet service is 100 times less expensive, according to Uppal. “What we’re trying to do is use that Internet that costs $2 per megabit per second along with the private wide area network to expand the choices for the customer,” says Uppal. It’s a project that VeloCloud has been working on for the past two years. Initially incubated by the networking startup incubator , VeloCloud raised a seed round in November 2012, followed by a $5 million commitment from NEA. Venrock came in to lead the $15 million Series B, which closed just over a month before the company’s launch from stealth. While the thought of a virtualized wide area network might not mean much to most people, the possibility of driving down networking costs is a big draw for big, distributed businesses. VeloCloud already has 20 customers in beta, and these are all large businesses with lots of sites around the country, according to Uppal. “We use deep packet inspection… We understand each one of the 2,000 applications that are coming from branch officers and assessing which line is best suited to transmit the information,” Uppal says. For NEA general partner Krishna “Kittu” Kolluri, the virtualization of networking is just another example of an enterprise application winging its way into the cloud. Just like his portfolio company, Storvisor, is virtualizing storage, VeloCloud is virtualizing the network, says Kolluri. “When I first joined NEA about eight years back, there weren’t a lot of interesting things happening in the security and networking area,” he says. “Now the lines between computing, storage and networking are — if not getting erased — blurring significantly.” |
Adobe Picks Up 464K Creative Cloud Subscribers In Q2, Ends With 2.3M | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | After the bell today, Adobe announced its , including $1.07 billion in revenue, $0.17 per share in earnings using GAAP metrics, and $0.37 per share without. The company’s shares are up sharply in after-hours trading, spiking more than 9 percent. Critical to the company’s quarter are the 464,000 new Creative Cloud subscriptions it picked up, ending the three-month period with 2.308 million total subscribers. Creative Cloud is a for creative types. It retails for as little as $19.99 per month, and up to $74.99. Adobe is transitioning from selling software in boxes to selling it as a service. Microsoft is another company making the transition to selling software on a recurring basis, instead of on a multi-year cycle. But there is a wrinkle to selling a product as a service instead of a single paid unit: Your sales costs might be the same, but the ensuing revenue will come in pieces over an ensuing set of payments. So you front load your costs, and accrete your revenue. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is a metric used by many software-as-a-companies to better explain to investors what their future incomes will be, in comparison to current GAAP expenses. Adobe’s current ARR for its Creative Cloud product grew to $1.2 billion in the quarter, according to the company’s release. In the quarter, 53 percent of Adobe’s revenue was recurring, according to the company. This is likely a similar percentage to what the company recorded in its , when it reported that “more than half” of its revenue in the period was recurring. |
Are Secret’s Raging Hormones A Problem Or An Opportunity? | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | I can’t recall the exact wording on the short-lived post that found its way into my personal feed on , the anonymish sharing app, the other day. But the illustrative image behind it was less easy to forget. It depicted a naked trio, consisting of a guy and two girls. Let’s just call them ‘entangled.’ The secret’s poster claimed to have kissed two female colleagues, and was anticipating the prospect of a similar threesome landing in his own private life. The highly graphic screenshot did stand out — and likely explains why this Secret vanished into the ether pretty quickly. But the adult sentiment didn’t, because Secret’s content has become increasingly sexualised of late. And the majority of these textually smutty posts are sticking around (at least in my feed). It’s been a few weeks since , where I live, and over that time the content appearing in my feed has evolved from tedious confessions about binge eating junk food to sex-related stuff, including some pretty hardcore sentiments. And no, it’s not just UK Secret users who are keen to share the thoughts tangling up their sheets. My US TC colleagues report similarly plentiful sexy stuff clogging up their own personal Secret channels. As one colleague put it: “My feed is about 80% polyamory, threesomes, kink and ‘boned at work just now’. Then about 18% startup gossip and about 2% honest, heartfelt stuff.” Secret does vary for every user since its delivery algorithm is tailored to your contacts and their networks. (Co-founder and CEO David Byttow will only say this much on the algorithm’s inner workings when I ask: “We don’t talk about how it works other than everyone has a unique experience depending on a number of factors, such as language, geography and, most importantly, whoever is in your friends.”) And while it’s possible that tech journalists have an especially freaky group of friends, it seems fairly unlikely that we’re the only Secret users fielding a lot of smut. Sure we’re obvious outliers on the startup gossip front. But sex? Interest in sex is by no means bounded within circles of tech hacks, so it’s not surprising that sex-focused content might find a general outlet on Secret. Indeed, it would be way more odd if an anonymish secret-sharing app didn’t end up skewing towards some sexy stuff. Video-sharing app in its early days. It and added some additional filtering to knock that on the head. But a video app obviously has more immediate reason for concern about graphic content than an app designed for quasi-anonymous sharing of secrets. For Secret, sex and adult themes may well present a manageable opportunity to build engagement and traction, since feeds are by definition personal — if not entirely private — and one person’s freaky is another person’s fruity, so to speak. And, well let’s face it, sex confessions are far more interesting than people talking about midnight binging on Krispy Kremes. Careful management is required, though. None of the investors I contacted to ask about this wanted to comment about Secret and sex. And Secret’s app is age-rated 13, which does mean some of its users are underage — so it needs to be sure those users are seeing age-appropriate content. A Secret spokeswoman tells TechCrunch it has no plans to increase its age rating. Secret does certainly have rules about what’s allowed and not allowed within the app. And pornographic content is absolutely permitted within its But it obviously doesn’t have a problem with sexy stuff, which is as it should be. The rise of anonymish apps gives users of more mainstream social networks like Facebook an outlet for thoughts they can’t post elsewhere. Still, that means Secret is going to have to do a fair bit of decision-making along sexualized lines to determine what’s just a blowing-off-steam sexy confessional and what’s out-and-out off-limits pornography that needs to be swiftly ejected. The Secret spokeswoman declined to specify exactly how Secret defines pornographic content, saying that the startup is adhering to best-practice industry guidelines on that front; she says the sort of content that would be flagged on Facebook or Instagram will likewise be flagged on Secret. She did add that it’s not just visual stuff that can be classed as porn by Secret’s moderators. So a particularly graphic text-based Secret could still violate its guidelines. But who knows exactly what that would say. On the moderation front, Secret says it has recently hired former staffers from Facebook and BuzzFeed to join its team — and is tooling up on that front. “Our moderation team reviews all flagged posts and also reviews content for any clear violations of our policy,” adds Byttow. “As we’ve seen explosive growth in the U.S. and abroad, our team is ramping up quickly to scale and make sure that all content on Secret meets our guidelines.” Plus, there are already tools within Secret that enable users to tweak the content they see — swipe left on a particular secret and a menu slides into view with options to subscribe to a secret, or to flag it or remove it from your stream. Flagging is for stuff you think Secret should be removing from its community entirely, not just your own feed. Asking to remove something from your own feed means you’re training the algorithm about the type of content you want to see — or, even, about a particular user whose content might not be for you. Secret says it’s doing more around that learning aspect of its algorithm. But again it’s related to the special-delivery sauce that Byttow isn’t keen to go (too) into. These user-tweaking tools aren’t as immediately obvious as they could be. So highlighting those features is perhaps something Secret could work on — especially given that the network a Secret user gets is not one they actively choose in the way they can on Twitter, for instance. The secrets you see depend on the friends in your phone book. The app does filter and flag some stuff automatically. If you compose a Secret in a way that suggests you’re writing something unpleasant about a particular individual, it can pop up a message to warn you to consider what you might be about to post. And for all the plentiful smut I’m seeing, my Secret feed is refreshingly light on malicious content, which looks promising for its anonymity-with-limits model in terms of keeping the most vicious digital trolling at bay (albeit it’s still very early days for Secret, which is a mere five months old). Another new addition to the app is a that separates content generated directly by friends and friends of friends from the wider pool. Now called ‘Explore,’ it pulls in stuff more tenuously connected to you, i.e. secrets that might have been hearted by friends of friends, so written by people in networks rather than yours. Again that gives Secret users a way to manage the content they are seeing by, say, opting to focus mostly on friends’ stuff — assuming people with a more direct connection to them are going to be posting the sort of content they actually want to read (which of course may not be the case). Secret says it will continue to develop tools — on the back and front ends of the app — to give users more control over the content that arrives in their feeds and help them to see content they’re interested in. On that front — coming later today, in fact — is an opt-out button that will be offered within the “Manage Account” view to allow users to block NSFW content. ( Secret has confirmed the ‘Don’t show me NSFW content from outside my network’ opt-out has now been rolled out.) “We’re evolving and making constant changes,” says Byttow. “What you’re reporting on is something we’ve already been working on and likely obsolete by now, or will be in the very near future.” Whether Secret comes up with a problem-free system for filtering certain content on its platform that certain users don’t want to (or shouldn’t) see remains to be seen. But one thing’s for sure: This app is in a complex, long-term relationship with adult content. |
SolarCity Ends The Day Up 17.58% After It Purchases Silevo, Announces Manufacturing Plans | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | Shares of SolarCity jumped 17.58 percent in regular trading today, as investors applauded its decision to solar-panel manufacturer Silevo, which had plans to build a factory in New York. SolarCity intends to build the plant and scale it to “capacity greater than 1 GW within the next two years.” The deal tipped the scales at a total of $350 million, with $150 million of that coming as earnouts that will be paid provided the “achievement of certain milestones,” according to . SolarCity ended the day worth just under $6 billion. Investors loved the idea. SolarCity has long installed solar technology, but has not built panels. The goal, , an investor in the company, is to develop panels that will allow for “unsubsidized solar power to cost less than grid electricity from coal or fracked gas.” To pull that off, SolarCity essentially thinks that it can not only build better panels, but that the market will accept the new supply. The company noted in its that announced the deal that “there is excess supplier capacity today” in the solar panel industry. So this is a material wager. According to a , Elon Musk owns about 21,044,146 shares in the company, which are worth, after today’s price pop, around $1.36 billion. Musk, along with other shareholders, had a pretty good day. |
There Will Not Be A Live Video Stream For The Amazon Phone Launch | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | Bad news, nerds. TechCrunch just received word that Amazon will not provide a live video stream of . Thankfully we’ll have a couple of writers on-hand to live blog the action, but you won’t be able to watch Bezos’ dog-and-pony show until after the event wraps. Amazon tells us that it will post the event in its entirety on its YouTube channel when it’s over; it will also roll out videos to its media channel. But there will not be a live video stream just like for the Fire TV launch where the retail giant also failed to stream the event. Amazon’s handling of its phone launch has been haphazard at best, and from a journalist perspective, the whole process was painful. The company just told us the venue of the event yesterday, and that was after a week of not knowing if Amazon was going to select TechCrunch for a press pass (which every outlet had to apply for). It’s widely expected that Amazon will announce its gimmicky smartphone, which packs head-tracking technology. Most of the news , but a few questions remain. We’ll have plenty of coverage of the event, so tune in tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. PT for all the action. |
The CreoPop Pen Is The Easiest Way To Get Into 3D Art | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | If you’re looking to get into 3D art, the pen is the closest thing you can get to a “beginner’s option.” Unlike 3D printing, which requires creating a model in a CAD-like application and sending it to an expensive printer like those made by , CreoPop lets you create 3D objects directly from your imagination. The CreoPop comes with some trade-offs from those pricier options. It’s like a mix between a hot-glue gun (though it uses UV rays to solidify the polymer, not heat, so it’s totally safe for kids) and a paint brush. You still have to have artistic ability to make something fancy, like a statue of your favorite fictional character. It can’t just print a template you downloaded from the Internet. Starting at , the CreoPop will be available to backers in early 2015. The device will come with several colors of “ink,” but the company is already working on inks that incorporate polymers that allow for unique characteristics. This includes magnetic ink that can be used to hang an object from your home refrigerator or that change colors at different temperatures. For a better idea of how the CreoPop works or the interesting objects that can be made with new types of ink (edible art!), watch our interview with Andreas Birnik, co-founder of CreoPop: |
Three Senators Decry The House’s NSA Bill, Citing “Watered Down” Reform | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | A trio of Senators wrote an and decrying the bill that passed the House recently as insufficient for the protection of the privacy of U.S. citizens. The Senators, , and , come from both parties. Senator Wyden is known as the senator that James Clapper , regarding government surveillance. The editorial is punchy, saying that “for years […] senior government officials claimed that domestic surveillance was narrow in focus and limited in scope. But in June 2013, Americans learned through leaked classified documents that these claims bore little resemblance to reality.” The senators also mention a “loophole” in American law that allows the government to “read some Americans’ emails without ever getting a warrant.” This is likely a comment on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 that, somehow, still allows for the government to that is older than 180 days with a simple subpoena. The group wants to ban bulk collection of “American’s private information,” fix the ECPA, and install an “advocate” in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. So what about ? If you recall, it set out to curtail bulk collection and install an advocate in the FISA court. That was true at the beginning, at least. The Senators are not impressed with what eventually passed the House, saying that the “revised version of the USA Freedom Act” had “nearly all of the essential reforms either watered down or removed.” So, what passed the House won’t do, in their estimation. That USA FREEDOM Act, long in a , was rushed through at the end. Around . The Senators promise to “vigorously oppose this bill in its current form and continue to push for real changes to the law.” If the Senate can enact stronger reform, it will be interesting to see how hawks in the House react. |
OnLive Is Now Streaming Top-Tier Games To The Wikipad Gaming Tablet | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | Remember OnLive? Despite a , the company lives on, and in March it launched its new . Today, it’s partnering with , to deliver full AAA PC gaming to the tablet. OnLive already offers this to any Android device with access to Google Play via its app, but the version for Wikipad is optimized, with special support for its dedicated built-in gaming controller. The Wikipad 7 will be the first to get the OnLive treatment, but support will also be extended to Wikipad’s forthcoming Gamevice hardware, which adds a detachable gamepad to any tablet that wants one. The game streaming from OnLive can be paired with the CloudLift subscription service which makes it possible for players to pick up right where they left off on their home gaming rigs thanks to cloud-based save states and metadata. It’s a move that should add value to both Wikipad’s business and OnLive’s user base, but in the end it’s unlikely to prove truly game-changing to either. Especially as players like Nvidia are moving to create their own streaming game services like GRID, the system that works in the same way as OnLive but with the backing of one of the biggest mobile chip and graphics card makers in the world. It has yet to prove itself a sizeable business for anyone involved, however, which could just be a case of the tech (especially on the user end) needing to play catch-up with the service. |
eBay Launches “eBay Valet,” An iPhone App That Does The Selling For You | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | eBay today is expanding its lesser-known service to mobile with the launch of a new app called , which promises to let eBay do the selling for you. That is, it takes every step of the selling process — from determining an item’s value to listing it online to shipping it when sold — and handles it for you. Like its web-based counterpart, eBay Valet is designed to make online selling easier and more approachable, not only for first-time sellers, but for anyone who doesn’t have time to handle a listing for themselves. (It’s sort of like the digital counterpart to those stores that would “sell it on eBay” for you, which you might remember from the movie “ !”) To some extent, eBay’s Sell For Me service is its own take on the various online consignment shops that have sprung up lately, like Poshmark, The Real Real, ThredUp, Threadflip, Twice and others. But unlike those services, neither eBay’s Sell It For Me, and now Valet on mobile, support selling clothing. Instead, on its Sell For Me website, eBay how it can sell a number of other items for you, including electronics, collectibles, shoes, handbags, sporting goods, musical instruments and even automotive parts. However, it won’t work with just anything, such as bulky items heavier than 25 pounds, those in poor condition worth less than $40, media like DVDs and CDS, high-end valuables, and more. The new mobile app will have similar restrictions, we’re told. The app was designed and developed by the IIC (Israel Innovation Center), a unit within the Innovation and New Ventures organization based in Tel-Aviv, which is chartered with rapid prototyping for eBay Inc. For now, the e-commerce giant says eBay Valet is a “pilot” program, and it doesn’t have specific metrics in mind that it will have to hit to move forward. For consumers, the process of using eBay Valet is easy. To get started, you just take a picture of the item in question, then enter (or speak) your item’s description. Within 30 minutes, your “valet” will respond with a valuation range, and you’ll be asked if you still want to sell it. If you have a box handy, eBay will send you a shipping label. If not, the company can send you a free, prepaid box instead. You can then log into eBay.com to watch the sale, which takes place under the valet’s account. After the item sells — typically via a seven-day listing — you keep 70 percent of the profits, which are deposited to your PayPal account. “Even though you’re not selling the item, there’s still an experience of selling,” Steve Yankovich, eBay’s vice president of Innovation and New Ventures says. “You get to experience the listing but do none of the work.” Plus, he explains, the difference between the eBay Valet app and other selling programs is that on the business side, eBay is actually vetting the items. “We have a person looking at the item, doing research on eBay for condition and our marketplace has good inventory,” he notes. eBay Valet is something that’s reminiscent of some others startups we came across in recent months. For example, (which ), was attempting to do something similar, and before it several services tried to topple established companies like eBay or Craigslist (on the local side), , and . To date, none have really panned out. But eBay — because it’s eBay — may have a shot. The new app is live . |
LinkedIn-Owned Email Widget Rapportive Is About To Get Less Useful | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | All good things must come to an end. , the fantastically helpful email widget that jazzed up your Gmail sidebar with rich contact information pulled from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more, is getting its first big revamp following in 2012. And frankly, it’s not all good news. If you’re unfamiliar with Rapportive, you don’t email enough. For those who use this contact management service by way of Gmail plugin, it’s become so ingrained in our email workflows that . It’s this perfect, little “CRM-for-everyone” widget that let you instantly see things like a person’s job title, recent social updates and accounts from around the web, as well as let you click a button to connect with them on the sites it supports. But now, it’s changing. LinkedIn , but that’s not the extent of it, as it turns out. In Rapportive lingo, that let you add a number of other data sources to Rapportive’s default configuration, including things like CrunchBase information, CRM data from a number of sources, GitHub, Lanyrd, Klout, Kred and more. Notes, meanwhile, are the you may have added to provide context to those you interacted with on Gmail. It burns to see those features disappear, but they likely weren’t the most heavily used, so that makes sense. However, LinkedIn is also making some significant changes to how Facebook and Twitter functionality will work going forward, as well. Now, those networks in the sidebar unless the contact in question has those sites listed on their LinkedIn profile. For a number of obvious reasons, that’s not going to be the case when it comes to Facebook. But to spell it out: the place where you post your personal and family photos and play Candy Crush is not something you necessarily want to advertise to your business colleagues. So don’t be surprised if you don’t see many Facebook links in Rapportive’s sidebar going forward. Meanwhile, Twitter is better integrated with LinkedIn, mainly because of which lets you tweet your LinkedIn updates on Twitter’s service. But it’s not necessarily going to be attached to everyone’s profile, which means it too will somewhat disappear after the update. In addition, even though Facebook and Twitter are present on a contact’s Rapportive profile, they’ll no longer work the way they did before. You won’t see the user’s recent tweets or Facebook status updates, for example. And you won’t be able to just click a button to follow them on Twitter or add them as a friend on Facebook. Instead, you’ll have to click through to view their profile on those competing networks and friend or follow them from there. The whole point of Rapportive to begin with — and what made it so great — was the fact that it aggregated access to many networks in one spot and gave you simple tools to connect with contacts from a single widget. But LinkedIn isn’t interested in what made Rapportive so great for users; it’s interested in how Rapportive can be so great for LinkedIn. Of course, that’s how things go when a big company snatches up a cool startup, and from LinkedIn’s perspective, it makes sense to focus on building out the LinkedIn functionality. But for heavy Rapportive users (I know a few around here), these are the kinds of changes that can leave a bad taste in your mouth. (I mean, it’s like when all over again. .) But not all the forthcoming changes will take away current functionality, LinkedIn points out. The service at least is still being actively developed, which we should be grateful for, and the company is making improvements to its speed and reliability. It’s also going to tighten up the integrations with LinkedIn to do things like display the shared connections you have with your contacts, for example. And since Rapportive’s user base is very much about using LinkedIn (that’s why LinkedIn bought them, after all), this will be a handy addition. The changes will be implemented on July 31, says the company, so enjoy ye olde Rapportive while it lasts. |
Dropbox, Box Competition Heats Up As Companies Buy Early-Stage Startups On Same Day | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | When two closely competing companies make purchases on the same day, it’s probably fair to say that it’s not a coincidence. Such was the case yesterday when and purchased early stage startups only hours apart. In fact, the cloud startups with similar names have been on mini buying sprees of late, fighting to fill in holes and improve their products as they march toward an inevitable IPO. Let’s look at yesterday’s purchases. First of all, . The product lets you stream files from the cloud directly to your local machine. It’s worth noting that you have been able to view files in Dropbox and Google Drive in your desktop OS file manager for some time. The fact you couldn’t see Box content locally in the same way as competitors had to be a big limitation and I’m betting Box has been hearing a lot of requests for this functionality. Streem actually it takes it a step further by letting you mount the drive on your local system, then streaming the file directly from the cloud, saving your local hard drive space. –and it only costs them money instead of engineering resources (and they get the engineering team too.) Meanwhile, not to be outdone, This is a big data visualization company, but it’s not clear how Dropbox will use this technology. Perhaps they are looking to extract data about its massive user base or simply to improve its underlying database technology as it continues to grow, or even as a friend , it could be to help visualize content in Dropbox. That they announced these purchases in the same day shows just how tightly these two companies are beginning to compete. For a time it seemed they were on parallel paths with Dropbox taking the consumer angle and Box taking the enterprise one, but over time Dropbox has been increasingly making a play for the same enterprise market, even image with IT. In the past, I never actually saw the two companies as true rivals, even though they had some common functionality, because of their laser focus on different markets, but it’s clear that’s changing. Box has the upper hand in the enterprise today because it’s been concentrating on it so much longer, but Dropbox has numbers on its side and it’s growing quickly with more than 300M users, and a plan to make itself more attractive to enterprise buyers. Two purchases hours apart on the same day by two companies in the same space might not be anything at all, but given the history of these two companies it’s hard to write off as mere coincidence and would appear to be indicative of a deeper developing competition. |
Amazon’s Top-Secret Gadget Lab Is Building Plenty, But A Thinner Kindle Could Be The Coolest | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | Amazon is apparently working away on a lot more besides the upcoming smartphone with the 3D interface at its Lab126 hardware R&D facility. A new details some of the work that went into creating the new smartphone, as well as a few other efforts, including a speech-controlled Bluetooth speaker, a Square-killing credit card reader and a projector for anywhere. But the most exciting development of all might be one that seems rather boring on the surface: a super-thin Kindle. The Bloomberg profile mostly focuses on the Lab126 makeup, which consists of around 1,600 people, according to information from LinkedIn. They’ve launched two new devices this year already, including the and the grocery-scanning gadget. The Fire TV, while mostly well-received, doesn’t do much for non-Prime subscribers they can’t get elsewhere. And the Dash is really only useful where Amazon offers AmazonFresh, which is still just limited to a few U.S. locales. Even Amazon’s unannounced (until tomorrow) smartphone is being met with a lot of early skepticism. One person I spoke with, who spoke under the condition of anonymity and who got some early hands-on time with the device, said they weren’t very impressed with its 3D gimmick. That’s been reported by others who have had an early look, as well, including a source speaking to and a separate source who shared information with TechCrunch. Truth be told, the other products reported by Businessweek strike me as similarly odd in design and conception. A device that “projects a computer image onto any surface” is essentially a pico projector, it sounds like, and a voice-powered wireless speaker sounds like a mostly unnecessary mashup of Siri and your basic Jambox. A credit-card reader to compete with Square could help Amazon bridge the gap between online and local retail, but from a consumer perspective, the item in the project pipeline with the most potential appeal is a new Kindle Paperwhite. Amazon’s Kindle remains the company’s most interesting consumer hardware device, and is arguably the most successful of the bunch (which is hard to say given Amazon’s reluctance to share device sales numbers). The Paperwhite line has been a terrific improvement on an already solid product, and now this , codenamed Ice Wine, sounds like it could be even better. An suggests it’ll be lighter, with a 300 ppi high-resolution display, and the return of physical buttons. Businessweek’s profile says only that it’ll be “incredibly thin,” but that alone would be a market improvement. While it’s great that Amazon is working hard on building new and different kinds of hardware with unique interfaces and interaction paradigms, the company continues to show its strength on a product that was smart and timely out of the gate. I’ll be watching to see what the Amazon brings to the table in a new phone tomorrow, but I’m honestly much more excited about whatever’s in store for its e-ink-based e-reader later this year. |
Qplay Is An iPad App For Binge-Watching The Internet | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | While the seemingly infinite video options on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and elsewhere provide plenty of content, there’s definitely a effect when it’s time to pick the next thing to watch. is an iPad app that looks to reduce that stress of choice by turning videos from around the web into “Qs,” channels of content from your social feeds and around the web. The app gives you a couple of options to find content that’s up your alley. You can register a Qplay account, which lets you create either private Qs for yourself or public Qs if you want to share content with friends or followers by saving content from your browser using . You can also register with your Facebook, Twitter or YouTube accounts to draw in content from your friends, the people you follow, or the channels you subscribe to. To make relevant videos easier to find, Qplay lets you add hashtags to content within the app. So when you’re watching a tech-focused Q that you found on the service and want to watch more videos about Android, you can narrow down the focus of what you’re watching by clicking that hashtag. While hashtags have a tendency to become annoying on social networks, in Qplay they serve as an unobtrusive layer of metadata that you can ignore if you want to. That’s true for most of the functionality in the app. If you’re the kind of person who consumes content very passively, you can simply click on the News Q and watch up-to-date content from a variety of news sources around the web. Since the Q moves between videos automatically, the experience is like watching cable news and changing the channel every time there’s a boring segment on — but you don’t have to touch the remote. I enjoyed using Qplay on my iPad to stream a mix of news, comedy, dogs, and video game reviews while hanging out on the couch or in bed, but most people would prefer to enjoy their videos on an actual television. To that end, the company today rolled out the ability to send your Qs over to a Chromecast. Since Chromecast doesn’t work by directly streaming from your device — the app simply tells it where to find content — you can do things like watch one thing on your TV and another on your iPad, or queue up a Q and close your iPad to focus on what you’re watching. I don’t have a Chromecast, but in a demo with Qplay CEO Phil Peterson last week, I was able to see how it handles. Everything was quick enough, with new Qs starting up on the TV almost immediately after being selected on the iPad. The only issue I noticed was that videos would occasionally play at really low resolutions for a 1080p screen, a problem Peterson attributed to the source feeds, not the app or Chromecast. If there’s one downside to using Qplay for casual video watching, it’s that the interface is a little cluttered for my taste. There’s navigation through public and private Qs, hashtags, videos in the current Q you’re watching and, if you have it set up with Chromecast, controls for the videos on the TV and the iPad. The app has an intro video that guides you through the basics, but it goes through each feature a bit too quickly and its animations are all a little too distracting to absorb what you’re supposed to be learning. An interactive demo that a user can skip would be better here. After watching the video, I found myself confusedly tapping to try to pause content or make the interface go away and accidentally doing something else like skipping to another video in my Q. That might just be something that goes away once you get used to it after extensive use. Right now, Qplay is free — and devoid of all ads that aren’t actually part of the videos you’re watching — making it a good alternative to setting up playlists of videos on YouTube for watching later, for instance. When I asked how content creators feel about having ads stripped from their videos, Peterson suggested that Qplay might eventually become a new avenue for distribution of content, with companies specifically creating paid Qs that people could tune in to for a small fee or subscription. That, of course, depends on the success of the app and the content that becomes popular among its users. The , but the company plans to offer versions for Android tablets and eventually phones. |
ChatCenter Is A Global, Secure Chat System That Lets Anyone Drop You A Line | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | of chat apps out there. From WhatsApp to Viber to Skype, you can’t walk a mile in Palo Alto without tripping over an emoji. That said, , a new service from TechCrunch co-founder Keith Teare and two engineers, Alex Komarov and Sergey Zhukov, is an interesting addition to the glut. To use it you simply register an identity – I’m – and give out the link to people who might like to chat with you. The service is primarily HTTP based but they have just launched their with an Android app forthcoming. Because each URL is unique and the chat works well in the browser, people can chat with you from anywhere. Notifications are sent to your iOS apps or to your email address.
The company has raised $370,000 so far to build the app and web presence, mostly from Teare’s own fund as well as from Greg Kidd and Innovalley. “We believe that Chat is siloed in various mobile apps. To chat with me you need to know which app I run and what my ID is in that app,” said Teare (who is ). “If voice worked this way (needing to know the platform and id of the user before calling them) it wouldn’t work. Voice and Text are universal communications tools in that sense, with universal addressing schemes (numbers or email addresses) but until now Chat was not.” “You can put you Universal Chat Address in your email signature, a social profile, on a blog or a post, in a Tweet or an Instagram message. Indeed anywhere,” he said. The goal is to add alerts to all platforms and to streamline the universal chatting system. However, it works quite well right now. “We will later have open and free API and SDKs for developers to build us in – even other chat apps. But especially apps that need chat and do not want to reinvent it,” said Teare. Teare and his partners based much of their work on their previous startups, and Chance. While building out those platforms, Teare realized that many of the users were just using one chat app to ask for account info for other chat apps. By making everything work together, he said, especially in the browser, you can streamline that interaction. “Chat Center is an attempt to promote Chat to be a human scale communications medium like Voice and Text. By creating a Universal address system and placing it in an http cloud we make it open and accessible to all,” he said. While the product is still too new to call a success, it definitely seems like a compelling alternative to an email signature full of various chat handles or all the various chat apps out there. [youtube=http://youtu.be/Hjrqo1Cu3TI] |
Estimote, Knoll Partner To Bring iBeacons Into Office Space Planning | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | has today announced a partnership with Knoll to bring its platform to the office space planning company. , a Disrupt and YC alum, offers a platform for developers to easily integrate iBeacon tech into existing apps and services, and at NeoCon 2014 (a trade conference for interior design) Knoll debuted one of the first retail installations of iBeacon technology paired with the Bounce app. is a well-established office design and office space planning firm. The team realized that one of the core difficulties with planning an office space is that there is a level of uncertainty around which investments will pay off. Using the Estimote iBeacon platform, Knoll planted seven iBeacons in their showroom that would give attendees a chance to look at occupancy levels at different stations. The idea is that Knoll clients could install iBeacons around their own offices and look at potential upgrades to the space that would maximize efficiency. With the Bounce app, these clients could ensure that any investment they made to change their office space — perhaps by splitting one large conference room into two — would actually be useful for the way the office functions. The Bounce app also added layers of information about products through a push notification sent from other iBeacons around the space. Generally speaking, this is the most common way we see iBeacon technology playing out at first. The expectation is that retailers will advertise an app that will offer location-based content and coupons within an actual store, bringing immeasurable value to the retailer but begging the question of what’s in it for the consumer. But Estimote has over 20,000 developers working on interesting ways to integrate iBeacon technology in a manner that is valuable to the end-user. For example, Estimote envisions a world in which you don’t stand in line at the airport or check-in to your flight with an ID — the airport will have already verified that it’s you boarding a certain flight. This latest partnership with Knoll is of how iBeacon technology can be used for purposes beyond simple location-based coupons. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk8th_0xO_U&w=640&h=360] |
Nike+ FuelBand App Now Available On Android | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 17 | Nike has made the companion app for its FuelBand and FuelBand SE activity tracking wristbands available to , two years after it first introduced the hardware and its apps for iOS devices. The companion app provides access to NikeFuel score information and history, and makes it so that your Android device can connect to your FuelBand as long as it has Bluetooth LE capabilities. The app is compatible with Android Jelly Bean 4.3 and higher, and supports only a few handsets at launch, including the Samsung Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4, and Galaxy S5, as well as the HTC One, Nexus 5 and the Moto X. It’s an English-only app, and is available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany and Japan from the now. Other features for those new to the FuelBand world include the ability to track and receive progress updates for a daily NikeFuel goal, tracking by individual session, the new “Win the Hour” feature for FuelBand SE owners, leaderboard with friends, syncing in the background over Bluetooth LE and more. Nike’s FuelBand has been the subject of a host of recent reports, including one involving layoffs in the company’s hardware department that led many to believe it would . The new app for Android indicates that at the very least, the company is continuing to work on software to support existing devices. In fact, its arrival on Android runs somewhat counter to recent reports that Nike and Apple would be working closely together on upcoming fitness-tracking initiatives, with Nike focusing on software while Apple tackles hardware, presumably through an upcoming wearable. |
Alibaba Acquires UCWeb, Maker Of China’s Most Popular Mobile Browser | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | , already an investor in , will buy all remaining shares of the web browser and search company. The two firms announced the merger, one of the most significant among Chinese Internet companies to date, earlier today. UCWeb will join UC Mobile, one of Alibaba’s business unit as Alibaba preps for its U.S. IPO. Though Alibaba did not disclose how much the deal is worth, it did say that it is w paid for 91 Wireless by Baidu last year, formerly the biggest deal in China’s Internet sector. In a statement, the companies said “The move highlights the comprehensive integration of Alibaba and UCWeb following Alibaba’s investment in UCWeb in 2009 and 2013, and will enables deeper synergies between the companies by marrying Alibaba’s strengths in e-commerce, cloud computing and big data technology and UCWeb’s leading market position and technology in mobile.” UC Mobile will oversee Alibaba’s browser, mobile search, location-based services, mobile gaming, app store and mobile reader operations. UCWeb is one of the biggest web browser companies in China, with more than 50% market share. It also surpassed Opera as the top mobile browser in India last year, when , and now holds a 35% market share according to StatCounter, compared to Opera’s 25%. Before the merger, Alibaba already held a 66% stake in UCWeb in convertible preferred shares, according to its and also participated in several fundraising shares. Its total carrying amount in UCWeb was RMB3,358 million, or about $540 million. The move is significant because it builds up Alibaba’s mobile strategy, making it a more formidable competitor to other Chinese companies like Baidu, which in June 2012, and Tencent. It may also mean that Alibaba plans to strengthen its presence in India and other emerging markets. UCWeb named India as its second headquarter in April 2013, while UC Browser has grown worldwide by with phone makers including HTC, Samsung, Nokia, LG, Lenovo, and carriers such as Vodafone, China Mobile, and China Telecom. Before selling a controlling interest to Alibaba, UCWeb , our partner site in China, but it may have scuttled those plans as smartphone users began spending more times in apps instead of their mobile browsers. On Alibaba’s end, UCWeb will be able to develop browsers and other tech it needs for its smart TV ecosystem and e-commerce businesses. |
Index Ventures Raises New $550M Early-Stage Fund For Europe, The US And Israel | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | has announced a new early-stage, €400 million ($550 million) fund aimed at tech startups in Europe, US and Israel. This is its seventh early-stage fund and part of a total €3 billion ($4 billion) raised by Index since its inception. The fund will invest from seed and early stage, scaling up to €15 million depending on the requirements of the company. And it’s quite into fashion, such as online product discovery platform Rad (pictured). Index intends to focus on its “core hubs” of London, San Francisco, Berlin, New York, Stockholm/Nordics, Tel Aviv and Paris. And it certainly has some good stats on its side. Seven of its companies exited for over $1 billion in the last year. It had four European-born IPOs with Just Eat (LSE – the first listing on the LSE High Growth Segment), King and Zendesk (NYSE), Criteo (NASDAQ), plus one U.S.-born IPO with Arista Networks (NYSE). It’s had two strategic exits with The Climate Corporation (Monsanto) and Supercell (to Softbank) In its portfolio it has 11 companies valued at over $1 billion, including five from Europe (Criteo, Supercell, Just Eat, King and Zendesk); and six in the US (Climate, Dropbox, Etsy, Hortonworks, Lookout, Pure Storage). Companies it has that have attracted very significant financings include Elasticsearch, Farfetch, Funding Circle, Shapeways, SoundCloud and Socialbakers, as well as seven from the U.S.: Dropbox, Etsy, Flipboard, Hortonworks, Lookout, Pure Storage and Squarespace. Index is approaching the point where it could be considered to be playing at the level of any Valley-based VC. We understand is was a “relatively easy” fundraising process, according to partner Ben Holmes. He said the company had ever more conviction that “you can build out from Europe. That question is being answered now. Six ‘billion-dollar’ events in the last 12 months puts us up with where the best Silicon Valley names are. We don’t think that’s the end of the road for the exits.” Against other players Index competes and sometimes co-invests with Balderton and Accel. The latter had a big ownership in Supercell, as did Index for instance. “It’s becoming visible that this new era of tech companies have huge revenues, and are sizeable in terms of employes, such as Just East, Criteo, Zendesk, King,” Index Ventures partner Dominique Vidal tells TechCrunch. “It’s not just air. These are great businesses.” Interestingly these exits are starting to form a better ecosystem for Europe. For instance, 40 people in Criteo alone made $1 million apiece. It means they in turn may become angels. “We’re not US transplant VCs. We not a franchise partner of a U.S. fund,” partner Neil Rimer said. “We’re not even the second generation. The founders of the company run it today. We stacked our reputation on betting outside of the Valley and bet because of the growth of the Internet – the Internet is now ‘Silicon Valley’. Great entrepreneurs can now come from anywhere.” Index has been a heavy advocate of European IPOs. “The ‘winter is coming’ feeling about high valuations of U.S. startups is more a U.S. phenomenon,” Holmes says. “In Europe this is less the case.” Its other investments include: |
Lady Gaga’s Backplane Pivots To Let You Build And Monetize Your Own Social Network | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Why should Facebook or Ning earn the money if you bring the audience? wants to put that cash in your pocket. That’s why it’s pivoting from building social networks for big brands and celebrities into an open platform where anyone can coordinate people, charge subscriptions and even sell ads. The goal is to put the power back in the hands of organizers, from sports teams to musician fan clubs, volunteering groups to concert halls. back in early 2011 to create community sites for big influencers, starting with for Backplane adviser and investor Lady Gaga. It assembled an impressive array of founders like Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and Gaga’s manager Troy Carter. A-list investors like Google Ventures, SV Angel, Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures, Founders Fund, Greylock, and Sequoia have put around $13 million into Backplane. With 1 million users on , Backplane stepped out from Gaga’s shadow in February 2013 with an expansion to power sites for Guns N’ Roses, Conde Nast and more. But with time it saw a bigger opportunity in DIY social networks for anyone with a community to rally. Facebook’s Groups feature had swelled to 500 million users, but organizers had little flexibility to customize or monetize their memberships. So now Backplane plans to open its social network builder in late Q3 of this year. If Backplane can align its incentives with that of content creators and community leaders by offering ways for them to do business through their social networks, it could persuade them to host their content there instead of elsewhere. This drive is why Backplane has hired Scott Harrison, a decade-plus Wall Street veteran and CEO of financial tech provider UNX, as its new COO and president. “Wall Street does nothing without thinking about monetization,” Harrison tells me. Backplane social networks will let organizers make announcements, plan events, heavily customize their designs and track analytics. Naturally, members can reply to posts, share photos, join forums and mingle. But rather than having to pay to set up a network as they would on Ning, Backplane will get organizers paid. They’ll be able to charge dues, sell merchandise and crowdfund projects. And if their community grows large enough, Backplane even wants to help them sell ad space in their networks and split the revenue. “Why wouldn’t I push my content to an area where I can make money opposed to other people making money? If you can bring 10,000 people to a room, we should share that value,” Harrison explains. He admits that on the user side, there are plenty of places to congregate on the web, “but the people who control content, they’ll drive people to the place where they like to see that content consumed.” He believes a network must provide more than social engagement for its leaders. “It has to change into , as well.” Backplane’s success will hinge on two big challenges. First is convincing people that existing solutions like Facebook Groups aren’t good enough. Since Facebook users frequently return to the service and check their notifications, it has powerful retention that helps Groups content get seen. Backplane will need ways to make sure people come back to their niche networks, which could be very tough. It will also need to trumpet its monetization features if it’s going to gain traction. Second, it will need to lean on its connections to the entertainment industry to get any celebrity with a vibrant fan community onboarded. If done right, Backplane could become the new Myspace, and use that popular exposure to promote that fans can make their own social networks about anything. But that’s a big “if.” The whole thing is. Backplane has a steep road ahead. One thing on Backplane’s side, though, is a pervasive feeling that big social networks like Facebook put the interests of users and themselves ahead of content creators, brands and organizers. That prioritization ensures the user base doesn’t get burned with spam and stop coming back, but it also heightens the desire for control amongst potential Backplane clients big and small. DIY organizers might not like how Facebook makes it easy for members of Groups to mute notifications, cutting off their core communication channel. That might be why Coca-Cola chose to create a Backplane network for . Harrison tells me “Coke feels like they get lost on Facebook. They don’t feel represented when their brand is subservient to the Facebook brand.” |
CliMate Is The Cutest Bluetooth-Enabled Environment Tracker Ever | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 10 |
I am obsessed with my dehumidifier. I live in a city where the average relative humidity hovers around 80% for most of the year and it’s a constant battle to keep my things–camera equipment, leather bags, houseplants I want to keep fungus–protected from the elements, even when I’m indoors. Unfortunately, if the air is too arid, I get nosebleeds. So that is why my finicky, moisture-sensitive self is excited about , a tiny environment tracker that connects by Bluetooth to an app on your smartphone and is Created by a startup based in two very different climate zones (Taipei and Mountain View, California), CliMate is a tiny, portable cloud-shaped tracker that measures humidity, ultraviolet light, and temperature. CliMate can be kept on a stand inside a room or worn on a lanyard outside your clothing so that your body temperature doesn’t skew its readings. While other companies have made Bluetooth climate sensors before (including , a TechCrunch disrupt finalist), CliMate wants to differentiate with the twee design of its tracker and app. Instead of just charts, it also shows you a cartoon plant that withers away when conditions are less than ideal. It will send you alerts, based on your settings, that tell you when to put on sunscreen if you are outdoors.
CliMate also aggregates all user-generated data to alert people in the same area to weather changes. The tracker was developed by Rooti, formerly known as . Before changing its name, the company developed , a wristband that monitors your automatic nervous system by measuring breathing and heart rate. Also launched on Kickstarter, W/Me was successfully funded and shipped on time last year. The company is seeking $50,000 this time and the campaign ends on July 21. Devices start from the early bird special price of $39 for one CliMate. For more information, check out its . |
Amobee Buys Adconion For $235M And Kontera For $150M In Consolidation Play | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Another day, and another two big acquisitions in the digital advertising industry. , a mobile ad company , is to build out its position in the wider digital ads space: It’s gobbling up and , for $235 million and $150 million, respectively. Amobee notes that the consideration payable for Adconion Direct North America and Adconion Australia (the two divisions of Adconion) is approximately $209 million, excluding debt. Both Adconion and Kontera will become a part of SingTel. Adconion, which has been around since 2005, had from investors like Index Ventures and Wellington. Among the company’s twists and turns over the years, in 2009 it picked up the failed video network Joost — originally founded by the creators of Skype with lots of high hopes — and in 2012 folded it into , Adconion’s existing online video ads business. The company says it has some 2,000 clients on its platform. Kontera, meanwhile, is a another long-in-the-tooth advertising startup that was something of a pioneer in ad tech and analytics. The company, based in the U.S. but with its roots in Israel, had raised from investors that included Sequoia Capital and Carmel Ventures. The move is a big consolidation play from Amobee, bringing in both a bigger client footprint and more ad tech. SingTel has some 500 million subscribers in Southeast Asia and beyond over mobile, broadband and fixed-line connections, and so this is, in part, about the company picking up technology to target them with more and different kinds of ads. “The SingTel Group has significant scale and customer relationships with over 500 million mobile customers, as well as intelligent networks, billing capabilities and extensive touch points,” said Allen Lew, CEO, Group Digital L!fe and Chairman of Amobee, in a statement. “Together with Amobee’s advanced digital marketing technology and solutions, we will create relevant and innovative marketing campaigns across multiple channels for brands and advertisers. These acquisitions will further differentiate Amobee and help solidify its position in the digital advertising market.” But at the same time, this also points to a larger trend for consolidation in advertising with the economics of the business, with its thinner margins, favouring bigger players. “The digital advertising business is about scale and capitalizing on the market opportunities with technology as a core differentiator,” said Mark Strecker, CEO of Amobee. “With these two acquisitions announced today, we have extended our product offerings, increased our sales footprint and reinforced Amobee’s leadership position in the fast growing digital advertising market.” These are not the first acquisitions from Amobee under SingTel. Last year, to add real-time bidding technology to its platform. In 2012, it to bring in 3D technology. Image: |
Oculus VR Has Hired Jason Rubin, A Naughty Dog Co-Founder, To Lead First-Party Game Development | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Oculus VR that it has hired to lead first-party game development. This comes less than a week after the company announced that it has to lead the creation of a platform for selling virtual-reality experiences. Best known for his work as co-founder at , Rubin served as director on every title in both the and trilogies, the definitive adventure games of the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, respectively. At Oculus, he will lead game development projects coming from studios in Seattle, San Francisco, Menlo Park, Dallas and Irvine. These hires are just the latest to demonstrate that Oculus is looking to become far more than the maker of a peripheral for enabling virtual-reality experiences. In , the company also listed more than a dozen hires it’s made in recent months from big-name studios like (the developers currently in charge of the Halo series) and , the company behind the Half-Life series and the gaming platform. |
TC Cribs: Feeling Like A Kid Again At FiftyThree’s Creative NYC HQ | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Welcome back to Cribs, the TechCrunch TV show that goes behind the doors of tech companies to see what it’s like inside for the lucky ducks who work there. Today’s episode brings us to the New York City headquarters of . FiftyThree, which is behind the for the iPad, is for making beautifully designed mobile products — and as you can see in the video, its light-filled office is a sight for sore eyes as well. FiftyThree is located in the historic , which was a nexus for communications back in the days of the telegraph and continues to be a key today. Built in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Western Union building is a prime example of Art Deco architecture, so it’s fun to experience the contrast of passing through the building’s Deco-ed out lobby on the way to FiftyThree’s much more modern and Zen inspired space. The whole point of FiftyThree’s apps is to let people loosen up and tap into the kind of artistic creativity that came naturally to them when they were kids, so the company’s HQ is kind of like a big well-designed art classroom for adults. Watch us tap into our inner children in the video above. And here are a few photos our team took of FiftyThree HQ:
[gallery ids="1014243,1014244,1014245,1014246,1014247,1014248"] This episode of Cribs was edited by . All camerawork, sound, and lighting by and . All production coordination and supervision by . |
President Obama Hits Up The Youths On Tumblr | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | The President took to Tumblr today, answering users’ questions on topics relating to education. It was another example of the President using alternative mediums to attract the attention of young Americans. Notably, and infamously to some, the President answered to promote Healthcare.gov. That effort . The President’s digital trip to Tumblr, albeit taking place physically in Washington, was not without humor. The above fist-bump gif was just the start. The President answered a question from Tumblr user ‘ ,’ which led to general guffaws, and then , from the user: : Welcome to 2014. The President went on to compare Tumblr founder David Karp to NBA superstar LeBron James, making the point that people who achieve peak success — the President cited Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — are rare. Karp of course , placing him in the unofficial unicorn club. It will be harder to gauge the impact of the Tumblr session than it was the “Two Ferns” episode, as the latter had a simple goal: Drive web traffic, which is eminently trackable. Spreading knowledge about student loan relief is slightly less so. While it can seem slightly odd to see the world’s most powerful person take to comedy shows, and a microblogging service synonymous with whimsical gifs, it’s reasonable: The percentage of the nation that is reached by traditional news programs in the evening is in decline. And, when you need to reach a specific demographic, you go to where they congregate. On other fronts, the President condemned a political culture in Washington that has failed to address rampant gun violence on school campuses. |
Pyne Offers A Simple Way To Poll Everyone (Or Just Your Friends) | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | “Oh jeez, another Q&A app.” That was my knee-jerk reaction when I heard about a new startup called , which has created what it says is an app that allows users to “poll the world.” But then co-founder Tony Peccatiello gave me a demo, and I have to admit that it was appealingly quick, simple and fun. As explained to me by Peccatiello, Pyne’s main selling point is the fact that it should only take a few seconds to ask and answer questions. If you want to create a question, you just type it out, add an image, and then identify whether it’s a yes/no question or multiple choice. (If it’s multiple choice, you type in each choice. If it’s yes/no, well, the possible answers are obvious.) Lastly you can identify the audience you want to reach – men, women, Facebook friends, or everyone on Pyne. From the answer side, you’re presented with one question at time, which you can favorite, share on social networks, comment, or, of course, answer. It’s one tap to answer a question, then you’re presented with the next one, on and on until you get sick of it. Peccatiello said that this quick question-loading process sets Pyne apart from other apps, which often present the questions through a search or feed interface. The closest competitor may be Thumb (which last year), but even then he said Pyne is different because it offers “a more robust answer choice,” allows answerers (whew, WordPress spellcheck says that’s really a word) to interact with each other on the results page, and allows the askers to either direct their questions as described above, or to push their question to everyone and then filter answers by different groups. The app started out as a way for women to ask questions of men, and vice versa. While you can still see elements of that in Pyne, and while Peccatiello expects the app to feature plenty of dating- and relationship-related content, he also wanted to aim broader. I’ve been playing with the app throughout the day, and it is quite fun, even if the questions can be pretty random. Right now I’m stumped by “Between these two which is your favorite work of fiction? A) Green Eggs and Ham B) The Bible” (Zing!) Earlier, I had to admit that I didn’t have an intelligent opinion on Bad Boys 2, because I hadn’t seen it. (Over time, Peccatiello said Pyne should get better at providing users questions that are relevant to their interests.) The company is self-funded, with . I actually first heard about it through the recommendation of TechCrunch columnist who worked on the app as part of the development firm . You can . |
Venture Capital Keeps Austin Startups Flush | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Austin investors may not be keeping the city weird, but they’re sure keeping its startup scene humming. Like the rest of the country, venture capitalists in the Capital City are riding a wave of exits to big new numbers in startups financed and capital committed over the past few quarters. , there’s no better time to take a look at how the city’s faring. “It’s not surprising,” says Josh Baer, of the newly formed and incredibly active early-stage investor . “Austin is the fastest-growing city in the country with 150 people moving here every day.” The city has had a few recent successes it can point to, with , , , and , all topping $1 billion exits through public offerings or acquisitions. Large financing rounds for companies like Spiceworks, SolarBridge Technologies and Noesis Energy pushed Austin’s investment numbers to the most active first half of the year in the last five years, according to CrunchBase data.
And new funds like Live Oak Venture Partners and Baer’s own Capital Factory are helping to boost the numbers of startups in the Austin scene. For Baer, a few companies like Sparefoot.com, which raised about $30 million for its space storage marketplace, or uShip.com, which is a marketplace for shipping, point to the seeds that were planted by HomeAway and RetailMeNot in the marketplace vertical. But enterprise software companies and mobile developers are also strong in the region, according to Baer. “There’s a rising-tide mentality,” says Baer. “It’s a very collaborative environment and people are very supportive of each other.” [slideshare id=15021078&doc=introtoaustinstartupscene-121104134230-phpapp01] Perhaps no firm has the depth, or breadth of experience, in the Austin community as the synonymously named Austin Ventures. One of the oldest venture firms in the region, Austin Ventures has backed several of the most successful startups coming from Texas including many of the recent winners like HomeAway and RetailMeNot. “There’s been a genealogy of tech companies over the last 30 years,” says Austin Ventures’ Mike Dodd. “We’ve funded five companies out of BazaarVoice alone over the past three years.” For Dodd, what’s working in Texas isn’t much different from the types of companies that are gaining traction in New York or Silicon Valley, or anywhere else. “The lens that we use is not if we’re investing in the best company in Austin, or the best company in Texas. We’re investing in the best companies nationally and internationally,” he says. There are, however, a few deals that could only be done in the nation’s oil capital, says Dodd. “Oil and gas software… There’re 15 different verticals in the upstream oil and gas market,” he says. “We’re looking at a ton of different deals in that market.”
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Lowercase Capital Is Raising A New $25M Fund, Led By Matt Mazzeo | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | is raising another $25 million, we’re hearing. This is notable for a couple of reasons: Due to , Lowercase Capital’s very first fund — a modest $8.5 million raised in 2010 — has seen its value increase by more than 100x, which is perhaps historic in early-stage seed funds. Lowercase’s second fund, “Spur,” has also done quite well due to its Uber and Optimizely follow-on. Lowercase Managing Director and former Googler will now be Chairman of the fund rather than Managing Director. Replacing him is Lowercase partner and former CAA agent , who will be promoted to Lowercase Managing Director. That means Sacca — — will no longer be Lowercase’s first point of contact, we’re hearing from people familiar with the matter. Mazzeo has thus far brought in multiple juicy seed deals for Lowercase, including Mark43, Next Games, Victorious, Mindie, MakeSpace and vidIQ, and will continue to source. While no longer the “face” of Lowercase, Sacca will still be working with existing portfolio companies in the background. The new $25 million fund will close in the next couple of weeks and has seen high demand from LPs, we hear. Aside from building a reputation for his early-stage prowess, Mazzeo has been raising the financing mostly on his own. The new fund will be called Frontier, following Spur and Stampede, which boast investments in Uber, Optimizely, Stripe, Medium, StyleSeat and WordPress. Not all of Sacca’s funds are cowboy-themed however. He Dan Primack with such banal fare as |
Food Startups Are Riding A VC Gravy Train | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Investments in food-related startups, from delivery services to new restaurant chains to new types of foods and additives, have raised unprecedented amounts of cash in the most recent quarter, as investors dug in to the food business. Food companies raised $89 million in the second quarter of this year alone and have raised nearly $350 million since the second quarter of 2013, the strongest performance for the category over the past five years, according to CrunchBase data (does not include food-delivery deals). What’s happening in the food business mirrors venture capital interest in other sectors that were traditionally outside of the startup purview. As software is eating the world, it was only a matter of time before it began to nibble on the industries that make, process, ship, prepare and distribute what we eat.
Earlier this month into school-lunch company Revolution Foods. And Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures is also finding itself in the food business through an investment in . ., Mike Roberts, and staffed with a team of ex-McDonald’s executives, Lyfe Kitchen has raised at least $21 million this year alone, according to a filing with the SEC. “Lyfe fits into the trend of healthy solutions,” says Brad Holden, a principal and investment counsel at Tomorrow Ventures. “More and more people are focused on their health. [They’re] focusing on nutrition, and diet is one of the biggest impacts on your health. In the long term we definitely look at companies that are in the space, although some of them tend to be pretty out there.” Holden may be referring to Hampton Creek, the vegetarian egg substitute, , the investment fund of Hong Kong billionaire industrialist tycoon Li Ka-shing.
Investors are even launching early-stage accelerators for food and beverage companies. joins the growing food investment movement at its earliest stage. Founded by Lauren Jupiter and Jordan Gaspar, AccelFoods has a dedicated investment fund of $4 million to invest in new food brands. The accelerator commits up to $400,000 in its portfolio companies and typically takes in about eight companies per class. “This was born out of the desire to bring more structured support to this industry,” says Gaspar. “A lot of support comes to the tech companies graduating from Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and TechStars. By offering a program loosely based on the successful models from the tech industry, we thought we could do the same for food businesses.” The AccelFoods model is essentially mirrored on what Techstars had done and built in other components that are more relevant to the food industry, says Jupiter. “The challenges in this space are very real for inventory management and getting foods from point A to point B.” Helping with initial delivery and distribution, AccelFoods has a partnership with FreshDirect, which is distributing products from four companies from the accelerator’s first class. The food phenomenon isn’t just isolated to the U.S. Globally, investments in food companies are gaining traction. In fact, new startups in the food business span the world from Boston to Beijing, according to CrunchBase data.
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Fantastic Indie Puzzler VVVVVV Is Coming To iOS And Android This Thursday | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | If you haven’t gotten around to playing through in all of its wonderfully frustrating indie puzzler glory, first of all: shame! Second: You’ll be able to play it on your phone soon, so now you have no excuse. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, watch this: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxuacwotoQw&w=854&h=510] Four years after its debut on Mac/PC, (pronounced “the letter v six times”, “V6”, or, if you don’t mind people staring at you, “veeveeeveeveeveevee”) is set to hit iOS and Android later this week. Barring any last-second delays, the mobile ports will start hitting your device’s respective app stores on Thursday, June 12. Confirmation of the game’s impending mobile launch comes via of Terry Cavanagh, the game’s creator (and the same gent who brought us the equally rage-inducing ). Fans have been clamoring for an on-the-go VVVVVV port for ages, but many were concerned that the game’s super-twitchy control mechanism wouldn’t make the jump to touchscreen very well. Fortunately, Cavanagh says that he’s figured out a control scheme that’s “super responsive”: Basically, you put your thumb down on the screen – move it left and you move left, move it right and you move right, let go to stop. It feels super responsive and nice! To prove the game works just fine on a touchscreen, Cavanagh post a video of himself successfully tackling one of the game’s hardest levels on the iPad : [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzP5QfxPEcw&w=640&h=360] No word yet on pricing, but I wouldn’t expect it to be more than a buck or two. |
CarHero Brings The Oil Change And Car Wash To You | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Cars need to have their oil changed every 5,000 miles or so. Fact. But it’s a hassle. wants to make it less of a hassle by performing the routine service wherever the car is parked at home or the office. The company just launched in the Dallas area with the hope of scaling nationwide. The idea is simple: Using CarHero.com, a customer orders and schedules an oil change for their vehicle. The technician, a CarHero Specialist as the company calls them, will come to the vehicle and perform the service as well as hand-wash the car and lightly detail the interior. The whole package is currently $57. The company is bootstrapped and already has healthy margins. Currently, the service is only available in the Dallas and Fort Worth area. Co-founder Carlton Green tells me that the company expects to easily scale the service. The company makes money on every service performed. CarHero is essentially for just oil changes and washes. As the co-founder told me, though, CarHero’s model takes all the complexity out of on-demand car repair service. CarHero only offers one service package where YourMechanic aims to do most car repairs. By providing only those specific services, the company doesn’t have to stock or provide a wide-range of parts and tools — just oil, filters and car detailing supplies. |
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Dropbox For Business Acquires MobileSpan To Make Bring-Your-Own-Device More Secure | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Dropbox has just , a startup that helps enterprise employees access corporate firewalled content securely. MobileSpan will shut down at the end of 2014, and active development will cease immediately. Dropbox has spent the last year-and-a-half concentrating on . MobileSpan’s knowledge of the bring-your-own-device world will bolster that push. Dropbox confirms to me that all four MobileSpan team members are coming aboard, and that this is a full-fledged acquisition so tech is coming along with the talent. The buy follows last week as it seeks to fill holes in its product through acquisitions instead of slowly building things in-house. from investors True Ventures and K9 Ventures since its start in 2011. The way it worked was that companies would install the MobileSpan gateway at an on-premises Windows server and distribute the MobileSpan for iOS and MobileSpan for Windows desktop apps to their employees. Once approved by IT, employees could access the specific documents, folders and applications relevant to their work. The idea was to secure the connection rather than lock down a user’s device, making BYOD much simpler. Due to device fragmentation, it’s tough to scale to work on every mobile handset and laptop. With Dropbox’s help, though, MobileSpan’s team could quickly build apps for more operating systems so employees can get to their work files no matter what device they’re packing. In their announcement of the acquisition, MobileSpan’s execs wrote: “…We still have some ways to go before business content is freed from its desktop-focused roots and is made readily usable yet secure on modern mobile devices. Joining forces with Dropbox will allow us to rapidly accelerate the realization of that dream. Dropbox isn’t the only one with that dream. It’s battling Box, Microsoft, Google and more in the fight to provide enterprise cloud storage, access and collaboration. The problem has been that Dropbox’s consumer-focused product was seen as inadequate for serious business, as I detailed in . It didn’t have the security or permissioning for big enterprises to feel safe providing employees with differing levels of access to confidential files via Dropbox. But as our enterprise expert Ron Miller wrote last week, the company is hard at work to become a respected corporate software provider and fix “ .” That’s when enterprise employees store work files in their personal Dropboxes in a way that makes security-minded CIOs squirm. Ilya Fushman, Dropbox’s head of product, mobile, and business, told Miller: “Ultimately, most CIOs I talk to, the response isn’t ‘I’m scared of Dropbox.’ It’s ‘People like Dropbox, I want to give it to them. You need to build this and this and this to make it more comfortable for us.’” The MobileSpan acquisition could go a long way to making Dropbox the lockbox that corporations crave. |
How Max Levchin Plans To Reinvent Consumer Finance Again, With His New Company Affirm | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Max Levchin is one of the founders of PayPal, a company that made it easier for consumers to transfer funds to one another and provided an easy-to-install payment processor for businesses. Now he’s seeking to once again reinvent consumer finance as CEO of his new company . Affirm was founded out of Levchin’s , and over the past two years has been focused on reimagining how consumers apply for, receive, and pay back micro-loans instead of going into credit card debt. It’s also quietly raised $45 million in debt and equity financing from investors that include Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Nyca Partners, while building up a team of 32 employees to engineer and deploy its technology. That includes re-assembling many of the members of the old PayPal risk team, including Nathan Gettings, who is Levchin’s co-founder and Chief Risk Officer at Affirm. Along with them on the founding team is former ngmoco Chief Data Officer Jeffrey Kaditz, who serves as Affirm’s CTO. With its first product, , Affirm hopes to provide a new way for consumers to finance their purchase at the point of sale. Rather than using a credit card and being charged interest each month they have an outstanding balance, Split Pay provides an easy way for consumers to apply for and receive a short-term loan to finance the transaction. “We spent the last two years trying to hone in on what the prototypical consumer would be,” Levchin said. Affirm hopes to target Millennials, who he believes are mistrustful of the current financial products out there. And they have good reason to be: Levchin notes that the standard credit card APR calculation is not designed to be consumer friendly. With Split Pay, Affirm wants to give that group a way to purchase items that may not have that might be more than their monthly cash flow, but to do so in an affordable and transparent way. As a result, its financing is structured more like a mortgage or car loan, and provides consumers with a full report on the overall cost of the product and interest, plus how much they’ll pay each month. By itself, Split Pay might not be so revolutionary. But on the back end, Affirm has built a new method of evaluating creditworthiness and lending risk that goes well beyond your typical FICO score and could lead to many more financing approvals while also lowering the amount of money consumers pay in interest when financing purchases. When signing up for Split Pay, consumers enter a small amount of personal information, including name and phone number, and Affirm is able to evaluate a person’s credit history in real time. In a matter of seconds, the system can approve a consumer for financing and show the structure of their offer. Affirm has integrated with a number of large databases of consumer finance information, and over time will be increasingly using its own data to confirm the creditworthiness of its users. But “the most important set of data is our operating data,” Levchin says. (As a side note, Levchin hates the term “secret sauce”… “I don’t like putting the veneer of magic over technology,” he says.) By understanding the loans that Affirm approved and had paid off, the company can build on and improve a new model for consumer finance. That stands in contrast to the current credit card debt model, where financial institutions benefit the longer that consumers take to pay off a bill, and from each late payment. That will enable it to help consumers save money on their purchases as opposed to putting them on a credit card, and could also have benefits for repeat users. If you successfully pay off a Split Pay financing, for instance, you’ll be more likely to be approved for a larger amount or on more favorable terms a second time. “The goal is not to create revenue from people going into debt,” Levchin said. Affirm makes money both as a payment processor — taking a small portion of each sale — as well as from interest it collects from consumers. The company is also taking on all risk from loans that default, which means that merchants who sign up will get paid whether or not a consumer successfully paid back the loan. For a growing group of merchants, adding a new, risk-free way for consumers to finance purchases has a strong appeal. As a result, Affirm has managed to sign up more than 100 e-commerce companies to test out the product. To support those early adopters, Affirm is working closely with its initial partners to ensure things run smoothly. But there will come a time when the company hopes to provide a self-serve widget — kind of like — that will allow merchants to deploy Affirm as a payment option on their own. Because it has a dual revenue model, and because the team believes it can do a better job of determining the risk of lending to consumers, Affirm can likely produce better margins than typical loan processors. Ultimately, that means it can pass on savings to consumers in the form of lower interest rates than competing financing options. Levchin said it wasn’t his intent to take over as CEO of Affirm, but he missed running a company. In the four years since Google acquired Levchin’s social gaming company Slide, he’s been mostly focused on building up his so-called “mad scientist lab / investment vehicle” HVF. But the opportunity at Affirm was too big for him to be sitting on the sidelines. “I originally planned to be Chairman, not CEO,” Levchin told me. “But I realized would rather be an active member of the team than watch someone else run it.” As a lending company, Levchin says several things matter as it scales up — you have to increase your book of loans, make sure lenders aren’t too highly concentrated, and get high approval and repayment rates, all while increasing the number of merchants that use the product. But those are all challenges Levchin seems not only prepared for, but excited about. |
Amazon Said To Start Selling Babysitting And Other Home Services Later This Year | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Amazon wants to be your one-stop shop for everything – including trades and services, according to a new report by . The company is looking at debuting sales of things like babysitting, handymen services, painters, haircuts, home repair and more. The move would extend Amazon’s range of competitors to sites like Angie’s List and Craigslist. According to Reuters, Amazon intends to roll out its services market in the same way that it has approached Amazon Fresh, starting in one market at first to test consumer appetite and its financial model before expanding to other cities and eventually nationwide. The services market would work much like its existing ecommerce shop, as Reuters says that Amazon has been reaching out to both service providers directly, and startups that offer the kinds of local offerings mentioned above. Reuters notes that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had previously invested in Pro.com, a services startup out of Seattle to help find and book contractors. It’s also true that adding to the range of potential marketplace partners on the site could greatly improve revenue, as Amazon already derives a substantial portion of its inbound cash flow from third-party partners. |
Amazon Now Lets You Buy Any Kindle On A Payment Plan Without A Credit Check | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Those interested in buying an Amazon e-reader or tablet can now pay in a series of five equal monthly payments instead of one lump sum at checkout. According to the (shown below), this payment plan doesn’t require a credit check and doesn’t add anything to the price of the gadget, making it a pretty sweet deal for those on a budget looking to pick up a device. This isn’t the first time Amazon has offered a payment plan for the Kindle line. Late last year, the company just for the , though that plan had customers pay more up front (25 percent versus 20 percent) and spread payments out farther (every 90 days instead of every 30). Why would Amazon want to risk giving out hardware for one-fifth of the actual retail price with no guarantee that it’ll get paid in full? Simple: Kindle users Making it even easier for someone to get a Kindle or Kindle Fire makes it more likely that they’ll spend money on both real and digital goods on Amazon’s store. And if it turns out that people reliably pay for their Kindles in full, the company can roll it out to even more products — like its , which will likely be announced June 18 |
Opera Is Buying Mobile Video Ad Network AdColony, Sources Say | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | Opera Software is making another acquisition to build out its mobile advertising business: It has either purchased or is close to purchasing mobile video advertising startup AdColony, according to sources with knowledge of the companies. We’ve contacted both companies asking for comment. Opera spokespeople in the U.S. and Europe have told us that the company will not comment on market rumors, and AdColony has not responded to requests for comment. One source said that they’d last heard the negotiations were nearly complete. The other said the deal had closed at a price in the low hundreds of millions (up to $275 million). Now, we don’t want to downplay the difference between a deal that’s done and almost done, but for what it’s worth, the “not quite done” source did acknowledge that their information might be a little out-of-date, and that a completed deal would be consistent with the timing that they’d be hearing about. From what we understand, AdColony employees were told about the acquisition over the weekend. Norway-based Opera is known for its web browser software for , , and , with its search results and content recommendations based around visual, tile-style interfaces. On mobile devices, one of Opera’s main selling points is its compression algorithms that the company promises give faster download speeds that use up less data, and therefore cost less to use. But, as with other companies that make web browsers, Opera has developed other lines of business to help monetize that software. Those efforts include an app storefront and a mobile advertising network. The latter business, which operates under the Opera Mediaworks brand, also includes AdMarvel, which Opera acquired in 2010, and other, more recent additions , a German startup focused on rich media advertising. In all, prior to AdColony, Opera has made eight acquisitions in the past four years, with several of those to further its advertising business. It looks like AdColony could be used in Opera’s effort to expand that network even further into video ads. The startup, which launched in 2011 and was backed by Insight Venture Partners (amount undisclosed), emphasizes performance — Anthony says every time he meets with the executives, they come up with a new way to show off the speedy loading time of their video ads. That’s an area that Opera, with the compression technology that it uses in its browsers to reduce pageload and dataload, could potentially boost further. And given Opera’s interests in connected TVs, you can see where a video-focused play makes a lot of sense. Video ads, like other dynamic ad units, command higher rates and provide another format for Opera to sell to clients. In January, AdColony said that it reached . But the company could also see a negative impact up ahead on its ads delivered over iOS devices, in light of some recent changes that Apple is making around ads in apps — as Sarah reported, it has started to that offer rewards for video views and social shares. You can see an example of how an AdColony ad within an app works here: |
Roost Takes On Twitter, RSS With A Platform For Web-Based Push Notifications | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | A new Y Combinator-backed startup called wants to succeed where RSS readers perhaps failed with the introduction of a new service that lets consumers subscribe to websites using browser-based push notifications. However, unlike a browser plug-in system such as , for example, Roost is based on an upcoming standard for web push, which is built into Safari and is coming soon to Google Chrome and Firefox. , Safari’s push notifications allow users to remain engaged with the websites they care about by opting in to notifications – in a similar way to how you opt in to push notifications within mobile apps. But with Roost, the idea is to build push technology on top of the web to offer a platform that will eventually grow to work seamlessly across browsers (including one day, mobile browsers) while providing web publishers with more advanced features, such as scheduling posts and analytics. The company was founded by Ohio native Tim Varner and serial entrepreneurs Casey Haakenson and Burton Miller who serendipitously met a few years ago at SXSW. Haakenson and Miller were already enthusiastic about the power of push notifications, having previously founded . Now, they want to bring that experience to the web, too. Officially founded in July 2013, the Roost team began working on the product last fall after a brief stint focusing more on the enterprise than the consumer market. But with the system quietly launched in January of this year, Roost is now a publisher-facing service designed to help websites build their followings and engage their readers. The idea is that, with a line of JavaScript code added to their websites, publishers will be able to use the Roost platform to work with any browser that supports push notifications. Today, that’s Safari, but both Chrome and Firefox are expected to release similar technology in the third quarter of 2014. On supported sites, users will see a dialog box that pops up, asking if they want to enable push notifications. If they say yes, then they’ll see the updates in real time on the top-right side of their monitors — even if they happen to be working in a spreadsheet at the time, and are not browsing the web. Whenever users want to adjust or shut off the notifications, a section within the browser’s preferences screen lets you easily do so. Meanwhile, on the publishers’ side, Roost allows for a quicker way to support web push, and it provides tools that help them offer a better experience, including tools for scheduling notifications, managing campaigns, automating RSS, and more. And it offers analytics like subscriber and engagement statistics, as well as analytics on how the messages themselves performed, for example. The platform is being offered on a freemium basis with pricing not yet set in stone. For now, up to 1 million pushes per month are free; none of the company’s over 1,200 websites have hit that limit yet. Roost is now being used by a mix of smaller publishers and larger brands, such as Fansided, a Sports Illustrated partner network of 280+ sites, and Journal Broadcast Group. In beta tests, the team found that web push had 30 times the opt-in rate of email marketing, says Varner. “We can provide what RSS did. It’s a quieter, one-on-one sort of engagement between a brand and a consumer,” he explains. “Email is very heavy, and Twitter is kind of noisy. RSS and Google Reader were kind of nice because you could just go to one place and read what you wanted to read without any chatter. So we’re sort of providing that to the user, but it’s in real time now.” |
The Bay Lights, The LED Art Project Backed By Big Tech Names, Kicks Off $1.2M Crowdfunding Campaign | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | Just over a year ago, a large scale art project turned the Bay Bridge, the San Francisco Bay Area structure that’s historically been the plainer sister to the famed Golden Gate Bridge, into a glittering destination in its own right. But as iconic as the Bay Lights have quickly become, it turns out that they’re not set to be here to stay. The original erection of the Bay Lights, a roughly that was supported by high profile (and high net worth) San Francisco techies including Marissa Mayer, Ron Conway, Matt Mullenweg, and others, has a two year duration that will make the lights go dark in March 2015. In order to bring the lights back and keep them going for another ten years, from 2016 to 2026, they’re going to need $12 million more. So Illuminate the Arts, the nonprofit behind the project, has turned to crowdfunding startup to help raise the needed funds from a larger pool of people. The crowdfunding effort, dubbed “ ,” launched last night with the aim of raising $1.2 million in 45 days, which is ten percent of the ultimate goal. As of this writing, about $185,000 has been contributed. It makes sense that the Bay Lights would seek out more tech-centered ways of raising money than your typical art exhibit, since the Lights represent a unique blend of art and technology. The piece itself consists of 25,000 low power LED lights which are attached to the 1.8 mile western span of the Bay Bridge, and switched on from dusk til dawn. All the lights are individually programmed with software algorithms that create a generative sequence making it so that the patterns never occur twice. The piece was created by artist Leo Villareal, who worked as a programmer in Silicon Valley in the 1990s before shifting his attention to art full time. In an interview at an event Wednesday evening in San Francisco kicking off the crowdfunding campaign, Illuminate The Arts chairman Ben Davis said that The Bay Lights has reached a uniquely large audience. “More people will see the Bay Lights in its two year tenure than will visit the top 15 museums in the United States,” Davis said. “It’s fine art that people can see, without ever buying a ticket.” Not bad for a project that costs $30 per day in energy costs to run (the bulk of the project’s cost is in the insurance and labor costs of erecting and maintaining it on the bridge, and keeping it in compliance with California transit authorities.) To contribute to the Bay Lights project, go . And below, you can see a bit of the Lights in action, and watch a short interview that I conducted with artist Leo Villareal when The Bay Lights were first lit back in March 2013.
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House Of Representatives Passes Amendment To Cut Off Funding For NSA’s “Backdoor” Searches | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | The House of Representatives has passed by a landslide an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that will cut off funding to National Security Agency’s “backdoor” surveillance. The act, which places limits on how the NSA can gain access to communication, including email, online browsing, and chat histories, still has to gain Senate approval, but it represents a significant coup for opponents of the NSA. The act had strong bipartisan support, with . Details of the NSA’s surveillance program were last year. “Backdoor” surveillance searches conducted without a warrant. The bill, led by Representatives Zoe Lefgren and Thomas Massie, would prevent the NSA from using funding from the Defense Appropriations Bill to conduct these types of searches. The amendment followed a bill by President Barack Obama that would put an end to the NSA’s ability to collect call data in bulk. If it is approved by Congress, the bill means that bulk records would only be retained by phone companies for as long as they usually would, instead of being saved for the NSA, and that the NSA would only be able to obtain specific records after a court order. |
Light Chaser, The Animation Studio That Wants To Be “China’s Pixar,” Raises $20M From GGV Capital | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | , the animation studio that aspires to be China’s Pixar, announced today that it has raised $20 million in series B funding led by GGV Capital, with participation from Hillhouse Capital and returning investor IDG. The company was launched in March 2013 by Tudou founder Gary Wang after , creating China’s biggest streaming video site and aspires to make high-quality computer animated films with a “Chinese cultural touch.” Light Chaser, which has spent the past year and a half filling out its art, technology, and management rosters, also said that its first 3D animated feature, “Little Door Spirits,” will be completed by July 2015 with a budget of RMB 70 million (about $12 million). While “Little Door Spirits” won’t be released for another year at least, Light Chaser has released a short film called “Little Yeyos” as a preview of what it can do. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_aigupDZts&w=640&h=360] In a statement, Jixun Foo, managing partner at GGV Capital, said “The movie market in China is booming, and certainly there is a very significant growth space for Chinese animated feature films. We are impressed by the vision and execution capability of Light Chaser. Within a very short period of time, they have built up an excellent team and a world-class animation production pipeline. It’s very exciting that Light Chaser’s animation and CG capabilities are already at a level close to Hollywood.” |
Microsoft Updates The Surface Pro 3 Ahead Of Its Release Tomorrow | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | Tomorrow is launch day in Canada and the U.S. for , and to make sure the device has as smooth a launch as possible, Microsoft has released a set of updates for the tablet-hybrid. The updates include a slurry of performance boosts, as well as a fix for a power button issue that was annoying some. If you have a review device, the code should be live for you now. Otherwise, you can snag the updates tomorrow. The Surface Pro 3 is Microsoft’s latest attempt to bridge the mobile and desktop worlds by creating a device that it feels can operate as a top-tier tablet and replace your laptop. It’s , but if you are a 90 percent laptop and 10 percent tablet user, there are probably better options out there. If your usage is closer to parity, the device is certainly worth checking out. Microsoft is working overtime on the Pro 3, it seems, even to the house of Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik to look into his feedback regarding pen input on the device. It’s far too soon to tell how the Surface Pro 3 will fare, but we’ll have a decent look at partial results when the company next reports earnings in July. |
Adobe’s Ink And Slide For The iPad Are Useful, But Expensive, Additions To An Artist’s Workflow | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | With of the , Adobe has made its first foray into the realm of hardware gadgets. The company describes the pair of gadgets as a “ Pen and Digital Ruler.” In my time with the Ink and Slide, I’ve found that it works quite well in concert with , one of the company’s latest apps designed specifically for the iPad. The curved shape of the anodized aluminum stylus feels great in the hand no matter how you hold it. It’s extremely light, which I prefer for extended use, though I know some like their tools to be more substantial. As for the Slide ruler, it looks like something from Apple’s concept labs and also feels great in the hand. You never have to charge it; Adobe decided to use magnets to simulate multi-touch points on the iPad’s screen rather than syncing with Bluetooth like the Ink. Beyond aesthetics, there are a few aspects to the Ink and Slide user experience that could use some improvement. There’s a noticeable amount of lag as you draw or write in Adobe Line, and sometimes it feels like the tracing lines that show up when you touch the Slide to the iPad’s screen jump around as it tries to make certain angles with what you’ve already drawn rather than following your exact movements. If you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber and want to add the iPad to your workflow, the combination of Ink and Slide and Adobe Line might be enough to fulfill your needs for rough drafts. The app lets you send drawings to Photoshop or Illustrator on your desktop with a few quick taps once you’re ready to do some heavy-duty editing. But for those who just want to dabble with drawing on the iPad, you might get a better deal for your dollar with a dumb stylus and a free drawing app — $199 is a lot of money if you’re not already invested in Adobe’s software ecosystem. For a closer look at the Ink & Slide, check out the video below: |
Google Donates Mod_Spdy To The Apache Foundation | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | With , Google brought its SPDY protocol, which by now forms the basis of the next version of HTTP, to the popular and open-source web server . That move undoubtedly helped popularize (pronounced “SPeeDY”), which is now supported by most popular web servers and browsers. With those goals achieved, Google today that it has donated mod_spdy to the Apache Software Foundation. Through this, mod_spdy can now become an integrated part of Apache instead of being a third-party add-on. “The intent is to work on making it fully part of [Apache] 2.4 and, of course, a core part of 2.6/3.0,” said Jim Jagielski, co-founder of the Apache Foundation in a statement today. As Google software engineer Matthew Steele notes in today’s announcement, this will bring SPDY to even more Apache users “and pave the way for HTTP/2.0, which was submitted as a proposed standard last November.” SPDY helped to popularize many of the features in this next version of HTTP, and in many ways, Google’s protocol was the basis for this . You will hear quite a bit more about HTTP/2.0 in the coming months, but if you want to learn more about what makes it different from the HTTP you’re using today, you can find a nice rundown of the changes . |
The Next Fitbits Uncovered: Heart-Rate Sensors, GPS Info, Atmospheric Tracking, And Smartphone Notifications | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | The Fitbit product line is looking a little stale especially after . But that’s seemingly about to change with the addition of several upcoming, and upgraded, models including a fitness tracker with a heart rate sensor. Meet the Fitbit Surge, Fitbit Charge and the PurePulse. I had a lengthy discussion with Fitbit CEO James Park in January, and he told me Fitbit envisions users having multiple fitness trackers — one for exercise and one for casual use. It seems Fitbit is charging towards that goal with the next generation of devices instead of simply rereleasing the recalled Fitbit Force. The information comes who found US Trademark listings of recent applications from Fitbit for the Fitbit Surge, Fitbit Charge, and PurePulse. The latter is missing the Fitbit branding in the trademark application, seemingly indicating that it could be a separate brand apart from Fitbit itself. Of course, since this information is from a trademark filing, the descriptions and product features might not properly reflect the devices when they launch. Companies tend to load up trademark applications with all the possible functions. According to the application, the PurePulse is a wrist-based sensor with an optical heart rate monitor that displays “time, date, heart rate, calories burned, activity, intensity, and exertion”. The trademark listing notes a “multifunctional electronic devices”, which means this tracker is going to have a screen and from the description, seems to be a fitness-focused tracker. The Fitbit Surge is seemingly geared towards runners, with the inclusion of atmospheric conditions such as wind speed and weather information. The device also has a pedometer, altimeter and a screen to display, among other things, heart rate, global positioning, direction, distance, speed, pace and routes. The listing also notes that the tracker will be able to track sleep and display incoming calls and messages. Lastly, the Fitbit Charge appears to be the lower-end option with many of the same fitness-tracking abilities of the Surge minus the atmospheric and global positioning functions. This model also tracks sleep and will notify the wearer of calls and messages. Fitbit did not respond to a request for comment. |
BlackBerry In Talks With Drake For BlackBerry Classic Launch Promotion | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | BlackBerry pre-announced (the announce before the real announce) a new phone today called the . But they’re apparently enlisting some serious talent to help push their upcoming BlackBerry Classic, the other new smartphone the company is bringing to market later this year, with a November projected launch date: Drake is in talks with the company to help promote the Classic, according to a source familiar with BlackBerry’s plans. The BlackBerry Classic is kind of a mashup of the current and the Bold 9900, with BlackBerry OS 10 powering things and a 3.5-inch touchscreen, but adding BlackBerry’s trademark hardware navigation keys and an optical trackpad button. If this sounds like the Alicia Keys fiasco from the BlackBerry OS 10 launch, it isn’t quite at that level; our source says that Drake is actually a dedicated Bold user, and in fact he’s been spotted . Plus, as a Canadian, he’s required by the laws of citizenship of our country to love BlackBerry and QWERTY keyboards in exchange for free healthcare.
Our source adds that Drake’s promotion will include the claim that he was involved in the design process of the new smartphone, which again isn’t as far-fetched as you might think – the rapper has apparently resisted the urge to upgrade to BB10 because no device that runs that OS has a physical trackpad, which is among his favorite features of the 9900. If true, Drake’s taste is shared by a lot of C-level executives I’ve talked to, who lament the removal of the function keys as well as the trackpad on the Q10. It’s still possible the deal could fall through, and BlackBerry will have to look elsewhere for ways to get the general public excited about its upcoming QWERTY device in November. BlackBerry, when contacted for this story, responded with a statement about how they “don’t comment on rumors or speculation.” |
Gasp: Twitter GIFs Aren’t Actually GIFs | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | What’s in a format? Does that which we call a GIF by any other name invoke just as many lols? Just yesterday, Twitter . But there’s a catch! What Twitter ends up showing you isn’t actually a GIF at all. EVERYBODY PAAANIIIIIIC. Note: don’t actually panic. This isn’t a bad thing. Quite the contrary. As noticed by the folks over at , the “GIFs” that end up in your Twitter feed aren’t actually GIFs at all. They’re technically not even really image files in a strict sense — they’re more like video files without sound. They’re MP4s, embedded with the HTML5 video tag. Even if you upload a GIF, it’s converted into an MP4. While the GIF/MP4 difference may seem trivial, it’s actually a pretty damned smart move on Twitter’s part. Why? Compression, compression, compression. You see, for all of its ubiquity and seemingly recent popularity, the GIF is an antique. It was introduced in 1987, picked up animation support around 1989, and… hasn’t really changed since. The upside? It works pretty much everywhere. The downside? The format is nearly 30 friggin’ years old, and its age shows in maaaany ways. That’s why lots of GIFs are just a few seconds long with awful color, yet many megabytes large. Video compression, meanwhile, has come a pretty long way in the past 30 years. An MP4 can be twice as smooth and thrice as pretty, but still come in at a quarter the file size. For Twitter, that means lower bandwidth bills. For you, that means less waiting around for GIFs to load. Are there drawbacks? Sure. Some browsers don’t play friendly with HTML5’s video tag yet, so Twitter would have to fallback to something else in those cases. (Oddly, as far as I can tell, Twitter is falling back to Flash there.) Some browsers also make it a bit less straightforward to save MP4s for later resharing. But over the next few years, we’ll probably see the switch from GIF to MP4 become fairly commonplace. That raises the question: what do we call these little looping bits of silent animation, if they’re not actually GIF files anymore? Most people don’t care about the technical implementations of one thing versus another – they just want an easy-to-remember word for whatever they’re referring to. And once that name gets popular? Changing its usage is like trying to move a mountain by yelling at it. See: “Xerox” for photocopies, “Photoshop” for photo editing, or “Googling” for “not using Bing”. Half a decade from now, will the term “GIF” have been abstracted to mean anything short, silent, and looping? |
Apple’s Maps’ New “City Tours” Feature Uncovered In iOS 8 Betas | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | An officially announced but yet-to-seen feature in Apple’s new operating system iOS called “City Tours,” by an enterprising developer who managed to capture a video of what this 3D “Flyover” technology will look like, when it goes live. The feature, which lets you view a city from above, zooming in and panning around famous landmarks, was noted on a slide at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month, but hadn’t been released in the current iOS 8 beta builds. However, figured out how to unlock City Tours through a hidden debug screen. City Tours are one of the many upgrades coming with the introduction of iOS 8. They allow you to virtually visit a number of major cities around the world, including New York, Barcelona, Rome, Stockholm, Glasgow, Cape Town, Perth, Bordeaux, Paris, and San Francisco, according to what’s been unlocked as of today. However, that list will likely grown by the time iOS 8 is released to the general public. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz1_FT1ykFw&w=704&h=426] After a user kicks off one of these Tours, the Maps app will switch into Satellite mode, then begin zooming around the city, letting you view notable landmarks from many angles, and generally giving you a bird’s eye view of things. It’s not necessarily the kind of thing that will be practical in terms of everyday navigation, but it could be a fun thing to play with, especially if you’re thinking of traveling to a new city, or just want to be reminded of how some famous building looks. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEd1vvqiDnQ] There are a few videos of City Tours in action now on YouTube, including ., published by and of Paris, published by . |
Google Acquires mDialog To Improve DoubleClick’s Video Advertising | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | Google today announced that it has acquired video advertising company . In , the company said that it will “work with the mDialog team to incorporate their technology and expertise into our DoubleClick product suite,” helping publishers on DoubleClick (which ) monetize their video content. The company pointed to , as another example of how it’s investing in “helping brands connect with high-quality video content.” mDialog was founded nearly a decade ago and raised $8 million in funding, most recently in . ( By the way, the firm managing the fund a couple of years ago. Through its Smart Stream Platform, mDialog says it can integrate with existing ad tech to deliver videos to a number of devices, including iPad, iPhone, Android, GoogleTV, Apple TV, Roku, and Xbox. that it will continue to work with its existing customers with “no immediate changes.” A Google spokesperson, meanwhile, said the company is not disclosing the acquisition price or commenting beyond its initial post. |
Box Said To Move Forward With Its Debut As The Tech IPO Market Perks Up | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | Box, a cloud storage and file management company, . Box , and then didn’t hit go on, its offering in the time frame that the market initially expected. A deterioration in market sentiment and the led to a general slowdown in the IPO pipeline. We’re still waiting for the company to file an update to its S-1 document, which will include information from its first fiscal quarter of the new year. A Box spokesperson provided TechCrunch with the following statement: “Our plan continues to be to go public when it makes the most sense for Box and the market. That plan hasn’t changed. We’re focused on the fundamentals of growing our business, building deeper and stronger customer relationships, and continuing to execute against our strategy.” Why might Box shift back into gear now? I think due to the market generally having more zip to it, and the ensuing success of three recent public offerings, Zendesk, MobileIron and, to a smaller extent, Arista Networks. Each of the three firms had a strong first day, showing appetite for technology shares. MobileIron and Zendesk are . This means that they are losing money as they look to grow their GAAP revenue and, yes, their ARR. That makes them similar to Box, a firm that is also looking to quickly expand its recurring revenue and is deploying ample cash to do so. Put simply, the recent success of Zendesk and MobileIron indicate that the investing public appear willing to accept short- to medium-term GAAP losses on the promise of quickly advancing revenues in the medium term. MobileIron’s CEO told me in a post-IPO interview that he had found investors to be “discerning.” Separately, the that he had been “impressed by the quality of the investors that we’ve met on our roadshow,” and that the “public market investment is as sophisticated as the private market investment.” Starting with MobileIron’s most recent debut, the company was during its debut. MobileIron priced its offering mid-range. What’s interesting is that MobileIron’s most recent quarterly revenue growth was modest. As TechCrunch reported on the company’s IPO day: In its , MobileIron detailed its first-quarter 2014 results, in contrast to its first-quarter 2013 results. Revenue grew, modestly, from $25.82 million to $28.21 million, but “Subscription” revenue jumped from $2.73 million to $5.96 million. Parsing that, I think that investors were content to value the company more on its growing ARR — up more than 100 percent, its S-1 implied — than its short-term, year-over-year revenue growth. MobileIron’s loss widened in the first quarter, from from $3.1 million in the first quarter of 2013 to $13.9 million in the first quarter in 2014. Zendesk also . It experienced a strong flotation, and is up nearly 100 percent. However, there was some turbulence getting it out the door, I’ve heard. But the stock has performed since it’s been live. Finally, Arista Networks went public and was well received. It’s a profitable company, making it slightly separate from the other companies mentioned here. I bring it up because it , around the $250 million that Box’s S-1 claims it wants to raise. All told, the market doesn’t appear to be sizzling, but it also doesn’t feel downright cold. Provided that Box has strong first-quarter numbers, its IPO could shake out well. Until we have new numbers, of course, we’re still mired in speculation. |
Apple’s Smartwatch Said To Debut In October With A 2.5-Inch Screen And Wireless Charging | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | Apple will reportedly launch its smartwatch as early as October, after kicking off production in July, according to a new report from . The smartwatch will have a 2.5-inch screen, according to the news organization’s sources, which will arch up from the band and be “slightly rectangular,” and it’ll feature touchscreen controls and wireless charging. Apple is planning on shipping 50 million of these in the first year of its availability, Reuters adds, and Taiwan’s Quanta computers will be mass producing the device for the Cupertino-based iPhone-maker. It’s currently under trial production, the company’s sources add, and it contains a pulse sensor (likely an optical one similar to that found on the Gear 2), plus a display supplied by LG for this first test batch. The report is yet another claim by a reliable news organization that says we’ll see Apple’s foray into smartwatches launch in October. A report from Japanese business newspaper Nikkei earlier this month said that , too, and also claimed it would pack a curved OLED display (which could account for the arcing described in this product) and health-tracking capabilities. Generally speaking, once Apple ramps up its production on new large-scale runs of upcoming products, the details begin to leak to major news organizations through suppliers in rapid succession. There are always a flood of these kinds of reports ahead of a new iPhone launch, for instance. That, combined with the increasing agreement of the details contained within the reports, is a good sign that the information they present is reliable. Apple introducing a rectangular display in its smartwatch could mean we’ll see something more akin to the FuelBand-esque concepts being thrown around, but it’s still too early to tell what this might look like based on available information. It sounds like it will almost certainly plug into Health, Apple’s new fitness and wellness-tracking app coming in iOS 8 in the fall. |
Google’s New Web Starter Kit Is A Boilerplate For Multi-Screen Web Development | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | For a long time now, Google has offered developers a set of what it believes are . Today it is going beyond just providing this information by the , a boilerplate kit similar to that includes templates and tooling for getting multi-screen web apps up and running quickly. Google says the templates are optimized for performance and responsive layouts to help developers quickly write multi-device web experiences. It essentially implements the recommendations Google has been giving developers already and packages them into actual code with the necessary tooling to get apps off the ground fast. The Starter Kit, it is worth noting, assumes that you have Node, Ruby, the Ruby Sass gem and , a streaming build system, installed on your system. Using Gulp — which is optional — also enables developers to make use of features like , automatic image optimization and HTML minification. Besides the latest version of Chrome, the Starter Kit also supports most other modern browsers, including IE10 and 11, Firefox 30 and 31, as well as most popular mobile browsers. While there is some overlap with projects like Bootstrap or ZURB’s Foundation, Google makes it pretty easy to use the Starter Kit with the styles from those projects, too. Unlike those projects, Google doesn’t offer . It’s unclear if Google plans to add those at a later stage, but as Google engineer Addy Osmani , the idea isn’t to compete with Bootstrap in terms of UI components. He also argues that Bootstrap, Foundation and similar libraries are “a great start for prototyping your apps, but one of the biggest challenges with them is that it’s (almost too) easy to get stuck using their styles, look and feel for the lifetime of your application.” Unlike these projects, Web Starter Kit wants to encourage developers to change the base styles to suit their own apps. Just like Bootstrap and Foundation, though, Starter Kit focuses on layouts that offer a fluid grid, though Google’s solution feels a bit more flexible. The project is officially in beta now. It’s a bit surprising that Google would release this tool only a week ahead of its in San Francisco, but maybe the company wants to give attendees some time to familiarize themselves with it before running sessions about it at the event. |
Yo, Virginia, There Is A Cult Of Disruption | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | Disruption. From frenzied investment pitches on Sand Hill Road to the name of the top conference for startups in Silicon Valley (i.e. ), that word has become synonymous with everything and everyone creating innovation today. Yet, the communal rhetorical choice is quite peculiar. When you deeply think about it, disruption is a pretty unpleasant word to be associated with. We sigh when a schedule disruption cancels our trip to the East Coast because of another aircraft maintenance problem. We search our drawers for candles when a power disruption shuts off our lights. Perhaps the only progressive activity associated with the word is the euphemistic labor disruption (read: strike). And that is certainly not an activity that Silicon Valley appreciates. In a strange sort of hipster anti-mainstreamism, Silicon Valley loves to place positive spins on such negative words – just look at our society’s views on the word “hacker” compared to our own. It is the ability of our startup community to redefine its reality that makes it so compelling, and yet, simultaneously so riven with flaws. For we don’t live in the technological oasis that is so often envisioned by venture capitalists and startup founders, where objective technological superiority is always a guarantee of success. Rather, we live in a world where politics, narratives, and human relations play an outsized role, and where incumbents hold most of the cards of the deck. That’s why our obsession of disruption is tragically ironic. It is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “disturbance or problems that interrupt an event, activity, or process.” And really, that’s exactly what Silicon Valley does these days. For a group of self-described problem-solvers and solution-finders, we seem to have to invent a lot of problems just to be able to fix them. Only through crisis can we find progress. How did we get here? Well, the theory of economic disruption has a fairly extensive history, but its main academic cheerleader comes from Clayton M. Christensen, the writer of , a book that is certainly at the top of the pantheon of cited references for writers of startups. Christensen posited that industries are disrupted when new entrants into a market build simpler and less expensive products that eventually evolve to compete against incumbents but at a better cost model. Incumbent companies often respond by becoming more specialized, eventually forcing them to ever smaller niches as they retreat from the wider market. In this week’s copy of the , , arguing that its case studies are not diverse enough for such a generalized theory, and questions many of the conclusions of the various industries studied in the book. She also points out an interesting pattern: that many of the incumbent companies assumed by the original book to be heading toward death remain at the top of their fields, while the disrupters are no where to be found. It is a solid critique, and a much needed corrective to a text held up almost religiously by its adherents. However, it misses so much about the language of disruption that one wonders whether Lepore was effective in her critical analysis. “Disruption,” like so many buzzwords, is a programmed idiom. These words do not just convey a concept or a theory, but also act as shibboleths, a kind of arcana to ensure that the speaker and listener are part of the same affinity group. We have so many of these phrases in the Silicon Valley universe that it truly has become its own language, with newcomers expected to pick it up just to be understood. As an example, a first course might be “mobile-first”, “social/local/mobile”, “cloud computing”, “advanced persistent threat”, “big data”, “delightful”, “disruption”, “innovation”, “software-defined networking”, “next-generation”, “ephemeral”, “engagement”, “acquihire”, “net neutrality”, “software-as-a-service”, “rockstar”, “Bitcoin-enabled”, “3D printing”, “partner”, and, of course, “yo”. Disruption, though, remains at the top of the rhetorical pyramid. It’s occurrence in a pitch deck or presentation is practically a guarantee, yet its meaning is deeply incoherent, and that is the fundamental flaw of Christensen’s theory. By placing his emphasis on a single type of disruption, Christensen misses the wider constellation of directions that innovation can take. Its original narrow applicability has since become so generalized and popularized that few remember that the theory has limitations. Most “disruption” has not looked like the disk drive or steel mill industries, in which new competitors started with inferior products and then improved to (theoretically, at least) clobber the incumbents. In fact, quite the opposite has taken place in Silicon Valley. The startups that have grown into today’s household names were many times the best in their fields, and were priced at a premium rate to boot. Take a startup like Uber. It wasn’t a cheaper taxi service that offered a lower-quality ride, yet one that people found acceptable enough to use. Instead, it came in at the high end of the market, creating a seamless and delightful experience for users at a price well-above existing taxi services. Later, the company developed additional lower-fare options that allowed it to move down the market. It may be “disrupting” the taxi industry, but it did so from the complete opposite direction of Christensen’s theory. Similarly in hardware, Apple’s iPhone wasn’t a low-end feature phone that evolved to compete with Motorola and Nokia but at a more competitive price point. Instead, it completely shifted what a phone experience could be, and was launched at a price point that was among the most expensive in the market. If you want a more startup-focused example, take a look at Nest Labs. Nest built a beautifully designed thermostat at a premium price point. Its thermostat didn’t disrupt the industry from the bottom, but created a new market at the top through a superior product. This is the diversity in tactics that is missing from our general usage of “disruption.” The more accurate message is that startups can change their markets in quite different ways. The startups that become unicorns don’t just try to build a cheaper model of a mousetrap and evolve it, they fundamentally alter the need for people to have a particular mousetrap in the first place. The new market may supplant the old one, but the two bear such little resemblance to each other that it seems hard to make the connection between them except historically. To be fair, there are certainly startups that are more in line with Christensen’s view, such as Warby Parker and its disruption of Luxottica. But even here, it isn’t clear that Warby Parker’s products are inferior to the glasses provided by the Italian eyewear monopoly. I think that’s why Lepore’s observation that many of the disruptive companies featured in are no longer here, yet the incumbents are. As much as these startups wanted to defeat the incumbents in their markets, they focused on building better products using the same model, rather than changing the model itself. Eventually, the incumbents either catch up through internal invention or external acquisition. The startups that take their market don’t defeat their incumbents, but simply make them irrelevant. I am less concerned about our overuse of the Innovation Dictionary in speaking about startups than Lepore. Our idioms and argot are key for founders to communicate with others about what they are building. We don’t have to fear the Cult of Disruption, but don’t let it stand in the way of clear-headed thought. Never dumb-down your own thinking just to fit a theory or a word, and don’t be afraid to develop whole new approaches to solving a particular market problem. That is often the most important element of designing a startup, and not one to be avoided. For everyone involved in startups, from journalists and investors to the founders themselves, my call is this: precision in language is just as important as precision in strategy. We are all involved in disruption, if by disruption we mean building new companies in existing markets and product spaces. But the nature of that disruption is quite varied, and we need to be intellectually honest about what exactly we are trying to accomplish, and why that strategy in the market is likely to succeed where others fail. Let’s get beyond the words without meaning to the sentences that could change the world. |
Skout Launches Fuse, An Ephemeral Messaging App That Makes Group Chats Explode | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | Call it engagement hacking. But mobile developer teams from the one that built Facebook Slingshot to that guy behind the app ‘Yo’ app are tinkering with unconventional ways of making people interact. With ephemerality and anonymity, it’s getting weirder. Maybe a little more conceptual. Maybe a little nonsensical. It’s hard to predict what will make people stick, or what could morph into the next version of Vine, Snapchat or Twitter. But everyone’s experimenting. Skout, an app backed by Andreessen Horowitz that helps strangers meet locally, is branching out with a new group messaging app called . It marries group messaging to ephemerality. The hitch here is that once someone starts a ‘Fuse,’ everyone else has three to 10 minutes to respond. Once the timer ends, all of the content inside the ‘ ‘ disappears and no one can ever see it again. So it creates this pressure for a person to decide to either jump in right away or ignore it. There’s also a Ghost mode, so people can respond anonymously. “It’s almost like a dinner conversation,” said Skout CEO Christian Wiklund. “It’s contextual, based on who is around you right now. If the burns out, you can go onto the next conversation.” Wiklund said they broke out the app separately because they didn’t want to bog down the core Skout experience with too many extra features. That’s a similar decision to what Facebook has done over the past year with new concepts like Paper and Messenger. Skout is an app that lets people connect with other strangers locally. While the San Francisco-based company isn’t as flashy as some of its other mobile and social counterparts like Snapchat, it does have a revenue model through selling a virtual currency called ‘Points’ that can unlock other features. It has raised $22 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz. They plan to cross-promote through the Skout network. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAZZT9Vao58&w=560&h=315] |
Meh | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | It seemed . So mindless. And yet, creating this has, for me, been a journey. A journey from the Poke to the Like, as I was saying only the other day to my co-founder, Roi. But today, I can reveal to you the new app I’m working on and am poised to leave TechCrunch for: . Yes, Meh may leave you scratching your head. Or scratching something. But Meh is about sending other users a single word: Meh. See? It’s so simple. This contextually-relevant, zeitgeist-capturing experience will target the existentially minded hipster, allowing users to simply and quickly share their little, disinterested shrugs. Their little moments of ‘Hey, I’m just not thinking about you ok?’ kind of moments. Their feelings of ‘Hey, whatever…’ We already have tens of active users in the hipster capitals of Shoreditch, the Mission and Kreuzberg. We’ve seen as many as 26 Mehs pass across our servers. While other apps may be leveraging context, Meh is leveraging something greater than that: complete and utter disinterest. We think this is an untapped resource in social media. Time and again people have wanted the Dislike button on Facebook. Today they have that. They have Meh. This isn’t ‘Digital Dualism’. This is ‘Digital Dullism’. Meh is about being faster to look cool and disinterested than anyone else. Call it Social Grooming for the perpetually unimpressed. I’m going to place my bets early: While other such apps will have dropped out of our collective consciousness by next year, Meh is here to stay. And I’m happy to announce that we’ve already secured $1.8 million in funding, exactly a third more than that other app with the purple logo. Why? I’ll tell you why. We have ONE MORE LETTER, that’s why. Because as of this week, one extra letter gets you a third more funding. Yes. That’s how the Valley rolls. Meh is a signal of a larger trend. A trend of Meh. Because a Meh is the new unit of currency for completely stupid startup ideas that win funding off the back of ridiculous, dumb hype from Silicon Valley (sometimes). Welcome to Meh. It’s here to stay. Meh. |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 10 | null |
Kima Invests In Pakistan-Based Startup Behind Groopic Photo App | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | The world just got that little bit smaller. The Pakistan-based startup behind , an iOs and Android app that ‘ ’ has secured an investment from . Kima is a seed stage capital firm with headquarters in Paris, France, and is known to . , which made Groopic, is an alumni of , Pakistan’s government-backed tech incubator. The investment amount was undisclosed but said to be a USD six figure, in the form of a convertible note. |
Facebook Search Warrant Disclosure Reveals Scope of Government Requests | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | Facebook announced Thursday it’s been pushing back against a bulk set of search warrants requesting private data from its user accounts since last summer. , the social media network announced a court in New York requested personal data for 381 users, including photos and private messages. The company argued the request was unconstitutional, but the courts prevailed and the information was turned over. This information is just coming to light now as Facebook filed an appellate brief Friday in an attempt to force the government to return the data it had seized and retained. Facebook says the government responded by moving to unseal the warrants and all court proceedings, allowing the company to notify the users their information had been taken. Only 62 of the 381 people who were subjected to the searches later had charges brought against them in a disability fraud case. The government still has the data from more than 300 affected users who were never charged. But the most surprising revelation made by Facebook in its announcement today is that the bulk warrant request is one of the largest it has ever received. The post said it “by far the largest we’ve ever received — by a magnitude of more than ten.” That means the bulk search warrant requests Facebook has responded to in the past have never affected more than 38 people. Chris Sonderby, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, tells me in his four years with the company, the largest search warrant request he had seen before this one had been for about 30 people. Facebook then appealed that request, and the size of the request was then narrowed down to just one person. Sonderby also said Facebook “scrutinizes” all government requests it receives. He said these requests were also unusual because they asked for almost all of the users’ information. He said requests differ on a case by case basis, but Facebook often is able to get the government to limit its request to specific information or a certain time period. Facebook was unsuccessful in limiting the size of the request or the amount of data in this case, he said. Facebook users have repeatedly questioned the amount their personal data is subjected to government searches without their knowledge. Although the company now provides to the public, it initially dragged its feet on making such disclosures. Thursday’s revelation applies only to search warrants, typically used by law enforcement authorities like police. According to a Facebook’s transparency report, the company responded to a total of 5,814 search warrant requests that affected 9,122 users. The company reports data was produced in 84.81 percent of these cases. Although Facebook was able to get the gag order lifted this time and reveal this large search, it still faces strict limits in disclosing requests the government makes for national security purposes through the FISA courts. These are the types of requests that came under scrutiny in the wake of former government contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency surveillance programs. Due to federal laws, the company is required to disclose the number of FISA orders it receives in increments of one thousand. It also requires Facebook to wait six months for disclosing those numbers, so the most recent data During this time, Facebook received fewer than 1,000 FISA content requests that affected between 5,000 and 5,999 users. Those are broad ranges that don’t give the average Facebook user a good idea of how many people are actually affected by these requests. Facebook it filed in court, and it’s clear that the company tried very hard to not disclose its users data. The request first came in July, and Facebook pushed back until December when it had to comply with the order in the face of potential criminal penalties. The company continued to fight for its customers until June, when the government finally allowed it to notify them. In its post Facebook noted “there is still more work to do” as government requests should be “narrowly tailored, proportionate to the case, and subject to strict judicial oversight.” Just as Facebook has more work to do when it comes to pushing the government to return the information it sought under the search warrants especially for the more than 300 people who weren’t charged, it also has more work to do when it comes to making disclosures about requests the government makes for national security reasons. Although today’s news shows the scope of the search warrants the company receives, it’s important that the public one day has a better understanding of how frequently Facebook receives all types of government information requests. |
Review Trackers Raises $2M Series A Round To Help Businesses Better Manage Their Online Reputation | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | , a Chicago-based service that helps businesses aggregate and manage online reviews about them, today announced that it has raised a $2 million funding round for a wide range of Midwest-based investors. The round was led by Milwaukee’s CSA Partners with participation from , and angel investor . As the company’s founder and “Chief Tracking Officer” Chris Campbell told me earlier this week, the company plans to use about half of the new funding on bringing all of the features on its roadmap to market by doubling the engineering team over the course of this year and the other half on growing its sales team and focusing on customer acquisition. The service, which offers plans , compiles customer reviews from all of the major review forums like OpenTable, Google+ and TripAdvisor, as well as from smaller niche feedback sites. Campbell tells me he started Review Trackers after working in marketing for almost a decade. “One of my clients came to me looking to track and manage their online reviews,” he told me. “As we dug into this we quickly realized that the solutions in the market didn’t solve the problems this national retailer was looking to address.” He then in 2012, which gave him its first round of funding, and then launched Review Trackers in 2013 before joining the Madison, Wis.-based accelerator program. “I started this company as I felt the market needed a better solution, something that solved their problems,” Campbell told me. He believes Review Tracker’s approach, which heavily focuses on customer service, and the team’s knowledge of the problems business face helps set it apart from similar services. “We’re very committed to making sure what we build is specific to the needs of the businesses and to continuously support them throughout,” he noted. So far, this seems to be working out pretty well. Over the last year, revenue at Review Trackers grew about 80% a month. |
The Day I Measured My Heart Rate Through My Butt | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | Of all the weird science fiction projects that the future would bring us, the last I expected to see was a seat cushion that would be able to measure your heart beat through your derriere. And yet, the future is here (or nearly here), thanks to a new “smart seat cushion” called . The main idea behind the Darma cushion is to reduce the amount of strain users put on their back from sitting too long and from maintaining poor posture while doing so. It’s built to keep tabs on the amount of time users spend in their chairs in a non-intrusive way, and to occasionally nudge users to get up and stand or walk around. Unlike other posture systems, Embedded in the seat cushion are optic fibers that have light passed through them continuously. The system can determine how long someone has been seated, how fidgety they are in their chairs, and how good their posture is based on how the light passes through those fibers. But that’s not all — the fibers can also measure a user’s heart rate, respiration, and general stress level through the cushion. If that sounds kind of crazy, it is — but it also works incredibly well. I tested out the monitoring of my heart rate and respiration as measured through the Darma cushion as well as through a heart rate monitor placed on my fingertip. Surprisingly, the results from both were virtually the same. In which the intrepid reporter sits on the cushion and measures his heart rate Users will also have access to all that data through a mobile app that connects to the cushion via Bluetooth and tracks trends in their health and well being over time. I saw the second prototype of the seat cushion, which the team hopes to crowdfund on Kickstarter in a few months. They expect the cushion to cost $249 at retail, but plan to make it available for $149 for early backers during their crowdfunding campaign. Of course, the plan starts with the cushion, but the team hopes to make the technology available to other third-party furniture makers to get its smarts embedded directly into chairs and sofas and other general seating devices. The team imagines a world where fiber optics in your bed will be able to measure how well you sleep, to turn off the lights when it senses users are conked out, and turn them back on when they wake up. But let’s face it — that’s some Jetsons-type shit. For now, they’re just focused on measuring your heart rate… through a cushion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crqrPYcOlug |
Globby Helps Small Shops Take Advantage Of Southeast Asia’s Booming E-Commerce Market | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | Mobile penetration is , and still growing, and the increase in mobile devices also fuels a . The problem for many vendors, however, is how to bring their brick-and-mortar stores online. A Singapore-based startup named (short for Global Blaze Solutions) wants to be the e-commerce platform of choice for Southeast Asia’s stores (and differentiate from other e-commerce platforms like and ) by offering hyperlocalized support and tools that are tailored to sellers in the region before tackling other markets. The startup has gained user traction with a series of marketing campaigns that target small stores and fashion designers in Singapore. “We are very bullish about e-commerce growth in Southeast Asia now. This is also shown in the strong growth in the number of shops using Globby: in less than 9 months, over 100 stores are using Globby to power their online presence,” says Pam Wong, the startup’s demand generation executive. Wong says that one of the key challenges vendors face as they figure out how to set up an online presence is the lack of personal interaction in e-commerce stores and service staff to help guide customers toward products or take the right steps to ensure that they complete the transaction or return to the store for other purchases. “A lot of small e-commerce vendors are not aware of how to overcome this issue because of the little knowledge they have of building up their brand. As such, most vendors have trouble building a customer base that comes back frequently to make repeat purchases,” says Wong. Globby addresses that with a tool that allows stores to send our email campaigns that are targeted to specific segments of customers. Its analytics tools track unique visitors and their details and purchase specifics. “Globby is not just about helping our clients build online stores. We want to change how businesses go about using their e-commerce stores. Here at Globby, we see e-commerce stores as a tool that facilitates data collection,” says Wong. “Using the data analytics on the backend, we help Globby users better understand their customers and create targeted promotions so as to increase the relevance of their marketing efforts.” |
Samsung’s Gear Live Android Wear Smartwatch First Impressions | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | The Gear Live is Samsung’s first kick at the Android Wear can, and like the other hardware in this category, it offers Android Wear basically as Google intended it. Software wise, there’s almost nothing to distinguish these devices – which means it’s all down to hardware design for Wear makers to make their mark. Samsung’s Gear Live is the only one in the launch crop of devices to sport an optical heart rate sensor, which is a handy spare feature if you’re an athlete or incredibly interested in your fitness levels and activity tracking. The Gear also features pretty much the exact same hardware that Samsung shipped with the Gear 2 smartwatch, released earlier this year and powered by Tizen, which is itself a refinement of the original Gear. They’ve managed to make a device that’s comfortable and easy to wear all day, albeit with a band that isn’t all that easy to latch onto your wrist to begin with. The smooth transition from bezel to lug is also aesthetically pleasing, but it isn’t convenient when you want to replace it with something else; the connector is proprietary to Samsung, limiting the availability of custom options. The display on the Samsung is more legible in direct sunlight than the LG G Watch, too – though neither is wonderfully clear in those circumstances. But it is incredibly bright and colorful, vividly rendering the new Material Design principles Google introduced at I/O. |
Android TV First Look Video And Hands On Impressions | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | Android TV is one of the myriad new things that Google announced this year at I/O, and the from Google’s previous effort with Google TV, a project announced in 2010 and updated continually since but that still hasn’t managed to become a significant part of Google’s lineup. Google is looking to change all that with Android TV. It’s a brand new platform, designed with simplicity and relevance in mind, with an interface that puts a strong emphasis on content first, and then offers up apps ordered based on your usage patterns and focuses finally on delivering top-quality Android games right to your big screen. Content, apps and games; that’s it, and it’s a smart move by Google to pare down and focus on the core experiences that matter to TV watchers. Over and over, the company spoke to its new desire to provide the right interface for the right situation on the right device, and Android TV is a great example of that theory put into action, at least based on our early impressions. It’s similar in many ways to what Amazon has done with the Fire TV, but Google’s interface is better-designed and less confusing, and it probably will have a better time incorporating content sources from third-party providers than will Amazon, thanks to its developer tools and the advantages devs have by building apps that work across Android wherever it happens to appear. |
Android Auto First Look Video With Google Automotive Chief Andrew Brenner | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | Google is about to make your smartphone the powerhouse behind your in-car infotainment system, with , a new feature it’s introducing to Android devices that replaces your built-in car navigation and media system with a version of Android designed specifically for vehicular display systems. The effort is very much reminiscent of Apple’s CarPlay, with an interface that highlights things people use on their devices when they’re in their cars specifically, including navigation, music playback, and voice-based interaction for search, composing messages and more. As you can see in the video, the idea behind the design of the system was to build something resembling Google Now for a central jumping off point, and then making sure that there are plenty of contextual smarts built into search so that it can understand even the most informal queries, and also anticipate your next requests without you even asking. Google will begin shipping its Android Auto solution later this year, beginning with a few select car and device manufacturers supporting the feature, and then expanding from there. It’s already looking pretty much road ready, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it hit the streets once they’ve had a chance to get more third-party developers on board. |
YouTube’s New Creator Tools Include Donations, Fan-Submitted Subtitles, And A Mobile Creator Studio App | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | YouTube is by far the largest platform for online video viewership in the world. But frankly, it wouldn’t be anything without its creators. That’s why in a keynote today at Vidcon, the company announced a wide range of new tools for the people that upload videos to the platform, all in the hopes that it will allow them to be more… creative? For the creative community, the keynote was largely a preview into the future, as YouTube Director of Product Management for Creators Matthew Glotzbach and VP of Engineering for Creators Oliver Heckmann showcased features that would mostly be considered “coming soon.” That decision to preview upcoming changes was intentional, as YouTube creators have consistently asked for more transparency around upcoming changes to the platform. After all, even features that are considered good for the overall community can still be disruptive to their workflow if they aren’t ready for them. At the keynote, which featured new YouTube boss Susan Wojcicki, the key themes were helping creators making videos more awesome, reach a wider audience, and grow their businesses. Here’s a quick rundown of the new creator tools and how they’ll help: |
Two US Government Agencies Are Working Together To Lower The Cost Of Installing Wi-Fi In Schools | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | The FCC that it $1 billion in 2015 to help bring in-school Wi-Fi to 10 million students who currently lack the technology. Today, the agency announced a with the U.S. General Services Administration that will allow participating schools to secure better rates on the hardware they need to install WiFi than they could on their own. The partnership will “allow schools and libraries to utilize the GSA’s reverse auction platform to seek bids from equipment vendors at prices even better than those already available under the relevant GSA schedule,” according to the FCC. That’s somewhat dense, but it means that schools can likely lower their installation costs, which could mean broader, and perhaps quicker adoption of Wi-Fi in American schools. I’ve asked the FCC if potentially lower per-school installation costs could increase the total number of students impacted in 2015. How big is the issue? According to the FCC, almost 60 percent of American schools “lack sufficient Wi-Fi.” And, of course, some of this country’s learning institutions have no Wi-Fi whatsoever. Last year, no FCC money was apportioned to provide more WiFi in schools. A few basic thoughts: More, faster, and better varied Internet access is good for our students, because they are entering into an increasingly digital-first world in which proficiency with computing products of every shape and size is a competitive advantage. And not just inside our own job market — the better trained our larger workforce is, the more competitive our country will be on the global stage. Every student in our country should have access to modern technology products, fast Internet connections, and all the software they can consume in pursuit of both self-directed and guided learning. We should be moving even more quickly than we are, though the FCC’s recent moves are certainly pointed in the right direction. |
Prescription Auditing Service Truveris Raises $12.75 Million | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | Bringing clarity to the $300 billion prescription drug payment system in the U.S., has raised $12.75 million in a new round of funding led by Canaan Partners. The New York-based company launched its first product in 2009, a system to check bills received by health insurance companies for prescription fulfillment. Truveris has an index of the cost of each prescription drug sold and the company’s software checks that price against the price charged by the pharmacy. “Average wholesale prices could be loaded incorrectly, or maximum allowable costs could be loaded incorrectly,” says Bryan Birch, the chairman, chief executive and president of Truveris. “The payer can save money and the member of the health plan can save money.” More recently, the company launched another product, called TrueBid, to create a marketplace for buyers and sellers of pharmaceutical payment plans. “Think eBay for prescription benefits,” says Birch of the company’s newest offering. Pharmacy benefits managers like the system because it creates more efficient work flows for bidding on contracts with insurers, and don’t mind the increased transparency it purports to provide. Up next for the prescription payments technology developer is a reporting service for benefits managers. “We not only provide the reporting solution like Tableau would, and the data warehousing, we also customize the reports for [managers] up front.” Canaan Partners led the Series C investment in Truveris, while previous investors New Leaf Venture Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, New Atlantic Ventures, and First Round Capital all participated in the financing. As a result of the investment, Canaan Partners’ Stephen Bloch will be taking a seat on the board. The company raised the round to support the roll-out of new products, which should be launching in the fourth quarter. Truveris already counts 200 customers on its service, representing 30 million members. The company’s software processes 300 million claims on an annual basis representing 10 percent of the country’s drug spend, according to Birch. |
VCs Ben Horowitz And Lars Dalgaard Want To Bridge SF’s Growing Digital Divide | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | Pews were packed at San Francisco’s church in the city’s Tenderloin district last night with people who wanted to hear the gospel thoughts of two of Silicon Valley’s most successful VCs, Ben Horowitz and Lars Dalgaard. The event was designed to support a $10K Crowdtilt fundraiser for the campaign put on by Glide SF, the church organization helping San Francisco’s poor and most marginalized communities. The topic of the event was how to fix SF’s growing digital, and hence economic, divide. It was ripe for a disparate crowd of folks from both tech and the Tenderloin. Notable figures in the audience included MC Hammer, both VC’s families, a sprinkling of startup entrepreneurs and Mark Zuckerberg’s parents. Just prior to her husband taking the stage, Horowitz’s wife Felicia got up in front of the crowd to talk about her life growing up in Compton. “If you know anything about that place, it’s far from tech,” she joked. Her rendition of a song from the musical “The Wiz” sent chills throughout the then hushed crowd. It’s easy to scratch our heads at a couple of billionaires asking the crowd to get involved and donate. We could even reason that they, along with the other tech billionaires, have helped create this divide. “I was walking around and seeing these 7,000 homeless people and I’d be going to fancy parties at HP… Or I’d have a friend buying some overpriced lamp,” Dalgaard said. While this made most of the audience laugh, it was an uneasy truth that seems to linger on everyone’s mind here. San Francisco is going through a time of rapid economic change. Unemployment is it’s been since the dot-com boom and wages, rent and seemingly everything else has increased. The change has given rise to protests, people have been kicked out of their homes, much of the city’s artistic population has had to relocate elsewhere, and yet the city still sees an egregious amount of homeless people and members living on its margins. A woman in the back would say, “mmm, okay” or “preach” when Dalgaard urged the crowd to get involved. “You can’t walk through these halls and not want to get involved here. I challenge you,” he said. Dalgaard and Horowitz, who currently work together at A16Z, shared some uncanny wit back and forth on stage. “It was either do this or buy a designer lamp,” quipped Horowitz in response to Dalgaard’s earlier comment. Horowitz then relayed that his involvement was in part because he’d been influenced by the 70’s TV miniseries Roots. Because of Roots, at a young age he began asking how slavery ended. He then went on, “A tiny group of really weird people called the Quakers said this is not ok.” During the Q&A, a woman asked if either of them had a plan to help close the economic chasm. Both noted their contributions to the community and emphasized the importance of CEOs giving back. “Look at Mark Zuckerberg. He didn’t take his earnings and spend it on a fancy new car or home. He took his first $100 million and to the Newark school system,” said Horowitz. Both Horowitz and his business partner Marc Andreessen that half of all their earnings will go to charity. Dalgaard was quick to point out the flack that Marc Benioff took with his 1/1/1 corporate charity plan. Zuckerberg, Horowitz and others have also urged for reform in education and immigration. “What would happen if Silicon Valley lost all of its immigrants,” Horowitz asked. He didn’t need an answer. Dalgaard, an immigrant of Danish origin himself, sympathized. He is one of many strong supporters in the tech community for the work of on immigration reform policy. “This event is free. If you don’t have anything, that’s okay, but give if you can and get involved if you can,” said Dalgaard. Those interested in getting involved can find out more at . |
Why Twitter Spiked 5% Today | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | Shares of technology stocks were mostly today, with the . Twitter, however, a company still down heavily from its earlier post-IPO highs, advanced 5 percent. Why? Positive external forecasts. that it thinks Twitter’s domestic user growth could best its first quarter tally, reassuring skittish investors worried that the social company didn’t have the mojo left to attract more eyeballs to its service. In its report, Evercore said that Twitter could see 20 percent year-over-year growth in its domestic user base in the current quarter. Twitter and other social companies generally have an easier time extracting revenue from domestic customers. So Twitter’s local audience is likely a key driver of its revenue growth. Twitter has performed well financially since its debut. Its share flew from its initial $26 pricing, cresting the $70 mark before retreating, eventually falling to around the $30 mark. In its two quarterly reports since its IPO, the company’s lackluster user growth figures have overshadowed . Twitter closed today at $41.44. Its recent recovery has been somewhat quiet, with the company steadily growing its market cap since the start of June. Provided that Twitter can prove that its days of audience growth are not behind it, investors could fall back in love with Twitter. According to , Twitter’s value ended regular trading at around $24.4 billion. |
Japan’s Moi Corporation Raises $5M For Mobile Live Streaming App TwitCasting | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | Once upon a time, say about three or four years ago, there were all sorts of companies trying to help users live stream themselves onto the Internet. There was Livestream and Ustream and Justin.tv and others, promising users quick and painless tools for live online broadcasts — even on mobile. And then things calmed down a lot, and the mobile live-streaming market stopped being really exciting. But a startup out of Japan wants to change that, and it looks like it’s getting a little bit of traction. Moi Corporation, which is the company behind Japanese mobile live stream app , just raised $5 million to extend its reach outside of its home market and to grow around the world. The company raised that funding from Indonesia’s Sinar Mas Group leading and Japanese seed investor East Ventures also participating. TwitCasting actually has two different apps — one for broadcast and one for viewing — and allows both broadcasters and viewers alike to chat with one another. While it was originally , the app has been gathering momentum over time: it took two years to reach its first million users, but it has grown to 6.5 million users over the last year or so. The key to its growth, according to founder and CEO Yosuke Akamatsu, is a live-streaming technology that allows for quick and easy broadcasting, regardless of network connectivity. The stream adjusts for changes in network quality, allowing users to broadcast even when there’s not a ton of bandwidth. The app also now also allows up to four users to broadcast on mobile or online together. And, of course, it allows users to share their broadcasts on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Anyway, the company is pretty big in Japan and in Brazil, and it hopes to expand in other parts of the world. That funding should help. |
How Can Chromecast Connect To Your Friend’s Phones Without Using WiFi? Ultrasonic Sounds | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | During yesterday’s I/O keynote, Google announced a rather fantastic new feature coming to the Chromecast: soon, your friends won’t need to be connected to your WiFi to be able to send things to your TV. As long as they’re in the same room, it should just work. But how? While Google’s Rishi Chandra mentioned yesterday that the new WiFi-less pairing system used a “variety of technologies” to determine when you’re near a Chromecast unit, he didn’t really breakdown what those technologies might be. Bluetooth? Some proprietary protocol that Google had cooked up? ? Turns out, it’s closest to that last one — or at least, it’ll probably like magic to anyone without superhuman hearing. Thanks to a post-Keynote presentation, we now have a better idea of how it’ll work: ultrasonic soundwaves, inaudible to the human ear. Once you’ve configured your Chromecast to allow nearby devices to connect, the Chromecast will push a uniquely generated ultrasonic sound through your TV’s speakers. Encoded in that soundwave is everything a phone needs to know to get paired up. You can’t hear these sounds, but your phone can. Apps using the Chromecast SDK will use your smartphone’s microphone to listen for these soundwaves. Once one is detected, it’ll offer up a Chromecast pairing button just as it would if you were on the same WiFi network. Sound familiar? Google’s engineers have actually been playing with the idea of ultrasonic networking At TechCrunch Disrupt SF last September, meanwhile, a company called SlickLogin for 2-factor authentication without the extra typing. They went on to be acquired just five months later. The buyer? [Via ] |
Hands On With The Moto 360, The First Round-Faced Android Wear Smartwatch | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | Motorola’s Moto 360 was ironically probably the most-coveted this year, because despite high interest it’s also the only one that wasn’t available. It’ll still be shipped out to all conference attendees when it becomes publicly available later this summer, but for now we managed to snag some hands on time and a video walkthrough with Motorola themselves. The smartwatch features the first shipping use of Android Wear’s round watchface design, complete with custom faces created by Motorola. The faces, and other interface elements, take up the entirety of the round screen, meaning that according to Motorola, there’s no wasted space despite the fact that it’s not a square display. Other than that, it works like the other two Android Wear smartwatches from Samsung and LG, with notifications pushed from your smartphone and contextually relevant information surfaced by Google Now, plus a built-in mic for voice control. [gallery ids="1022676,1022677,1022678,1022675"] Design-wise, the Moto 360 might first surprise because of its size – it seems bigger than either of the other two smartwatches because of its circular design, but it also actually looks more at home on thinner wrists than the others, too. The stainless steel case sets this watch apart in terms of the high degree of quality it conveys, and as a watch enthusiast it’s definitely my favorite looking Android Wear device. It also ships with a leather band as part of the stock kit for an additional premium feel. Motorola says it always planned to ship the watch on its own timeframe of late August, and they weren’t about to rush the project just to make the deadline for the conference, so everything is still proceeding according to their original plans. Aside from it running a bit warm, it definitely felt pretty much ready to ship, so hopefully we won’t have to wait too long. |
Germany Nixing Verizon Contract Highlights Economic Impact Of US Spying | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | The German government announced it was pulling its contract with Verizon due to fears the Internet provider was allowing U.S. agencies to spy on the government’s communications, . The news highlights the negative impact controversial government surveillance programs have on American businesses abroad. Reports of the U.S. spying on German citizens sparked backlash in Europe last year in the wake of leaks from former government contractor Edward Snowden about the scope of NSA surveillance programs. News that German Chancellor Angela Merkel “There are indications that Verizon is legally required to provide certain things to the NSA, and that’s one of the reasons the cooperation with Verizon won’t continue,” Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate told the Associated Press. The announcement demonstrates the controversial surveillance practices are bad for American businesses. In the aftermath of the Snowden leaks, tech companies from Verizon to Facebook have had to defend their companies practices to angry customers in the U.S. and abroad concerned they are sharing personal data with the U.S. government. Companies from to have called on the government to make reforms. Verizon Germany’s managing director Detlef Eppig released a statement to TechCrunch, “Verizon Germany is a German company and we comply with German law.” The company outlines its “position on the inability of the U.S. government to access customer data stored outside the U.S.” on its policy blog. , Verizon did not receive any demands from the U.S. government for data stored in other countries. It goes on to say the U.S. can’t compel Verizon to produce data stored in centers outside the U.S., and if it tried to, the company could challenge that in court. The current contract between Germany and Verizon will expire in 2015, the AP reported. Germany has a history of leading European countries in the . Their strict policies have presented challenges for American and . The news comes on the heels of U.S. attempts to repair the blows the Snowden documents caused to its relationships with EU nations last year. On Wednesday the Obama administration pledged to pass legislation that would extend some of the personal privacy rights Americans have in U.S. courts to EU citizens. When Merkel visited the U.S. in May, she told Obama it was too soon to return to in the wake of the NSA revelations. The announcement shows that’s not changing soon. |
Uber Turns Gay Marriage Into A Marketing Stunt | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | In honor of Pride weekend in San Francisco, Uber is cheapening the whole concept of marriage by letting you order a . Uber will pick up you and your significant other and rush you through the legal paperwork and ceremony, all in under an hour. The company might mean well, and the experience might even be fun, but the whole thing reeks of opportunism. Delivering kittens to cuddle is one thing. Marriage is just a wee bit more serious. On Saturday from noon to 6pm in SF, no matter your sexual orientation, you’ll be able to order one of these abominations. Uber will provide vows if you don’t bring them, which I imagine go something like “I take you to be my husband, through standard fares and surge, with or without complimentary bottled water, and promise to give you 5-star service until death do us part.” Friends can meet you at the ceremony, where a violinist will play the wedding tune as you’re “surrounded by flowers from Bloom That and candles from bella j. After you both say ‘I Do,’ we’ll celebrate with dessert from SusieCakes, cheers with champagne from Iron Horse and you’ll receive a gift bag from L.” Afterwards, HotelTonight and Alaska Airlines will hook up a free honeymoon. In other words, Uber won’t have to pay for much. But the stunt will get even more people looking at the Uber app during the middle of the hectic Pride weekend when the company stands to make UberSUV-load of cash on surge pricing. From one perspective, UberWeddings seems cute. The company appears somewhat earnest when it writes: “We’re thankful to be based in San Francisco, a city that recognizes love doesn’t have to look any certain way. In honor of week, we’re celebrating the inclusive idea that with something that lasts a lifetime.” But I can’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t the point of the fight for marriage equality. You should be able to express your love however you want, but is the lure of a free wedding worth having the momentous occasion swallowed up by a brand? I plainly asked a few friends who identify as gay what their thoughts were of the campaign, with no leading questions. “Yeah, pretty gross,” Matt Conn, founder of and the conference, told me. “While it’s nice they’re giving away free trips to people who want to tie the knot…it seems like a very gross way to enter into what should be a lifelong commitment. It seems like a way to get people who are using their app to be like ‘Oh, Uber supports LGBT people, they’re great.’ It’s a very see-through attempt by straight folks to try to capitalize on the ‘hot’ trend of gay rights. It’s just disrespecting marriage.” Another friend who asked to remain anonymous said: “Seems a bit pandering from Uber’s perspective, but they’re not exactly know for being subtle.” Paul Mauer, an excellent photographer, was more blunt: “I think it’s contributing to the popular notion that gay relationships aren’t as serious or deeply felt as their heterosexual counterparts. It’s kinda fucked up.” On Twitter, some people , but others were upset: this is the most ridiciulously upsetting pride appropriation and also utter bullshit. — Kendra Albert (@KendraSerra) https://twitter.com/dannyhertz/status/482251101672988673 Uber has delivered barbecue, mariachi bands, and ice cream, but this is different. It seems ill-advised to muscle in on Pride week with marketing schtick that’s tone-deaf to the significance marriage has to some people. I get that Uber is trying to grow its business by whatever means necessary, but it shouldn’t be surprised if crossing the line this way leads to chants of “Divorce Uber.” |
Aereo’s Dissent | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | waiting for the Supreme Court ruling on all week. When it came down yesterday, it felt a little bit like Groundhog Day. If the Supreme Court sided with Aereo, winter would be over; if they didn’t, six more weeks of cold. Either way, I think Aereo will eventually have its own spring… but now it will take a while. So here’s the bad news: the Supreme Court yesterday ruled that Aereo is . They said that Aereo technology, despite actually operating within the boundaries set forth by the Copyright Act, simply looks and acts too much like a cable company as an end product. And so… Your cable bill will still be through the roof, and you’ll still have to buy the Tennis and Golf channels if you want to watch football on ESPN. You’ll still have to battle with customer service agents over bogus charges and steadily rising monthly rates, and still, after all these years, if you want to watch content on some device other than your TV, you’ll have to buy and download that content even though you already paid for it with cable. So before I go any further, I want to state for the record that, like Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, I dissent. The TV industry is based on an oligopoly that started ages ago. The reason Time Warner and Comcast can cry “no monopoly” as they inch towards a all stems from their history, in which each company dug trenches and invested time and resources to build out the infrastructure that we enjoy today. They didn’t overlap because it was tough enough just to build out a regional empire. Ultimately, these cable companies turned into lords of each of their realms, forming regional monopolies that consolidated over and over again to comprise a small group. The same group of big guns we get bills from today. Of course, there are a few little guys who still operate regionally, but they’re minor players in the game. Because of these monopolies, cable companies could charge broadcasters and networks exorbitant fees for the content without any undercutting from competition. When the networks saw the inequity within the relationship, the government helped out. Essentially, they said that broadcasters could have a bunch of public resources, including wireless spectrum, that would be available to consumers outside of the reach of the cable companies. In return for the spectrum and the return to balance with the cable companies, the broadcast networks would air their content for free to consumers. With millions of eyes on their ads, it was a pretty good deal. Up until the last decade, broadcast networks didn’t get any retransmission fees from anyone. But they weren’t just sitting around twiddling their thumbs. They bought up other media companies, built out other channels. As American households shifted away from antennas, media companies were building out empires of various programming. Cooking channels. Niche sports channels. Channels aired in other languages. Channels for dudes. Channels for chicks. Channels for people who love stand up comedy, and channels for people who love watching toddlers compete in pageants. Suddenly, the American consumer had to choose from, but only a few places to get it. The cable companies had their regional monopolies, and as a countermeasure, the media companies built up an oligopoly, too. There is a very small group of media companies that are responsible for the vast majority of the television available to you. The Walt Disney Company, Comcast, CBS Corporation, and News Corp have pretty much all of it: E! to Oxygen to Bravo!, ESPN to FX to Esquire Network, and everything in between. Shockingly, ESPN is far more popular than the Disney XD channel, and so the Walt Disney Company can sell them together to the cable companies, who really don’t have much of a say at all. But it goes beyond that. Media companies are not only bundling all their extra cable programming into one over-priced wholesale package to the cable companies, but they’re now charging retransmission fees for their broadcast content. Yes, cable companies pay exorbitant rates to send you content that is actually available to you for free, because the networks have the leverage to withhold CBS if the deal doesn’t also include a dozen of their other popular channels, as well as a handful of incredibly popular channels. Sure, the production costs of television continues to rise. Dramas and sitcoms have become increasingly labor-intensive, and the inflation of sports rights is even worse. But don’t let that fool you. The folks at these media companies are making bank. They have all of us, not just cable companies, in their pockets. Let’s zoom back in to you, the American consumer. Five years ago, your cable bill was probably around $60. Today, it’s probably closer to $120. Some of us are perfectly fine with this. The TV content continues to get better, and more varied, and is worth the rising cost. To . For most of us, however, we watch a few things on TV and that’s all. We have our favorite shows, or maybe we love sports. We don’t need 500 channels. In fact, we only ever watch about three or four different channels at all. And yet, we pay for 500. Pardon my French, but that’s fucked up. And it gets more fucked by the second, because the cable companies are consolidating yet again. As consumers, the only voice we have comes from the mouth of our wallet. We don’t pay The Walt Disney Channel or News Corp or NBC Universal. We pay Time Warner Cable and Comcast. The only imprint we can make is the bill we pay each month, and when the few competitors in the space join forces, our choice in the matter disappears. The one or two cable companies will pay the fees demanded of them, and they’ll charge us even more because we have no other option, and we’ll be even more fucked than we are today. Just like cable, Aereo lets you tune to your favorite show, watch it live, and record it to a DVR service. The process by which it achieves this is very different from the way that cable companies do it, however. While cable companies are forced to pay for free content and then charge you for that free content, Aereo developed a way to let users rent a remote antenna, as well as subscribe to a cloud locker service to achieve the same effect. Both the antenna, and the DVR service are very legal. But when combined, Aereo takes on the appearance of a cable company. It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, but it’s not a duck. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court was very focused on Aereo’s aviary appearance. Within the opinion, the court even admits that Aereo’s method and technology for delivering content very different from the cable companies. It also states that this difference (based around user involvement in the process of transmission) could be the saving grace for other technology providers, but not for Aereo. This Court recognizes one particular difference between Aereo’s system and the cable systems at issue […]. The systems in those cases transmitted constantly, whereas Aereo’s system remains inert until a subscriber indicates that she wants to watch a program. In other cases involving different kinds of service or technology providers, a user’s involvement in the operation of the provider’s equipment and selection of the content transmitted may well bear on whether the provider performs within the meaning of the Act. But to the cable companies targeted by the 1976 amendments, It just looks too damn much like a duck. Of the nine Justices making the , three dissented. Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito sided with Aereo. And to be perfectly honest, the dissent seems to make far more sense than the actual opinion: The Networks sued Aereo for several forms of copyright infringement, but we are here concerned with a single claim: that Aereo violates the Networks’ “exclusive righ[t]” to “perform” their programs “publicly.” 17 U. S. C. §106(4). That claim because Aereo does not “perform” at all. The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard (“looks-like-cable-TV”) SCOTUS promised that this ruling will not affect similar technology providers, like cloud storage companies, but how can they keep that promise? This is, for all intents and purposes, a new precedent. If 1 million people buy on iTunes, half of them upload it to Google Drive, and a thousand of them choose to stream it down to themselves at the same time, then isn’t that considered a public performance, too? Isn’t Google Drive acting similarly to a cable company? The implications here are frankly terrifying, but that’s not even the biggest loss. The biggest loss is Aereo itself. I have been covering Aereo since it was but a glimmer in ‘s eye. I had high hopes for the company, based almost entirely around how desperately the TV industry needs disruption. As much as I love Aereo, I’ve never believed it would replace the current head honchos of the industry, but it was the Friendster before the Facebook. It was the stepping stone that is necessary to cross this turbulent river into a land where you can choose the content you want to watch and pay for that content. It’s disheartening that our greatest chance at a brave new world was obstructed by the government, but the fight is not over. If it’s not Aereo, another someone or something will come in and chip away as well, just like Netflix and Hulu and others. Slowly but surely, the industry is fragmenting into media streaming players and binge-viewed content and streaming content companies. It’s no longer if, but when. Congrats on the battle, big TV. See you at the next one. |
null | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 6 | 19 | null |
500 Startups Files With The SEC So Dave McClure Can Talk Up His New $100M Fund | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | Dave McClure’s seed-stage investment firm is raising a big new $100 million fund. . But now, thanks to some filings with the SEC, McClure can finally talk about it. That’s because 500 Startups has filed the paperwork necessary to allow for a general solicitation exemption while fundraising. In plain English that means McClure, who has never exactly been shy about what’s happening at 500, can freely discuss that new fund in public. Like, maybe, at his . Previously, firms like 500 could talk behind closed doors about their new funds, but they couldn’t publicly advertise that they were looking for investors. That changed last summer when the SEC , but certain requirements remained — in particular, if firms are going to be making public statements about their fundraising, they need to be ultra-careful that everyone who writes a check is an accredited investor. To deal with that provision, 500 Startups is partnering with equity crowdfunding platform to do all the investor verification and other services. The firm will be using SeedInvest’s white-label platform to manage its fundraising activity and keep track of investors that have put money in. That said, even though 500 Startups is partnering with an equity crowdfunding platform, it’s not exactly “crowdfunding” its $100 million fund. In a phone conversation, McClure said that filing for a general solicitation exemption was more about playing by the rules than it was about trying to crowdfund $5-$10 million checks. “We want to make sure that we’re playing by the rules as the SEC has defined them, to make sure we are able to talk publicly about our fundraising efforts,” McClure told me. By doing so, 500 Startups could potentially find new investors that it hadn’t previously been in touch with. Or they could find 500, through new channels like Twitter. After all, he can now talk about his new fund to, and the 500 Startups Twitter account . Then again, if you haven’t heard of 500 Startups by now, you probably should have. “I think it was tough in the past to approach institutional investors, since we were still pretty new and still pretty small,” McClure said. “But we’re not so new and not so small anymore.” Indeed, 500 Startups now has more than 30 employees, including 10 who are making investments. It also has a fairly international presence, with employees in Brazil, Mexico, China, India and Malaysia, as well as San Francisco and Mountain View. And it’s running , graduating about 30 startups per class. It’s looking to raise more funding based on some early success in the three years or so that it’s been writing checks. Some exits include Wildfire, Makerbot and Viki, all of which were acquired in nine-figure deals. It’s also seeing about 20 percent of the companies it made early-stage investments in raise later rounds, with companies like Twilio, CreditKarma, SendGrid, TaskRabbit, and 42 Floors taking Series B or later rounds of investment. To keep investing at a pace of more than 200 startups per year, 500 could use that fresh $100 million. The new money could also help 500 continue to follow-on with investments in winners, which has been somewhat constrained by the size of its first two funds. But hey, maybe being able to discuss the funding could help move the process along. McClure sure thinks so. |
Loyalty And Marketing Analytics Startup CrowdTwist Raises $9M More | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | is announcing that it has raised $9 million in Series B funding. Since the company offers tools for creating online loyalty programs, co-founder and CEO Irving Fain said that a few years ago, CrowdTwist was sometimes “gravitationally lumped into the intense fervor around gamification,” but he pointed to the new funding is a sign that it has a bigger vision, one that can provide “long-term, sustainable value to brands.” The real key to CrowdTwist’s approach, Fain added, is the fact that it sees loyalty programs as way to gather data about customers across online, offline, mobile, and social channels — and to do so in a way where all the data is opt-in and owned by the brand itself, not a third-party provider. “In a world where brands want to customize their experience based on who you are and the things that you care about, they need to look at eight or nine different platforms and points of data and recognize they all come from same individual,” Fain said. “Otherwise they’re never going to be able to deliver on the promise of true personalization.” Using that data to tailor their pitch to different customers can lead to improved sales — the company says its customers see a 20 percent lift in sales on average. Moving forward, Fain said CrowdTwist will be giving businesses “more intelligence” so that they can act on this data. He argued that since the company was founded in 2009, an increasing number of brands are talking about “multi-channel loyalty” — for example consumer packaged goods brands that sell through supermarkets or drugstores but still want to have a direct relationship with their customers. New CrowdTwist clients include Ultimate Fighting Championship, L’Oreal USA, Sport Clips, and USA Track & Field. The company was part of the inaugural TechStars program in New York and it back in 2011. The new round was led by StarVest Partners, with investment from all previous backers, including Fairhaven Capital and SoftBank Capital. |
Russia’s Skolkovo Project Back On Track | Monty Munford | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | The pace of change in Russia appears slow at the moment. Ongoing events in the suggest an inward-looking country that has no ear for global opinion and is set on acting like the angry Soviet bear that we know from the Cold War. The perception, however, can be different from reality, especially when viewed from thousands of miles away, because despite its recalcitrant political front, there is a revolution in entrepreneurship taking place in Russia. The began in March and included startup pitch-offs in 27 cities before culminating in a one-day, showcase event held at the ‘s Moscow technology incubator. The event is indicative of the growth Russia’s nascent technology startup scene; the foundation plans to bring the Startup Tour to more Russian cities in 2015. The Skolkovo Foundation is Russia’s state-sponsored push to jumpstart the country’s tech ecosystem. It’s not just promoting startups through the multi-city tech tour and competition. It’s also building a 400-hectare site on the outskirts of Moscow. That site will be a hub for up to 30,000 workers when the project is completed in 2020. At the finale of the startup tour held earlier this month, the spotlight was on Russian robotics. Presentations ranged from glorified creations with an emphasis on to a much more impressive kickboxing robot. The winner of the $26,000 nationwide startup competition was , an ambitious robotics company that not only aims to improve the quality of life for disabled people (an area where Russia has certainly not led the world), but also to provide disaster relief in affected zones. There were also two second prizes. One went to , a resident of Skolkovo’s Space Technologies and Telecommunications Cluster, and the other to , a resident of the Nuclear Cluster. The Jury’s Choice Award (as well as the Open Stage special audience award) went to , a designer of digital planar holography. While Skolkovo is now basking in some success, the project has generated its share of controversy. Accusations of corruption and a damning report from the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office stating that between 2010 and 2012, nearly 30 billion rubles ($600 million) out of a budget of 50 billion rubles ($1 billion) were used neglectfully ‘in the absence of budget control’, cast a shadow over its work — almost before the project was able to get off the ground. Things have moved on since a proper audit of Skolkovo’s books. And VCs realise that Skolkovo has to exist in a country that is rich in scientific knowledge but low on marketing expertise. “As a global investment company we know it’s important to build the early startup culture at a country level. Skolkovo in Russia has done a good job in educating and bringing up the young startup market, as well as pre-seed investments into tech companies,” said Dmitry Chikhachev, Managing Partner at , a $135 million global venture capital fund based in Moscow with a satellite office in Palo Alto and plans for a London office later this year. The first stop-off on this year’s tour was the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, the catalyst for the Russian Revolution where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks on July 17, 1918. The city, Russia’s fourth-largest with more than 1.5 million people, became a major manufacturer of arms for World War II and was renamed Sverdlovsk after a local communist leader, before becoming a “closed city” to foreigners for its proximity to sensitive military zones. This changed in 1991 when it was renamed Yekaterinburg and its closed status was revoked. In the intervening 23 years the city has become a hub for emerging mining and technology startups, attracting young entrepreneurs graduating from the city’s 16 educational institutions. Other Russian cities are also beginning to emerge as tech hubs, and these developing innovation centers will need the support of institutions like Skolkovo, according to investors. “The is really an ecosystem for the commercialisation of innovative ideas. Skolkovo is only three years old and it takes time to build a strong ecosystem of high quality,” say Lyubov Simonova, a principal at . “Russian companies want to build companies with billion-dollar revenues. Skolkovo is one part of the ecosystem that can make this possible,” she said. Perhaps the peculiar and unique evolution of the Russian state is one where state-sponsored projects like Skolkovo are needed to change mindsets and create outward-facing companies, be that in Moscow, Yekaterinburg or even the steppes of Siberia. With a third Startup Village tour earmarked for next year and another $4 billion guaranteed for Skolkovo over the next six years, there will be plenty of time to find out. |
Snapchat’s “Our Story” Is A Genius, Collaborative Reinvention Of The Livestream | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | What does it feel like to be a massive music festival? Nothing like a glossy livestream of the mainstage. Much more like Snapchat’s , a curated channel of user submitted photos of videos from all around a big event. I was there last night at Vegas’ Electric Daisy Carnival, an 140,000-person dance music festival where Snapchat piloted Our Story. I can vouch that the decentralized perspective was remarkably accurate. has huge potential, and you can follow along tonight by adding “EDC Live” on Snapchat. The startup’s other big experiment at EDC didn’t fare so well. See, cell phone networks get overloaded at every music festival. Wouldn’t it make sense for Verizon or AT&T or someone to set up extra towers or Wifi to help their customers or lure in competitor’s? Well Snapchat tried to beat them to it by providing free wifi for the mega-rave, but only for using the official EDC app and…Snapchat. The idea was that while people’s texts, Instagrams, Facebook posts and tweets wouldn’t send, Snapchats would go through in an instant. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work. I tried more than 20 times across my 8 hours at the festival, and never successfully connected to the Snapchat Wifi networks. None of a dozen people I talked to were able to connect either and many festival goers expressed frustration about the experience on Twitter. It would have been very useful as few people’s mobile networks could handle the load and communication became nearly impossible. But worse than just resigning to being disconnected, many like me wasted battery and attention futilely trying to jack into Snapchat’s wifi. Maybe that’s why Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel looked a bit hurried when I ran into him for a split-second in the EDC media center just before . Snapchat had secured a nice partnership with the festival that promoted it in the official EDC app. Banners around the grounds advertised “No Signal? No Problem” and advised people to connect to Snapchat’s wifi. Some people must have gotten it to work, but the promotion seems to have attracted more users than the network could handle. Still, it was a valiant effort, and I hope Snapchat and other companies keep experimenting with the concept though it fell short at EDC night 1. We’ll see if it improves the next two nights. [Update: Snapchat’s wifi problems persisted through much of the festival. Just before midnight on Sunday I met with Snapchat’s on-site crew including COO Emily White. She admitted the company was a bit overly ambitious to say it would “provide everyone at EDC with free wifi access”, but implied it was the popularity of Snapchat and its idea to offer an alternative to clogged mobile networks that caused the breakdown. As for Our Story, the team seemed to be glowing with its success. One member got a snap of his chosen for the EDC Live story, and saw his clip had been seen by over 130,000 people in the past 24 hours. I asked to see the content management system Snapchat was using to curate Our Story, but the squad refused, saying its nuts and bolts were a secret.] The wifi would have been especially nice for uploading snaps to Our Story. My crummy AT&T network failed to push my clips to it, or let me watch it once the bulk of the ravers arrived around midnight. But on the ride home at sunrise and hungover in bed this morning, Our Story was a lovely way to relive the night from different vantage points. A buddy who’d come with me to EDC in 2012 watched from home in Arizona and posted “EDC Live is a gamechanger. Can’t stop watching”. If he wanted a high-fidelity look at the big-name DJs on stage, he could watch the official , but Snapchat shows what it’s like on the ground. What made Our Story special and much better than just lurking a hashtag was the curation. Using geofencing, Snapchat detected who was actually at the EDC festival grounds at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and only offered them the chance to contribute to Our Story. Snapchat edited out any spam or objectionable content, but also boring and low-quality snaps. It cut down most photos it featured to just 1 second each the parade of Snaps stayed brisk and never got boring. It also managed to avoid overtly sexist content, which is tough when the crowd is full of amped up bros and scantly-clad ladies. Our Story authentically portrayed the event, from people enduring the entrance lines to throwing down on the packed dance floors, taking selfies in the front row or soaking up the grandeur from the bleachers. No sarcastic quips from afar, no incoherent rambling, and not just the same lame pics over and over from the back of the crowd. Following the hashtag on Twitter delivers some good pictures but also plenty of self-promoting DJs and useless live tweets. On Instagram, there’s just so many photos from people in Vegas and getting ready in their hotels that the best ones from EDC itself are drowned out. It’s only had one night in the wild, but I think Our Story could be big for Snapchat. That’s especially impressive considering the feature is all about public sharing rather than the private, intimate transmissions Snapchat built its name on. Snapchat hasn’t announced plans for any additional Our Story events, but they could help keep the app growing and finally let it earn some money. If it’s the best way to follow along with big happenings, perhaps Coachella or the MTV Movie Awards, Our Story could seduce new users to Snapchat. Meanwhile, the feature acts like a digital jumbo-tron. It might re-engage lapsed users or get loyals ones sharing more if contributions to Our Story could make them ‘Snap-famous’. Events might also be willing to pay for the promotion and cool-factor Snapchat could provide by setting them up with an Our Story. Snapchat could charge for inserting an event’s account into people friend lists, giving global visibility and buzz to music festivals, sports matches, and other big gatherings. Eventually, any geographically-centered community, from colleges to landmarks could have their own Our Story, though figuring out how to keep the curation strong will be a challenge. Two years ago I wrote that location-based photo feeds were . Instagram discovery feature has hardly budged since, and now Snapchat is capitalizing on the opportunity. As our prized possessions like photos and music become digitized, meatspace experiences are growing more valuable. Everyone can’t physically attend events like EDC, but Snapchat may have found a way to make the exhilaration scale with Our Story. |
The Story Behind Google’s Cardboard Project | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | The surprise hit of Google I/O was without a doubt . Google’s paper product — or phone-based VR viewer — made its debut during yesterday’s keynote, and today, David Coz, the project’s founder, revealed its origins. Depending on who you ask at I/O, Google went ahead with this project either because it wanted to show that Facebook overpaid for Oculus Rift or because it is jealous that it couldn’t acquire it. According to Coz, however, who works for Google’s Cultural Institute in Paris, Cardboard was simply a project he felt like working on. “I’m a big VR fan,” he said, adding that there has been so much progress in this space in the last few years. With Cardboard, he wanted to see how he could build a VR viewer in the “simplest and cheapest way.” The project started about six months ago. After Coz showed it to Google Research scientist Christian Plagemann in Mountain View, it became his 20 percent project, and the company decided to go ahead with it for a larger project. So why use cardboard? Coz said he started working with it because it was an easy way to hack together a prototype, but he also liked it because he wanted the viewer to look really simple. All the processing, after all, is handled by the phone. In addition, he noted that Google wants anybody “to just take scissors and staplers and modify it.” Given that Google has made a developer toolkit available for Cardboard and that the hardware is not just simple but also open source, chances are we will actually see quite a few Cardboard-based apps and viewers in the near future. The team also talked a bit about how could be used for more precise head tracking. To be fair, others have tried a similar approach to phone-based VR viewers. None of them, however, can match Google’s reach and existing developer ecosystem. |
This Video Shows A Day In The Life Of DDOS Cyber Attacks | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | This is that’s been shared throughout the Internet purporting to show a concerted DDOS attack coming mainly from China and concentrated on United States internet servers on the day that Facebook’s service for many users worldwide. We’ve looked into this further, however, and it turns out this attack bore no relation to Facebook’s outage on Thursday. For one thing, we’re told the time stamps don’t square up quite correctly. We’ve updated this post’s headline to make that completely clear. Meanwhile, Facebook says its that the outage was due to an internal software configuration error still stands. So, as action-packed as it is, the video above was just another of the many global DDOS attacks that regularly occur in cyberland (showing why companies like Facebook have had to erect top-notch security teams for constant protection.) Technology companies large and small are for such attacks — as more people come online, the potential for havoc gets larger. And now, the video has been from YouTube for violating the site’s policy against “spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content” (the title of the video said the attack caused the Facebook outage.) You can still see a blip of the video in the screenshot embedded in this post. This past Thursday, a number of Facebook users worldwide were unable to access the social networking site worldwide for about a half an hour. Such an outage is for as large a site as Facebook, and at the time, the company with a short statement that attributed it to a software configuration that had been enacted before the outage. According to footage posted by a YouTube user called Tournaments Replays that was allegedly pulled from , a security intelligence company that monitors cyber attacks in real time, there appears to have been a large distributed denial-of-service ( ) attack coming mainly from China and concentrated on United States internet servers on the day that Facebook’s service was down for many users worldwide. of the alleged attack is embedded above. |
WatchESPN’s Record 1.7M Concurrent World Cup Viewers Beats The Super Bowl | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | The WatchESPN app (or site, or however you access it) was the way that many Americans were watching the US vs. Germany World Cup match today. So many, in fact, that the site had issues serving all of its users in the first half. Some folks, including me, couldn’t log on until many minutes into the match. Still, that didn’t stop ESPN from hitting a record 1.7M concurrent viewers during the second half, the company tells us. “We did investigate some limited issues due to unprecedented demand during the first half,” a spokesperson said in response to inquiries about streaming issues. The problems I had connecting appeared to be at the point where WatchESPN authenticates my cable provider in order to verify that I actually subscribe to the channel. Ironically, this is an issue that wouldn’t have occurred if they offered some sort of standalone subscription — which will not happen any time soon, no matter what cord-cutter fever dreams you might have. Still, 1.7M concurrent streams is pretty impressive — for the web. It’s still far below traditional TV, of course, but it compares very well to recent events. The in at 1.1M concurrent users of the Fox Sports Go online streaming service during the 3rd quarter blowout of the Broncos by the Seahawks. If you’re keeping track, international football beat American football, handily. Of course, there are a couple of caveats here. This isn’t a service-to-service comparison as it’s Fox’s new-ish streaming service vs. WatchESPN. And the Super Bowl is a very American event. The fact that the World Cup also aired mid-day in the US, when people are more likely to stream and less likely to watch on TV, also probably played a huge part. Still, it’s an interesting, if somewhat imbalanced, comparo. : Fox head of also notes that the network’s Super Bowl stream wasn’t available on mobile devices. As we all know the tipping point has been reached for mobile streaming, that would likely have been another big boost. Fox doesn’t get the Super Bowl back until 2017, but does have the NFL, the Women’s World Cup and the US Open coming up. The Super Bowl was their first ‘BIG’ event streamed on the Go service. “Our live stream absolutely did not experience any outages,” a Univision spokesperson tells us. “In fact, Univision Digital broke records today delivering 750,000 live concurrent streams for the USA vs. Germany match.” The Brazil vs. Mexico match broke the same record for the network 10 days ago. It became Univision’s most watched live stream ever with 630K concurrent viewers. That makes it almost 2.45M concurrent streams between WatchESPN and Univision, which did not require a subscription or login. Olympics viewership during the USA vs. Canada men’s hockey game . March Madness is harder to pin down, but as ‘accessing’ the live feed during the first day of the tournament. The record for a live-streamed event is still Felix Baumgartner’s space jump, watched by 8M people concurrently. In case you’re wondering how far streaming has yet to go, TV stats for the Super Bowl clocked in at 111.5M viewers. The US lostwon 0-1 to Germany, but both teams advance to the round of 16. Image Credit: |
Will Google Enter The Insurance Industry? | Christoffer O. Hernæs | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | When it comes to collecting and organizing information, Google is well on its way to establishing its hegemony through the registration of 6 billion daily unique searches and indexing of over . What remains to be seen is how this information is being made universally accessible and at what price. One of the industries that has particular advantage of access to the world’s information is insurance. So far, Google has managed to capitalize on this information through keyword advertising through AdWords. A glance at the keyword advertising data shows that insurance and other financial services are the top spenders, with a combined annual spend of $4 billion according to Google AdWords and Wordstream statistics. The absolute greatest vertical in Google’s AdWords revenue is auto insurance, where State Farm, Progressive and GEICO alone accounted for $110 million in In a recently published report in cooperation with BCG India, Google concludes that insurance is among the top five product categories in which the web is the dominant purchasing channel in addition to travel, digital media, ticket purchases and books magazines. Common for the first four product categories is that the traditional sales channels have long been redundant as a result of digital disruption. The same report predicts that . If these predictions are accurate, it will give Google a dominant position as the primary sales channel for the insurance industry. Is the insurance industry the next industry where technology with Google as a key player disrupts the existing value chain? A review of Google’s acquisition activity and technology development provides an indication of what position Google is able to reach based on the insurance industry’s key revenue sources such as car, home, and life and health insurance. Google made its first move towards the insurance industry back in 2012 with , the price comparison service for car insurance, for £37 million. Looking at the numbers, Google charges up to $54 per click for insurance . In addition to this Google already has real-time monitoring of traffic through obtaining metadata from all Android devices moving along major roads, and is able to give accurate traffic reports through Google Now. The same real-time traffic information is potentially valuable analysis data for an insurance company. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that Google has taken initiative for the formation of the , which aims to promote Android as the standard platform for future entertainment systems, apps and other technology in cars. In January 2014, Google made its second-largest acquisition ever by for $3.2 billion. According to , this will strengthen Google’s position in smart homes and provides an opportunity for the Android operating system to become the primary platform for the The interesting question to ask is how the information obtained through smart metering and other household sensors can be used? A continuous and automatic monitoring of all electronics in a house is valuable information on an insurance object for both the pricing and settlement of claims. Connect this with the information already collected through Google Maps and Google Earth, and this would, for example, be the basis for a precise calculation of accumulated high risk in densely populated areas. Google Glass is another area where Google has the possibility to create a position within the insurance value chain. In January 2014, Google and the VSP, the nation’s largest insurance player in optical insurance, , subsidizing Google Glass with prescription lenses for VSP’s policyholders. This may at first glance be dismissed as a move to boost short-term sales of Google Glass, but rather it will provide ample opportunities for collecting insurance data such as real-time health information from each user of the device. states that the industry has long abandoned its product-centric logic and is becoming increasingly consumer-centric. This leads to ever-increasing expectations and demands, as well as declining customer loyalty. Combined with a possible threat from new entrants such as Google, the analysis company argues that the insurance value chain is facing fundamental changes. The truth is probably somewhat less dramatic than what is claimed, as the industry already has a high degree of technology adaptation and has systematically developed digital channels, with GEICO and Progressive as good examples. But despite systematic work on continuous improvement and incremental innovation, history shows that it requires a new mindset when an industry is exposed to . For the insurance industry this poses a number of challenges at a time when much of the focus and resources are tied up in compliance with the regulatory requirements of and , the search for alternative allocations of capital due to and high complexity and in core systems. My hypothesis is that it is not a question of whether Google is going to take a position in the future value chain for the insurance industry, but which position Google wants to take, and how this will affect incumbents. |
Amazon’s Master Of Commerce Move Into The Phone Game | Alistair Goodman | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | Mobile is so 2010. So why would throw its hat into the game of phones? That’s the thing — it didn’t. The company is headed into battle in two other markets full of potential: real-world commerce and digital advertising. Amazon has focused its business almost solely on e-commerce since its launch in 1994. Twenty years later, the vast majority of commerce takes place in the physical world; a 2014 Q1 US Census report shows that So, if 94 percent of sales still happens in the real world, how does Amazon conquer this territory? It introduces a phone. The Fire Phone can recognize a physical object, scan a bar code, and quickly provide you with Amazon’s prices, taking showrooming to a whole new level. And then, the company is able to unlock that other 94 percent of commerce spend that it previously couldn’t touch. Should retailers be shaking in their proverbial boots? Probably. With , Amazon has become a trusted provider of goods. Now, those who trust the company already can buy an Amazon phone that makes it even easier to find what they want and order it with a couple of clicks. Even if just 10 percent of active users buy a Fire, that’s still 24 million people who will have access to Amazon’s low prices, vast inventory, and shipping. But real-world commerce isn’t the only new frontier for Amazon; the Fire Phone unlocks mobile advertising opportunities for the company, making it the third viable player in the thriving space, along with Google and Facebook. In 2014, and reach , eclipsing online advertising spend, according to analysis from eMarketer. Google and Facebook combined . Now, Amazon could give these two companies stiff competition due to its customer relationships and new features on its phone that aren’t available on Apple or Android devices. Amazon becomes the third major player with a mobile device tied to an immense database of browsing and past purchase data. With this phone, Amazon is able to do exactly the same thing as Google and Facebook: utilize customer identities and interest to bring targeted mobile ads to them on their phones. But Amazon has a distinct advantage: Its users have already bought something from them! As a result, the company is even better-equipped than other companies to use past purchase data to send highly tailored mobile ads to consumers. Amazon will be able to guarantee brands a pre-qualified, “in-market” audience. Who else can do that? In his demo of the Fire, Bezos made the real-world connections for the phone absolutely apparent, talking about how easy it is to walk down the street and use Firefly to recognize signs, goods, etc. This feature opens up so many doors: the ability to recognize places in the real world, to search for things you want based on what Amazon knows you are interested in, and the ability for Amazon to harness that data for more relevant recommendations. In effect, the Fire could provide an understanding of the physical world and merchant locations and, when combined with everything else Amazon knows about a user, actually deliver on the promise of “Marketing that consumers find really valuable, not intrusive.” Now imagine that they start pushing you the occasional recommendation when you’re near a physical store. Imagine you can get a reminder for something you have scanned when you’re near a place to buy it, with Amazon taking its cut for driving that real-world transaction. That massively changes the game of mobile marketing. Rebecca Lieb, an analyst with the Altimeter Group, : “Scan a product or listen to music, and you’re delivered straight to the page on Amazon on which you can purchase it. Impulse shopping just went to a new level.” Amazon is not in the mobile business, the phone business or the Internet of things business. And while analysts appear divided on the short- and long-term impact of the Fire for Amazon’s overall business model, they should agree on one point: Bezos and Co. are the masters of the commerce business, and the Fire Phone is just one tool that can be used to help it gain its slice of the immense cash flow happening not online, but on Main Street. I would even go so far as to say that the Fire Phone will be key to the Amazon growth strategy for the next 50 years. Congratulations, Mr. Bezos. Well played. The only thing I am wondering is, Why isn’t the phone free? |
Three Realities About Venture Capital | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | This week’s centered on many facets, but none got more attention than the nascent startup’s $1.2 million in venture capital funding. The reaction to this investment across the web came in several flavors. Founders complained that their own startups created far more value for society than an app that essentially acts as a doorbell, and yet, they had not received any venture capital funding. Another strain of incredulity focused on the investors themselves, who must have either been stupid or crazy to invest in such a “useless” product. These reactions are all fair, and I can certainly understand some of the vitriol that emanated from the web this week. Unfortunately, a large number of the complaints seemed to be based on misinformation about the venture capital industry. This lack of understanding seems to have only magnified with the increasing numbers of marketers employed by VC firms. I want to step through some of the realities of venture capital today, and hopefully shine light on the confusion that plagues its understanding. Specifically, I want to walk through the size of the VC industry, how limited partners affect the strategy of a firm, and the performance aspects of VC investing. Despite the sheer amount of coverage of venture capital in the tech press, it is always important to remember how truly small the industry is. according to a survey conducted by Thomson Reuters. To put that in perspective, in the same time period according to DJX LP Source. But constraining ourselves to private equity would be a mistake as well, which itself is a relatively small asset class (although one that has grown tremendously over the years). Just this past month in May, , or almost double what venture capital funds raised in all of 2013. And that’s just for mutual funds, and doesn’t include massive asset classes like ETFs, bond funds, or just investors directly buying equities. Investors looking to put their money to work have a dizzying array of options, and all asset classes must compete for those dollars. Investors share a variety of goals, including performance, risk, and diversification. Venture capital is a single star amid the entire Milky Way of capital, and it is truly a rounding error of the total wealth of the world, or even the wealth that is managed by investment firms. One effect that this size has on the industry is that a sudden increase in popularity for venture capital can dramatically change the nature of the business. In the first quarter of 2014, venture funds raised about $8.9 billion in new capital, or double the amount of the same quarter last year. Twenty-five new funds were created as well, up from ten a year ago, again according to Thomson Reuters. That means we may be seeing a lot of people get into the venture capital business who have never invested in startups before. Venture capital is very unusual in the universe of possible asset classes. Unlike equities, where liquidity generally comes immediately or within a couple of days for block trades, venture capital dollars may be locked up for almost a decade. Once a limited partner invests in a VC fund, it is very unusual to get out of the agreement or sell the shares off to another LP. Angel investors and other early investors used to be able to sell their shares more freely on sites like , but with , most angels are increasingly expected to hold for the entire duration or sell at artificially low prices. Venture firms, like most private equity firms, raise funds through private placements, in which a small number of investors offer capital to be managed. After the fundraise, no new capital can be added to a fund (which is why we say a fund has to reach its closing). Unlike an ETF, which can expand or contract elastically with demand, venture firms are raised once and spent over a period of years, typically five years of active investment with an additional five years for monitoring and management. This means that funds tend to be raised in good years and not in bad years, even though a saner strategy would probably have it the other way around so startups can exit in the most auspicious markets. These dynamics drastically limit the universe of potential limited partners, the people who designate venture capitalists as managers of their money. There are very few groups involved in venture capital, since its long lock-up, illiquidity, irregular fundraising, and obtuse performance (to be discussed shortly) make it difficult for most investors to get involved. This is part of the excitement of , which might allow others to get involved in these sorts of investments. Money for venture capital in the United States comes from four primary sources: endowments (particularly those at universities or research funding bodies), pension and insurance funds, corporations, and family offices. Many of these investors are interested in venture capital because of its innovation and economic growth prospects. State pension funds, for instance, often invest in venture capital as a way to point out their investment in their state’s own economic growth, allowing it to navigate local politics more effectively. Similarly, university endowments like the connection between educating innovators in the classroom and financing innovation through venture capital. VCs and LPs negotiate a limited partner agreement that stipulates how management of the funds should work. I don’t want to dive into the details, but the key point here is that LPs are empowered to push their managers in particular investment directions. After all, it is their money that the venture capitalist is investing, and if they aren’t happy, the fund manager will eventually be looking for new work. Most of the power here is held by LPs through future fundraising though, rather than actual control of the funds. Startup founders rarely ask about LPs when they are fundraising, but they really should. Some firms can make bets in spaces like clean tech and biotechnology because they have LPs who agree with that investment strategy and are willing to take on the risk in the hopes that their capital helps to improve society. Other VCs are deeply constrained by their LPs in the kind of investments they can do, and how risky those investments can be. Getting a sense of the flexibility here between the VC partners and their LPs can be quite helpful. As an aside, this is one reason why Silicon Valley VCs are such a breath of fresh air for founders who have pitched to international VCs from their home countries. rather than university endowments. The same is true in much of Asia. Many sovereign wealth funds and companies are ill-equipped to understand the kind of that permeates Silicon Valley, if only because their experience may come from areas like construction and infrastructure rather than high-velocity technology startups. As one friend put it to me recently, many VCs are looking for venture-style returns with the low risk of a bank loan. In short, LPs are a bit like destiny. They don’t determine the exact investments of their VC managers, but they sure can expand or constrain the scope of what a venture capitalist can do. Since venture capital is quite an unusual asset class, it tends to attract LPs with fairly unusual goals as well, which can include economic growth or simply societal improvement. The other major reason that venture capital funds don’t receive money from many sources is that the industry is notoriously hard to understand in terms of performance. Thus, LPs generally have to spend a great deal of time understanding the dynamics of different funds in order to identify the top performers. This opacity of performance is simultaneously a function of the complexity of venture capital investments, as well as the lack of transparency of most managers in the industry about their results. Venture capital is complex because money is not used until it is needed. When a fund is raised, there isn’t some big jackpot hiding on Sand Hill Road where all the funds are deposited. Instead, when an investment is made in a company, every LP has to wire their fair share of the amount as part of a “capital call.” Even though a particular LP may have committed $10 million to a fund, it will slowly disburse this money over a period of several years as the managers make investments. Furthermore, venture capitalists rarely put a single check into a company. Instead, they often put in additional capital in later rounds (known as a pro-rata investment), which means that money will flow into a company multiple times. On the other side, exits are rarely clean as well, often requiring earnouts, or multiple share distributions as part of an acquisition. Due to the time value of money, it matters when dollars were called in and when they were returned to investors, yet such accounting can be difficult to track and assess (although anecdotally this has improved in the last few years). When the data is compiled, the results don’t look good. that very few venture capital funds in their sample produced a return above the public markets after accounting for fees. Given that venture returns tend to follow a power law, it seems only natural that the returns for the funds would also follow such a pattern. Given these poor results, some observers believe that the lack of transparency in the industry partially explains why venture capital continues to attract limited partners, even when its aggregate performance is so low. I am less convinced about this, simply because plenty of firms do have track records of returning funds over extended periods of time. For those endowments and wealth managers that can get their dollars into the right funds, the returns speak for themselves. For everyone else, it certainly appears as though they are wasting their time and money. Venture capital is very small, kind of weird, and doesn’t even perform that well. It’s a wonder why any country would want to build up this industry, and yet, governments around the world are putting in huge incentives to create VC industries in their nations. The main reason is the other side of results: , and who can argue with household names like Microsoft, Apple, or Google? What then about Yo? I think the key message here is that different venture capitalists have different risk tolerances and desired areas of investment. It shouldn’t be surprising that after healthy returns from a number of social networking companies that investors are willing to put a bit of capital into a fresh startup that could one day make it big. And frankly, $1.2 million is a pittance of the more than $8 billion raised last year for the VC industry (note: the money likely came from angels and not funds, and thus is not even included in this amount). Investors build portfolios, not one-off dreams. , maybe they were on to something in the first place. |
Consumer Robotics Is Finally Ready For Prime Time | Rudina Seseri | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | The robotics revolution has been in the making for decades, but market expectations have historically outpaced technology readiness. While industrial and military sectors have adopted a number of high-priced robotics solutions, the consumer sector has lagged due to lack of technological maturity and high costs. In recent years, we have seen accelerated levels of innovation in both software and hardware that are now driving new possibilities for consumer readiness and adoption of personal robotics. Instead of requiring expensive custom onboard computing, robots are now able to leverage commodity hardware, smartphones and cloud computing for processing and storage. This has implications on both cost and availability of data for machine perception and learning. Under this new paradigm, a robot is often a set of commoditized sensors (and actuators) that leverage the cloud for intelligence. Nest is an example of this. New hardware and algorithms, tuned by corpora of training data, have made machines more perceptive and improved interface with humans. This is a self-reinforcing loop: As machines can better understand the real world, they learn at a faster rate. These new interfaces open the market for consumer applications where users can interact with machines in near-natural language and gestures. Siri, Kinect, and are examples of this. The ability for machines to tap into multiple online data sources and services allows them to quickly stitch together value, reducing time and cost to go to market. Location-based data, financial and weather, and increasingly healthcare data are all examples. In the past few years, there have been major investments by large players that have helped to validate and reinvigorate the robotics market. IBM’s Watson platform, and Google’s driverless car and string of recent acquisitions in AI/machine learning come to mind. As most breakthrough technology innovations require large entities to lay down the costly foundations, we are now seeing that happen in AI. For example, Watson has reduced the barrier to creating innovative AI applications that process large amounts of unstructured data to arrive at accurate answers. What do the next five to 10 years of consumer robotics look like? Will cars drive themselves? Will household robots assist with our daily chores? And will robots ultimately interact and transact on our behalf and even with other robots? We predict the following developments will take shape. The humanoid robot popularized by media will not be the dominant form of consumer robotics. Artificially intelligent devices will take on a multitude of forms where the form factor will more closely match its functions and use case. Many more will be in the form of embedded intelligence within everyday systems we are already familiar with. One thing we can predict: goodbye flat, rectangular devices; hello, form factor diversity. Robotics will initially augment and eventually replace high-cost human labor. The market acceptance of this progress will be driven by reliability and safety and there will be interim solutions. For example, driverless cars are preceded by cars with heads-up displays and automated sensory-enabled breaks already in the market. As devices learn and begin to anticipate consumer needs, they make more recommendations and even make transactions on the consumer’s behalf. In the Internet of Things world, device providers will be more willing to lower prices of the hardware and appliances if they get a cut of revenue from services that are delivered on those platforms. Consumers will be able to download “apps” (either paid or free), which then connect to the cloud to deliver functionality via a subscription model, for example. Finally, the computer industry structure will loosely map to the robotics landscape. There will likely be a dominant open OS platform adopted and supported by large vendors (like Linux/Android) and a few manufacturer specific closed OS’s (like Windows), a number of “app” stores (like iTunes), and a wide variety of apps and API-based services offered by small and large companies. A new wave of education providers, engineers and service professionals, security providers, financial/insurance products, and legal frameworks will also emerge. |
Google May Buy Video Search Startup Baarzo | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | Google has been in talks to acquire video search startup , according to sources with knowledge of the company. However, those sources were less clear about whether the companies had reached a final agreement. (One suggested that the deal had closed, the other was noncommittal.) ( A third source had also said that Baarzo has been acquired.) The companies both declined to comment, Google offering its standard note: “We don’t comment on rumors or speculation.” Baarzo its product as “true video search,” allowing users find specific moments in a video, like a slam dunk in a basketball clip. If it delivers on that promise (I can’t say one way or another, since the company is not accepting signups), that would be pretty appealing to Google, both for search in YouTube and for the company’s efforts to offer “universal” search across media types. Apparently Google Executive Chairman (and former CEO) Eric Schmidt was impressed by a demonstration of the technology at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where co-founder and CTO Siva Yellamraju . Here’s a little more of Baarzo’s description of its technology: Unlike Google or YouTube searches, which only evaluate the text around the video, the Baarzo search technology actually analyzes the video content, recognizing hundreds of thousands of objects and millions of faces, and locates the precise moment in the video when the search objects interact in the way you had specified. Someone tipped me off about the possible deal when people started posting on Facebook that Google had acquired Baarzo. Some of those posts were private, but at least one (screenshot below) was public. The startup has not announced any funding, but says that it was part of StartX, the accelerator for the Stanford community, and that investors include Ullas Naik of Streamlined Ventures and Matt Sonsini of Sobrato Capital. |
Encrypted To The Last Drop | Contributor | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | Everything is for sale in the dark web marketplaces. Anonymous buyers can procure everything from prescription painkillers to exotic designer drugs. You can hire sex workers and buy weapons in the same exchange. Danger lurks around every corner and Satoshis flow like water while whales make it rain on encrypted Tor gambling servers. But not everything on the dark web can kill you or bring you down. One established drug vendor has recently branched out to sell old fashioned coffee, which they say they procure directly from farmers, roast themselves, and describe in loving language that wouldn’t be out of place in an organic grocery store. Welcome to the nicer side of the dark web, where things look more like Whole Foods than Blade Runner. “We are all long time coffee drinkers,” said an anonyous representative of in an online interview. “Coffee has always been our favorite caffeinated drink.” It may be lawful to sell caffeine, but the operation is still tied up in the sale of illegal drugs. The experiment started, in fact, as a promotion by an established seller of edible cannabis products: buy a brownie or a rice crispy treat laced with THC, get a complimentary six ounce bag of coffee. The reception was positive, the representative said, and they decided to spin Dark Net Roasters off as its own entity. “Once we realized how much everyone was enjoying our coffee it was a natural progression to want to offer them to others,” said the representative, who told me that roasting coffee started out as a hobby that they shared with family and friends. Why sell their coffee on the dark web, where Amazon-like marketplaces can only be accessed on the anonymizing service Tor? The Dark Net Roasters representative said it was an ideological decision to avoid what they see as unnecessary red tape and oversight—and also a bid to capitalize on a population that’s already making regular purchases on the online black market. “The Internet is inherently a disruptive technology that fosters competition and innovation,” they said. “However, with the Internet sales tax looming, net neutrality, other noncompetitive legislation and the extent of which the government has been gathering information on its citizens, the dark net and digital currencies become the instinctive solution.” Selling legal goods on darknet marketplaces isn’t unprecedented. On the Silk Road, an early marketplace that was last year, one merchant sold caramel candies that earned positive reviews.
I needed to try this encrypted dark roast myself so I obtained four bags of Dark Net Roasters coffee, which are deep black and emblazoned with a pixelated logo, and were delivered by USPS in a nondescript parcel. Dark Net Roasters describes their roasts in language normally associated with boutique retailers. Their Ethiopian Yirgacheffe features “deep flavors of cherry, stone fruit, violet and cocoa,” according to an official product listing, and their Zambian Terranova has “hints of apple, vanilla and citrus.” Some are advertised as Fair Trade, and others as cultivated sustainably.
Not all those claims are testable, but I wondered how an experienced coffee taster would feel about the product. I arranged to prepare and taste the samples with Peter Cannon, the technical director for artisanal Massachusetts roaster Barismo. In addition to his work with Barismo, Cannon has been involved for years with exacting barista competitions and, in layman’s terms, is obsessed with coffee. A few things jumped out at Cannon, who emphasized that he spoke only for himself and not his employer, before he even opened the packaging. Two of the bags were leaking when they arrived, which he said can allow the flavor fade more quickly than it would from a sealed container. There was also no roast date on the bags, and the coffee arrived pre-ground, both rarities in high quality coffee—though Dark Net Roasters told me later that they plan to offer whole bean coffee in the future, and that roast dates were a possibility as well. Cannon prepared and tasted all four roasts by pouring hot water over the grounds, brewing them for four minutes and then carefully smelling and sampling each with a deep spoon, a ritual known as “cupping” in roasting and barista circles. The bottom line, he said, is that all four samples are extremely, unusually dark—though he conceded there is a deep divide in the contemporary roasting world between light and dark coffees, and that he personally prefers light roasts. As a professional operation, Cannon said, he would have expected better. The four roasts were “incredibly uniform,” he said, grimacing. “When I taste the cup, I just get dark and ash.” Very dark roasts, Cannon said, are frequently seen as a tactic to overwhelm delicate flavors, covering up a lack of confidence in in the bean or the roasting technique. “I’m going to guess this is some guy in his kitchen,” Cannon said. He paused. “Or his meth lab, or whatever.” Cannon’s best guess is that the outfit is not yet large enough that they are looking seriously at consistency between batches, which makes quality control difficult at a commercial level. He also pointed out that direct trade hinges on transparency. Dark Net Roasters can advertise that their coffee is sourced from a specific region or that they have sought out relationship with a particular grower, but with no paper trail, those claims can’t be verified. And in any case, many coffee aficionados today expect a roaster to provide information on the origin of beans down to the specific farm and elevation where they were grown, which would be a security risk for an anonymous seller. Would Cannon buy Dark Net Roasters on his own dime? “I think it’s safe to say ‘no,'” he said (Cannon later revised his opinion further, it was “the grossest coffee I’ve had all year.”) Of course, others might feel differently, and that’s not incompatible with Dark Net Roasters’ philosophy: ultimately, the market will decide. “We are merely using a new choice of market to reach coffee consumers,” the Dark Net Roasters representative said. “We can only offer our coffees to people. We cannot make them buy it. Ultimately, it is the market that will decide if there is a place for us.” |
Gillmor Gang: Pulp Friction | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — talk FirePhone and its impact on digital transactions in the material world. For starters, it’s not really a phone as much as an object recognition system that taps directly into the mainline of showteling. Just as mobile has “freed” us from our assigned desks, so too has the notification economy thrown off the shackles of the showroom. @stevegillmor, @kteare, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Webydo Bags $7M To Turn More Designs Into Hosted Websites | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | , a software as a service startup that gives web designers the tools to circumvent a more traditional website creation process by excising the need for them to do any manual coding by automatically converting their design into a hosted HTML5 website, has closed a $7 million Series B funding round. The round was led by equity-based crowdfunding VC platform , along with and a group of unnamed strategic investors from the US and UK. The new round brings Webydo’s total funding to $9.7 million. The business was founded back in 2010. We first covered Webydo in , when it was showing off its wares in Startup Alley at Disrupt NY and opening up its closed beta to the US market. It now has almost 93,000 active designers using its platform, and says it’s adding “thousands” more every week. While more than 335,000 websites have been created with its tools to date (up from 50,000+ back in April 2013). It pegs its user growth rate in Q1 this year at 100%. Webydo competes to a degree with Adobe web design tools like Dreamweaver but it’s differentiating by offering both the tools and the management and hosting of the resulting websites in one service offering — so it’s targeting designers and agencies wanting a simplified all-in-one route to get websites up and running. [gallery ids="1019242,1019243,1019244,1019245,1019246,1019247"] Webydo has a freemium model and a community focus. Its drag and drop website creation tools are free to use but the designer pays a hosting fee once they hit publish to turn their web design into an active website. Pricing starts at $9 per month for one website and 3GB of storage, rising to $85 per month for 250 websites and unlimited storage. The community element involves Webydo polling its designer users on the next features it should develop. Recent community requests have led to the beta launch of a Code-Free Parallax Scrolling Animator, for instance — as seen in action on created with its tools. CEO Shmulik Grizim says Webydo plans to use the new funding to continue expanding the feature-set of its software, and also to develop additional tools to tap its community. “We’re a community-led cloud platform and our mission is to provide our designers the best professional work environment for website creation. Therefore, we’ve doubled our team of engineers and designers,” he told TechCrunch. “We now have a team of 35 creative thinkers working on developing all the features requested by our community, including the next stages of development of the Code-free Parallax Scrolling Animator and [another community requested feature] the Pixel-Perfect Responsive Editor that are currently in Beta.”
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