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Dattch Lesbian Dating App Launches On Android, Expands Into New York | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | is one of the first and only mobile dating services that caters exclusively to women, just in case there are folks out there who would prefer to book a date than 20 minutes in advance. Today, goes live in New York after hitting the UK, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Florida. The app has also been released for Android in all available markets. And just in time for Pride next weekend. Though gay and lesbian markets are more niche than the larger heterosexual population, they’re an underserved bunch. If anything, marginalized groups in society need accessibility to meeting people online, which is exactly why was developed. Founder Robyn Exton realized that the current dating products out there were not only flooded with dudes asking for threesomes, but that the actual mechanics of the services didn’t fit the way that queer women relate to each other. To start, each Dattch user has their own living profile that they can update with photos from Instagram, Facebook and their camera album. You can view a Pinterest-style board of ladies in your area, or search through various filters. And if you’re really shy, Dattch has a “Would You Rather?” type game that gets the conversation going. Users choose between two girls, and if both women choose each other, they’re sent a notification to let them know and get chatting. You can like other users’ entire profile or individual photos, which sends them a notification, or add them to your Wish List secretly to keep an eye on them. Dattch has a built-in blog so that queer women can keep up with community events, as well. The company has raised and continues expanding to different markets in the U.S. You can learn more about Dattch . |
Welcome To Extremistan! Please Check Your Career At The Door. | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 6 | 21 | Will robots and software eat all the jobs? No. Will robots and software eat job? Yes, probably. Eventually. Rejoice! …for your grandchildren. You and your kids are likely to have a pretty tough time over the next few decades. Sorry about that. Everybody who’s anybody is talking about technological unemployment, the notion that technology will soon destroy jobs faster than it creates them; a conversation kickstarted by MIT professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, authors of and — Incredibly proud of my coauthor , who got invited to the White House yesterday to talk tech+econ+jobs with Pres. Obama. — Andrew McAfee (@amcafee) Earlier this month, Marc Andreessen, who should need no introduction, with characteristic optimism: We virtually never resist technology change that provides us with better products and services even when it costs jobs. Nor should we. This is how we build a better world, improve our quality of life, better provide for our kids, and solve fundamental problems … It is hard to believe that the result will not be a widespread global unleashing of creativity, productivity, and human potential … In arguing this with an economist friend, his response was, “But most people are like horses; they have only their manual labor to offer…” I don’t believe that, and I don’t want to live in a world in which that’s the case. I think people everywhere have far more potential. Many others are far more pessimistic. One one flank, I give you this on Andreessen’s long-term utopian vision: Look at the future this guy has concocted in his head: …it’s like he’s never met anyone who didn’t attend a top tier university. Here’s reality: On the other, Alex Payne : You seem to think everyone’s worried about robots. But what everyone’s worried about is you, Marc. Not just you, but people like you … so much wealth and control in so few hands … Owning a smartphone is not the equivalent of owning a factory … It seemed like a lot of people were going to get rich in the “app economy”. Outside of Apple and Google, it turns out, not so much … Unless we collectively choose to pay for a safety net, technology alone isn’t going to make it happen … Instead, you’re kicking the can down the road and hoping the can will turn into a robot with a market solution. Andreessen argues: https://twitter.com/pmarca/statuses/473211455656181760 But it seems to me that there’s a (c): many people will contribute, but , because tomorrow’s jobs will increasingly exist in Extremistan, not Mediocristan. You won’t be familiar with those terms if you haven’t read Nassim Taleb’s brilliant , which you should. . Briefly, for our purposes: the remuneration for Mediocristan activities is fixed by boundary constraints — the number of hours worked, the number of clients aided, the number of widgets manufactured, etc. By contrast, the remuneration for Extremistan activities — basketball player, musician, messaging-app co-founder — can scale to an arbitrary amount … …but only for a tiny fraction of those engaged in the activity. Most would-be pro athletes never make it. Most artists never get to quit their day job. Most startups fail. Few people engaged in Extremistan activities ever become successful enough to start referring to what they’re doing as a . I submit that technology is slowly dragging us all, economically, away from Mediocristan and into Extremistan. Consider college professors: Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, edX, etc, allow individual professors to teach hundreds of thousands of students, while . Consider lawyers: it may be “ ” — but the very best attorneys will remain incredibly valuable and expensive. Consider even doctors: : “Health care jobs may be safe now,but our sense of what’s safe has been consistently belied by the impact of our technological progress.” Valley legend Vinod Khosla has been arguing for years that … but at the same time, tech could greatly expand the remit of the best. It’s not hard to imagine — whisper it — even software engineering moving into Extremistan. Already, everyone wants the so-called “A-players,” but has only lukewarm interest in second-tier software talent, much less the third tier. The best companies hire the best engineers, who, by definition, are a minority; the best engineers work at, or launch, the best companies; technology increasingly allows the best companies to dominate their markets like never before. Extrapolate that twenty years into the future, and what do you get? This won’t happen to everyone everywhere, obviously — I’m talking about proportions, not the entire population — but I expect the shift will be significant enough to have enormous consequences. While technology will indeed, as Andreessen points out, create new professions and new fields of human endeavour, the fact that technology is an ever-more-powerful force multiplier implies that those fields will increasingly exist in Extremistan, and be partitioned according to ; a few will be enormously rewarded, while the majority scrap for crumbs. I’ve , and whenever I do, commenters always chirp, “we just need everyone to become an entrepreneur!” But of course entrepreneurs have lived in Extremistan … and most of them fail. Everyone who calls for a future of greater entrepreneurship is implicitly calling for us to move ever deeper into Extremistan. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It seems likely that, considered as a whole, Extremistan is far more creative and productive than Mediocristan. But while its economic pie may be much larger, it is also much more unequally distributed. I’m not saying this will all happen tomorrow; there will be enormous hurdles en route. (Education, in particular, is as much about context as content, and MOOCs won’t succeed until they figure out a context in which their students thrive.) But it seems apparent to me that the long-term trend is away from Mediocristan and towards Extremistan; in other words, towards a few winners and many losers. If so, then what will life be like for the losers — by which I mean, the majority? Adjunct professor might not be a bad analogy. Poverty wages, supplemented by odd jobs in the , while you and the millions of others like you keep knocking on the doors of success, year after year, knowing all along that only a tiny percentage of you will ever be admitted. Or maybe even no wages at , like artists or interns today. Now: do I have any that we’re heading this way? Er. Well. The trouble with speculating about the future in a time of rapid change is that the available evidence is almost by definition insufficient. I hasten to admit that I certainly could be wrong. But there do seem to be a lot of people singing along in tune with this theory. , for instance, who : Technology and globalization give greater scope to those with extraordinary entrepreneurial ability, luck, or managerial skill … Most obviously, the best athletes and entertainers benefit from a worldwide market for their celebrity. But something similar is true for those with extraordinary gifts of any kind. For example, I suspect we will soon see the rise of educator superstars who command audiences of hundreds of thousands for their Internet courses and earn sums way above the traditional dreams of academics. He doesn’t talk about what happens to the educators. But Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff — Until now, our societies have proved remarkably adept at adjusting to disruptive technologies; but the pace of change in recent decades has caused tremendous strains, reflected in huge income disparities within countries, with near-record gaps between the wealthiest and the rest. Inequality can corrupt and paralyze a country’s political system – and economic growth along with it. Will each future generation continue to enjoy a better quality of life than its immediate predecessor? In developing countries that have not yet reached the technological frontier, the answer is almost certainly yes. In advanced economies, though the answer should still be yes, the challenges are becoming formidable. Jagdish Bhagwati at Columbia : “technological innovation is driving wages down.” Paul Beaudry of UBC , “Many higher skilled workers have moved down the occupation ladder and accepted less challenging employment.” Federal Reserve economists the rise in “involuntary part-time employment” which “has led to a concern that there is an underbelly of labor market slack not well accounted for by the overall unemployment rate.” The pay gap between college graduates and non-graduates has increased … but mostly because “the average wage for everyone else has fallen 5 percent” over the last decade. Meanwhile, “ .” …All of which sounds like what we’d expect would happen during the beginnings of a general shift towards Extremistan. (Though of course this is hardly decisive proof.) It’s obviously hard to tease out how much of this is driven by technology, vs. globalization and economic cycles — but last month I attended a dinner hosted by Silicon Valley VC kingpins Draper Fisher Jurvetson, whose partners all seemed awfully worried that tech is destroying jobs faster than people can be retrained. Vinod Khosla : “Technology concentrates wealth in the hands of the creators of technology and the people who fund them … creates more wealth and jobs for a few and takes away jobs at the bottom end of the spectrum.” My point: if I’m wrong, I’m certainly not alone. So, if this is all true — what can most people do? Erik Brynjolfsson three categories of jobs immune to robots and software, for the moment: “creative tasks and inventing new things – ideation, some people call it … [those] involving interpersonal relationships: motivating people, comforting people, caring for people … [and] fine motor control – the kinds of things that a barber or a gardener or a cook or a janitor does.” The first category is classic Extremistan, of course. The second and third are not … but they’re notoriously poorly paid, gig-economy type jobs. And, he helpfully notes, “you can imagine machines getting better and better in all three as well.” The most pessimistic are : Unless we intervene, the same economic system that has produced this astonishing prosperity will return us to the Dickensian world of winners and losers that characterised the beginning of capitalism … Our birthright as humans – the ability to produce things by our labour that others find valuable – may become economically worthless … on the output side of our new robot economy, we will have material abundance undreamed of by earlier generations. But on the production side we will have an economy increasingly independent of human labour and so unwilling to pay for it. Hence the crisis … The material abundance being wrought by ever increasing automation makes the affordability and sustainability of a universal basic income more credible. This is probably a good time to mention that I’m actually an optimist. My own thesis has this: technology eating jobs as we know them, and , because when you step back and look at them, jobs as we know them aren’t particularly desirable. We want to be on a slow trajectory towards the utopia Andreessen describes; a low-scarcity society where people mostly spend their time doing what they want to do, rather than “jobs,” which largely consist of people being paid just enough to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t . To get from here to there, obviously, we’ll have to shed a lot of jobs … so the devouring of jobs by technology is a thing, an indicator that we’re on the right path. Unfortunately, our economic and even, to some extent, our systems are built around the assumption that most able-bodied people have jobs. Those systems aren’t going to change as fast as the economy itself. So the transition, for (probably) you and your kids, is going to be more than a little wrenching — by which I mean, a lot of people who didn’t expect it are going to watch their once-prosperous families sink into relative poverty. But, barring catastrophe, kids ought to have it great. I hope that’s some consolation. In the interim, what we need is https://twitter.com/pmarca/statuses/473213805967597575 Indeed. But if more and more people become unemployed — by which I really mean, fighting to get by in Extremistan — then only one safety-net option will work: a . Marc Andreessen is exactly right when he says technology can kindle the kind of economic growth we need; from my perspective, we need it to make a basic income a viable option. I just hope that happens before too many lives are ruined because our politics evolve orders of magnitude slower than our economies, much less our . This isn’t true for everyone — many people, including me, actively enjoy what they do, and would continue doing it or something like it for free even if economic utopia descended tomorrow — but let’s not lose sight of the fact that it’s true for most people worldwide. |
My Startup Battlefield Story | Andy Pandharikar | 2,014 | 6 | 7 | There comes a moment in a startup’s life that changes its trajectory forever. For us, it was a phone call from Alexia Tsotsis in August 2012. was about to get selected to participate in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2012, and we were about to embark on an unbelievable journey. We didn’t win the Disrupt Cup or even get runner-up. Our story ends with an , if that counts. And then our . We’ve been through a lot but it all started with TechCrunch. So for those who are about to apply and battle it out, here is our Battlefield story. Our fashion e-commerce destination powered by fitting technology needed big money for the launch. We had built an intriguing technology. Other e-commerce companies were interested in licensing it, but we weren’t keen to go that path. Meanwhile, we started seeing the end of our financial runway and VCs were still giving their standard “too early” BS. Frankly, we were a bit desperate! We had invested all our personal savings, worked our asses off without salary, and got our friends and family to invest their hard-earned money in us. When we ran out of that, we kept pushing more with bank line-of-credit and personal credit cards (thank you, Wells Fargo and Visa). We were losing key team members, walls were closing in, and the sky was falling. We were witnessing the classic . I must have knocked on at least a thousand doors that week. Angel groups, crowdfunding sites, incubators, accelerators, rich friends (few remaining), grants, fellowships, awards and many more. Turns out, one of them was the Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield application. Thankfully, our application struck a chord with TechCrunch and we were invited to join the Startup Battlefield. We knew we had to give it our best and nothing less. TC imposes a strong embargo on all selected startups regarding any disclosure about their selection. This includes amongst the participants themselves, so we had no idea who we would be competing against. All we knew was that we needed to prepare a six-minute pitch (with demo) and that there were rehearsals scheduled at Sequoia Capital, where we were to be coached on our pitch. This was our first time at the Sequoia office. In addition to the TechCrunch editors, Sequoia’s in-house communications expert was present to help us improve our pitch. Our rehearsal was at 2 p.m. There were these two underage founders presenting before us in the room. I Googled the company printed on their hoodies. Holy shit. They had raised $3 million from none other than Khosla Ventures. There is no way we could top that. To add to that, our initial pitch was in shambles. No surprise, we got badly battered by the experts in the rehearsal room. We walked out almost assuming that we were disqualified! We were not going to go down without a fight. This was our last chance. There are good, bad and ugly pitches. I guess we must have started out with a super ugly one. Whomever we were pitching to was thrashing us. But we kept going and going, and kept getting better along the way. Here is the deal: We had a tech rehearsal one day before Disrupt. Surprisingly, that went well without significant technical issues, thanks to the demo gods! It’s a nerve-racking experience getting the microphone hooked up and waiting backstage for your turn. Suddenly you hear trying hard to pronounce your name. And suddenly you’re onstage! I had just one thought while all this was going on: Our entire life now depends on the next six minutes. We had such bright green lights on our face that we weren’t able to see the audience clearly. We did what we trained ourselves to do. Delivered the pitch/demo with the utmost enthusiasm and energy, and ended with a bang. The judges asked their questions, and we already knew that the answers to most were tied to our funding (or lack thereof). I remember the night after our presentation. We partied like there was no tomorrow. Everyone was coming up to congratulate us; they wanted to know more about our story. News came out that we didn’t get selected for the final round. There were other startups that were further along compared to us. I was very skeptical about biases towards VC-backed startups. But hey, that’s how it works in real life, too. We didn’t care much at that point anyway. Our signups were shooting up beyond imagination. We were getting ton of press. We received our first acquisition offer within a few days. A small one from a lesser-known company. Many of the investors who said no to us before, now started responding to our emails. We started getting firm commitments towards our round. Meanwhile, International featured us as the second-most exciting tech news that week — the first being the iPhone-5 launch. While we were expecting series-A term sheets, we received another acquisition offer, this time from . And that was the offer we could not refuse.
Myntra was within a few months, in a deal touted to be India’s biggest e-commerce acquisition. It all really started with a call we received from TechCrunch in August 2012. So all you founder’s out there, by June 16. |
Mobile-Enabled Commerce Will Yield The Next $100B Startup | Patricia Nakache | 2,014 | 6 | 7 | No one can predict with perfect accuracy what technology trend will birth the next set of billion-dollar, venture-backed companies or Even more difficult is determining where the next $100B+ “super unicorn” will come from, as history tells us this rare breed of company only emerges once or twice in a decade. Yet given that the last three U.S. super unicorns have all been consumer technology companies (Facebook, Google, and Amazon), and given that venture investment in consumer technology companies is increasingly dominated by mobile-first startups, it is reasonable to expect that smartphones will be the technology that unlocks the next $100B+ outcome. Here are two bolder predictions: By 2020, smartphones and tablets will account for more than 75 percent of global online commercial transactions and more than 50 percent of spend. And the world’s first mobile super unicorn won’t be an audience company like Facebook or Google, but a commerce company like Amazon. When tech historians look back on the 2010s, they will remember it as the m-commerce decade. For entrepreneurs eager to capitalize on the m-commerce opportunity, the first step is to understand the lay of the land. The m-commerce ecosystem falls into six primary categories: Mobile Payments, Retail Enablement, Mobile Retail, Marketplaces, On-Demand Services, and App-Based Services. Mobile Payments and Retail Enablement are , equipping smartphones and tablets with tools to support a new era of mobile-based retail businesses. Mobile Retail and Marketplaces are , comprised primarily of e-commerce companies that previously existed on the web but benefit greatly from the transition to mobile. On-Demand Services and App-Based Services are , consisting almost entirely of companies that are not just improved by smartphones and tablets, but could not exist without them. (We excluded media, games, messaging services, and social networks, which tend to be more audience-driven than commerce-driven and monetize primarily through ads or digital goods rather than physical goods and services.) Opportunities for entrepreneurs looking to build the next billion-dollar m-commerce company exist across all these categories, but are particularly concentrated in the relatively greenfield categories of On-Demand Services and App-Based Services. Companies in the Mobile Payments and Retail Enablement categories like and capitalized early on the transition to mobile by building new businesses or reinventing old businesses to take advantage of growing merchant and consumer demand to conduct commerce on smartphones. Meanwhile, e-commerce companies like and that built their platforms as the mobile trend was gaining momentum exploited the opportunity to tailor new business models like daily deals around smartphones to gain a competitive advantage. In Q4 of 2013, Zulily generated 45 percent of its North American orders through mobile devices versus just 31 percent during Q4 the prior year. Only in the last 18 months have Uber and Lyft emerged as the first two unicorns in On-Demand Services, while the more nascent App-Based Services category has yet to generate a single unicorn outside of audience-driven mobile media apps, which we have excluded for the purposes of this discussion. Our bet is that the On-Demand and App-Based Services categories will spawn many unicorns, and other early stage venture investors appear to agree. Following and ’s success, venture capitalists have poured over $100M into a dozen meal and grocery delivery startups, including , , , , , , , , , , , and . Ridesharing and food services have been natural initial targets for substantial investment because they boast high-frequency use cases and are time-sensitive, meaning they benefit from mobile features like GPS tracking and real-time push notifications. Other on-demand subcategories are heating up, including house cleaning, laundry, and self storage. And App-Based Services are also seeing activity, with recent investments in fitness apps ( , ) and healthcare apps ( , ). Below is a brief overview of each m-commerce category and thoughts on what it takes to win in each: We define Mobile Payments companies as those that provide mobile payment infrastructure, mobile point of sale systems, and direct mobile payment solutions. This is a challenging space, characterized by razor-thin margins, large capital requirements to achieve scale, and fierce competition from credit card companies and PayPal. Successful entrepreneurs in this category must be good at accurately assessing credit risk. Given how difficult it is for payment companies to reach the scale required for an IPO, it’s also critical for entrepreneurs to keep M&A opportunities open to their companies as an exit option. One example of an exit in this category is the recent sale of . Image via Shutterstock We define Retail Enablement companies as those that facilitate mobile-based retail transactions either by helping potential customers discover items they want to buy online (contextual commerce) or by helping them find offers offline (in-store marketing, mobile couponing, and location-based offers). Most of the companies in this category depend on location tracking and/or push notifications to present the right customer with the right offer in the right place at the right time. Winning is all about engaging with users intelligently to establish habit-forming behaviors without being intrusive or annoying. We define Mobile Retail companies as those that extend web-based retail platforms to mobile or build mobile apps to sell goods to customers through smartphones and tablets. In Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn argues that e-commerce startups have four survival strategies to compete against Amazon: proprietary selection, proprietary pricing, proprietary experience, and proprietary merchandise. All four strategies can be improved by leveraging advantages unique to mobile platforms. That being said, the current set of breakout companies are focused most on differentiated experiences. These companies are shifting the customer experience by embedding natural smartphone services such as picture taking and messaging. We define Marketplace companies as those that facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers of goods or services either on mobile as an extension of web-based marketplaces or through a mobile app. The key to any marketplace is achieving liquidity, which companies can do more quickly by extending their marketplaces to mobile. Some marketplaces like and that involve local, time-sensitive or untethered transactions have gone mobile-only, recognizing their platform is fundamentally better on smartphones. Winning in this category is all about acquiring buyers and sellers cost-effectively and matching supply and demand efficiently to make transactions as frictionless as possible. We define On-Demand Service companies as those that provide services to buyers in a short timeframe either through vertical integration or aggregated supply. While many of these companies function as marketplaces, we place them in this category if they provide fulfillment on-demand (usually within minutes or hours) and/or provide real-time status updates to buyers. Smartphone features like location tracking and push notifications have only made these services possible in the last few years, which is why this category holds so much opportunity. Many On-Demand Services function as utilities. This means that winning in this category is all about price and convenience, both of which are driven by who has the most scale and the s governing vehicle dispatch, delivery routes, and fulfillment. We define App-Based Service companies as those that provide services to customers entirely within a native mobile app. Given that users experience these services immersively on their smartphones, designing an intuitive user interface and seamless user experience can be the difference between success and failure. Entrepreneurs building apps in this category should emphasize accessibility, engagement, and retention. They should also take advantage of the digital nature of their products to conduct low-cost experiments, continuously refining their products to optimize their conversion funnel. Cumulatively, these optimizations translate into customer delight and more attractive economics. The rise of m-commerce represents the most important wave of retail innovation since consumer brands first began selling goods and services online 20 years ago. Given the size of the m-commerce opportunity, entrepreneurs who successfully execute on new mobile business models before the rest of the market stand to reap outsized returns. Especially exciting are new categories of consumer-facing businesses such as On-Demand and App-Based Services that could not exist prior to the smartphone – and are sure to spawn a stampede of new unicorns. |
The Ascent Of Early-Stage Venture Capital | David Blumberg | 2,014 | 6 | 7 | Early-stage funding by angels and venture capital firms is growing in size and impact on the technology industry. Last year, U.S. venture capital firms raised 10 percent less than in 2012, but VC funds focused on early-stage investing raised $9.37 billion, a jump of 51 percent, according to DJX LP Source. In addition, 151 early-stage firms closed funds – more than in the last dozen years. Moreover, investment returns among early-stage venture capital funds are starting to outpace late- and expansion-stage funds, according to the most recent National Venture Capital Association’s (NVCA) , the Cambridge Associates LLC U.S Venture Capital Index. And at the angel (seed) stage, the number of investments announced globally tripled in 2012 and 2013 versus 2007-2011, according to the 2014 Preqin Private Equity Report. There are a number of structural reasons for the surge in early-stage funding: The bottom line, then, is that starting companies, creating product and reaching customers is lighter, easier, faster and cheaper today. And these factors are expanding the number of entrepreneurs while increasing the need for early-stage funding. The growing opportunities for venture capital firms focused on early-stage investments will continue in the current investing environment because of the deep and rich support system that they provide entrepreneurs. Unlike a disparate group of angel investors – most of whom have very small ownership stakes, limited capacity for follow-on investment and fragmented attention – an early-stage venture firm’s team can offer entrepreneurs a focused and cohesive portfolio of resources from multiple skill-sets across varied domains. The early-stage firm’s networks, methodology and viewpoint can also contribute to the entrepreneurial mentoring and nurturing. There is also continuity, because early-stage firms can help entrepreneurs with follow-on investing, providing preferred access to later-stage venture capital firms and introductions to potential strategic partners, customers and acquisition targets. At our firm, for example, we offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to meet members of our CIO and CMO Councils, which consist of hundreds of marketing and technology executives from companies like WPP, Merck, Coca-Cola, Safeway, Hearst, IBM and ESPN. We also have a CEO Club for the leaders of our portfolio companies where they can meet regularly to discuss issues of common concern in a supportive, confidential setting. To illustrate the entrepreneurial enrichment that an early-stage venture firm can provide, let’s look at – one of our portfolio companies. Trulioo improves transparency and protects consumers by authenticating real users and denying fraudsters in real time through the validation of social profile information. It has benefited from our introductions to strategic partners such as USTGlobal, and, through them, WalMart and Equifax, among others. This has led to a strategic partnership as well as an investment by USTG. We’ve also helped Trulioo CEO Stephen Ufford negotiate the acquisition of a company that expands Trulioo’s scope globally to include new countries and important, proprietary data sets. Additionally, we’ve assisted with recruiting and negotiations with other, later-stage investors, who have made offers or invested in Trulioo. Finally, in a joint effort, Blumberg Capital and Trulioo recently organized a startup pitch contest in Vancouver, Canada, to offer value to the technology ecosystem on which both of us depend. The event garnered more than 70 entrants, six finalists and a grand-prize winner. We’re not alone when it comes to mentoring and nurturing early-stage companies like Trulioo. The future will remain bright for early-stage companies and their venture funders. It’s a great time for early-stage IT entrepreneurship and investing, while many alternatives look weak by comparison. The entire global services oriented economy (more than 50 percent of world GDP) – which consists of financial services, advertising, publishing, logistics, education, health care, travel and retail, for example – is also facing an onslaught of rapid technological change. In the face of such unprecedented change, the only way to survive and thrive is by embracing and adopting a steady stream of next-generation innovation in areas like mobile, social, e-commerce, cloud computing and big data. At the same time, large enterprises generally have strong balance sheets, brands and distribution channels, but they are weak at innovation. As a result, they’re increasingly reaching out to the early-stage venture capital community, incubators, accelerators and startups to engage more actively. These big companies realize that they need to buy or partner, rather than trying to build advanced technology internally. Adding up all these factors, there are many exciting opportunities for early-stage startup entrepreneurs and their early-stage VC funders to cooperate. And I believe that they will collaborate in coming decades, by launching a variety of exciting new technological innovations that will transform our lives, businesses, institutions – and the world over – in ways that are scarcely imaginable today. It’s a good time to be an IT entrepreneur, to work for a startup, to invest in startups, to partner with startups, or to buy from startups. It’s strategic to be early, and early is beautiful. |
null | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 26 | null |
With iOS 8, The iPhone Will Become Your Digital Hub | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 7 | At Macworld 2001, , making it the device where all of the single-purpose gadgets for things like recording movies or playing music would be managed. At this year’s WWDC event, Apple showed that the iPhone is the new hub, and your Mac, iPad, and everything in the cloud is now just an accessory. This is quite a pivot for Apple — at Steve Jobs’ last WWDC keynote, he declared that : “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device.” So far, iCloud hasn’t really lived up to that promise. While things like Contact syncing across devices work seamlessly on iOS, developers found that using the service to store data didn’t work as well as Apple had promised, forcing them to roll their own solutions or integrate offerings from Dropbox, Amazon or Google. Meanwhile, a massive portion of total device usage shifted from laptops, desktops and tablets to phones. As : “It may be better to think of tablets, laptops and desktops as one ‘big screen’ segment, all of which compete with smartphones, and for which the opportunity is just smaller than that for smartphones.” We can look at Facebook’s monthly average user numbers to get an idea of how this trend is reflected in real-world usage. There are more people who only access the service via mobile devices than there are desktop – and laptop-only users, and 79 percent of users spend some of their time on the service via mobile: Graph courtesy of Andreessen Horowitz analyst Benedict Evans. With iOS 8, Apple encourages this trend by pushing nascent ecosystems to focus on mobile. Nearly every aspect of the “new” ecosystem Apple showed this week revolves around having the iPhone as the center of your digital experience: The iPhone may not be as powerful as your home computer, but it’s good enough, almost always on your person, and packs software features and sensors that wouldn’t really make sense on a desktop machine. iCloud is what makes the magic happen in iOS 8, but it does so by facilitating your interaction with the world immediately around you and your device. That’s what moving away from the desktop (and the cloud) allows. It makes computing more personal and more attached to the world we actually live in. The tagline for Apple’s latest commercials has been “With the power of iPhone 5s, you’re more powerful than you think.” They’ve shown how it’s used to , to — to be more human. |
Jimmy Wales Blasts Europe’s “Right To Be Forgotten” Ruling As A “Terrible Danger” | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 6 | 7 | Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has spoken out against a controversial ruling by the European Court of Justice that requires Google to consider information removal requests from individuals whose data its search engine has indexed. In comments emailed to TechCrunch, Wales described the ruling as censorship of knowledge — pure and simple. “In the case of truthful, non-defamatory information obtained legally, I think there is no possibility of any defensible ‘right’ to censor what other people are saying,” he said. He also warned the ruling may make it more difficult to make “real progress on privacy issues.” “We have a typical situation where incompetent politicians have written well-meaning but incoherent legislation without due consideration for human rights and technical matters,” Wales added. The by the ECJ last month required Google to quickly put in place a process for fielding requests from people who believe that information it has indexed about them is outdated or irrelevant and should be removed. The ruling enforces European data protection legislation dating back to 1995. Google’s went up at the end of May. As of last Monday, the company said it had received more than 41,000 requests, with some filed on day one. So you can’t say there’s no appetite for this piece of legislation. Google said it will be weighing each individual’s right to be forgotten with the public’s right to know whatever it is they want deleted before taking any action on a request. In an interview with the last month, Google’s Larry Page revealed a breakdown of initial requests for data removal in the two weeks after the ECJ ruling (and prior to the webform being put in place). Google said 31 percent of requests received at that point related to fraud/scam; 20 percent to arrests/convictions for violent or serious crime; 12 percent to child pornography arrests; 5 percent to government or the police; 2 percent to celebrities; and an additional 30 percent were referred to by Google as “other.” If that proportion has held up, around a third — some 13,500 requests — of the 41,000 would fall into a category that does not encompass fraud, serious/violent crime, government or celebrities. In addition to launching a formal process to comply with the ECJ ruling, Google has announced an advisory committee — drawing in outside expertise including from free-speech advocates, lawyers and ethics professors to work with it on weighing the issues. Wales has agreed to be a member of this committee. Other non-Googlers on the committee named so far are: Frank La Rue (UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression); Peggy Valcke (Director, University of Leuven law school); Jose Luis Piñar (former Spanish DPA, now an academic); and Luciano Floridi (information ethics philosopher at Oxford Internet Institute). TechCrunch asked Wales what the committee’s role would be, and more broadly for his views on the right to be forgotten. See below for our Q&A. Back in , Wales admitted to editing his own Wikipedia bio — a practice frowned upon by the site. And, it must be said, a little eyebrow-raising given his outspoken views on the imperative of free speech online. Wales passed up on the opportunity to explain how his own views about personal revisionist history might have evolved since 2005. But he did agree to answer our other questions about the committee’s role and his personal views on the ECJ ruling. He has previously dubbed the ruling “ridiculous” and “very bizarre.” In comments to TechCrunch he went further, calling it “a deep injustice and terrible danger in European law.”
They called me last Wednesday [May 28] I believe it was.
There has been some misreporting about this under the assumption that we’ll be the ones deciding what to censor in Google. That’s wrong. We will not be making decisions on individual requests. The remit of the committee is to hold public hearings and issue recommendations — not just to Google but to legislators and the public. We have a typical situation where incompetent politicians have written well-meaning but incoherent legislation without due consideration for human rights and technical matters. Best to ask Google — I don’t know! I think the decision will have no impact on people’s right to privacy, because I don’t regard truthful information in court records published by court order in a newspaper to be private information. If anything, the decision is likely to simply muddle the interesting philosophical questions and make it more difficult to make real progress on privacy issues. In the case of truthful, non-defamatory information obtained legally, I think there is no possibility of any defensible “right” to censor what other people are saying. It is important to avoid language like “data” because we aren’t talking about “data” — we are talking about the suppression of knowledge. I don’t view these two cases as different philosophically at all! You do not have a right to use the law to prevent Wikipedia editors from writing truthful information, nor do you have a right to use the law to prevent Google from publishing truthful information. Wikipedia can and should work hard to do a good job, just as Google can and should work hard to do a good job. This is key to understanding the issue: no one is (yet) proposing censoring true information directly from Wikipedia. But they are proposing censoring links to true information directly from Google.
Those two objections are ridiculous. There is no “right to be forgotten” — there is apparently a “right” in Europe to censor some information that you don’t like. And the idea that Google’s own algorithms could see into someone’s mind to determine what they think is “irrelevant or outdated” is magical thinking. Google is not magical. If you don’t tell them how you want to censor them, how are they to guess?
I’m not very interested in that aspect of things in this context. I’m only interested here in setting right a deep injustice and terrible danger in European law.
A part of the outcome should be the very strong implementation of a right to free speech in Europe — essentially the language of the First Amendment in the U.S. [ by via Flickr] |
Gillmor Gang: Apple Sauce | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 6 | 7 | The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. The setup: a delicious Apple muscle-flexing that to some somehow escaped the gravity of the Post Jobs era into orbit. We barely got to all the delights in the candy store — even upstarts with plenty to lose like the Box guy sat in the front row with a grin on his face at the sheer fun of Apple’s broad athletic reach. it’s not that we don’t stand in awe of Google’s electric grid, or the giddy ascent of secret startups, or the slowly gathering storm of the Cloud in general. But this is the Big Show, an all too human collection of aspiration and inspiration, not a small touch of arrogance, and yet the uncanny whiff of occasionally and ultimately pulling it off. See the man with the stage fright… And when he gets to the end, start all over again. @stevegillmor, @kevinmarks, @dbfarber, @scobleizer Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Mozilla Continues To Bet On Firefox OS Even As Android Encroaches On The Low-End Market | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 7 | is a tough project to evaluate. Mozilla’s phone operating system is meant for developing countries and first-time smartphone owners. To keep the price of the phones down, the hardware it comes on doesn’t really compare to today’s flagship phones, either. Instead of native apps, Firefox OS runs web apps written in HTML5 and JavaScript, which naturally incurs a performance penalty. Still, it’s a fascinating project and you can’t help but feel at least a little bit of admiration for Mozilla given the audaciousness of launching a new smartphone ecosystem into a market dominated by a few incumbents. Last week, Mozilla sent me a review unit of ZTE’s latest Firefox phone, the Open C. The phone is through eBay in the , , , and many other European countries. In the U.S., the unlocked phone is going for $99. So far, however, it seems the interest is low, with the ZTE eBay store reporting just around so far. One of the reasons even these rather low-priced phones aren’t gaining much traction in the market may be that the competition is heating up. Why, after all, would you buy a $99 Firefox OS phone when you can get a or a for even less? I asked Chris Lee, Mozilla’s director of product for Firefox OS, this question earlier this week. He argues that it will be a challenge for Android to go after the lower-cost market. In his view, because Firefox OS was designed from the ground up for low-end devices (though Mozilla has also set its sights on mid-tier devices through other partnerships with OEMs), it’s smarter about its memory footprint, for example. Mozilla famously hopes to get a sometime later this year. At that price point, it won’t really have all that much competition. When it comes to $100 phones, though, it now has to compete with perfectly good Android phones that have better performance and an existing app ecosystem with native apps and games that currently outperform the Firefox model. To make up for this app gap, Lee and his team are taking a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, they are working on getting tier-one apps on Mozilla’s platform so new users won’t be left without their Facebook, Twitter and YouTube apps (all of which are available already). On the other hand, though, Mozilla is also focusing on getting hyper-local apps on board for the countries where Firefox OS is already available. At the same time, the team is also working on getting more games on the platform, which means — because of the focus on open standards — WebGL-based games for the most part. Thanks to Mozilla’s work on Emscripten and asm.js, it’s possible to write pretty advanced games for these devices. But even with asm.js, modern games still incur a performance penalty on the web platform. As much as I support Mozilla’s mission, though, I worry about Firefox OS’s viability in the market. The Open C is actually a nice phone. It feels pretty solid, has a decently fast processor that makes the OS feel much more fluid than earlier models and a decent 4-inch screen with a 233ppi. But while it has a camera on the back, the pictures it takes are nothing to Instagram home about. The camera can handle daylight shots just fine, but everything else is a challenge. Of course, U.S.-based tech writers aren’t the target market for this device and maybe it’s not fair to judge it by the same standards as other devices. But the Android OEMs are also aware of the market opportunity around low-cost devices, and they are already giving Mozilla some heavy competition before it can really establish itself in the market. |
Dear Clients, Please Stop: Ten Ways Founders Sabotage Themselves | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 6 | 7 | , I spend my Saturdays opining here on TechCrunch, but I spend my work weeks writing software, building apps, sites, and services for the fine startup-to-Fortune-500 clients of the software consultancy . ( !) In that time I have learned many lessons from our clients…the hard way. By which I mean: over the years I have seen far too many clients make disastrous mistakes. (Or at least try to. I’m pleased to report that we’ve often managed to talk them back onto the path of righteousness.) Below you’ll find a list of ten of the most common tragic client errors. I beseech you, clients of the future; please try to make new mistakes. These ones are getting a little old. Names have been omitted to protect the guilty. We’re all friends here, right? Yes, scaling is both hard and important. Yes, your app/site/service needs to be built within a technical architecture that scale… …but you would be amazed how many clients focus an an enormous amount of their attention on whether it already . Founders who haven’t even launched yet, convinced that their baby will instantly become the biggest thing since sliced bread, grow obsessed with whether their app can handle a million users, ten thousand concurrent … rather than, say, whether anyone who doesn’t personally know them will ever discover that the app exists, and how many of people will install it, and how many of people will use it, and how many of people will use it regularly. Dear clients: Focus on your product, not your stress tests. You don’t need to launch with a back-end API already built as a full-fledged service-oriented architecture ready to scale to an arbitrary number of users. A decently-architected app running on a scalable service (Heroku, App Engine, reasonably-set-up AWS, etc) can scale to quite a sizable number of users without much effort. And if and when you start bursting the seams of that envelope, you know what, . That means you’ve , because you’ve proven that your app/site/service has mass appeal. If your app is reasonably well-designed, your eventual scaling problems will be solvable. If it isn’t, well, you’ll never get to that point in the first place, because… Clients often come to because they’ve had a Minimum Viable Product built on the cheap and then discovered, the hard way, that this often means it’s a hornet’s nest of bug-ridden spaghetti code. You know what clients in that situation really don’t want to hear? “The best solution here is to scrap the whole thing and rewrite it from scratch.” You know what the truth is, 90% of the time? “The best solution here is to scrap the whole thing and rewrite it from scratch.” Dear clients: if the expert engineers you have hired are telling you this, swallow hard, bite the bullet, and listen. We know you don’t want it to be true. We don’t want it to be true either. We want the code you bring us to be elegant and extensible so that we can build new cool stuff rather than reinvent the wheel so that this time it’s actually round, rather than pentagonal. But bad code is often so bad that rewriting it is easier than fixing it. Also: you know all those times when we said, “Well, the clean and elegant solution to Issue X will take a little longer,” and you said, “I have a demo on Wednesday, just get it done now”? Every time that happened, you accrued a little bit more . If you don’t build in time for testing and maintenance — and if you don’t that time, no matter what happens to the schedule — you’ll just keep accruing more … and bugs will start popping up more frequently, and the pace of development will grow slower and slower, and you’ll very soon lose far more time than you gained by cheaping out on writing tests and refactoring old code. Dear clients: a stitch in time really does save nine. I’ve had clients who wanted to keep all of their plans incredibly hush-hush, NDAs for anyone who so much as breathed the same air, for fear that their genius idea would be stolen. Dear clients: with rare exceptions, the broad strokes of your ideas don’t much matter. What matters is your execution. I’ve had clients who were convinced they could get Apple or Facebook to change their app rules. (And, OK, one client that actually , but they’re the exception which proves the rule.) I’ve had clients who didn’t want to host on because they were worried about lock-in — a risk, granted, but one of the more improbable among the panoply that startups face — but also because, believe it or not, they worried Google might steal their code or degrade their quality of service. (I’m very fond of App Engine, despite its idiosyncracies, because it usually makes both initial development, A/B testing, and subsequent scaling fast and very easy. Just ask Snapchat or Khan Academy, both of which are App-Engine-powered.) I even had a client who refused to host their video-related iOS app on Google servers because Google owned YouTube and was therefore a direct competitor and not to be trusted. They wound up on AWS. Because it’s not like Amazon does video, right? Oh, wait… Dear clients: you are not industry players, at least not yet. You will be lucky if any of the Stack behemoths pays any more attention to you than an elephant does to a flea. Speaking of Stacks, Platform. It’s a magical word. Everyone wants their app/site/service to one day be a platform. Unfortunately, this can lead people to believe that this is what they are in fact building. With a , that is not how this works. You don’t build a platform; you build a product. You plant a seed. If the product is successful, if it , maybe you can turn that tree into a platform. Not before. Dear clients: stop adding platform features — in fact, stop adding features full stop — and start them. Seeds need to be small in order to take root and grow. I know, I know. You have it all figured out. You just need to get a few people to start using your app, , and so on, and so on, and voila, you’re the new WhatsApp. Right? And hey, you know what? Something like that just might happen. Some of the apps we’ve built for our clients are genuinely pretty great. But do you know the why it might happen? Because your app is cool or useful. Do you know one reason it might happen? If you keep reminding your users to log in with Facebook, or share with Twitter, or pin to Pinterest, over and over again. Such demands are neither cool nor useful. Dear clients: yes, you do want to make it easy for users to share. But if your app doesn’t go viral, it’s almost certainly because it isn’t useful/good/fun enough, rather than because it doesn’t have a sufficient density of prompts to share. You don’t want to obnoxiously pester your users with calls to action. Furthermore, if “going viral” is your only marketing plan… Y Combinator calls it the “ .” I prefer “Valley of Despair” (well, actually, I prefer “ “, but nobody else at HFC does.) It’s what happens in the weeks and months you launch, when the surge of interest and adrenaline from the initial press and email blasts wears itself out, and you’re left with nobody but your baseline regular users … who may well number in the mere hundreds. There are a million-plus apps already available in the App Store and Google Play, and, to Fred Wilson, “Not only do we have a rich get richer dynamic in mobile apps, but we also are witnessing a maturing market consolidating.” It’s never been harder for an app to become a breakout hit. It’s also never been more lucrative … but that’s scant consolation if you don’t make it. Dear clients: know your market, and have a marketing plan other than “launch and go viral” — and talk to us about it. You would be amazed how much time and effort clients put into analytics. Adding ever more events to track, ever more values to measure, heat maps, demographic breakdowns, elaborate custom-built reporting interfaces, a dashboard for every occasion, you name it. Is Google Analytics good enough? Should we use Flurry? How about Mixpanel? New Relic? (OK, New Relic is actually pretty cool.) Does iTunes Connect have an API we can use to download that data hourly? And we to have our users log in via Facebook, so we can get their demographics, and their interests, and their friend graphs! Now, granted — and if you have users who are actually, you know, generating it for you, and your privacy policy is clear and upfront — then it can indeed be incredibly valuable. But all too many clients don’t actually know what they want to learn from their analytics. Instead they take the NSA’s approach: “collect it all and look at it later.” This is a mistake. Dear clients: I know Big Data is the phrase of the era, but you won’t get valuable insights from just collecting the maximal amount of analytical data and then randomly browsing through it in an ad-hoc manner whenever the mood strikes you. You need to figure out what your key metrics are, what it is you actually want to measure. Stop trying to replace “asking the right questions” with “throwing more unwanted answers onto an already huge pile of analytical noise.” Instead, start defining exactly what it is you want to learn from your analytics. Project management is a fine art, and a lot of clients are new to it. I do understand, and greatly sympathize; they’re taking a risk, they want results, they want them as fast as possible, and they don’t fully understand when engineers tell them about the unforeseen problems which inevitably arise. They just want it to work, dammit. A noble goal. But there’s a particular kind of vicious managerial cycle which I’ve seen happen a few times. A client pushes the panic button, instigating crisis mode; engineers (and designers) respond, because hey, it’s a fire drill; and then the client, noting how that big red button got results, just keeps pushing it over and over again, whether or not there’s an crisis … without really noticing how the results keep diminishing, because nobody can work in crisis mode all the time, and after a few weeks it loses all meaning and begins to just breed resentment. Dear clients: save the big red button for real crises. If things seem to be wandering down the wrong trail, or moving too slowly, just sit down and have an honest and open conversation about your concerns. You’d be surprised how effective that is, and what you might learn from such a discussion. I don’t need to write this point because someone else already has: I give you the brilliant . Dear clients: if you work for a hidebound bureaucratic large company, and you’re hiring an agile software consultancy, . And cringe. OK, this may sound like a mere pet peeve. And it probably is one. But it’s one which has consumed an enormous amount of my time over the years. Dear clients: when you are reporting a bug to an engineer, never ever say “it doesn’t work” or “it’s broken” or the like. Instead, use the form “when I did X, I expected Y, but got Z” — and then specify X, Y, and Z in reasonable (or even unreasonable) detail. Dear clients: like you, and we genuinely admire you, and we think your idea is excellent and could be big. We really do, or we wouldn’t be working with you. We want you to succeed almost as much as you do. , and avoid making these mistakes, or at least open your mind to the that they might be mistakes — and you will maximize your chance of success. I solemnly swear this in the name of . , public domain. |
AppCam Lets Android App Developers Capture Videos Of User Activity For A/B Testing | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | is a new SDK that allows Android developers to capture videos of user activity in their apps. The startup says AppCam is the first such service developed especially for Android, though several similar products already exist for iOS, including , , and . The Seoul-based startup, which recently received seed funding from , lets the creators of apps see what features their users spend a lot of time on (or quickly exit); when they are likely to purchase real or virtual goods; or where they are most likely to close out of the app. Recording options can be configured to capture on wi-fi only to minimize mobile data usage. In order to optimize video quality and network bandwidth, AppCam says it “implemented a proprietary congestion control algorithm to adapt to a wide array of network environments.” Developers can also chose to hide sensitive user information by skipping screens or masking specific fields. AppCam’s founders, Luke Seo and Taeho Kim, say the SDK doesn’t impact the performance of their apps even on older or cheaper Android devices. For example, the developer of a music player app discovered the following things after using AppCam discovered layout problems with lower-end smartphones commonly used in Southeast Asia. “The biggest challenge for the Android platform is dealing with the variety of Android devices and OS’s. There is huge difference in CPU power between the newer and older devices. We wanted to ensure that integrating the AppCam SDK didn’t have a negative impact on the app’s performance for the older devices,” they explain. “To overcome this challenge we built our own algorithm to make AppCam optimize the video quality and network bandwidth usage for any device. So far we have verified that AppCam runs well on over 100 different Android hardware models, including many of the older devices.” Other potential use cases for AppCam include remote usability and beta testing, or getting detailed user information without requiring him or her to go to a specific location. App crashes are difficult to figure out by looking at log data analytics, while analyzing app crash videos makes the process much quicker. Live monitoring is also available, but AppCam takes several steps to protect user privacy. “Basically, AppCam does not interact with any data of the app itself or any data that is sent and received through the network to and from the app. We also provide the tools to protect any sensitive user information. It is possible to block out a specific field, such as a password field or credit card number field, or an entire screen, and it is even possible to skip specific activities so that they are never recorded by AppCam,” say Seo and Kim. “We ask through our terms, and trust the app developers – who each have their own terms and privacy policies – to abide by their agreement to respect their users’ sensitive information and receive their users’ consent when necessary,” they add. “After all, it will be the app developers and not AppCam who will be viewing the videos.” AppCam’s founders say being based in Seoul is an advantage because Android’s share of the South Korean smartphone market is about 85%. The startups haven’t ruled out the possibility of creating an SDK for iOS in the future, however, which would mean it would compete directly with Appsee, LookBack, and Watchsend. For now, AppCam’s founder says the main alternative to their service is , a beta testing service for Android. AppCam differentiates by offering an SDK that can be configured for different use cases, while TestFairy is a test-only platform and developers upload an APK which TestFairy sets to take captures from every screen. The first few devices a developer uses AppCam’s SDK on are free, then they can pick from a based on the number of devices the SDK is used on with no limit to the number of apps or user interaction videos that get captured. |
PlayStation TV Coming To US And Canada This Fall For $99 | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | At its E3 press conference, Sony just announced that the PlayStation TV game console (known as the PlayStation Vita TV abroad) is coming to the United States and Canada this fall. The PlayStation TV will come by itself for $99 (you’ll have to bring your own controller) or in a $139 bundle that comes with a DualShock Controller, a memory card to store downloaded games on, and a copy of the Lego Movie video game. The console will be compatible with many of the games currently available on the , Sony’s portable game console. Those will be for available for download on the PlayStation store. PlayStation TV owners will also be able to log in to , Sony’s upcoming Netflix-like service that lets people “stream” games from the cloud. The service will have approximately 100 PlayStation 3 titles available as well as more than 20 free games made specifically for PlayStation Now. Gamers with a PlayStation 4 in their home will also have the ability to stream games from the console to multiple TVs in the house through the PlayStation TV . You can watch the announcement in the video below: |
Sony Announces White PlayStation 4 As Part Of Destiny Bundle, Coming September 9 | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | After opening its press conference with a new trailer for , the new shooter from Bungie Studios, Sony announced that the game’s release would bring with it a bundle featuring a white variant of the PS4. On September 9, gamers will be able to pick up the PlayStation 4 Destiny Bundle, which will pack in a white PS4 (with the same specs as the original model, including the 500 GB hard drive), a white controller, a copy of Destiny, and 30 days of PlayStation Plus membership, which includes online multiplayer as well access to free games on the PlayStation Store. Sony didn’t mention the pricing of the Destiny bundle, though you can expect it to go for at least $399, the console’s current suggested retail price. It’s interesting to see how hard Sony is pushing Destiny on the PS4. The game will be available on other consoles, including the PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox One and Xbox 360, so it’s not the same as Microsoft’s heavy marketing effort for Titanfall, which is available only on the company’s platforms. |
Hybrid Storage Provider Egnyte Turns To Google’s Cloud To House Future Customer Data | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | Egnyte, a company that sells a hybrid storage solution that includes a cloud-based component, is turning to another provider to help house its growing set of customer data: Google. Why might a cloud company turn to another cloud provider to host its data? Google, through its Google Ventures arm, is , making the union reasonable. Egnyte does not intend to move its extant dataset — around 40 petabytes — to Google’s cloud, but will begin to store the preponderance of new customer data on Google’s iron. There is a certain irony here. Egnyte’s storage play is aimed at companies that want to keep some of their data on-premises, in part because existing data can be massive, and thus hard to put into the cloud en masse. Thus to see Egnyte not move its current data to Google’s cloud, and instead only new data is to see Egnyte have a hybrid approach, to delivering a hybrid service. I spoke to Egnyte’s CEO, Vineet Jain about the decision. Google approached Egnyte, leading to the eventual choice by the smaller firm to use its investor’s technology platform, Jain said. Egnyte recently raised , and has revenues in the $25 million to $35 million run-rate range, according to the company. Aside from the relationship with Google Ventures, Egnyte didn’t find Microsoft’s Azure too appealing given its focus on products from Microsoft itself, according to Jain. Google also offered pricing on storage that Jain referred to as “astonishingly low,” which couldn’t have hurt. (Egnyte is not alone in leaning on other clouds to host its own cloud-based service. Dropbox, for example, .) Egnyte keeps some data out of the U.S. where the government has stronger legal authority to request access to information. Some customers don’t want their information stored on U.S. soil, given the aggressiveness of the country’s surveillance arms. Egnyte has a European data center, and through Google will be able to keep data segregated. The company . Egnyte is currently storing data at a rate of around 20 petabytes per half-year, meaning Google just picked up a big customer for its cloud services. On burn the . |
Eventbrite Beefs Up Engineering To Take on Ticketmaster | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | Eventbrite has been busy hiring a bunch of new and notable engineering talent of late to create what they hope will become a true platform for event discovery. The company just crossed the 200-million-tickets-sold mark and reaped over $1 billion in sales in 2013 alone. The company also rolled out advanced reserved last March in order to add seated concerts and sporting events. Overall have grown nearly 300 percent in just the past month, according to the company. The free events are a big driver of Eventbrite’s business. The number one driver of new organizers are previous attendees who got inspired to do their own event, according to the company. The company most recently brought in April Chang from PayPal as a new VP of Engineering, Consumer & Infrastructure Operations, Danny Greenfield, author of Two Scoops of Django, as well as co-creator of the Django framework, Simon Willison. Chang’s vision for the revamp is to own the event space and make it more of an event suggestion marketplace. One possible scenario here is going to the site or on mobile and seeing that a few of your friends are already at an event in real time that you would not have known was happening in your area otherwise, then being able to immediately purchase tickets and attend. Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia HartZ say the reason for the new focus is a previous indication that a marketplace was already inevitably being created. Over 1 million people come to the site to buy tickets each week, and over half of them end up returning to the site once again to sign up for more events. The Eventbrite events marketplace will further facilitate people already coming back and looking for more stuff to do. Eventbrite believes positioning themselves as a go-to site for event discovery, in addition to social integration and the wide inventory of events on the company’s platform positions them well as an events platform, beyond mere planning and organizing. Chang, who was specifically hired to build out this marketplace for both web and mobile, confirms that incorporation of the new marketplace discovery model will happen over time. |
Atrocity Exhibition | Devin Coldewey | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | It’s likely that, at the time of the horrific acts of violence in Santa Barbara, it was someone’s first instinct to go through the trail left by the murderer and save every last item. From the deluded, misogynistic ramblings on YouTube, to the posting history on Reddit and elsewhere, to the near-incoherent “manifesto,” every grisly detail would have to be captured. I’m conflicted by this practice. On one hand, it is potentially motivated by that morbid attraction, that contradictory push and pull we feel when we encounter other macabre subjects — human sacrifice, or Unit 731. On the other, it can be an invaluable service, like that of a crime scene photographer. For once the blood is cleared away, the bullet holes probed and duly spackled, the caution tape balled up and bagged, all is as it once was — like nothing ever happened. And of course, that’s not true. Something did happen. Lives were lost, diminished, changed forever, and unlike a hundred, 50, or even 20 years ago, there is more than an absence to show that something was taken away. As John shortly after the Isla Vista shooting, the perpetrator weaves a web of context, at the center of which is the final crime: between blog posts, forum threads, video logs, and the gauzy layer of metadata lying lightly over all of it, there’s enough circumstantial evidence to occupy a team of lawyers — or onlookers — for months or years. So far fact. But the question is not whether this data exists. The question is what should we do with it? Admittedly it is not a question of equal gravity to that of why such and such a person is capable of such and such an act. But I think it’s an important one to answer together, as a society to which the Internet has become integral. What should we do, for example, with something like the Isla Vista murderer’s video blogs? Of course, YouTube simply took them down, but that may simply be a matter of policy, and at any rate our friend the online crime photographer will have done his work already. If people want to watch them, they can. We can continue to fill in the bullet holes on the Internet, but the truth is this evidence is ineffaceable. Are we sure we’re doing the right thing when we clear away the blood? I think it’s arguable that we should in fact be doing the opposite: preserving this data. Not furtively, in torrents and private subreddits, but officially and with the solemnity and context it deserves. We’re entering an era when everything we do, from our lunches to our conspiracies to commit murder are on the record. It is a pitiless mirror being held up to humanity; what does it say if we refuse to look ourselves in the eye? Why not a place where the information is safely and comprehensively stored, court findings stated, diagnoses and commentary summarized, charities listed, and so on? It would be a place where people could see the story of this person’s sickness and offenses under the cold light of posterity rather than the heat of sensation. A mausoleum for heinous crimes is better than a pyre; it’s hard to learn from ashes. The objections, of course, are numerous: we shouldn’t give these people a pedestal; similarly-minded people will use it as a resource; it’s better to forget such things; it’s disrespectful to the victims and their families. There is some truth to these, but like other valid objections, they will be rendered moot in time, if they are not already. Everyone with access to the web, after all, has unfettered access to the most brutal, the most horrific, and the most explicit material ever created. That’s not going to change. And as bad as the world is, I don’t think it’s because people have pornography or snuff movies on demand. So when we have an opportunity like this, to be shown in shocking detail as a fellow man, a human like ourselves, inches down a path of madness and self destruction, raising questions the whole way about how our society functions and doesn’t function, how little succor we as an ostensibly charitable and loving culture really offer, how deep our flaws and prejudices run, and worst of all, how human this monster really was — to throw away this opportunity to be honest with ourselves for once in history is a mistake we will live to regret, and die under the ignominy of lives unexamined. They say that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I would add that those who refuse to acknowledge evil are doomed to permit it. |
Now Backed By Sir Richard Branson, TransferWise Raises $25M For Cheaper Money Transfers | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | A couple of months back, European money transfer startup hit a major (PR) milestone. Its platform had processed £1 billion of customers’ money, an eight-fold increase from the previous year. At the time, Executive Chairman and co-founder Taavet Hinrikus sounded as bullish as ever. “If I look at the world right now… money transfer is such a humongous market,” . “Even though we have transferred a billion pounds so far, we’re just touching the beginning of it.” Today, Hinrikus’ words are brought sharply into focus. The London-based company has closed a new round of funding. It’s raised a further $25 million, adding Sir Richard Branson as a backer, along with existing investors, including Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, IA Ventures, Index Ventures, TAG (Robin Klein and Saul Klein), and Kima Ventures. This brings the total raised by TransferWise to $33 million since its launch in early 2011. It’s also further evidence the money transfer market is . More curious, however, this comes amid recent reports and has been talking to a number of London-based fintech startups, including TransferWise. When those reports first surfaced, Hinrikus refused to be drawn into speculation regarding the über-social network, except to say, if true, it validated the need to bring greater transparency to financial services and in particular the hidden fees charged by banks when transferring money from one currency/country to another. “If someone as big as Facebook comes into the space, then I think that’s only going to be beneficial to everyone,” he said, in typical ‘we welcome competition’ startup speak. When asked today whether or not TransferWise are still in talks or working with Facebook in some way, Hinrikus offered “no comment”. But, with fresh and substantial capital in the bank, his insistence TransferWise is in it for the long haul, seems as genuine as ever. Or, more cynically, the startup’s potential price tag just went up a notch. He also tells me the company could break even today if it chose to, but he thinks that would be a mistake steeped in short-term thinking and instead is gunning for further growth. TransferWise grew 10x in the last year. So, what’s a feisty fintech and revenue-generating startup to do with new finance? In TransferWise’s case, it says it plans to continue to expand, including head count, and embark on an aggressive marketing spree, making specific reference to its self-proclaimed “cheeky” advertising campaign that recently set out to expose the . Cheeky, perhaps? It certainly of the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, which may not be quite what TransferWise had in mind. However, according to Hinrikus, the fact that even the ASA doesn’t seem to understand the way money transfers incur hidden charges underlines the overall problem. To that end, Hinrikus says in a statement: “We’re going to use this money to lead the charge against hidden bank fees and expose the problem to a wider audience. It’s outrageous that they can get away with advertising that claims their transfers are ‘fee-free’ despite often taking up to 5% of the money sent through the exchange rate.“ That’s another reference to TransferWise’s modus operandi. By employing a P2P model, the startup is able to undercut the banks and other legacy competitors when sending money abroad, while at the same time exposing the lack of pricing transparency across the industry. Typically, incumbent players, such as the banks or Western Union, encourage consumers to compare money transfer fees without being made aware of the mark-up added to the exchange rate offered. TransferWise wants to change this. Continuing that theme, the company has put together a Pinterest “Board of Shame” featuring its competitors’ advertising. I’ll say no more… |
Inside Jobs: What It’s Like To Be The Community Director At Polyvore | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | For a consumer-facing technology startup, the people who make the biggest impact on the company’s success or failure are not the founders. They’re actually not even employed by the company at all. They’re the users — a group that’s often referred to as the “community.” What these people think, feel, and say is the real pulse of how a company’s product is performing out in the real world. For this week’s episode of Inside Jobs, I sat down with , the community director at . Polyvore has attracted one of the largest fashion-focused communities on the web today with some 20 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, so the company’s community management team never has a dull moment. Hussain’s job is to interact with them on a personal level, and relay their feedback to Polyvore’s engineering and product teams. Doing this means hours of emailing, chatting, and often speaking on the phone with people all over the world who use Polyvore. So it made sense to hear Hussain say that community managers often form real friendships while doing their jobs:
“I keep love letters on my desk. I have these cards that members have sent our team, and it’s just a nice reminder every day to just think about, this is who I’m supporting, this is why I do what I do, it’s for the community. And what’s really awesome is we have members all over the world, and I think they’ve all invited me to come stay with them. We were thinking about going to Brazil for the World Cup, and one of our members was like, ‘If you come, you’re staying with me! I have a room for you, and you can bring your friends.’ And that’s really cool. We’re developing these really awesome relationships with our community members.” Take a step inside Nadia Hussain’s job by watching the video above. Producing, shooting, editing, sound, and lighting for Inside Jobs is done by . Production coordination and creative direction is done by . Original logo design by . Motion graphics and graphic design by . |
Facebook Poaches PayPal President David Marcus To Run Messenger, Maybe Monetize It With Payments | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | Facebook doesn’t show ads in Messenger or WhatsApp. Instead, payments could be the key to earning money on chat, especially in the developing world where ad rates are low. If that’s the strategy, Facebook just got the perfect executive to lead the charge. It’s to run its Messenger unit. Facebook hinted that Marcus would be looking outside of ads for how Messenger could bring in revenue, writing in its announcement of the hire that “David is a widely respected leader in the technology industry with a track record of building great products and finding creative ways to turn them into great businesses.” For now, eBay CEO John Donahoe will be the interim PayPal president. Marcus joined PayPal three years ago when it for $240 million in cash. Zong let users buy things online through carrier-billed mobile payments. In a Facebook post announcing his move, : “While I was in the middle of my thought process about what was next for me, Mark Zuckerberg and I got together. Mark shared a compelling vision about Mobile Messaging. At first, I didn’t know whether another big company gig was a good thing for me, but Mark’s enthusiasm, and the unparalleled reach and consumer engagement of the Facebook platform ultimately won me over. So… yes. I’m excited to go to Facebook to lead Messaging Products.” Facebook has previously said that it wants its standalone apps to hit them. Messenger now has users and recent acquisition WhatsApp has , so they’re both definitely eligible. Both have been focusing on growth and boxing out the competition in the heated messaging space. But since monetization plans can take a while to get mapped out and then revved up, it’s smart for Facebook to start thinking about this now. Facebook has already made some forays into the payments space. in April that Facebook had applied for an e-money license in Ireland that let it handle peer-to-peer money transfers in Europe. Using Marcus’ expertise could one day help Facebook earn significant revenue from developing nations and the parts of the world it’s trying to connect to the web through Internet.org. In these markets, buying power is smaller in absolute terms because of lower currency values, cost of living, and more modest incomes of citizens. This makes it tough to earn serious revenue from ads. Facebook makes just 11 percent of its revenue from all countries outside of the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia combined. But one thing people do spend money on in the developing world is fees for payments and remittance. Mobile payments for digital and physical goods are starting to become popular in developing nations. Meanwhile, many migrants send money they earn back to family members in their home countries, but are forced to endure extortionate fees. Facebook could use the ubiquity of its mobile apps, including Messenger and WhatsApp, to disrupt the current players in mobile payments and remittance, earning those fees for itself. Facebook and WhatsApp already know people’s social graphs so they can chat. Layering payments on top could be relatively simple. It could look a little like a combination of Messenger and Venmo, a slick peer-to-peer payments app that PayPal acquired along with its buy of parent company Braintree. The same way you select to send a photo with a message now, you could eventually add a money transfer. In the developed world, this might help friends settle up for group dinners or shared taxi rides. But in developing countries, remittance through Facebook could become popular if it costs less and were easier than existing solutions. I’d imagine Zuckerberg’s vision for mobile messaging that he shared with Marcus goes something like “Messaging connects people directly and privately. Along with text and media, another big thing people send one another this way is money. By expanding Messenger to encompass payments, Facebook can bring families, friends, and colleagues closer by eliminating the barriers to sending and receiving cash.” |
GoDaddy Files For $100M IPO | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | Today GoDaddy, the popular domain and web-services company, to go public. The company has seen quick revenue growth in recent years and massive losses measured using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). The company’s 2013 revenue totaled $1.13 billion. The company lost $199.88 million during that period. The company had revenue of $910 million in 2012, and around $894 million in revenue in 2011. The company’s GAAP losses are declining: GoDaddy lost $279 million in 2012, making its 2013 deficit slightly less painful than it might already seem. GoDaddy lists its “total indebtedness” as of the end of May, 2014, or around $1.5 billion. The company has $133 million in cash and equivalents. The company has an adjusted EBIDTA figure, of course, which totaled $199 million in 2013, up from $173 million in 2012. It is a very adjusted figure: We calculate adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss) excluding depreciation and amortization, interest expense (net), provision (benefit) for income taxes, share-based or unit-based compensation expense, change in deferred revenue, change in prepaid and accrued registry costs, acquisition and sponsor-related costs and a non-recurring reserve for sales taxes. Acquisition and sponsor-related costs include (i) retention and acquisition-specific employee costs, (ii) acquisition-related professional fees, (iii) costs incurred under the transaction and monitoring fee agreement with the Sponsors and TCV, which will cease following a final payment in connection with the completion of this offering, and (iv) costs associated with consulting services provided by KKR Capstone. The company is heavily leveraged and loses quite a bit of money. It will be interesting to see how the market responds to the offering. There has been uncertainty in the market recently regarding companies that wish to go public on the strength of their revenue expansion rather than profitability. Square and Box generally fall in this category. GoDaddy had revenue of $320 million in the first quarter of 2014, up from $262 million in the same period a year prior. That’s a . If investors find that figure strong, GoDaddy’s IPO could proceed smoothly. If that figure isn’t enough in the eyes of the street to compensate for the company’s staggering GAAP losses, it could encounter headwinds. Adding to the offering’s potential hangups is a complex management structure. Private equity groups including KKR bought GoDaddy in 2011 for a . It will interesting to see the delta they expect the company to provide them financially in this offering. If the GoDaddy IPO goes well, we could see a few other players get off the bench. |
Apple’s iOS 8 Includes Code For Running Apps Side-By-Side | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | One thing that had been rumored for inclusion in iOS 8 that wasn’t announced on stage was a new trick for the iPad that would let it run two apps side-by-side concurrently. The feature was at 9to5Mac as one in a series of articles revealing upcoming features of the then-secret beta, and claimed that you’d be able to not only run two apps next to each other, but also move data from one to the other. It wasn’t unveiled, but developer Steve Troughton-Smith has uncovered code that suggest it was at least in development. So… just in case there was any doubt left… iOS 8’s SpringBoard has code to run two apps side-by-side. 1/4 size, 1/2 size, or 3/4 size — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) The code found by Troughton-Smith allows two apps to run side-by-side in different proportions, taking up a quarter of the screen vs. three-quarters for the other active app, or half each. When executed, however, the code causes one half to display as simply gray and then the software crashes, according to another developer on the Twitter thread discussing the news. As originally reported by 9to5Mac, some features of iOS 8 weren’t deemed quite ready in time for the official launch, hence why we may not have seen it on stage. Instead, it might come in the form of an 8.1 update, which 9to5Mac’s sources originally reported could also include updates Maps with transit directions. Alternatively, they could also be scrapped, but it’s still interesting to see that they were once included. |
Okta Scores $75M In Final Round Of Funding; Hopes To Go Public In A Couple Of Years | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | Today, , a company that offers Identity as a Service that works across on-premises applications and cloud services, announced $75M in Series E funding. CEO Todd McKinnon told me he expects this to be the final round of funding prior to going public within a couple of years. The round is being lead by Sequoia Capital. Secondary investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Khosla Ventures, as well as new investors Janus Capital Group and Altimeter Capital. It brings their total funding to-date to $155M. McKinnon told me it was especially important to get some public market commitments because when they do go public they would have investors who are already familiar with them. In fact, the company had discussed getting this round of funding in the Fall, but decided in the February/March timeframe to accelerate that. This ended up a being a case of spectacularly bad timing because it was right about the same time that startup valuations started to plunge. They were able to find the public market investment they were looking for and fill in the rest with traditional venture investments. McKinnon acknowledges there is a lot of competition in the space he calls ‘Identity as a Service,’ including Ping Identity and even Microsoft and Salesforce.com. He said although the big guys don’t have serious products yet, they clearly recognize the strategic importance of identity in the age of cloud and mobile. He said competition is always scary in a way, and anyone who suggests otherwise is probably lying, but he believes competitive pressure drives his company and all of his competitors. He says while nobody wants a monopoly, the fact is that competition is stressful. Over the next couple of years, McKinnon has plans for his company including updating the number of applications pre-integrated with Okta from 3,000 today to 10,000 eventually. The goal is to make any application accessible to every end user (or even partners or suppliers) on any device –and he says that takes money. As he pointed out, this isn’t like in the 1990s when you had to support a version of Windows for three years and you were fine. Today, you have to support a number applications from on-premise ones to cloud services on any number of devices. The company also will be opening an office in Sydney, Australia. He said they have customers in Asia and Australia already, but this will be the first time they have personnel based on the ground there. But he says (saying the right thing for investors) that first he wants to get cash-flow, break even and go public eventually. The ultimate goal though is to be the identity network that holds the mobile-cloud driven economy together. Today, they have over 1,200 customers, which include LinkedIn, MGM Resorts International and Western Union and he believes that is a solid starting point on which to build the company moving forward. Pat Grady from Sequoia will be joining the Okta Board as part of the deal. |
SteelSeries Teams With Tobii To Track Your Eyes And Make You A Better Gamer | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | It’s not too often we see a truly novel gaming accessory; generally speaking companies are happy to slap a few stickers or a new coat of paint on existing controllers and headsets and call it a day. SteelSeries is changing that up with one of its new E3 launch devices this year – the . The Sentry packs some eye-tracking expertise courtesy of Tobii, a Swedish startup we’ve covered in the past that has worked for years on hardware to monitor a computer user’s eye movements and provides interactive experiences that can be controlled by a user’s gaze. There are a few people working on this problem, including The Eye Tribe, which took part in this year’s TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield at CES. Most have been looking to build the eye-tracking tech into tablets and PCs for the purposes of giving users the ability to look where they want their character to point in games, for instance, or automatically scroll through documents and web pages, auto-pause video playback and more. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VzMd8itaLA] In-game control is part of what the Sentry can offer, and planned for future software features, including calling up in-game social consoles and sharing, but the initial launch targets a different use case – coaching. The Sentry is designed to gather and report data about where a gamer looks and how they use their gaze and attention during a play session. It can track things like Fixations per Minute, which tells you how often you’re flitting your eyes around, and getting that number lower is apparently correlated with being able to process a lot of information at once. [gallery ids="1013920,1013925,1013924,1013923,1013922,1013921,1013919"] Benchmarks will be established based on the world’s best-performing professional gamers, and then there will be tips and advice for Sentry owners to help get their numbers in line with the best in the biz. Hey, pro athletes make a lot of money selling training gadgets, advice and software that promise performance improvements to amateurs and hobbyists, so why not gaming, too? SteelSeries might’ve found the most practical current use of eye tracking, too, but we’ll have to wait until this device ships in the fall to find out. |
Watch Sony’s PlayStation 4 E3 2014 Press Conference Here | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | Last year, Sony’s E3 conference was all about the PlayStation 4. The console had yet to launch, and many gamers were eagerly waiting for the successor to the PS3. But this year, Sony shouldn’t be announcing any new console. So far, the company has sold PS4 units, but the PS3 is still the console of choice for many gamers. Tune back on Monday, June 9 at 6:00 pm PDT to watch Sony’s E3 press conference. Sony will also in 40-50 movie theaters across the U.S. and Canada. |
The Battlefield Hardline Closed Beta Starts Today | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | First-person shooter fans, rejoice: EA decided to surprise everyone at E3 today by announcing that the closed beta for Battlefield Hardline is available today for a limited number of gamers on the PC and the PlayStation 4. The Battlefield Hardline sign-up form is , but PS4 owners who own Battlefield 4 can navigate to the game on their consoles and sign up via a new Live Tile. While the game is sure to include the same big explosions and vehicle-oriented multiplayer that the series is known for, the latest Battlefield title differs from its predecessors by focusing on a different kind of “battlefield.” Instead of taking place in the same old combat settings, Battlefield Hardline is about the war on crime, with players taking the role of well-armed criminals or the specially trained über cops that are sent in to deal with them. For those who don’t get into the closed beta, relax. The game will land on all major consoles on October 21. |
Ron Conway And Chamath Palihapitiya Debate SF Housing And Google At Next Big Thing Conference | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | Venture capitalists and got caught up in a shouting match toward the end of one session on inequality at the in Sausalito, Calif., today. In an answer to what he would do if he were Mayor Ed Lee, Palihapitiya said he’d resign. That was the last straw for Conway, who’d been waving his hand for comment for the last 10 minutes of the session. Conway is a close friend of Ed Lee and was a major backer of the San Francisco Mayor’s election campaign, dropping to help pass Prop E, which lowered the business tax for tech companies in SF. Conway finally erupted and launched into Palihapitiya, calling him out on his idea for contributing employee equity to the city and also about ridiculing Marc Benioff earlier, defending Benioff’s charitable contributions to the city. “They’re working to make it a better city and so is Mayor Ed Lee, and it is going to get better, not worse,” yelled Conway. Palihapitiya countered, saying there were a lot of frustrated people getting pushed out of housing in the city and added in his belief in a subsidized housing tax. Conway lost it at that point and said Mayor Ed Lee actually had a mandate in every city department for building 30,000 housing units, a third of which would be for low-income residents in the city. “Is that not enough?,” asked Conway. It’s not and it’s . Palihapitiya divulged his idea to help the lower income residents of San Francisco while up on stage earlier, basically saying he thought San Francisco startups should have a 1% equity tax. Conway, who is a in many of the major Silicon Valley tech firms could barely contain himself over that and many other statements made by Palihapitiya, pointing out that he lives in Palo Alto and that Conway, himself, actually lives in San Francisco. Conway then reiterated what Palihapitiya had said earlier about Google. “You ridiculed Google for not being generous enough. They’re paying $8 million dollars for the kids…Google’s participating in San Francisco. You don’t know what you are talking about.” “He was so arrogant,” Conway said after, speaking of Palihapitiya. “Somebody had to say it. It was obvious.” : Conway has given a statement to TechCrunch about the discussion today: I’ll grant you that today did not reflect the approach I would normally take as a member of an audience listening to a speaker. But as a San Francisco resident who knows first-hand about the significant efforts underway in the public and private sectors to address the City’s housing crisis and widening income gap, it’s very difficult to sit quietly and listen to someone who is not engaged at all in these efforts spread so much misinformation. Chamath was talking about the right issues – I agree that tech and those who are doing well in this new economy need to do more – we are still not doing enough to educate every child, train everyone for a job and house our workforce and families. But rather than lecture everyone else about what’s wrong with San Francisco, i would like to see Chamath and more of his colleagues in the Valley join those of us who are trying to DO something about these challenges in SF. I’ve already reached out to him and invited him up to the City to meet with me and some others so we can talk about ways he can get involved.” Palihapitiya gave an update to TechCrunch, following Conway’s update:
As someone who grew up in need of a social safety net and was lucky enough to use it to get to the “other side”, I’m really sad that the social mobility that I benefited from no longer exists in the same way. My parents apartment cost $500/mo. I had fully subsidized federal health care. I went to a great university that cost $10k/yr. Now that was in Canada and it is probably too naïve to expect this type of equality to exist all over the US, but I think we as a population in Silicon Valley can create an example for the rest of the US of how people can economically benefit and bring many people along. As a city/state/country, we should be frustrated, but I think we need to focus our frustration about this towards those that have the moral imperative to fix it: our political system and our political leaders. It isn’t a company’s moral imperative to fix the lack of affordable housing, its the city’s. Focusing on intimidating an engineer at a given tech company distracts us from what is really necessary which are structured, meaningful programs to fix the growing social immobility that many face – not just in San Francisco but beyond. If we did these things, my expectation is that the SF Equality Fund would generate billions of gains over the next several years and we can then go and solve these meaningful problems in meaningful ways. It is is insufficient to celebrate piecemeal progress. View the exchange below: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxfZONn6z5M&w=560&h=315] |
New Bio-Sensor Draws Liquid Out From Under Your Skin To See If You’re Thirsty | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | As you may well know, plants (and humans) need electrolytes. Until now, however, we’ve had to trust our guts and go out and buy a bottle of Brawndo if we were feeling a little down. Fear not, however, because a new sensor will use micro needles to steal a bit of your precious bodily fluids in order to tell when you need to fuel up. The system, , is small enough to fit in a watch and sits on the surface of the skin. It samples interstitial fluid – the fluid between cells – and not your blood. It is painless because the needles don’t activate any nerves in the body. It’s designed for both doctors who need to maintain certain levels in a patient as well as athletes who might need to know when they should replenish electrolytes. With a bit of tweaking, the system could also test for sodium and calcium levels in the body as well. Future systems could also allow users to get doses of the right minerals and electrolytes as needed, based on a feedback loop led by the sensor. Because it’s non-invasive, painless, and doesn’t sample actual blood it’s far more efficient than current methods for biosensing. “We want to make the device wearable, noninvasive, and with real-time readout to constantly measure things a doctor might normally order for laboratory tests,” said Polsky. |
Facebook Has Another Go At Snapchat With Slingshot | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | Facebook has been promising that it would “ ” in order to better compete on mobile by breaking up the main Facebook app into mini-apps focused on specific features. Today, it’s making good on these previously stated intentions with a new photo and video-sharing app called , now available in select markets. The app is designed to allow friends to share photos and videos of what they’re currently up to, by “slinging” that content to others on the service. However, unlike, say, competitor Snapchat, friends can’t see your shot until they, in turn, sling something back. That feature, though a bit gimmicky, seems specifically designed to increase the viral effects and spread of Slingshot. By tapping into users’ natural curiosity, they may be motivated to share with a friend in order to “unlock” the new shots they receive. Like competitor Snapchat, you can annotate the images with your own captions and drawings, according to Slingshot’s App Store description. However, it seems that the app may differ somewhat when it comes to the “ephemerality” of these shares. While the app promises that you can view your unlocked shots later if you’re busy, once they’re swiped away, they’re gone for good. The new Slingshot app closely resembles called , which was rumored to be a favorite among Facebook engineers who were actively working to clone the experience, . Slingshot also mimics the “slinging” concept popularized by an app called Rando, which . And, of course, Facebook earlier had infamously tried to clone Snapchat more directly with Poke, an app that flopped heavily and was from the App Store. Currently, the new Slingshot app is available in select markets only, as this appears to be either a test or staged rollout. (We’ve reached out to Facebook to confirm.) Slingshot was not, at time of publication, available in the U.S. market, so we’ve been unable to test how exactly the app works at this time, but we’ll offer a longer review when available. In the meantime, select markets (see list below) can . There doesn’t appear to be at this time. : Verge is the app is no longer available, though we’re still seeing it appear in select markets as of 4:40 PM ET. The app never became available in the U.S. store, but now you have to change stores inside iTunes to see it at all, as the App Store page is down. That could indicate Facebook is pulling the app back, as it turns out – for example, even when you’re in the Malaysian store, if you click to download the app, you get an error. Facebook has not provided comment. : A Facebook spokesperson has now told us |
The Open-Source Electronics Robot, The FirePick Delta, Could Bring Real Manufacturing To The Desktop | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | Pick-and-place (PNP) machines are the robots that grab and drop tiny components onto circuit boards. Designed to make thousands of boards an hour, these super-fast machines are part of the multi-part ballet that is modern manufacturing. And they’re amazingly expensive – sometimes reaching into the millions of dollars. The Holy Grail, then, for the home-brew manufacturer is to build a PNP machine on a small scale. Two engineers, Neil Jansen and Karl Lew, have dealt with the almost constant frustration of wanting to build cool hardware yet having no way to build usable circuit boards without expensive investments. By creating a very simple, very cheap PNP machine, they would enable a new electronics maker movement to blossom where, until now, the big boys held sway. The project is still in its infancy and the pair are now trying to enter the next HAXLR8R class in order to fine-tune their idea. The goal is to create a simple pick-and-place machine that can lift and rotate parts using suction, draw traces onto boards, and solder and remove components from the board. A CNC attachment would allow users to cut down PCBs to size and a laser would allow them to plot onto photo-sensitive boards. It’s not quite but it’s good enough for 90% of the hardware projects out there. What’s most interesting about this project is that it looks to be the first one that both works, in prototype, and could actually come to market. There are many hacks you can use to create your own PNP machines – you can even turn a standard 3D printer into a PNP with a lot of gumption – but a ready-made, tested device for the home electronics maker would me amazing. The team is also looking into creating a printing system that can extrude both plastic and electronic components which would create truly organic, cohesive products that used fewer resources and were more rugged. You can see related to the manufacture. Because the FirePick is a delta machine it uses fewer parts and is less complex to build. In fact, it’s much like a 3D printer in that the head moves in certain pre-set patterns, over and over, until it produces a finished product. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9mxzC6RLGk] |
TechCrunch Is In Austin And Seattle This Week | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | Live around or ? Come hang with TechCrunch this week. We’re in Austin on Tuesday and Seattle on Thursday where we’ll host close to a thousand attendees at each event. We’ve also lined up a dozen startups from each area to pitch at event with the hopes of winning tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt. Meetup tickets are $10 and includes a drink (21 and older only, please.) There are a few left. These events are the best way for TechCrunch to learn about each area. We arrive a couple of days prior, meet with VCs and startups and leave with a deeper understanding of the startup ecosystem. Plus we get to party with you guys. We hit up Austin and Seattle last year and are excited to be back — mainly for the tacos I just had here in Austin. Having hosted countless meetups, I can attest to the fact that this is truly a fantastic opportunity for all the attendees. While only a few TechCrunchers are at each event, there are in attendance hundreds of local founders, developers and venture capitalists. Pack your blazer full of business cards because you’ll need them. And the first drink is on us (because you bought a ticket.) TechCrunch will hit up more cities in the fall. We don’t sit still very long. |
Tinder Suspends Co-Founder In Wake Of Sexual Harassment Lawsuit | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | Tinder CMO has been suspended by the company he co-founded, after it was sued for sexual harassment and sexual discrimination by its former VP of marketing Whitney Wolfe. The lawsuit, which was filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, makes a litany of claims against Mateen, including that he called Wolfe a “whore” in front of CEO Sean Rad, and that he subjected her to numerous “sexist, racist, and otherwise inappropriate comments, emails, and text messages” during her time at the company. It also claims that Rad ignored Wolfe’s complaints and fired her after she offered to resign “in consideration for modest severance and the vesting of her stock.” The suit paints Wolfe as a driving force behind the team’s decision to move on from its previous Cardify product and work on the Tinder app instead. Even so, it claims that her title as co-founder was removed by Rad and Mateen, because she was a 24 year-old “girl” with little experience. The suit also describes the romantic relationship that Mateen pursued with Wolfe, despite the fact that he was her direct supervisor. When things went sour between them, issues within the organization became even more difficult. After a breakup in December of last year, the suit claims, Mateen told Wolfe to stay away from other men for a period of six months. Tinder may question some of the , but it can’t really dismiss the inappropriateness of the texts from Mateen that are included as evidence in the lawsuit. As a result, it has suspended Mateen. Tinder issued the following statement explaining why: Immediately upon receipt of the allegations contained in Ms. Wolfe’s complaint, Mr. Mateen was suspended pending an ongoing internal investigation. Through that process, it has become clear that Mr. Mateen sent private messages to Ms. Wolfe containing inappropriate content. We unequivocally condemn these messages, but believe that Ms. Wolfe’s allegations with respect to Tinder and its management are unfounded. |
UberX Wages War On Bay Area Taxis With 25% Price Cut | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | If Uber’s intent to put taxis out of business wasn’t clear already, the email it just sent SF Bay Area users should make it crystal. “We just dropped uberX fares by 25%, making it 45% cheaper than a taxi.” No matter how much people want hard-working cabbies to be able to support their families, uberX is now just too much cheaper for most people to ignore in San Francisco, the East Bay, San Jose, “and everywhere in between”. Unlike last time it , Uber is focusing on taxis and didn’t even put a pink “other” bar on its pricing graph, which was surely an allusion to Lyft. Either Uber thinks it doesn’t have to worry about Lyft or doesn’t want to remind its customers about them. Either way uberX has now gone from costing 15% more to 13% less than a pink mustache ride around SF. Of course, that’s without surge pricing, which seems to boost uberX prices higher and more frequently than Lyft’s “Prime Time” pricing. Lyft cut its own prices in April, allowing it to keep up with Uber. Now it will have to decide if it can afford to do it again. UberX is still more expensive in NYC than taxis, but you could imagine Uber dropping prices in a market until it breaks the local taxis, then moves the cuts to another city. Uber’s massive it raised earlier this month gives it plenty of room to starve out competitors. Taxis were already struggling to compete. With inconvenient meatspace hailing, unreliable scheduled pickups, beat-up cars, and unaccountable drivers, many people think the taxis deserve to go the way of the dinosaur. There’s no denying that uberX is great service, and I use it frequently. Still, others laud the navigation skills of veteran cabbies compared to uberX and Lyft drivers that are often new to professional driving or the city they operate in. There’s also an argument that taxi companies and drivers should be protected because they invested in $250,000 medallions that are earning them less money as Uber and Lyft compete for their business. But with uberXs costing just over half of what a taxi does, most people would probably put up with a wrong turn or two. The president of big SF cab company DeSoto Hansu Kim that “with Uber, Lyft, and the like, he would be surprised if the cab industry survives another 18 months in The City.” And that was before today’s 25% uberX fare cut. There’s an ongoing debate about whether cities should regulate services like Uber and Lyft. That could balance out competition with cabbies who invested in medallions, but impede innovation, degrade service, and raise prices for consumers. Cities better make up their mind, though, otherwise there soon might not be taxis in business to regulate. |
FBI, CIA Join NSA In “Backdoor” Searches On Americans | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | Thousands of Americans were targets of so-called “backdoor” warrantless surveillance by the NSA and other intelligence agencies last year, according to a sent to Senator Ron Wyden. The missive, written by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to the Senator in response to a question posed earlier this month, is plainspoken. The Office also stated that the searches in question are not based on an exploited legal “loophole.” The House recently voted to . Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to collect information on foreign targets that are, to use its own language, “reasonably believed to be outside of the U.S. at the time of collection.” It can’t target United States persons by law, and it isn’t allowed to reverse-target — picking a foreign target with the hopes of picking up the communications of someone thought to be in the United States. The information collected under Section 702 authority may include the communications of Americans picked up in the process of collecting data on foreign targets. The stored information can then be queried by the NSA, and its intelligence brethren, using search terms to find the communications of Americans. Hence the term “backdoor.” How many Americans are caught up in the mix? According to the letter, the NSA used such queries to search the communications of 198 U.S. persons in 2013. It also made around 9,500 metadata queries for the communications of U.S. persons in the period. The number of people impacted by the meta-data searches isn’t clear. The CIA made 1,900 queries of Section 702-sourced information “using specific U.S. person identifiers” in 2013. Ominously, the FBI also has access to some of the pooled data, but doesn’t count how often that it queries it using U.S. person identifiers. Senator Wyden isn’t pleased with the data. In a , he indicated that “[w]hen the FBI says it conducts a substantial number of searches and it has no idea of what the number is, it shows how flawed this system is and the consequences of inadequate oversight.” Scale is also something to keep in mind. The ODNI states in its letter that “collection under Section 702 is not bulk collection, but is targeted collection based on specific identifiers.” Senator Wyden disagrees (Emphasis: TechCrunch): While intelligence officials have often argued that it is impossible to estimate how many Americans’ communications are getting swept up by the government under Section 702, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has noted that , so even if US communications make up a small fraction of that total, the number of U.S. communications being collected is potentially quite large. In short, using a law named the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA and the CIA and the FBI are able to search and read the content of the communications of Americans. Brilliant. |
Court Allowed NSA To Spy On All But 4 Countries | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | A court permitted the NSA to collect information about governments in 193 countries and foreign institutions like the World Bank, according to a . issued by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2010 shows the NSA has the authority to “intercept through U.S. companies not just the communications of its overseas targets, but any communications about its targets as well,” according to the Post’s report. Only four countries in the world — Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — were exempt from the agreement, due to existing no-spying agreements that the Post highlights in about the group of countries, known as “Five Eyes” with the U.S. The secret certification from 2010 was part of a trove of documents that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked to reporters at The Washington Post and The Guardian last year. In addition to permitting the NSA to collect information about most countries, it also authorizes the NSA to target institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The documents reveal the NSA had even more free rein when it came to surveilling foreign individuals than was previously known, raising major concerns about the privacy implications this program could have, even for Americans domestically. President Barack Obama said the U.S. should no longer spy on foreign heads of state and said programs “shall be as tailored as feasible,” . If there’s anything to take away after a first look at Monday’s revelations, it’s that the programs are far from tailored. The Post reports the NSA is not “necessarily” collecting intelligence on all of the countries identified in the documents, but it does have the authority to. Former government officials defended the inclusion of almost every country, saying it could be necessary in the event of an unexpected humanitarian crisis where the military needed to evacuate Americans. The documents published also revealed new information about one of the most controversial NSA practices — collecting the emails and phone calls of foreign individuals and institutions under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. published Monday states foreign individuals can be targeted if the NSA believes they “possess, are expected to receive and/or are likely to communicate foreign intelligence information concerning these foreign powers.” This means academics or journalists who regularly correspond with foreign governments could easily be targeted if the NSA has determined they possess information that could be used for foreign intelligence. But the privacy ramifications of these documents are not limited to communications of foreigners. The court approved rules that also allow communications about targets to be swept up, not just the targets’ communications. If a target’s email address or phone number is even mentioned in another person’s email, that communication becomes fair game for the NSA. So in theory under the rules revealed in these documents, the NSA could intercept an email from an American journalist if it mentioned a target’s phone number or email address. , a judge said the NSA could be collecting as many as 46,000 domestic emails annually that either mentioned a target’s email address or phone number. These communications are known as an “about” collection. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has pushed to reign in the NSA programs, and told The Post when Section 702 was passed in 2008 that most Americans had no idea Americans’ communications would be collected because they contained targets’ contact information. “If ‘about the target’ collection were limited to genuine national security threats, there would be very little privacy impact,” Wyden told the Post. “In fact, this collection is much broader than that, and it is scooping up huge amounts of Americans’ wholly domestic communications.” The Washington Post’s article Monday comes more than a year after the original Snowden revelations and one day after . Legislation that would limit the scope of the NSA’s programs has passed through the House but still needs to make it through the Senate. |
Hack Your Brain With A Machine That Reads Minds | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | Star Wars first planted the idea over 35 years ago that we could move objects with our minds. That idea is now a reality that has come a long way in the last few years. is on the cutting edge of that technology with headgear that allows you to do things, such as make a toy car whiz by or help a quadriplegic mix music like a DJ using just their brain power. It works by scanning your brain for signals using the Emotiv EEG device on your head. That device then relays your signals through a brain-computer interface to detect emotions, interest and a slew of other things. It takes some work but, as the video above shows, it also helps you use your Jedi training skills to move objects with just the power of thought. There are numerous applications for this tech. Those with disabilities could become the best DJ you’ve ever heard or play video games or command robotic arms using just their minds. It could help those with epilepsy, ADHD, sleep disorders or the occasional panic attack to quiet the mind and focus. A project commissioned by the Royal Automotive Club of Australia is even using Emotiv to . During the research phase, a signal sent from the brain of a distracted driver caused their car to slow down or stop on the road. But it also steps into the world of market research. Emotiv can tell whether you really like something or not just by detecting the reaction of your brain signals to a certain product you see in a store. This would allow researchers to know whether something will be popular without even having to ask you questions. They’ll just see it on your brain. A greater threat with this tech could be , particularly in video gaming. This ability to capture neuro-cognitive feedback not only helps with more responsive gaming but could also make available a user’s private information or thought processes without them being aware someone had hacked in and was getting that information from them. A captured EEG signal can reveal your bank card number, determine whether you have a mental illness or are prone to addiction, according to this . Emotiv offers both the EPOC and EEG versions of its system. The EPOC headset (listed for $299) allows developers to create their own applications using the licensed SDK software. The EEG headset (listed for $750) adds to what the EPOC offers but also enables users to conduct research from collected raw EEG data. The technology has a long way to go still, but what we have so far with quadriplegic DJs moving about in virtual worlds, ability to detect mental disorders and to conduct market research from brain waves, is pretty impressive so far. |
With Software Eating Hardware, Silicon Valley Enters “Hard” Times | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | Software’s inevitable dominance is something of an axiom in Silicon Valley, where Marc Andreessen once famously wrote that it was “ .” Software companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook are among the world’s most iconic and valuable, and new startups like Airbnb and Uber aim to transform traditional industries like hotels and taxis. For some 30 years, software has been the one iron (and golden!) rule of building a startup. These sorts of business models have been unmatched as vehicles for founders and venture capitalists, since companies can rapidly iterate on their products and massively scale when product-market fit has been found. Most importantly though, software is profitable like almost no other industry, with margins for some companies reaching well beyond 50 percent of revenue. In such an environment, hardware startups became something of a backwater for Silicon Valley. Venture capital investment into hardware startups has traditionally hovered around the low single digits according to the National Venture Capital Association. Hardware startups are considered “hard,” requiring huge gambles on design, production quality, and supply chain management that software startups simply don’t need. That rule has been entirely thrown out. Hardware is now in vogue at software companies, a strategy once considered anathema. The last 10 months have been a record period for exits from the hardware startup space, many through acquisitions by software companies. While it was once a commonplace that hardware is a drain on profits, margins and resources, today the leading software companies are throwing their weight behind their physical brethren. What explains this sudden interest in hardware after so many years? There are a number of factors, but three would seem to be crucial in the change in heart. First, the culture of hardware design has become more like software coding, making integration post-acquisition easier. Second, companies are under pressure to provide the best user experience, and as a result, they are becoming more vertically integrated. Finally, competition for customers is becoming more intense, and hardware is one way to ensure consumers stay with one company. This is a banner year for startups in the hardware space, which has already seen several multi-billion-dollar exits. GoPro, the maker of a popular line of highly versatile cameras, , with its price jumping even after pricing at the top of its target range. Beats Electronics, the maker of a popular line of headphones, , the top hardware manufacturer in the world. But the truly interesting pattern has been the increasing engagement of software companies in the space, with Google being the prime example. While the company has produced for many years, today it’s key products are all software: Google Web Search, Gmail, Android, and Google Docs, while . In short, it is the very epitome of the Internet software business. Yet, the company , its second-largest acquisition. Just this month, the company bought two hardware businesses – (through Nest Labs) and – for about $500 million each. And while the company has , that acquisition in 2011 . Internally, the company seems just as focused on building up its competency in hardware. The “moonshots” that are coming out of its GoogleX laboratory include such hardware products as Google Glass, Loon balloons, and self-driving cars. Google is hardly an exception among top software companies. is one of the company’s largest acquisitions in history. Facebook’s second largest acquisition to date was , a startup less than two years old that received a cool $2 billion check. Amazon continues its long investment in hardware, . With billions of dollars spent acquiring hardware businesses, it is obvious that software companies are more engaged with hardware than ever before. One challenge for software companies looking to acquire hardware businesses has been the dramatically different culture between coding and designing physical goods. Hardware products have had long gestation periods, requiring multiple stages from conception using computer drafting tools to prototyping and readying a product for mass production. If an issue cropped up, it would take weeks or even months to repeat the entire process again. The huge upfront investment in a new hardware project also meant that companies generally needed to conduct market research before they began building, an approach completely contrarian to the Silicon Valley notion of launching software first and then using feedback from the market to evolve a product. Thankfully over the last decade, hardware design has become easier and more democratized. 3D printing and better software tools have accelerated the ability of many startups to build their prototypes, allowing them to speed up their product iterations. Early hardware startups now often feel like lean software businesses, with much more interactive product development, thus allowing for more rigorous analysis of product-market fit. In the past, when it came time to manufacture a product, only the largest companies used to have access to assembly lines in places like China. Minimum order sizes were often completely unaccommodating for startups. But as competition has intensified, custom manufacturing has become easier, and labor costs have risen, manufacturers appear to be more willing to engage with smaller orders, and they have also decreased their average turnaround time, as well. Beyond just design, hardware startups also have a greater role in software than in the past. From what I can tell talking to hardware startups, it is much more common for product managers, marketers, and engineers to be cross-functional these days, working across the traditional divide between hardware and software. It’s the only way to create a seamless experience for the user, but along the way, it also creates a culture that is more compatible with potential software acquirers. Verticalization could also be called the Apple-ification of software companies. Apple’s traditional strategy has been to sell vertically integrated technology, owning the complete user experience from hardware to software and services. By using its control, the company can ensure that all of its components work smoothly together, guaranteeing a level of quality that is difficult to emulate. Apple’s strategy has been unique in the industry, although this status is changing as Microsoft and others increasingly use this approach, especially in mobile. While there are certainly economic reasons why software companies desire more control over their products, I think one of the lesser-discussed issues is simply that the sorts of engineering problems encountered by companies today are becoming more complex. Consider the case of home automation. There have been many attempts in the space over the years, such as products around the X10 and KNX protocols. But solutions always faced the same vexing challenges – how to make all the sensors and control switches part of one comprehensive system, with easy setup and equally well-designed software. In addition, home automation is not currently a well-developed market, and so a company has to actually convince users on the merit of setting up one of these systems in the first place. It seems obvious that a verticalized company with a complete and well-developed product line on both hardware and software and excellent marketing is the only way this sort of product will be successful. There is a class of problems marked by deep integration between hardware and software that is simply tough to do with multiple companies involved, especially in the timeframes required by the market today. There can also be conflicts over incentives in such collaborations as well, since a hardware manufacturer may prefer a smaller market share but higher margins while a software company wants greater user adoption to generate traffic. It’s much easier if everyone is paid from the same employer. Perhaps the most important reason that software companies are increasingly interested in hardware is that owning the device of a user is much better lock-in strategy than being their first destination on the web. Think of a product like Google’s Web Search. Users can switch to a competing site in just a few keystrokes, whether it be Bing or DuckDuckGo (or by switching their default search engine in their browser preferences). The same concerns are visible in Facebook’s competition with Snapchat over mobile messaging. While brand and habits are tough to break, software companies are always vulnerable to a new incumbent taking their market share. Now take a hardware product like Nest. If you bought a new thermostat from the company, what is the likelihood of replacing that thermostat anytime in the near future? Even in my most progressive thinking, I can’t imagine that a thermostat is going to be regularly upgraded like a smartphone. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that anyone is going to use two thermostats at the same time. Essentially, once Nest has made a sale to a customer, it owns that customer for an extended period of time. The integration of hardware, software, and services in one complete package through verticalization not only creates a better user experience, but also means that customers who stray too far from one company’s products are likely to find it difficult to get everything working properly. By building this sort of sticky lock-in into its products, software companies can ensure more consistent revenues and also raise the switching costs for customers. In addition to culture, verticalization and competition, there is one more important trend working deeply in favor of more hardware startups. Consumers are adopting hardware technology at incredibly rapid rates. Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report , showing the acceleration of each new wave of technology, starting from the personal computer and continuing through tablets. , companies can now scale their revenues up nearly as fast as software has done in the past. So, hardware is cool again. In some ways, this is simply the pendulum moving back again. Hardware was once the bread and butter of Silicon Valley, the very name of which continues to evince the importance of this lineage. All of Silicon Valley’s early successes were physical, first in radar and klystron tubes, then later in the integrated circuit, semiconductor and personal computer. And of course, some of the venture capital industry’s most important early bets were on hardware companies like Apple, Tandem Computers, Atari and Intel. But then the software industry took off, and no one looked back. There is probably still more risk in hardware than software today, but there is also less competition, and far more low-hanging fruit from the lack of startups over the past 30 years. For founders willing to engage, 2014 might just be “hard” times. |
Community Will Get Its Sixth Season… On Yahoo. | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | Look out, Netflix: Yahoo just played a card that probably should’ve been yours*. They’re bringing back . After its sudden cancellation crushed fans back in May, whispers started going around that Community would turn to the web for its sixth season. Sure enough, Yahoo, series creator Dan Harmon and star Joel McHale have just confirmed it: See you in the fall. — Yahoo Screen (@YahooScreen) Sixth season. — Joel McHale (@joelmchale) The series will live on Yahoo! Screen, Yahoo’s video-streaming site that you very well may have never heard of before. Marissa Mayer to make “smart… strategic investments” into its video efforts, and this move certainly fits the bill. SIX SEASONS AND A MOVIE. Firefly Pushing Daisies |
High-Skill Immigration Reform Is Dead This Year – Again | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | High-skill immigration reform . The Senate managed to pass a around a year ago that went precisely nowhere in the House. When the new year kicked off, there was some optimism that we could get something done. Misplaced optimism, really. With this Congress, having a positive outlook is something akin to masochism. President Obama, today in a Rose Garden today, stated that in a recent conversation, Speaker of the House John Boehner indicated that the House will not vote this year on comprehensive immigration reform. The speaker responded with a that didn’t deny the claim. So, that’s that. Don’t even bother sticking a fork in it, I doubt it would be too tasty. High-skill immigration reform was in the Senate, meaning that it likely can’t, or at least won’t given current Congressional dynamics, pass on its own. So until we have comprehensive immigration reform, we likely won’t see . When immigration reform died an ignominious death on Capitol Hill last year, I was pessimistic that Congress would get much done this year. High-skill immigration reform: Still dead. America! |
Two Senators Upbraid The Intelligence Community For Insufficient Disclosure | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | Consider Senators Al Franken and Dean Heller unimpressed. Today the two Senators, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, released statements disparaging a from the U.S. intelligence community that broke down its activities in . The view of , that the report is progress, but not nearly enough, is roughly what I’m hearing from the private sector, as well. Here’s the Senator himself: The report released by the Administration represents some progress, but it does not do near enough to provide Americans with adequate information. The American people deserve greater transparency and American companies should be able to disclose more information when it comes to privacy rights and the federal government’s surveillance activities. His statement goes on to indicate support for the (STA) of 2013, which he and introduced. Senator Franken had similar comments, saying that the report is a “far cry from the kind of transparency that the American people demand and deserve.” The senator continues, stating that the report “still leaves Americans in the dark,” and that it “doesn’t tell the American people enough about what information is being gathered about them and how it’s being used.” I noted in my that the report itself was vague and incomplete and of limited use. But prior to the Snowden leaks, even this level of disclosure would have been unthinkable. Progress is progress even if it comes in small quantities. The STA would force more disclosure. It hasn’t seen much motion inside of Congress. The ever-wrong-but-still-funny gives it a 1 percent chance of passing. There was some overlap between the STA and the USA FREEDOM Act. As The Hill regarding the the crossover, “some transparency provisions were dropped from the House version.” Following the release of the statements, Senator Franken announced that he will co-sponsor the USA FREEDOM Act in the Senate, aiming to push for more transparency. Hardly surprising timing, of course. If the larger intelligence community had hoped that the report would quell discontent with its surveillance programs, consider that optimism dashed. |
Christensen Vs. Lepore: A Matter Of Fact | Thomas Thurston | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | Nothing gets keyboards clicking like a good controversy. Recently Jill Lepore, a history professor at Harvard, accusing another Harvard professor, Clayton Christensen, of being a quack. Lepore didn’t use that word, but she may as well have. Christensen is a business school professor renowned for his “Disruption Theory” about why businesses survive or fail. Lepore basically says Disruption Theory is no-good because it’s reckless, based on bad evidence and can’t predict the future. An ability to predict the future is, after all, the true test of a model. Christensen in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek interview days later, followed by droves of Internet chatter by onlookers. The real question is, who’s right? Christensen or Lepore? Is this just a case of one reasonable opinion versus another? Actually, no. The unpopular, debate-killing truth is opinion doesn’t matter. Whether or not Disruption Theory can predict the future isn’t a matter of , it’s a matter of . Here are the facts. Most people don’t know this, but it turns out Disruption Theory is the foundation of the most accurate, thoroughly vetted, quantitative prediction models of new business survival or failure in the world today. Oops. Allow me to explain. Nearly a decade ago I was working at Intel when it dawned on me to turn the company’s new business investment history into a formatted dataset. The goal was to look for quantitative patterns to better predict which Intel innovations would succeed or fail. Generally speaking, most businesses fail (around 75 percent) before their 10th birthday, regardless of whether they’re a startup, a venture capital investment or launched by a company like Intel. I wanted to know if data-centric analyses could better pick winners. Strong patterns began to emerge, suggesting it was far more possible to predict the fate of innovations than anyone thought possible. The clearer these patterns became, the more I noticed how similar they were to phenomenon Christensen had already been writing about for years. At the time Christensen had last published the book , claiming Disruption Theory could predict the kinds of outcomes my research focused on. While Christensen’s work had a litany of supporting examples, it struck me (perhaps as it struck Lepore) that the research didn’t have the kinds of data I cared about – quantitative predictive data. Christensen had reason to believe Disruption Theory was predictive, but I wanted to know predictive – exactly. Was it 10 percent predictive? 21 percent? 55 percent? 98 percent? As a manager in the trenches of Intel, this was the specificity I needed before deciding if Disruption Theory was useful. Those details were the gap between theory and practice. Since only around 25 percent of new businesses survive, to be useful any model would have to be more than 25 percent accurate at picking winners on a consistent basis. It’s important to note how , not perfection, is the standard to which science is valued. For example, a new cancer treatment is valuable if it saves 10 percent more lives, even if it doesn’t cure 100 percent of patients. At any point in time, solutions just have to be better than the alternatives. Since the patterns I found were more than 25 percent accurate, and those patters seemed to dovetail with what Christensen had long written about, I decided to test Disruption Theory on its own. Predictive testing is part of a structured discipline called the Scientific Method. While it can be part of a social science education, it’s most commonly associated with “hard” sciences like Physics, Chemistry and medicine. It’s why new drugs have clinical trials. A model has to pass through stages including blind tests across random control groups to see if its predictions are not only accurate, but also support statistically significant levels of confidence. Predictive accuracy with 95 percent or more statistical confidence means the model is probably right. Less than 95 percent confidence means the model isn’t reliable enough. So how’d it do? Was Disruption Theory more than 25 percent accurate with at least 95 percent statistical confidence at picking winners? In the first round of tests, the only blind dataset I had at the time was barely big enough to meet minimum sample size requirements (it only had 48 companies). Still, it was enough to at least run some preliminary trials, and it’s worth noting Christensen wasn’t involved – I’d never met the man. Instead, I did my best to reduce his theory to falsifiable yes/no logic using published research. Even so, in the first round these relatively crude rules based on Disruption Theory blindly predicted if new businesses would survive or fail with 94 percent accuracy and over 99 percent statistical confidence. Holy crap. If business research had “Eureka” bathtub moments, this would be one of them. This early test was described in detail by a former co-author of Christensen’s named Michael Raynor in the book . These results alone satisfy the burden of proof demanded by Lepore’s article. The debate could end right there. But there’s more. My research started getting attention in and out of Intel. So while at Harvard one day I barged into Christensen’s office unannounced (he asked, confused, if I was there for a job interview). I introduced myself and summarized what I’d been working on. Months later I found myself living in Boston, leading joint research between Intel and Harvard to expand and improve these predictive models for new innovations. I was surprised to learn Christensen wasn’t the only guru whose theory hadn’t been tested. To my knowledge – brace yourself – business gurus in the fields of strategy or innovation had ever subjected their theories to the level of predictive testing we put Christensen’s work through (except for, partly, a little work by Eric Von Hippel at MIT in 1976 that, by oddball coincidence, made reminiscent discoveries to what Christensen and I found decades later). In business strategy and innovation departments, predictive testing simply isn’t the norm. Digest that for a moment. I applaud Lepore for calling out a popular business theory for lacking proof, but it’s no small irony that she targeted the one theory that’s been tested from hat to socks. Following the Intel-Harvard research I’ve continued to build predictive models as a data scientist, and more recently as a venture capitalist and head of research of an investment firm. In hindsight, the early Intel sampling cited in seems quaint compared with the subsequent work that’s followed. Nearly a decade later, highly refined versions of these Disruption-based models had produced more than 3,400 blind, real-world predictions about business survival or failure. These predictions informed more than $100 billion in organic growth, venture capital, stock trades and acquisition investments. When the models predicted survivors, they were right 66 percent of the time. When they predicted failures, they were right 88 percent of the time. Adding all survival and failure predictions together, the total gross accuracy was 84 percent. While lower at first glance than the 94 percent accuracy of the first early test at Intel, the models now account for robust combinations of industry, geography and temporality in ways early models didn’t. In each case, the predictions have sustained 99 percent levels of statistical confidence without a flinch. Science is a process, not an event, and last year the models took another leap forward. More sophisticated models yet – all based on Disruption Theory – continue to evolve, now involving more advanced algorithms and technologies. Taken together, the latest methodologies produced over 20,000 blind predictions (and counting). Not one but Disruption Theory-based models, each drawing from different data and underlying algorithms, continue to deliver 66 percent sustained accuracy with 99 percent statistical confidence. Put into perspective, the models have now made more predictions than all U.S. venture capital deals over the past five years combined, with a predictive accuracy more than 2.5X greater than the venture capital industry as a whole. A lot of people point to examples of when Disruption Theory, or Christensen, was wrong. It was wrong about the iPhone. Tesla. Ralph Lauren. In fact, it’s been wrong over 7,500 times by my count (remember it has a 33 percent error rate when predicting winners). Keep in mind, however, it’s 66 percent right while everything else is stuck at 25 percent. Improvement, not perfection, is the standard. Disruption isn’t the end-all-be-all of management thinking, but it’s a solid contribution to the field. The theory’s accuracy is also disproportionately higher for big financial wins, as opposed to small wins. I bring this up because some people look at exceptions like the iPhone, Tesla and Ralph Lauren and fret that the models somehow miss blockbusters. This too is a question of fact, not opinion, to which there’s been considerable analysis. The bigger a win, the greater the odds current Disruption-based models will catch it. I just used examples like the iPhone and Tesla because they’re well known. As if it weren’t enough, Disruption Theory has also proven highly replicable. It’s rules-based, not a fuzzy art form. More than 1,000 corporate managers and students at schools including Harvard and MIT have been tested both before, and after, specific training in Disruption Theory (over 8,000 observations). When asked to make blind predictions about the survival or failure of real (but disguised) businesses, test subjects with no training averaged 35 percent accuracy, whereas after being trained the average accuracy rose to 65 percent. This demonstrated that anyone following certain Disruption-based rules can achieve similar results — a hallmark of good science. Lepore’s article suggests the word “disruption” is over-hyped to the point of an empty rallying cry. She’s right. My research treats disruption as an extremely narrow, specific term of art, much as Christensen also takes great pains to articulate. Most people throw disruption around loosely, misstating, misunderstanding and misapplying it at the same time. I’d say at least half of the startup pitches I hear claim to be disruptive, but few of them are. Disruption Theory is like quantum mechanics in that, while anyone can read books about it, it takes a relatively high level of rigor and precision to accurately apply. It’s science, not art. As someone who understands disruption at a quantified level, I heard Lepore’s critique the way I’d probably sound if I read just one book on quantum physics, determined myself to be an expert (which I’m certainly not), and then called it all hogwash. Yet the article goes further. Entrepreneurs are called “ravenous hyenas,” investors are accused of having no conscience, innovation is blamed for the Holocaust, Hiroshima, genocide, global warming and both World Wars. That’s a stretch, to say the least. Innovation isn’t monolithic – the word is like “engineering” in that there are many flavors with different impacts on the world. Christensen writes about “sustaining” verses “disruptive” innovation, where sustaining innovation tends to deliver incremental growth, favor powerful incumbents, decrease access for those with fewer means and drive up costs. In contrast, disruptive innovation tends to create transformational growth, opportunity for underdogs, greater access for the less fortunate and lower costs. This is why, for many, disruptive innovation is a worthy goal. By no means does it inherently negate the conscience, loyalty or character of those who pursue it. I can’t help but notice another irony. Christensen has written two books arguing colleges and universities are beginning to face signs of disruption from online education, corporate and on-the-job training, and even YouTube (think Kahn Academy). For example, the University of Phoenix is now the largest college in the U.S. by enrollment, having over three times as many students as the second runner up (Pennsylvania State). Christensen says higher education faces a genuine threat – even at incumbent bastions like Harvard where he and Lepore work. However Christensen also predicts incumbents, when faced with disruption, overwhelmingly dismiss it, downplay its encroachment and resort to justifying their industry domination as a moral imperative. Lepore dismisses Christensen’s arguments about disruption in higher education. As support, rather than challenging the substance of Christensen’s case, Lepore takes a superficial, snarky stab at some of his examples and quickly migrates to another topic. The irony, however, is by offhandedly dismissing evidence that higher education may be facing serious disruption, Lepore – as part of the incumbency – is doing exactly what Disruption Theory would predict. This isn’t the first time Christensen’s theory has been challenged, and Lepore is correct to demand more predictive proof from business theories. There’s no shortage of hucksters, and bad business advice isn’t a victimless crime; especially for anyone whose life has been damaged by business collapse. It’s just a shame that when the article says “disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact,” it doesn’t seem to be aware of the relatively quiet, albeit massive, vetting that’s been done. Lepore could be right about Disruption Theory, but the odds are literally over 500,000 times greater that, as a matter of fact, she’s just plain wrong. |
Litecoin Slumps As Bitcoin Recovers Some Of Its Former Luster | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | During the height of the , Litecoin soared, late in the year. Since then, mostly tracking Bitcoin, Litecoin’s value has faded. Today, you can buy a Litecoin for just under $9. That cryptocurrencies are dealing with post-bubble excesses is hardly news. What’s more interesting is that Litecoin, which largely followed Bitcoin’s price fluctuations, has recently , failing to enjoy a price bump in recent weeks as Bitcoin itself found new legs. Using data, here’s the two cryptocurrencies’ price charts, superimposed over one another. Obviously, we discounted for scale, given that the price of Bitcoin has long outstripped that of Litecoin: So, as Bitcoin from its 2014 declines, Litecoin didn’t follow suit. A meme bouncing around the cryptocurrency world for some time said that Litecoin was silver to Bitcoin’s gold, given that more total Litecoin are in circulation now, and more will eventually be mined compared to Bitcoin’s hard 21 million coin cap. In fact, there are more Litecoin in the market now than there ever will be Bitcoin, but given that you can cut the cryptocurrencies into micro-pieces, it’s mostly a meaningless distinction. Why would Litecoin decouple from Bitcoin? Bitcoin has been, I think that it is safe to say, the most popular way to buy Litecoin. But Bitcoin’s recent rally wasn’t driven by small-consumer demand, data suggests, but by larger Bitcoin-per-transaction purchases that pushed its market value up quickly. Those same purchasing patters didn’t impact Litecoin, it seems, throwing the linkage between the two away. It remains an open question whether Bitcoin itself can become a that the average person will want to buy into the system, and transact their business using non-governmentally backed digital currencies. But if that’s a question for Bitcoin, it’s doubly so for Litecoin, which sports just over 10% of Bitcoin’s daily turnover (last 24 hours’ data). Bitcoin remains an interesting, and growing experiment, but I think it’s also important to keep scale in mind. This is my current-favorite Bitcoin chart: |
LinkedIn VP Of Product David Hahn Joins Greylock As Entrepreneur-In-Residence | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | Greylock Partners today , bringing longtime LinkedIn exec David Hahn onto the team. At the venture firm, Hahn will be focused on what’s happening in healthcare and education technology, with the long-term goal of entering one of those sectors. With the move, Hahn joins LinkedIn co-founder and Executive Chairman Reid Hoffman at Greylock. Hahn spent nearly a decade at LinkedIn, first joining as a junior product manager in 2005 and working his way up to VP of Product over the years. Along the way, he worked on a number of product initiatives, including some of the company’s early growth initiatives such as improving SEO around people’s names and streamlining its email invitation flows. Then in 2009, Hahn began to focus almost entirely on monetization of the LinkedIn product as it scaled that part of the business. Since then, Hahn has overseen all of the products related to monetization, which accounts for more than $1.5 billion in revenue. Over the past several years, many of Greylock’s EIRs have ended up either forming their own companies or joining the executive ranks of other major tech corporations. Meanwhile others have gone on to become partners at the firm. Hahn told me in a phone interview that he decided to join Greylock because he believes the time is right for real innovation to take place in the healthcare and education sectors, and he wanted to explore the possibility of entering one of those fields with his own company. “The EIR gig allows me to spend a majority of my time checking out these areas of interest, but without jumping in too quickly,” Hahn told me. |
Twitter Confirms Acquisition Of Mobile Ad Retargeting Startup TapCommerce | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | Twitter just announced that it’s acquiring mobile ad startup TapCommerce. about the acquisition earlier this afternoon, reporting that the deal price was $100 million. (Twitter declined to provide a price). TapCommerce helps mobile businesses retarget their ads, i.e., target ads based on previous user activity — something that’s become common for desktop web advertising but not really on mobile, due to the lack of cookies. (Co-founder and CEO TapCommerce is able to retarget using “large amounts of data coupled with sophisticated statistical analysis”) For example, an e-commerce app could use retargeted ads to convince a lapsed user to return, maybe by promoting new sales and promotions. It seems like TapCommerce’s technology could offer Twitter way to improve today. ( .) In , Twitter suggested that the acquisition was part of its broader strategy in mobile marketing, which it kicked off last year with . (Earlier this month, the company also announced .) In , the company said 80 percent of its ad revenue came from mobile. Richard Alfonsi, Twitter, vice president of global online sales, wrote abut the deal: Together with the TapCommerce team, Twitter will be able to offer mobile app marketers more robust capabilities for app re-engagement, tools and managed service solutions for real-time programmatic buying, and better measurement capabilities. Combined with our other ad solutions, advertisers will be able to drive conversions and ROI with mobile consumers on and off of Twitter, across the full user lifecycle — from acquiring new users through app installs, to engaging existing users who already have the advertisers’ apps on their device. And if you’re an everyday mobile user, we expect this will mean better and more relevant ads in the apps you use. When asked what made TapCommerce stand out, Alfonsi told me that he was impressed by TapCommerce’s focus on app reengagement, its support for programmatic ad-buying, and by its existing client list, which he said has significant overlap with Twitter’s. As the company’s name implies, its earliest advertisers came from the world of e-commerce, but Alfonsi said it now has gaming, travel, and lifestyle austomers as well. ( the deal will not affect the service it offers to those existing customers.) “People have been talking about [mobile retargeting] for a while, but I think it’s really starting to become real now,” Alfonsi said. He added that it’s “too early to say” when we might see TapCommerce technology used on Twitter (or on other apps that run MoPub advertising): “We’re still in the basic team integration stage, showing them the bathroom, those kinds of things, but we’re starting to think about the product roadmap and we’re excited about where this could go.” |
Irish Pub Only Accepts Job Applications Through Snapchat | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | At one pub in Ireland, applying for a staff position is actually a snap. Sober Lane, is only accepting applications through Snapchat, the app that allows users to send impermanent pictures and videos to their friends. The pub’s owner, Ernest Cantillon, tells me he has already received about 2,000 Snapchats since he started accepting them Friday morning. Cantillon said he had never heard of another company or restaurant using Snapchat like this. “We knew it would be popular, but we didn’t know it would be that popular,” Cantillon said. that it was beginning to accept applications at the Snapchat username SoberlaneD4 on June 26. “Make an impression if you want a profession,” the bar tweeted. Cantillion said the bar decided to use Snapchat for applications because it would allow them to find innovative, creative applicants and immediately see their personalities. “There’s so many bars in Dublin, and most are selling pretty similar products,” Cantillon said. “The only thing that’s really different is your staff.” Cantillon said among the best snaps were a video of a bartender making cocktails and a chef preparing lunch. He said some people also submitted videos of magic tricks or in costumes. Of the 2,000 people who applied via Snapchat, Cantillon says he will hire about 20. As of Monday, he had already interviewed about 15 candidates and hired six. He said using the app allowed him to evaluate candidates much more quickly but said some criticized the stunt for being more discriminatory than traditional application processes. Cantillon said too often traditional applications waste both applicants’ and employers’ time. He said he could learn everything he needs to from a Snapchat, which can either be a photo or a video lasting up to 10 seconds. “What I want to know is how many plates you can carry and if you can entertain a customer,” Cantillon said. “Those are all things you can get across in a Snapchat.” |
HODOR! | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | Stop. the. presses. , the that lets you send a “Yo” to your friends and nothing more, has a new rival. (Or perhaps a more appropriate word would be “parody.”) Introducing . As the name implies, this recently launched app offers a different spin on the Yo concept by letting you virtually shout “HODOR!” to your friends instead of Yo. How can you not download this? Hodor, people! It’s a “Game of Thrones” reference. Get with it! OK, fine. I’ll explain: Hodor, played by actor Kristian Nairn on HBO’s “Game of Thrones” TV series, is a large, but simple-minded servant who doesn’t really communicate except for shouting his own name, “Hodor.” So when there’s action to be had, and big guy has something to say, there’s a lot of “Hodoring” going around. The app, , is clearly meant just as a bit of fun by someone who may or may not think that Yo is some . The app was built by Tyler Hedrick, a former Facebook intern now working as an iOS developer at social blogging platform Medium. Hedrick teased his idea for Yo, Hodor well before its recent App Store release, joking on Twitter that “Hodoring is so much cooler than Yoing someone.” I wrote an app called Hodor because Hodoring someone is so much cooler than Yoing someone. — Tyler Hedrick (@tyler_hedrick) But at the time, the app was just a little project he had created for himself, not an official App Store download. Hedrick says he had some concerns that HBO or even Yo itself might sue. In fact, those concerns have not abated, which is why the App Store version no longer uses the photo of Hodor as the app’s icon – Hedrick doesn’t have rights to the photo. But that doesn’t mean Yo, Hodor is out of the woods, of course. “The sound clip I use for push notifications was taken from the show, so they technically own that, too,” he says. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but I assume they would give me a cease and desist before trying to sue me.” HBO, please don’t sue. Seriously. Hedrick says he began working on Hodor right after Yo blew up (around June 18th), and spent around 4 hours from start to finish building the app as an experiment to see how quickly he could reproduce what Yo had created. Yo, Hodor is built using the backend, just like Yo, which also helped to speed things up. After a few more tweaks, Hedrick released the app to his co-workers at Medium the following day. “Everyone thought it was hilarious, so I tweeted about it, which ended up getting quite a bit of attention. I submitted it to the App Store a few days later,” he says. Unfortunately, unlike Yo, the new Yo, Hodor doesn’t have a “find friends” function, so you have to add friends by name. That makes it a better fit for small groups of friends goofing around than anything serious. (Feel free to punish me for writing about Yo, Hodor by hodoring me at ). “A bunch of my friends have really been enjoying the app, and people at Medium have been pretty excited about it,” Hedrick adds. “People from school and college I haven’t talked to in a while keep hodoring me, which has been pretty hilarious.” So far, Hodor’s niche user base has sent over 10,000 hodors. Asked if he has some system for determining when to “Hodor” versus when to “Yo,” Hedrick says, actually, he no longer uses Yo at all. After , he removed the app, but when he later reinstalled Yo, he couldn’t log back in. “Now I just use Hodor instead,” he tells us. is pretty funny, you have to admit, unless you’re one of those people who goes apoplectic over any mention of the overly-hyped Yo. But it’s not the only Yo clone out there, as it turns out. Other Yo-like apps have also popped up since Yo emerged, including Android apps (and possible trademark violations) by Yo Labs, , , and others. Yo, Hodor is a . Enjoy it while it lasts because our days of Yo’ing may soon be behind us, it seems: : Hey, look who else had the Hodor idea! why hasn’t someone cloned the yo app but with hodor — Darrell Etherington (@drizzled) |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 9 | null |
Databricks Snags $33M In Series B And Debuts Cloud Platform For Processing Big Data | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | , the commercial entity created by the developers of the open source project, announced $33M in Series B funding today and the launch of a new cloud product, their first one as a company. There is little doubt that big data is a big deal these days and companies are popping up to help customers process the data. Databricks hopes to simplify the entire matter by moving it to the cloud to reduce management headaches, while speeding it up by using Apache Spark to drive the platform. First, let’s look at the funding, which is led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with a contribution from previous investor Andreessen Horowitz. It brings the total funding to date to $47M. The latest round gives the company a huge financial boost and CEO Ian Stoica says, they hope to increase the number of employees and expand rapidly. In addition to the funding, the company also announced a new cloud platform called Databricks Cloud that Stoica, says has been designed to simplify big data processing by bringing the process under one cloud umbrella. The cloud solution consists of three pieces: The Databricks Platform, Spark and the Databricks workspace. The idea behind the product, Stoica says, is to provide a single place to process data without having to worry about managing a Hadoop cluster to process your data. It’s all done in the cloud instead in a managed environment. After you add your data to a project, you can begin working with it immediately. The product has several core concepts starting with Notebooks, which provide a way to interact with the data and build graphs. As you discover ways of displaying your data, you can begin to build dashboards to monitor certain types of data. Finally, the platform includes a job launcher, which enables users to schedule Apache Spark jobs to run at certain times. The product has been designed to allow customers to access and plug in third-party Spark applications, so if they have additional requirements not available in the base Databricks platform, they can use existing third-party applications to take advantage of whatever those tools have to offer. The company believes that by providing a set of tools built in the cloud, they will remove much of the pain and complexity involved with a typical big data processing project where so much time is spent simply getting the right tool set in place before any work even gets done. Initially, Stoica told TechCrunch, the product will run on AWS, but they are looking to expand to Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure –and their large infusion of cash should help facilitate that. The company was born out of the Apache Spark project, which was originally developed by Stoica and colleagues from research at The University of California, Berkeley in 2009. He and his fellow researchers were looking for something that was faster than Hadoop and they developed Spark, which they open sourced in 2010. Stoica says that it’s faster for a number of reasons including that it requires less code to process the job and it runs entirely in-memory, rather than using disk reads, which can slow down the processing. While the company continues to support the open source project, last year as Spark was gaining traction, they decided to create a commercial entity on top of that and got $13.7M from Andreessen Horowitz to build the product and the company. Today marks their debut product. Stoica indicated the platform is available to a limited set of customers today, but they will be expanding that gradually in the coming months. |
Forget.me Puts Out Early Data On What Europeans Want To Vanish From Google | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | An online service called , to quickly capitalize on a from late May that requires Google to process requests by private individuals to de-index outdated or irrelevant personal information, has put out some early data on the kind of requests individual Europeans are submitting via its (for now) free service. Forget.me promises to hand-hold submitters through the process of asking Google to remove something about them, and keep them updated of the progress of their so-called ‘ ‘ (rtbf) request. You don’t have to use a third-party service — Google accepts requests directly ( ) but Forget.me claims it makes the process quicker and easier. It’s actually a business extension of another startup, , which works in the online reputation management space. Setting aside the irony of private individuals engaging a third-party company to take a very close interest in pieces of personal data they don’t want anyone else to know about (Forget.me’s privacy policy can be found in full ), the results make for interesting reading. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that Forget.me is getting by far and away the largest proportion of its traffic from the U.S. — even though the ECJ ruling applies only in Europe. Doh… Indeed, Google is not required to de-index any information on Google.com, only — in the cases of successful requests — on searches conducted via its local products within the European Union (and a handful of regional non-EU countries). However it’s not been entirely clear whether US citizens could request data about them be de-index by Google in Europe — which may explain some of the U.S. interest. Web traffic skewing to the US for certain keywords may also be part of the explanation. It’s also possible there is an appetite for removing personal information from Google in the US — especially given that Europeans now have an official channel to make requests. Forget.me’s FAQ notes that the European rtbf law only applies to those physically residing in Europe, so, presumably, a U.S.citizen temporarily residing in Europe could make a request under the law — although an EU citizen living in another part of the world could not. Forget.me said a third (33%) of its digital visitors in the first week of operation came from the U.S. The next largest single geographical group was France, with 7% of visitors (worth noting it is a French startup); followed by Germany and the U.K. (tied on 6% apiece). Here’s its full geographical breakdown: In total, since launching on June 24, Forget.me said its website has had more than 43,000 unique visitors, from 183 countries. While some 13,000 people registered on the site, which, at just under a third of total uniques, is not a bad registration rate. Of those who have registered, 1,106 have submitted right to be forgotten applications so far, requesting the removal of a total of 5,218 links. Forget.me has further broken down these early requests into some broad-brush categories — with the most popular motivation for a rtbf request being “invasion of privacy”, making up 28% of submissions. The next most popular category was “defamation and insult” (19%), according to Forget.me’s data. There is then a big drop to the next most popular category: “misused identity” (6%). The full list of categories also includes other currently even less popular categories, including criminal procedure, presumption of innocence and images. For the two most popular categories for rtbf requests, Forget.me provides a further breakdown. Within the invasion of privacy category the most popular reason for private individuals to request information about them be de-indexed from Google is the disclosure of their home address — making up around a fifth (22%) of these requests. This is followed (making up 18%) by negative opinions attached to an individual, such as if their name is mentioned on a forum critical of their workplace for example. In third place it’s redundancy (16%). The full breakdown of the invasion of privacy category is as follows: Forget.me has also provided more detail about the make up of the defamation and insult category — which shows that the largest motivator here (43%) is individuals worried about their name being erroneously attached to matters that are completely extraneous to them. In terms of which country is leading on rtbf requests at this early stage, the UK tops the chart, followed closely by France and then Germany. The top 10 countries for requests so far are listed in this table: Google professed itself shocked at the ECJ ruling late last month, although the related data protection legislation dates back to 1995. The reason for the sudden enforcement was a referral from a Spanish court when a private individual had requested information about a property foreclosure be removed from Google. The ECJ ruled that Google is a data controller — being as is orders and lists information — and should therefore be subject to the legislation. In the immediate aftermath of the court ruling, information about the sorts of early requests Google was receiving which carried the distinct scent of a controlled leak — being as pedophiles, dodgy politicians and bad doctors were identified as apparent rtbf requesters. Google then subsequently publicly revealed a breakdown of requests in an interview with the two weeks after the ruling. Then Google said 31% of requests it had received related to fraud/scam; 20% to arrests/convictions for violent or serious crime; 12% to child pornography arrests; 5% to government or the police; and 2% to celebrities. So, either the balance of requests has shifted around a month after the original ruling. Or the people using the Forget.me service are different to those making requests direct via Google. Or indeed both interested parties are spinning the data to their own ends. Let’s not forget that Forget.me is aiming to make money off this ruling, so has a vested interest in the new European world order here — even as Google continues to lobby hard against it. No one is without a wider economic agenda, except perhaps the private individuals submitting requests to Google — who just have their own individual and very personal agendas. [ by via ] |
CoreOS Raises $8M Series A Round, Launches Managed Linux As A Service | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 30 | a Linux distribution optimized for very large server deployments, today that it has a $8 million Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with follow-on investments by Sequoia Capital and Fuel Capital. This comes after a previous investment from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital last year. The company also today launched its first paid services. Like similar open source services, CoreOS’s distribution itself is available under an open source license, but the company plans to charge for some additional services that run on top of the operating system. Today’s launch of is a first step in this direction. “This is a big day for us. Not only are we announcing funding from one of the top Silicon Valley venture capital firms, we also have worked hard to deliver Managed Linux” said Alex Polvi, founder and CEO of . “Businesses today can begin to think of as an extension of their OS team, and for enterprise Linux customers this is the last migration they will ever need.” Businesses pay $100 per month if they want CoreOS to manage up to 10 servers. For this, they get automatic patches and updates plus limited support. For businesses with larger deployments, the company now also offers a premium plan that includes phone, chat and email supports, as well as the ability to use the company’s service for managing rolling updates behind a firewall. It’s worth noting that once you pass the 10-server limit for the cheapest plans, prices quickly rise and getting a support plan for 50 CoreOS servers will set you back $2,100 per month for a basic plan and $6,600 for the premium subscription. CoreOS definitely has a bit of momentum going for it right now. Google recently started on its Compute Engine platform, for example, and there are also images for Rackspace and Amazon. It probably doesn’t hurt the service that is has made support for the increasingly popular platform for running distributed applications a of its operating system. Unlike regular distributions, CoreOS doesn’t ship with a package manager — everything you want to run has to run in a Docker container. Docker is pretty hot right now, so it’s probably no surprise that companies operating in its ecosystem are also getting quite a bit of interest from venture capital firms. |
Apple’s Maps Are Still Lost | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 6 | 8 | Apple, during WWDC last week, delivered some significant updates across various parts of its business. It released, among other things, some (and a new ) to developers; a renewed, more aggressive effort in ; and some changes across its mobile and desktop operating systems to make them a with the primary way that we use our computing devices these days — to go online and interact with other services. But one area of Apple’s business was nearly nowhere to be found at the main event: Maps. I write “nearly” because it was not an event without mentions of Maps — Apple gave a quick line to the news that it now offers and other improvements in China. And there is a in iOS 8 that will give venue owners the ability to add more indoor positioning data. But from what we understand this was far from what Apple had intended. “There were multiple improvements that didn’t make it into iOS8,” a source tells us. Two years after , Apple is still trying to work out its killer Maps app. Apple never reveals its plans ahead of announcing them, but a fairly detailed report published prior to the conference from laid out what it claimed was Apple’s map news. Key changes included enhanced, “more reliable” data; more points of interest and better labels to make certain locations like airports, highways and parks easier to find; a cleaner maps interface; and public transit directions — that is, providing people with data about nearby buses, subways and trains. Further ahead, the report noted plans to integrate augmented reality features to give people images of what was nearby. Why didn’t they appear? One tipster says it was a personnel issue: “Many developers left the company, no map improvements planned for iOS 8 release were finished in time. Mostly it was failure of project managers and engineering project managers, tasks were very badly planned, developers had to switch multiple times from project to project.” It’s a take that is both contested and corroborated by our other source. “I would say that planning, project management and internal politics issues were a much more significant contributor to the failure to complete projects than developers leaving the group,” the source said. Maps have been a sensitive area in Apple’s software business. It was at the 2012 WWDC that Apple unveiled a new version of its Maps app — a bold move from Apple to cut mighty (and mighty reliable) Google Maps out of the equation by developing its own mapping data. It turned out to be a disastrous move for the company, one of the rare examples of not delivering a stellar mobile service to the masses. Patchy and unreliable data produced and bewildered users, and eventually prompted an from CEO Tim Cook with the promise that things would get better. If Apple taking ownership of this was a message to the market that it could and would do the job as well as, say, Google, then Maps was not proving that Apple could do this — not yet, at least. Given that Apple appears to be taking similar steps to bring search closer to its core business, now there will be two areas to watch to see how Apple evolves. In the last two years, Apple has been on the move to pick up more talent to fill out its navigation and mapping ranks and set things aright. In 2013, were in location data. It’s acquired companies like , , (these last two specifically focused on transit information) and just last week social search engine for places . And it continues to look to . Of course Apple isn’t working amidst a standstill in the market. On the consumer front, Google has launched and continues to enhance a great , and others like are pushing hard to position themselves as the most open and developer-friendly of all mapping data providers. And that’s before considering companies like Nokia. Now divested of its handset business, the Finnish company appears to be going all-in on what’s left behind, which includes its substantial mapping and navigation business. But competitive forces, and the hiccups and delays around last week’s WWDC, won’t stop Cupertino anytime soon. Maps are important to Apple because, just as search has been at the heart of how people find their way around the internet, maps are the key to how many people use their smartphones. Location data subsequently has become one way that companies creating apps and other services for smartphones may potentially monetise them. During WWDC Apple noted that there are no less than 680,000 apps in the App Store that use location data — apps covering areas like social, gaming, fitness, shopping, travel and (yes) navigation. |
With iOS 8, Apple Stands Ready To Ramp Up Consumer Purchasing Power | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 8 | Apple’s various additions to iOS 8 mean we’re going to see a big shift come September, in terms of what’s available to both consumers and developers, but the group that should be most excited might be marketers and others trying to get users buying things on and with their devices. A few of the new features in iOS 8 make it much easier to shop on and with your iPhone, and since Apple already has a mobile user base that’s shown its willingness to spend, that’s very big news. One such feature was uncovered through the beta late last week: with iOS 8, the to automatically populate credit card information fields in Safari. That means no more arduous copying out of your card number, cardholder name and expiration date every time you want to complete a transaction online – instead it’s a single-click thanks to optical character recognition, and it works automatically with existing web forms, so there’s no work required on the part of web devs. That’s only one of the new features that could lead to increased ecommerce activity on iOS 8-powered devices; previously, we saw how . And Continuity can play a big role in helping purchases take place online, too – Handoff lets a user move from doing something on their phone to completing it on the desktop, and vice versa, and that includes a browsing session. You can easily imagine how that might work with shopping online, as a user browses on their device and then moves to the web to do more in-depth research, or shifts back to the iPhone to take advantage of credit card scanning to complete the check-out. Apple has a lot more going on in iOS 8 besides these changes, but they make it just that much easier for those trying to use mobile devices to encourage sales and commerce activity. It’s still unclear what, if any kind of mobile commerce push Apple will make itself – we’ve heard rumors about iTunes becoming a platform for much broader types of payments for a while now – but in the meantime, it’s clear it still wants to be the best mobile platform for those looking to drive pay-based engagement. |
Logistics Company aCommerce Raises $10.7M Series A To Serve Southeast Asia’s Booming E-Commerce Market | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 8 | , a regional end-to-end e-commerce logistics and service provider for Southeast Asia, has closed a Series A funding round of $10.7 million. According to the company, this is the largest Series A for a Thailand-based startup and one of the largest Series A rounds in Southeast Asia to date. The funding was organized by founding investor Ardent Capital, and led by Inspire Ventures, a Bangkok-based firm, with participation from NTT DOCOMO; Sumitomo Corporation Equity Asia Limited; Sinar Mas Indonesia; Asia Pacific Digital; Cyberagent Ventures; and JL Capital, as well as angel investors and executive staff. Paul Srivorakul, regional CEO of aCommerce, explains logistics in Southeast Asia is challenging for vendors because the market is extremely diverse with multiple distribution channels. Low credit card penetration also means customers in up to 90 percent of local markets prefer cash-on-delivery payments. “Southeast Asia is made up of many different countries, laws, languages, currencies, and complicated geographically, like the Philippines and Indonesia islands. We make it easy for brands and retailers to sell online by providing ‘turnkey’ end-to-end e-commerce services and products across the region, from customs, web development, and digital marketing to local language customer service support, payments, fulfillment, and collection-on-delivery,” he says. “We also help brands acquire and manage the end customer and provide them with deep data/analytics across the entire customer experience and touch point, i.e. tracking everything from content/marketing all the way to packing orders and collecting payment/delivery.” Founded in June 2013, aCommerce has four offices with fulfillment centers and over 250 employees in Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. Their Series A will enable aCommerce to expand its logistics infrastructure, delivery fleet, technology platform, and channel management in each of its current markets and seek partnerships with other logistics and e-commerce companies. aCommerce will also invest in customs clearance, FDA certification, and local business operating licenses for international companies that want to break into the Southeast Asia market. The company already provides services for brands like cosmetics conglomerate L’Oreal, HP, Line Chat and Groupon. Srivorakul compares Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market to China back in 2010, “which means the market is about to explode.” Despite Internet penetration of about 25 percent in Southeast Asia and mobile penetration as high as 40 percent in certain markets, e-commerce is still less than 1 percent of the total retail market, he says, while advertising is roughly 3 percent of total ad spending, or $18 billion across the Southeast Asia region. The Southeast Asian e-commerce market was worth about $4.5 billion in 2014 and will grow to about $6 billion in 2015, Srivorakul says. Alibaba recently in Singpost, which was formerly the state postal service for Singapore, but has recently repositioned itself as a profit-generating entity with a logistics network that extends across Southeast Asia. Singpost competes with aCommerce in terms of order fulfillment and delivery, but aCommerce differentiates with services like channel management and Popshop, a platform that sends brands’ products to first- or third-party websites, apps and marketplaces. It also offers cash-on-delivery in markets that Singpost doesn’t or has low penetration in, like Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, Srivorakul says. “Singpost has always had more capital than us (i.e. a market cap of $3 billion) so them raising more money isn’t going to change much. It’s all about execution and we think we have the advantage because of our passion, local experience, tech, local teams, and head start.” Additional competitors include delivery services like DHL. On the other hand, aCommerce see e-commerce companies with their own logistics networks, like Rocket Internet’s Lazada, as a “channel management partner to feed and manage our clients’ brands and products in their Marketplace.” “I think the market is too small to really take any competitor too seriously because I think it’s still early and we need to work with everyone to grow the market as a whole rather than undercut each other for a small share,” he adds. Part of the funding will be used to “reinvent the last-mile customer experience for receiving a package and choosing their preferred payment at their doorstep. Srivorakul says this means aCommerce’s “delivery fleet will function as an extension of our customer service, and they will be equipped with smartphones with our software that is connected to our cloud platform to plan their delivery routes, get help from our dispatcher, communicate with the end customer, process cash or credit card payments, and handle questions, returns, or complaints at the door. We have to scale up with technology and physical staff until credit card penetration increases and customers are more comfortable with online transactions in our markets.” In a statement, Tom Kim, partner and co-founder of Inspire Ventures, said “In just one year, aCommerce has built a stacked team of players from Amazon, Walmart, DHL, eBay, Apple, Oracle, McKinsey, Microsoft, and Rocket Internet and expanded into four robust Southeast Asian markets. With their global experience and local expertise, we are confident in this team’s ability to execute and become the dominant e-commerce solutions provider in the region. E-commerce is growing rapidly, and these guys are well positioned to capitalize on this disruptive global trend.” |
Let’s Talk About Sex Baby, Because The Internet | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 8 | Lucky for me the talk about the ‘birds and the bees’ consisted of my parents popping in Nova’s “The Miracle of Life” into our VCR and that was that. But this was long before the World Wide Web and kids had easy access to internet porn. A of thousands of parents showed that over 80% of them blamed the internet for teaching their kids about sexuality before they did. Most parents are now talking to their kids at an average of around age 10 about sex and relationships before the internet does, according to the survey. That’s a full five years younger than the previous generation. Nearly half of all parents report never even having had the sex talk with their own parents when they were growing up. Porn was the most uncomfortable topic parents reported talking about with their young ones. Concerns over easy access to inappropriate material on the internet, TV and apps such as Snapchat made parents feel the need to bring that subject up at an earlier age than ever. According to , kids ages 8-18 spend a whopping 7.5 hours a day viewing online media and television content. This means they’re spending more time getting info from their screens than from their parents and teachers. Even if parents place rules on screen time, the kids can still view content at a friends house, from apps on their smartphone or by some other means. More than half of children also reported disobeying their parents rules on internet usage. So as reluctant as parents are to talk about sex, 8 in 10 feel they must. Of course, for every uncomfortable subject in “the talk” there’s now an app for that. The iPad app helps parents navigate that often awkward first approach about how babies are made. And just as fast as kids can Google any sexy word, parents can look up “how to talk to your kid about sex.” , a site created by Futures Without Violence and the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women also helps kids understand healthy sexual and relationship boundaries. It’s not necessarily a bad idea to bring up the subject before the kids start sexting, either. MTV’s It’s Your Sex Life hosts a “ ” party to…I guess…make it fun for teens to understand that sex has consequences beyond just the garbage that is “16 and Pregnant.” Speaking of teen pregnancy, that’s actually at , thanks to more sex education and access to free condoms. Even those opposed to abortions can thank more sex talk for less of that. are at historically low rates as well, thanks to earlier and more thorough sex education about how to prevent pregnancy — including discussion of, easy access to and normalizing use of “the pill.” It’s not clear what the consequences are psychologically for talking to kids about sex at a younger age, but what is for sure is that they are curious, asking about sex and looking for answers. Better to get it from the source who brought them into this world than from from some of the seriously messed up stuff they come across online. |
Facebook’s Dan Levy On Small Biz Outreach — And How He Became A Homeowner Thanks To FB Ads | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 8 | Facebook just began a series of small business-focused local events, and at Tuesday’s kickoff in New York, I had a chance to speak to the company’s director of small business Dan Levy. Levy had just that announced that , so our conversation was a chance to get more details on Facebook’s efforts in this area. One of the key things that businesses need to understand, he said, was that, “If you know how to use Facebook as a person, you can use it as a business.” In addition, I got to ask him about one of the anecdotes that he’d shared on-stage — that he actually found his first house thanks to a Facebook ad (and he later ran Facebook ads to sell it). One topic that I didn’t bring up was . Levy had actually , when he said that Facebook is focused on doing “what’s right for the people on Facebook.” |
#Love: Meeting My Real-Life Husband In Virtual Vegas | Contributor | 2,014 | 6 | 8 | Tinder, Match.com, Plenty of Fish, OKCupid. With dozens of Internet dating sites available today, it seems that much of the younger generation is comfortable with the concept of meeting their significant others online. But as a divorcée and mother of two, the idea of going online to meet anyone (especially my future husband) was a foreign concept. But when my two daughters came to me wanting to sign up for , a virtual world social network designed for teens, it was part of my motherly instinct to also join and check out the site. I wanted to make sure that it was a safe environment to play and used it as an opportunity to spend more time with them. After five years in ourWorld, I was given the opportunity to become a beta tester for a new, more adult-oriented site – – and found it easy to make the leap to the new platform. Where ourWorld has puzzle-style mini-games, Vegas World has slots, bingo, and poker – all the typical casino-style games you’d find in real-world Vegas but in virtual world format. At first, most people come for the games but stick around to hang out and chat with other users in Vegas World’s virtual night clubs, pools, and hotel suites. I would definitely categorize myself as “most people” in this respect. I’ve always been a casual gamer, but was new to developing and maintaining online relationships outside of what I shared with my daughters in ourWorld. Basically, my expectations were pretty low – generally not interested in much more than playing slots and poker. When I first started chatting with other users, I was pretty over protective about what I shared and who I connected with – being online you never truly know who’s on the other side. Who were these people? And what were their intentions for being on the site? So I quickly learned not to open myself up too much and avoided conversation much more than small talk. The more I spent time in the game, though, the more I truly connected with people. I learned how to differentiate the genuine people from the manipulators and I began enjoying my conversations with other users; we had fun playing games together and sharing funny stories. As time went on, a few of those relationships turned into friendships and I found myself getting anxious to log in at certain times when I knew my new friends would also be online. Many of us live in different time zones, so I even found myself setting an alarm for early hours just to get a chance to play and talk with them. Before I knew it, I had a solid group of friends (just a handful of them) that I depended on and them me. To be online at certain times. To be open and trustworthy. To be helpful and lean on each other for advice on life, family, and love. And these friendships became just as real as they would be outside of Vegas World. In many cases, these bonds were stronger than my friends in the “real world.” I was content with both my online and offline life. In person, Shane isn’t the typical guy I would go for. The fact that he lived in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., (nearly 700 miles and a whole world apart) meant that it was highly unlikely that our paths would have crossed in our everyday lives. In Vegas World, however, I had the opportunity to not only meet Shane, but get to know him as a friend without the pressure of dating. Shane originally came to Vegas World to play slots and poker. He generally enjoys playing casino-style online games and ran across Vegas World after seeing an ad on Yahoo. Like myself, he didn’t expect to become a part of the Vegas World community, but one day he noticed the \*club\* icon and found that you can chat with other users in social environments outside of the traditional casino games. He made friends quickly – getting invited to suite parties, mingling and sharing charms (in the form of virtual drinks) with other users, and generally being the funniest guy in the room. We ended up at several of the same parties before officially meeting; I’d typically stick with my core group of friends and he’d bring a virtual date. It’s actually pretty popular in Vegas World for people to bring dates to parties, have relationships, and consider someone in the game their boyfriend or girlfriend – whether people are sharing their “hearts” signifying that they are in a relationship or exchanging rings signifying marriage. A number of our friends maintain these in-game relationships, but most keep them in Vegas World. When I first met Shane, we had an instant connection. We’re both divorced with two children, so Shane and I share a lot of the same challenges and views on life. Before I knew it, he was rushing home from work to jump online while I would watch the clock until the stroke of midnight, waiting to log in until I knew he’d be home. As time went on, we were what you would call best of friends. We leaned on each other for advice, direction, motivation… Pretty much everything, big or small. The chemistry was obvious to both of us, but the potential for a future relationship was apparently only obvious to him. Perhaps being behind the computer screen allowed him to be more open with his feelings for me; perhaps the screen is what made me more averse to the potential of starting a romantic relationship with him. Whatever the case, it took Shane asking me to attend a party with him a number of times before I agreed to be his “date.” The easiest transition our relationship had was taking our frequent conversations outside of Vegas World. When I tell my story, many people ask how it was so easy to give my information out to a “stranger.” I compare it to meeting a friend-of-a-friend at a party. How did you begin to date your significant other? Did you really know them when you first shared your phone number? Or add them on Facebook? The answer is typically no. Like life, there are no guarantees with the relationships you form on the internet. Yes, I hadn’t met Shane in person, but I had vetted him in the same way I would have in real life – checking on his “references” through friends, getting a feeling for the types of women he’s dated previously, but mostly going with my gut feeling. In contrast, the most difficult transition was taking our relationship to a level beyond friendship. In person, early on you can rely on physical cues and connection to determine where the other person is at. Having our foundation based on online communication, the only thing you have to rely on is the other person’s written word. Add in the fact that I have two children that I have to consider in all of my decisions (romantic and otherwise), I wanted to be safe and mature about the feelings I was having. Technology is what really allowed our relationship to blossom – constant phone calls, Skype video chats, communicating on Xbox Live. The phone calls got more frequent and our feelings got stronger; speaking every morning and every evening to say good night. It slowly became clear just how much we really cared for each other. We became just like any other long distance couple. Shane’s sense of humor is one of my favorite things about him, so when the conversations began to center around marriage, it was instantly a joke between the two of of us. But the more you joke about something like marriage, the more you realize how true you’d like the thought to be. I can’t count how many time we’d sent ‘kisses’ to each other or said ‘I love you’ up until that point, but moving from words to actions – if only in Vegas World – is a different story. _“I would marry you in a second if we were together in real life… I’d marry you off the game as well as on the game if you’d let me.”_ _“Yes, I would marry you tomorrow if you would let me.”_ And that’s how it went. We were engaged. After more than a year of knowing each other on Vegas World and as quickly as we became best friends, we began the journey to taking a trip down the virtual aisle. We both couldn’t believe it at first, but the more we let it sink in, the more excited we got. The engagement was for a wedding in Vegas World, but when Shane surprised me with the opportunity to marry him in the game, I had tears in my eyes in real life. I think that’s when it really set in for me, how moved I was by the thought of our future together. We planned our wedding in Vegas World, the virtual wedding bells rang in the game’s chapel and we exchanged vows in front of our in-game friends. The emotional side of the relationship had evolved so far that once we finally met, the physical side followed very naturally. Two months after our Vegas World wedding, I planned my first trip to see Shane in Tennessee. At that point, he had already asked my daughters for my hand in marriage and we were planning on tying the knot — in real life — while I was there. Looking back, I think Shane was actually more nervous than I was. When we first saw each other, he instantly began crying and shaking. He had expressed doubts about taking things to the next level, unsure if the distance for the entirety of our relationship would bring up unforeseen issues. But normalcy set in quickly. Just a few short hours into my visit our interactions became an extension of the online life we had built. One that we couldn’t imagine without each other and knew that was supposed to be part of our story. It’s a surreal feeling seeing the person that, on the one hand, you know so well – that you’ve related to for so long, had pictures of, video conversations with, and truly grew to love – but on the other you’re meeting for the very first time. How different it was to actually be able to hold and touch them, and yet the same because you knew this was the person you were supposed to be with. It was less like you would imagine meeting someone for the first time ever and more like seeing your partner for the first time after being separated for a while. And then like it was no big deal. We took the plunge (or rather flight) to marriage. Shane has a major fear of flying, yet wanted the moment to be memorable for a lifetime. So just two days into my Tennessee trip, we were taking a helicopter ride over the Smoky Mountains. Once we were at the very highest point, we said our vows. Despite Shane being so terrified in that moment, he embraced the opportunity as we stared into each other’s souls and shared our true feelings. Let’s just say we spent the rest of my two weeks in Tennessee in the honeymoon phase. One of the major factors that I think separates us from other couples in similar situations and really allowed our relationship to grow was how supportive our families were. Especially being single parents, it was critical for us to really integrate our family into our lives with each other before making any decisions and moving beyond our long-distance relationship. Despite never having met in person, the people in our lives (both family and friends) saw how happy we were and chose to support us through the process. While my Dad was apprehensive, like any father would and should be, he wanted me to find a loving partner. My kids had mixed feelings – my oldest was open to getting to know Shane more, spending time communicating with him over Xbox, while my youngest was apprehensive to the idea. As teenagers, they understood why I wanted to pursue the relationship with Shane but didn’t necessarily understand the way that I got to that point with him. Bonding was also more difficult between them given the busy lives of teenagers. Shane’s family was also supportive from the get-go. They embraced the relationship and made the effort to get to know me, calling every day and making me feel loved and as a valuable member of their family. Shane’s children are younger, and were therefore far more open to my role as a stepmother. Meeting them for the first time was like meeting Shane for the first time – I was meant to be a part of their family. The only negativity either of us really received was from Shane’s co-workers. He received a lot of flak for our relationship. Everywhere he turned someone was saying how crazy he was for considering a future with someone he never met. As much as the pessimism planted seeds of doubt, going home to a supportive family dashed them. After seeing how happy we were together, their doubts faded to feelings of foolishness for what they put him through. But I do believe that people gravitate toward types of circumstances or groups of people that they’re meant to be a part of. Obviously Shane and I had a lot in common, but we also had coming to Vegas World as a key connection. Both of us enjoyed the types of relationships we developed through the site. We needed that buffer, a setting that didn’t pressure us to date or move faster than we were comfortable. One where we could enjoy each other’s company, play games together and genuinely experience each other without needing to constantly think about what was next in our relationship. One where our avatars’ could provide a sense of security until we were ready to reveal our true selves. I’ve recently found out I’m actually part of a much larger group of couples than I imagined, with one-third of all of today’s marriages beginning online and . I’m not the kind of person that is comfortable being a part of a dating site. I would never have set up a profile in the hopes of meeting my soul mate. I only recently learned what Tinder is. The fact that I did find my husband online is still amazing to me, but I am forever grateful for the opportunity the Internet has given me to meet the love of my life. It may be cliché, but as the saying goes – when you know, you know. So whether you’re happy meeting your potential spouse going about your daily life, have been searching for a boyfriend or girlfriend on your iPhone, or you meet in a more non-traditional place like Shane and I – what it comes down to is that love is love and it shouldn’t be dependent on where you meet the person to dictate your future relationship. |
Picfair Raises $520K To Take On Getty With An Image Marketplace | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 6 | 8 | Sites like and have taken the practice of sharing pictures and turning them into viral memes into something of an . But on the paid, professional side of the equation — when pictures are used for commercial purposes — there has been relatively little evolution. Now, just as music has seen a rush of companies emerging that are finding legitimate (but still popular) ways of making money from digital music, startups are cropping up that are looking to create more frictionless, and more financially-rewarding, ways for photographers to collect royalties on their work. One of these, London-based , is today announcing a seed round of $520,000. The funding — which will be used to build out more features in the image marketplace — comes from a number of angel investors, including Alexis Ohanian, a partner at Y-Combinator and one of the co-founders of Reddit, in what is his first investment in a non-US startup. Other investors in the round include design director Tom Hulme, and Duncan & Max Jennings, the founders of . Picfair’s emergence comes at an interesting time for the digital content business. The rise of citizen journalism, fuelled by ordinary people equipped with smartphones and then posting to social media sites like Twitter and Instagram, has seen a rush of amazing content being created and disseminated, sometimes exclusive and more unique than what professionals have been able to produce — something that media giants like and have tried to capture with their own citizen journalism investments. At the same time, there are a number of photo agencies, like Getty Images and Alamy, that provide a place for photographers to post and sell work for commercial organisations to use online. But many of these agencies typically take a large cut of the fees that they charge for usage — with photographers, at best, getting only around 50% of the charge but more commonly less than 20%, Lanyado told me. It leaves a big gap for new players to come in and do something different on a few different fronts: tapping into the long tail of photographers out there already snapping and posting pictures; appealing to professionals looking for quick and possibly better profits on their work; and in general for buyers an easier way of buying pictures with less guilt, because you know you’re giving a better cut to the creators of the images. Picfair’s marketplace model is very simple: when a picture that you post to the site gets bought, Picfair takes a 20% commission on top of whatever fee you set for the work. The pictures themselves are organised by themes, and have behind them an algorithm that tracks what kinds of images are being shared across the web to moderate what might be most popular in the Picfair database itself. Picfair, indeed, is a double-entendre, playing on two definitions of “fair”: a bazaar where people can browse and shop for pictures; and an honest deal. It’s not the only one going after this space of course: , the Berlin-based startup that has a double purpose of existing as a photo-sharing app as well as a place to sell pictures, recently for select photos from the app to be syndicated to the much larger photo agency site — giving photographers potentially much larger exposure (pun intended) than they may have had on EyeEm alone. That’s a sign not just of how there are other startups in this space, but also of how larger fish continue to move in to make sure no upstarts eat their lunch. But Benji Lanyado, the founder of Picfair, believes that what Picfair offers is still better, based simply on how easy it is to sell on his site and the pricing structure, which sees Picfair take only a 20% cut and encourages much more purchasing of an image because of the generally lower pricing. What’s interesting also about Picfair is the backstory behind the startup. Lanyado himself started out as a journalist, writing for places like the New York Times and Guardian. He says one of his proudest achievements on that front was writing the first big story about Airbnb in the NYT — a clipping that the startup, now valued at around $10 billion, has hung up at its office. Interestingly, he says that Airbnb was part of the inspiration behind Picfair: he says he liked Airbnb’s idea of a frictionless marketplace upsetting something that was a pain-point (finding cheap, homey, unique or local feeling places to stay in cities) before it came along. Lanyado learned to code at General Assembly, and one of his first projects when he started to play around was something called — a Reddit interface that made looking at the links across different subreddits a little easier by organising them into colored columns and in a tile-style interface. This turned out to be a fortunate first project as it made it a little easier for Lanyado to subsequently approach Ohanian, who had heard of and praised Reddit Edit. Up to last week, Picfair was essentially a one-man band (the journey behind its bootstrapping can be found ), all the more impressive considering that it has seen some 40,000 images from 50 countries uploaded since opening for business in August 2013. Now with some seed funding in place, Lanyado has hired four people to help code the site, work on business development and so on. Going forward, he says that there will be further enhancements made to the Picfair platform to make the pricing even more dynamic and automatic: users will be given recommendations for pricing, and when the picture begins to buzz — based on a combination of traffic and actual purchasing — the option to automatically modify the fee, applying the concept of surge pricing to the world of picture licensing. Image: Jason Kessenich, Picfair.com |
Now Anyone Can Tweet Up A Storm With Dave Winer’s ‘Little Pork Chop’ | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 8 | Tweetstorms. … and yet, they don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Ever since entrepreneur-turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen joined Twitter and began sharing his thoughts in long, multi-Tweet segments, we’ve seen a proliferation of these so-called “tweetstorms” cropping up every few days. A small but influential group of Twitterers that have followed Andreessen’s example — including a few members of his firm, Andreessen Horowitz — and forsaken the usual blog post for the more immediate gratification of sharing their thoughts by grouping together a big collection of stream-of-consciousness Tweets. But if you’ve ever tried to put together a tweetstorm yourself, you’d find the process can actually be a lot of work. That’s especially true if you thread those tweets together by replying to one after the other and (presumably) deleting the @mention of your own Twitter screen name. Anyway, if you’re going to participate in the horrible activity that is tweetstorming, there’s now a better way. Now everyone can tweet like — Michael Arrington (@arrington) Long-time Internet resident and developer has he calls “ ” that allows users to compose an entire tweetstorm which will be automatically sent out to all their followers. Once you’ve given it access to your Twitter account, Little Pork Chop enables you to draft out your thoughts and automatically separates them into new tweets based on the character count. Or, you can separate them yourself with a carriage return. It numbers and threads tweets together, and in its latest release even supports the ability to publish in reverse order so that a anyone who goes to your Twitter page will be able to understand them without reading chronologically backwards. So yeah… use it wisely. |
AT&T Is Offering $50K To Engineers To Make New York City Safer For Pedestrians | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | While smartphones make a whole lot of things in our lives easier, the instant access to information and constant notifications about what our friends are up to tends to be rather distracting as we go about our day. AT&T thinks that tendency might be contributing to an unfortunate statistic: in New York City, 14,845 crashes between cars and pedestrians were recorded in 2013, a 35% increase from 2012. In an effort to stymie that trend, AT&T and are announcing the , a three-month-long competition aimed at designers and software and hardware engineers. Entrants to the challenge are tasked with “[re-imagining] software and hardware technology to keep pedestrians in NYC safe and alert while remaining connected on their smartphones.” On a phone call, AT&T New York president Marissa Shorenstein pointed to the as an indicator of the kind of applications the company would like to see come out of the challenge. Available on Android, the app can tell when a smartphone user is driving and automatically respond to incoming texts with a custom auto-reply message. For those interested in entering AT&T’s competition, there are two categories for which prizes will be awarded: solutions for pedestrians and cyclists, and those for drivers apps that encourage safer behavior among both groups. Two additional prizes will also be awarded to projects that encourage safer behavior among both groups. Here’s the breakdown of how AT&T plans to distribute the $50,000 to the challenge’s winners: Pedestrians & Cyclists — Grand Prize $15,000 Pedestrians & Cyclists — Second Prize $5,000 Pedestrians & Cyclists — Popular Choice $2,500 Drivers — Grand Prize $10,000 Drivers — Second Prize $5,000 Drivers — Popular Choice $2,500 Multi-Modal Connections (2 prizes) — $5,000 each |
Windows 8.1 Scoots Past Windows 8’s Market Share | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | Windows 8.1 has finally bested its predecessor, with its market share edging higher than Windows 8’s in May, according to . In May, Windows 8.1 ended with 6.35% global desktop market share, while Windows 8 managed a slimmer 6.29%. As , that’s an aggregate gain of 0.40% for Microsoft’s new Windows 8.x platform. Here’s a plus, and a minus: While Windows XP’s market share fell over 1% in the month to 25.27%, Windows 7 saw is market share skip past the 50% line. So, it seems that large companies are moving from Windows XP to Windows 7, a shift that , is material. That’s good, in a way for Microsoft, as it implies sales of Windows 7 to large clients, but the final, month-ending Windows XP market share is still far, far too high: 25.27%. As TechCrunch has , lingering Windows XP market share is troubling not only for those left on the ancient operating system, but also for the larger computing community — the more unsafe PCs that are out there, the more malignant forces have to exploit to our larger detriment. Larger tallies: Windows as a whole picked up 0.19% in the month, to 90.99%, and Apple OS X lost 0.23%, to 7.39%. Microsoft’s share of the PC market that uses its new Windows 8.x operating system is growing, but not over-quick. Still, with a combined market share of nearly 13%, Microsoft may be able to accelerate use of the Windows Store, and drive more downloads to entice a larger active developer cadre. |
Why Does “Just Add Gameplay” Endure? | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | I could hear the sound of academics rolling their eyes from three states away. This in response to an article that appeared on VentureBeat about a . In short, attempts to gamify education through the use of roleplaying game mechanics. Students have characters, they level up based on things done in the classroom, and this activity increases their interest (because videogames) leading to a more engaged class. Using gaming in this way is not a novel idea, nor is the criticism that such approaches are behaviorist. You can teach facts and figures with the prospect of reward bananas, experts invariably say, but at the cost of reasoning skills. The kids might learn how to game the game, but whatevs. As tells it, the more extrinsic rewards are attached to problems, the less creative students become. And yet, in everything from “games for brands” through to “games for change” the same essential idea pops up again and again. “All you have to do to increase engagement is just add gameplay” has a surprising magnetism. Countless projects over the years have attempted to square the circle of trying to impart something to an audience via some form of game or . I mean stuff like: They all sound great in story form, but the actual hit rate for this type of use of gameplay is nearly zero. At best what tends to emerge from this whole sector is a set anecdotal examples or fragments of data that maybe might sorta kinda point the way, but then retreats. Obvious problems tend to exist in execution (the studio making the game doesn’t know how to make good software) and/or dissonance (the play of the game has little to do with the intended goal). They end up making a “game” that blares a message or a game that is fun in but doesn’t translate its fun into anything wider. And yet projects set up in this vein continue to get funded. Perhaps the reason why is the mediated relationships under which they get funded. Educational games, for example, are usually sold at the institutional level. In a situation not unlike watching one of the pitches from , the story of what the product could be with visuals and stats to match is 80% of the battle for getting over the funding line. The actual product less so. The world of brand, advertising and related games operates under a similar logic. Rather like the thinking that led detergent companies to create the soap opera to have some content to show between advertisements, brand-game projects believe that they increase awareness through getting players into the world of the brand. That might mean commercial brands like a burger chain, but often its charities and social responsibility organizations that become enamored by this idea. Another popular model is the game as trojan horse. The thinking goes that gameplay is highly engaging, engagement is the key to service adoption, and so therefore you use one to drive the other. This is why virtual worlds got hot, why Klout was thought valuable by someone, and why the investment rush in a brace of location sharing startups a few years back. However the “games” involved are usually too thin to stay engaging for long. Even Foursquare’s had to move on, but the trojan narrative is very attractive to some. (In that vein, watch what happens in VR). I understand why a section of the game development industry has peeled off to focus on this kind of market. For some it’s just a payday for relatively low-risk work (certainly compared to the wilds of commercial game development). For some it’s really just about a way to build a startup that will exit quickly. For many, however, the goal is more noble. The games-for-change set, for example, genuinely believes in the power of gaming to influence social behavior for the better while acknowledging that that power seems locked away. Paying projects act as extended research opportunities toward finding the solution, and then we’ll all live in a better future. Just like every other sector of the games industry, the future is a powerful motivator. But the whole sector essentially functions on naivety. That’s the part that fascinates me. Digital games are, after all, not a new medium. They’ve been with us for at least 50 years, commercially so for a good 40. Today games are so widely available that they are major cultural events at all ends of the spectrum. Nearly everyone everywhere (in the Western world at least) has played some form of digital game, even if it’s just on their phone or on Facebook. But at the corporate or institutional level a powerful cognitive dissonance pervades. They still talk about gaming’s supposed power, make sweeping equivocations about the value of “engagement” and use flaky reasoning to assert the value of such endeavors. Gaming, it seems, is still seen as the stepping stone. It yet retains its mystique regardless of its success rate. Will the naivety cycle continue? For a time, but I wouldn’t bet on it forever. There are enough earnest believers in the power of gaming to evangelize its message, whose enthusiasm then infects others. And, not to sound overly cynical, there is a ready supply of executives who like to be told stories about what might be and project how that fits their goals. My hope, however, is that over time the wider influence of gaming will increase the expectations bar. End users aren’t as naive as institutions. Just as viewers tolerate advertising to access real content, game players don’t engage with the ulterior ambitions behind games so much as simply tolerate them. Just because games are interactive doesn’t really mean that they have some magic power to circumvent propagandistic filters, it never has. Players show up for the gameplay first and foremost, not as set dressing for something else. Sooner or later the institutional world is going to catch on. |
On The Eve Of SAPPHIRE Conference, Vishal Sikka Puts SAP In The Rearview | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | It’s been , and I spoke to him a couple of days before the start of his former company’s that begins Monday in Orlando. The conference will be going on without him for the first time in 12 years, and Sikka is fine with that. Sikka sounds like a man at peace with his decision, one he says was his to make. He told me he was not forced out. It was just time to move on. Julie Bort writing on BusinessInsider right after Sikka’s resignation, . One was an internal power struggle between German and US executives. The other was he was hoping for a big promotion that didn’t happen. Sikka put it this way: “It was a different idea of how we saw the future and that’s why I left. I wish them the best. It ended in a way that I left abruptly. That’s how it goes in big companies.” He said he offered to stay through SAPPHIRE, but the executive team wanted a clean break. And he says it’s worked out for the best. He’s enjoying his time off, taking the time to talk to industry friends including VCs while he sifts through the list of career possibilities in search of what come next. This is the first time in 12 years, he’ll get to spend a significant part of the summer with his family, something he was looking forward to, and at the very least he plans to take the summer off before he decides what he’s going to do next. He puts a big caveat on that plan though, saying if a great offer came along, one he couldn’t refuse, he would take it–and he hinted there were some possibilities moving so quickly it might happen. For now though, he is going through the application process to become a consulting professor in Computer Science at his alma mater, Stanford University–and he’s excited about that opportunity. One possibility , but an industry insider told me, there was no truth to the rumor. Looking back on his time at SAP, Sikka is justifiably proud of his accomplishments at the company, especially overseeing the development of HANA and other significant software projects, but he says he is also gratified that he changed the company to what he called “a designer mindset,” including changing the way the company developed software, bringing in the 90 day work cycle and more recently a seven day development cycle, something he says is quite remarkable in a company the size of SAP. But he went even further, he says, changing the design of the work space itself to make workers more collaborative. For example he tells me every wall that is not digital is writable, meaning you can use it on the fly to sketch out ideas. But for all Sikka did at SAP, he is ready move on and see what comes next. He knows it will involve software just as it has his entire career, but he’s just not sure what form that will take. “Given how profoundly software is changing the world, our ability is still primitive when it comes to authoring software. I want to dramatically improve the ability to author something,” he told me. And for Sikka that means helping make the world even more programmable. He sees these changes driven by design and great programming happening all around him and uses Honeywell as an example. For decades they made thermostats, but it wasn’t Honeywell that changed the thermostat. It was Nest because it had a great design sense and an understanding of programmability and connectivity. They were able to build that into thermostats and completely transform them in the process, while the thermostat company missed it. He marvels at the amount of value lost or destroyed in this fashion inside large IT companies every day because these companies, in an effort to protect their traditional businesses, can’t look past the way they have always designed products. Yet smaller companies like Nest can afford to redesign these traditional products in new ways because they aren’t constrained by the old models. Sikka has been talking to venture capitalists and may do some consulting over the summer, but he doesn’t necessarily see his next move involving a startup because what he has in mind needs a bigger platform. He even leaves open the possibility of joining another big company, but only one without what he calls “structural roadblocks” and that gives him “the long-term ability to innovate.” He adds that past success can sometimes inhibit the ability to innovate inside larger organizations. Whatever he decides to do, he holds no ill will towards his former company, but he also seems to relish the opportunity to reinvent himself and jumpstart his career in a way that might not have been possible had he stuck with SAP. He says one thing he hopes to do with his summer off is get back to surfing, something he hasn’t been able to do in a number of years because of the furious pace of his time at SAP. And now perhaps he can ride a wave to the next chapter in his life, a man without regret, and ready for whatever comes next, whatever that happens to be. |
#Love: Kim Stolz On “Unfriending My Ex” | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | You may know reality TV celebrity as a contestant on America’s Next Top Model, or perhaps from MTV News, but what you might not know is that she’s spent the past few years researching many of the same topics we cover in this very column for an upcoming book called . (She also now works in finance with Citi Group.) That said, Stolz and I sat down to discuss a number of important questions: Are making us all micro-reality stars? Does the growing connectivity between us all strengthen or erode at our relationships? Is it possible that we’re all addicted to technology that may ultimately make us less sensitive, attentive people? And if so, why can’t we stop ourselves? As always, thanks for keeping up with the , and we hope you enjoy our first ever video segment. If you’re interested in learning more about Stolz’ book, which is available June 24, you can check out here or . |
Justin.TV To Kill Off Its Built-In Video Archiving System | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | Justin.tv, the webcam streaming service that birthed (and is now arguably dwarfed by) videogame streaming site Twitch, is killing off one of its core features today. As of June 8th, Justin.tv will no longer let hosts record their streams for viewers to catch later — and as of the same day, all previously recorded streams will be deleted. Why? Because, as far as they can tell, pretty much no one is actually watching streams after the fact. The company says that 50% of archived streams had 0 to 1 views, and the “vast majority” beyond that had less than 10 views. In other words, it’s just not worth it for them to keep supporting the feature and paying for the video storage. If you’ve got any videos sittin’ in your Justin.tv account that you don’t want to lose, you’ve got 7 days to grab them. Interestingly, they’re not even leaving the feature up for those willing to pay. In an FAQ, the company notes that they’re killing off archiving for everyone, including their $10-per-month premium users. Justin.tv’s sister-site Twitch made a similar move back in September of last year — but instead of ditching video archiving outright, they made it an opt-in feature (and didn’t delete any videos) so that only users who actually felt they needed it would use it. For now, at least, there’s no sign of Twitch moving away from video archiving beyond that. |
The Bill Gates-Inspired Galactic Cap Will Protect Your Wang-Dang-Doodle | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | As TechCrunch’s resident sex weirdo, I figured I might as well cover the Galactic Cap, a mini-condom that adheres the tip of the Fair Pink Vicar and allows you to visit Ye Olde Shoppe Of Curiosities without fear of issue. The project went live . How does it work? Well, it’s a two-part process. An adhesive goes onto the the tip of the woozler and can be applied hours or even days earlier. When you’re ready to visit Christmas Island you take out a little tip, peel of some adhesive, and slap it on the old Jolly Todger. The cap stays put, the lad and lass get to enjoy a bit of the skin on skin and the there is no danger of pregnancy. But why not regular condoms, you ask? And what about STDS? “Regular condoms are uncomfortable, difficult to apply and they take the pleasure out of sex. Their failure rate is high (15-18 percent) and their usage rate is low. Only 5 percent of men in the world wear a condom – 17-20 percent in developed countries,” said the creator, Charles Powell. “Healthy skin is a barrier to infection. However, if a man has a sore or an abrasion he should by all means use a traditional condom,” he said. “We feel the Galactic Cap will increase condom use because it’s more sexually satisfying. And we believe increased use will drive down HIV and STD rates.” The goal is to raise funds for clinical trial through Indiegogo. Powell is also giving out prototype condoms for a $100, a tough sell when jimmie hats are a few dollars a box. However, he hopes this will make people rethink sliding a regular condom onto their Thin White Duke and instead take a ride on the Galactic Train to Pleasantville. What does Bill Gates have to with this? The creator, Charles Powell, noticed that all of the grants awarded by the Gates Foundation for future condom creations went to wiener gloves that covered the entire penis. Powell thought he could do better. “What have we got to lose when more than 80 percent of men don’t use anything? What good does it do to have the perfect condom if no one is using it? We want to put more choice in the marketplace,” said Powell. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XVhYD-1_bxs] |
MOG Is Dead, Corpse Now Points To Its Acquirer Beats | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | After 9 years in the game, its streaming music service and now directs users to Beats, which for …and which was itself acquired by Apple this week. After providing subscribers a pro-rated refund and a 60-day free trial of Beats, the MOG concluded its delayed sunsetting schedule last night by scuttling its web streaming player. MOG was founded by former Gracenote CEO David Hyman as one of the first serious on-demand music streaming services back in 2005. It raised $24.9 million from Menlo Ventures and other investors, but never gained big traction. MOG watched Spotify surge past it in the US market. It cited in February 2012 compared to Spotify’s 3 million paying subscribers. Beats at the time was just a headphone maker owned by a mobile phone OEM. But soon it , and built a streaming service based on MOG’s experience and technology. In January 2014, Beats launched Beats Music, a Spotify competitor focused on curated, personalized playlists instead of search. Then after weeks of rumors, this week, including both the headphone and streaming businesses. One loose end that will have to be tied up is , who was brought on to steward MOG. Hyman alleges he was maliciously kicked out of Beats just before he hit his one year anniversary that would have brought him bonus equity in the company. That stake could be worth a lot of money since Beats sold to Apple. MOG was supposed to shut dwon April 15th, but the funeral was delayed. Billing finally ceased on May 1st and MOG refunded anyone with outstanding subscriptions. Users should have received emails with codes they can redeem until June 30th for MOG’s API has now shut down, and any favorites users selected on MOG are now gone. MOG gave users a chance to migrate their playlists to Beats but that option has expired. Users can for a chance to get them transitioned. One question looking forward is how many of the that CEO Jimmy Iovine says Beats has actually came from MOG? If it’s a significant amount and many of them are still on a free trial, it could mean Beats’ ability to attract fresh, paying subscribers isn’t as strong as it might appear. With MOG and Beats now owned by Apple, other streaming music services could become juicier acquisition targets for tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Samsung. Rdio is praised for its design chops but hasn’t been able to sustain rapid growth. Spotify is doing well with 10 million paid subscribers and 40 million total listeners, but has raised over $500 million making it a pricey buy. European startup Deezer, which has over 5 million paid subscribers and 12 million listeners, could be another potential acquisition. With any luck, the competition between music services will spur price wars, product innovation, and specialization. There are plenty of ears out there, and each pair is tickled by something a little different. : Founder David Hyman provided TechCrunch with this ulogy for MOG: “I’m incredibly proud of the team and our accomplishments. We raised the bar and significantly contributed to ushering in the new wave of streaming music.” |
Pirate Bay Co-Founder Peter Sunde Arrested Years After Conviction | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | Peter Sunde, the co-founder of the BitTorrent file-sharing website , has been arrested in Southern Sweden. reports that Sunde’s arrest followed several years on the run following an earlier conviction for Pirate Bay-related copyright violations — although Sunde has remained visible and active within the tech scene over this period. Another Pirate Bay co-founder, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, was arrested in Cambodia in 2012 and deported to Sweden at the time. A third, Fredrik Neij, remains at large. The site’s key financier, Carl Lundstroem, served out his sentence and now lives in Switzerland according to . Sunde will now serve the eight-month jail sentence handed down in 2010 for breaching copyright law. Sunde was also fined 46 million SEK (nearly $7 million) at the time. The Pirate Bay website turned 10 years old , and continues to function — although the it is now run by an organization, rather than individuals, and is registered in the Seychelles. After moving on from Pirate Bay, Sunde had continued to be active in the digital sphere. In 2010 he co-founded a social micro-donations startup called , which — ironically enough — gives consumers of online content a way to pay for the stuff they like. has attracted funding from and others, and counts Passion’s as a board member, according to CrunchBase. In comments on Sunde’s arrest, Burbidge told TechCrunch that she is “deeply saddened” by the news of his arrest. “I believe that history will look back on peer-to-peer and file sharing networks and highlight what a farce it was for the recording industry to litigate against developers and technology providers who wrote software — which enabled both legal and illegal activities alike as agnostic platforms. (This is akin to suing ISPs for what internet users do or the telephone company for illegal activities people might conduct/transact in a telephone call.),” said Burbidge. “The fact that Peter has been arrested in order to serve out a criminal sentence for his role in The Pirate Bay is such a stark contrast to where other individuals are at the moment such as Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker (two of the founders of Napster), or Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (two of the founders of Kazaa). “All of these others are heralded as tech visionaries, wunderkinds and positive disruptors for their respective roles in peer-to-peer development, file sharing and how technology has impacted users’ consumption of content and information. They are all now venture capital or angel investors, heralded as industry luminaries — and meanwhile two of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay are sitting in jail cells.” Burbidge pointed out that the Pirate Bay remains the only file-sharing case that has resulted in criminal prosecutions. “Swedish prosecutors filed criminal charges against TPB founders which was unprecedented and has not happened again nor since in any other jurisdiction. It’s important to recognize that this is what led to the criminal convictions and custodial sentences (jail time). Napster and Kazaa both settled civil lawsuits initiated by record labels for $36 million and $100 million, respectively,” she said. Regarding Flattr, Burbidge added that Passion Capital remains proud to be an investor. “We always hoped that common sense would prevail and Peter would have been able to continue working on all of the positive contributions he was making to the internet and online culture overall, including Flattr among other projects,” she added. [ by via Flickr] |
Secret Launches In China With A ‘Secret’ Partner, Adds Language Preferences As It Blows Up In Russia | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | Anonymous social sharing app opened up to new users around the globe a few weeks ago, becoming available pretty much everywhere except China. The company corrected that this weekend, introducing an app for Chinese users with the help of a large partner that it’s keeping a secret. “China is a special market, and one can’t expect to just put English product in China or simply translate it and call it a day. It takes a local team to build for the Chinese market. Usually this involves forming a joint-venture or some other arrangement,” co-founder David Byttow wrote in an email to TechCrunch. Chinese tech blog Geekpark reported that the company had to introduce the app to the local market, but Secret isn’t commenting on the details of the partnership at this time. In addition to China, it’s seen growth in other markets since its international launch a few weeks ago. For instance, the app has become incredibly popular in Russia, the former Soviet Republics, and surrounding countries. Over the past few weeks, Secret has made it into the top 10 of all apps on the Apple App Store in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, and The Netherlands, . And it’s been highly ranked in the Social Media category for those countries and a number of others. “Secret has caught on in Russia. It climbed to the #1 social network in a number of days. They really love it,” Byttow wrote. The international growth has also led to a bit of a halo effect in the U.S., where its ranking has creeped into the top 50 apps for the Social Media category in the past week or so. While that’s good news overall, the app’s popularity in different places around the world has led to an influx of foreign-language Secrets clogging up the feeds of its English-speaking users, which wasn’t a great user experience. (If you were like me, you were probably seeing dozens of Secrets in Russian alone.) With a recent update, the company has enabled users to select which languages users would like to see Secrets in. Users can choose between English, Russian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese to start. By deselecting languages, users will no longer see Secrets shared from those not in their network, but they could still see some shared by Friends and Friends of Friends. Byttow said the company was still tweaking how those are displayed. Still, it makes a big difference when you’re not seeing a bunch of posts that you don’t understand. |
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YellowSchedule Raises €600K So That You Never Miss A Therapist Appointment Again | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | Dublin and Limerick-based , which offers an online service to help therapists and clinics manage appointments and client records, has raised €600,000 from various angel investors, along with the taxpayer-funded Enterprise Ireland. Specifically, the angel investors participating are Sean Riddell and Jennifer Riddell, former CEO and former Head of Marketing of leading healthcare IT company EMIS — so a pretty decent fit for the young YellowSchedule. Competing with legacy therapy scheduling and CRM companies, whose offerings are often clunky and designed to work in older browsers without the usability that modern web standards provide, YellowSchedule enables therapists and other related industries to manage customer scheduling, records and relationships, as well as providing business analytics. It also counts more generic services, such as Schedulicity, Genbook and BookFresh, as competitors. In particular, after brother and sister duo Martina and Michael Skelly spotted a need for better appointment reminders, YellowSchedule aims to cut down on the number of missed therapy and related appointments, therefore increasing ROI for therapy providers. A no-show is potentially lost revenue, and this can often come down to simple forgetfulness. It can also be an early signal that a patient needs more support. To tackle this, the service provides automatic appointment prompts via email and SMS, with various paid tiers providing a set number of SMS messages, starting from £16.95 for 100 reminders. In addition to appointment reminders, another aspect of YellowSchedule is it enables self-booking for patients through its website, and in future mobile app, which also helps to increase attendance. “Reducing no-shows for our customers is more than just a revenue exercise,” explains CEO Martina Skelly. “Ensuring that patients adhere to treatment programmes leads to better patient outcomes and our 2 way messaging and indication of attendance can be an easy way to spot if a vulnerable patient is not feeling well.” Skelly says YellowSchedule’s customers also require additional privacy features, such as HIPAA compliance and data encryption. Today’s injection of capital will enable YellowSchedule to expand its marketing, with the aim to accelerate traction. It also plans to grow the team. Of note, Skelly tells me customers currently span 38 countries, however the startup’s mainly been targeting the U.S. and UK markets with over 70% of customers based in the U.S. |
A Brief History Of Tinder | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | null |
Smile: Your Selfie Is A Mugshot For The NSA | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | The is undoubtedly making the NSA’s job easier by producing a mountain of tagged online data to feed its facial recognition algorithms. A report in , based on documents from 2011 obtained by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveals that the US security agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly under the Obama administration — coinciding with a rise in popularity of taking and tagging self portraits on online social networks. The newspaper reports that the agency has turned to new software to process the flood of images being included in digital communication including social media, email, messaging, videoconferencing and other types of online comms. The 2011 documents show that agency officials believe technological advances in facial recognition software could revolutionize the way the NSA finds intelligence targets around the world. According to the documents, the agency intercepts “millions” of images per day — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — although it is not clear how many images the agency has amassed in total at this point. The NSA describes facial recognition technology as offering “tremendous untapped potential” for tracking intelligence targets. As well as its own in-house facial recognition software, the documents cited in the report note that the NSA also relies on commercially available facial recognition tech, including PittPatt — a company — to process the data it is harvesting. Facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers are now considered just as important to the NSA as written and oral communications, according to the report. The paper says the NSA’s use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond previously detailed efforts. Back in February it emerged that the NSA and UK spy agency from Yahoo users, between 2008 and 2012, which included the collection of sexually explicit material. While the NYT notes that the NSA does not have access to US state databases of drivers’ licenses or to passport photos of Americas (no such luck if you’re a foreigner of course), it’s likely that the mountain of tagged online data it can now sift through means it can obtain that intel on US citizens from other sources — such as, presumably, Facebook, Instagram et al.’s huge store of selfies. “It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information [that can help] implement precision targeting,” a 2010 agency document notes. An agency spokeswoman contacted by the NYT reporters declined to say whether it collects facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts. But that ‘no comment’ speaks volumes. Facial recognition software is about as big brother as technology gets right now. Facebook, which is of course already in possession of its own data mountain of tagged facial imagery, is hard at work perfecting its own facial recognition software, under an initiative called the . Back in March Facebook announced that DeepFace was nearing human levels of accuracy at identifying a face in a crowd (97.25% vs the average human score of 97.5%). Such commercial efforts undoubtedly make the NSA’s job easier, since the more accurately tagged imagery Facebook has, the more data effectively becomes available for harvesting by the NSA. Especially as US privacy laws provide no express protection for facial recognition data, as the NYT report notes. That said, an NSA spokeswoman notes that images are considered a form of communications content in the US, so the NSA would require court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its surveillance programs — in the same way that it does to read their emails or eavesdrop on their phone calls. However cross-border comms — where a US citizens might be emailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted. So it really depends who you are sending your selfie to, and where they live. In Europe, Facebook switched off its ‘ ‘ facial recognition algorithm-powered feature , as part of a settlement of an investigation into its transparency on user data and privacy conducted by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner. That facial recognition-software powered feature remains in place for Facebook users elsewhere, including in the US, where the tedious process of manually tagging all your selfies can be speeded up with Facebook’s tech. But that is, as it turns out, very likely more grist to the NSA’s mill. [ by via Flickr] |
Productivity And The Education Delusion | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | There is a constant tension about education in labor economics these days. On one hand, . Workers with college degrees, or even just some university-level courses, are significantly more likely to have a job and to be paid better, as well. This is borne out by , which showed a decrease of unemployment for college graduates, but an . The tension comes when you look at the government’s projections for job growth over the next decade. are also among the jobs that are least likely to provide a living wage, occupations like (median salary: $19,910 per year), ($21,110 per year), ($20,820 per year), ($18,260 per year), and the list goes on. In fact, of the top 20 occupations with greatest expected job growth, only two of the categories are above the current median wage of the country. This is the largest problem facing society this century. There has been much discussion over the past few weeks about Thomas Piketty and his book, . Piketty focuses on the increasing divergence of the income and wealth distributions between the top percentile and everyone else. Left mostly unanalyzed in the book, however, is how people at the top of the labor market are able to leverage their abilities so much more than those in the middle or base of the market due to a combination of technology and finance. We need to disabuse ourselves of the theory that just a little more education is going to change the fundamental dynamic of how the Internet economy functions. Instead, we need to understand how productivity is changing today, and why education is highly unlikely to smooth out those changes. Instead, we need to think bigger if we are going to create a more equitable and inclusive society. Productivity is among the most important measures of an economy. In economics, a takes a variety of inputs – typically, labor and capital – and outputs the quantity of products that are produced. As productivity increases, we have the ability to produce more goods while maintaining the same inputs, a wonderful outcome because it means we can serve more of our wants without additional costs. Productivity has for the most part increased monotonically over the course of civilization (the European Dark Ages being a notable exception). We started off as hunter-gatherers and eventually developed rudimentary agricultural techniques that allowed us to stay in one place while meeting our food requirements. Civilization flourished as workers could pursue activities outside of food acquisition, and that economic specialization has continued throughout history. Today, . That specialization has been particularly beneficial for the length of the work week, which has declined throughout most of history. Photo credit: Except, that is, until last century. Despite the impressive gains made in productivity, workers continue to spend thousands of hours a year toiling away, whether in services, information technology, or manufacturing. , workers in America averaged 1,790 hours of work per year, while workers in nations like Korea and Mexico work an average of over 2,000 hours per year. This is profoundly surprising, because one of the most influential economists of all time, John Maynard Keynes, once predicted that we would have a 15-hour work week by 2030. . One recent influential viewpoint on this matter comes from David Graeber, a professor of anthropology currently at the London School of Economics. He posits that which he defines as jobs that exist in the “administrative sector” – the paper pushers that keep modern society moving along. Graeber tries to analyze what’s going on. “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen.” Since it costs money to pay these paper pushers, shouldn’t we expect them to disappear through automation? His argument is fairly simple: we could almost certainly do without all of these jobs, but “the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.” In a society in which so many desire to become the boss and have a small army of direct reports, his frank analysis is perhaps not too far off the mark. The less conspiratorial answer, of course, is that replacing a paper pusher with an automated machine requires capital, and most human labor outside of a handful of rarefied industries is quite cheap. When you think of the fast food industry, for instance, nearly all the jobs in a typical restaurant could be automated, but we continue to use humans because hardware is pricey. This is why , since it is the cheapness of labor that keeps its demand high. This is the fundamental difference between the two groups of workers we increasingly see in our economy. One group is paid for their time hour-by-hour, doing readily replaceable tasks that continue only so long as they keep their wage depressed. A much smaller group of workers, though, has the ability to leverage their talents to uncouple their hours worked from their wage. Software engineers are a prime example. But the interesting challenge for productivity is that even those high-leverage jobs are increasingly becoming automated. Automation has been going on since the Industrial Age, but the Computer Age has really pushed that to an extreme. At first, it was just industries like accounting, where entire rooms of human calculators were replaced with spreadsheets. But today, it is lawyers that are getting the boot, and other professions like doctors seem likely to be challenged as well. There is a deep myth in Silicon Valley that education is the solution to this split in the labor force. If only people had more education, or that their education were more focused on marketable skills, then we wouldn’t have the employment problems we see today. Internet plus free courses with a smattering of TED Talks, and we should all be good to go. There is some truth to this, of course. For many years, between technology and automation on one side, and the ability of our society to educate its citizens to take on more and more complex tasks. The argument goes that computers have simply evolved faster than our education system over the past few decades, and our race for education is falling behind. That seems reasonable, yet it seems difficult to believe that we can truly increase our academic productivity in any sort of radical away for the individual learner to counteract that automation. While disparities remain huge in the American educational system, and the cost of education is flat-out ridiculous, our ability to move someone from elementary addition to advanced specialties has not been significantly cut over the past few decades. We can only input so much knowledge into the human brain at a time. Two different types of startups are trying to change that, but both will meet resistance. One is the rise of MOOCs – these massively open online courses that were the height of hype last year, but that seem to have quieted down more recently. These startups aim to make learning free for everyone, everywhere. It is indeed crucially important to disseminate the widest amount of human knowledge possible. Unfortunately, free access to knowledge has never really been the problem in the education system. Libraries have held most knowledge on their shelves for centuries, and yet our society isn’t swimming in PhDs. The Internet has certainly made knowledge acquisition more convenient, but that doesn’t seem to be an underlying issue here. Photo credit: One of the key problems with education is that motivation itself is one of the largest determiners for success, and character is difficult to teach. But even students with motivation don’t always have the time to engage in the kind of intensive study needed to enter the professions with the most opportunity for leverage. Workers in many industries are forced to work two or even three shifts just to survive, leaving little time for education no matter how convenient. Thus, MOOCs often end up benefiting those already capable of learning – the very knowledge workers who didn’t need the help in the first place. An interesting response to this comes from the rise of code schools or code boot camps, where people go to courses for a 12-week period (or whatever the case may be) and learn coding very rapidly. I have had a number of friends who have used such programs, and they seem to have enjoyed the experience pretty well. Here’s the key question though: if people can take a 12-week course and get a job on the other side paying $90,000, aren’t we looking at a serious labor market imbalance that will correct itself when more entrants show up in the marketplace? This is one of the problems with the idea that we should increase trade schools in the United States. In every labor market, the more workers that enter the market, the lower the prevailing wage in that market. If we really think that everyone would be rich if they become a software engineer, then we don’t understand the basics of market-based salaries. There is an obvious solution here, one that is controversial in U.S. education circles. One option is to simply specialize children earlier in their academic training, such as in high school or maybe even middle school. It doesn’t seem to make sense that students are in school for 16 years only to learn what they want to do in their final years of college. This would have to be coupled with periods of retraining that would allow workers to move between similar specialties throughout their career. But instead of confronting this reality, we continue to tack on requirements to grade-school students to try to prepare them for an array of specialties that they may never consider. I have this frustration even within the startup community, which has vocally called for high schools to be required to teach computer science. There is always a call to add requirements, but where does the time come from? Should we be scaling back language classes, math classes, or something else? The level of base knowledge needed to be a “cultured” adult seems to only increase without end. As our knowledge of the world rapidly expands, we have to accept that most of us are going to be ignorant about a great many topics. We can’t simultaneously teach all of the engineering disciplines, social sciences, and humanities to every child if our hope is to get them prepared for a meaningful life. Education shouldn’t just focus on children, though; it has to be part of a lifelong commitment to improving and adapting our minds to the needs of our society and our changing personal goals. Today, a growing number of employers don’t want to train new workers, but instead desire workers who already have the skills they are looking for. Given the state of unemployment in the economy, there are many employers who can be quite choosy with whom they select, and thus the skill requirements for new employees have been increasing. There are two directions to consider here. There needs to be greater guidance for both students and adults about what skills are actively demanded in the marketplace, as well as how to acquire such skills. Whether it is financial modeling, programming, or essay-editing skills, directing workers to the right resources with accurate counsel would be highly valuable. The other direction is to consider how to guide employers to choices that actively encourage them to engage with workers and develop them. Employers need better options than expensive executive-education courses (an extremely profitable market these days) in order to get the right return on investment. Making it easy for employers to add the right training while keeping costs low could actively provide employees with the skills they need to continue productive lives. Our economy is increasingly making some people richer and others poorer. The reason is an underlying mechanic around leverage. Most people work at jobs that are easily replaceable, while a narrow group has the ability to amass larger income by leveraging their time, often through technology and finance. While education has often been the answer to this problem in the past and also is deeply embedded in the value system of Silicon Valley, it seems to be incapable today of giving humans the opportunity to compete with machines for work. Our technology has done something wonderful – increasing productivity while cutting labor costs, but at the expense of a far more inequitable economy. As the pain increases, questions about distribution are only going to become more prominent, an issue that startups seem ill-equipped to handle. The people on platforms like YouTube and Kickstarter who leverage their networks can make hundreds of millions of dollars (see Maker Studios and some of the other multi-channel studios or Oculus Rift), but everyone else makes essentially nothing for their efforts. That is unlikely to remain tenable as our occupational futures become increasingly bifurcated. The only answer to such systemic issues is through a wider lens on the problem. One solution is to move toward a model of specialists that regularly adapt to new work. Imagine if workers had the ability to take a year off from work at their old salary as long as they focused on building a skill set in a needed area of the economy. Programs like this already exist for laid off workers, but these programs could expand to encompass everyone. Another option, popular with Thomas Piketty, is to devise a global wealth tax. The idea is simple – charge a really small percentage tax on wealth, creating a disaggregating effect on wealth in the economy. Beyond its impracticality in a globalized world though, it seems a tax is the wrong kind of model to solve issues around automation. For us in the startup community, maybe there is a real opportunity to provide leadership here. We could create labor markets and structures that direct people to the most lucrative job offerings, and advise people in real-time of the classes, people, and projects they should be engaging in order to progress in their careers. that a real-time labor market protocol may solve some of these problems. At sufficient scale, this might just turn back the split in the labor force we have witnessed recently. It is not often we get to work on some of the largest issues facing humanity. We need to take advantage of the moment, and work to solve the underlying labor problems that plague our economy. We created many of the dynamics we are seeing today – let’s do our part to reform it. |
Apple’s New Approach To iCloud Is Good News For Everyone | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | At its WWDC keynote earlier this week, Apple announced that lets app creators tap into Apple’s iCloud so that they can more easily work cloud components into their mobile apps. As , it was one of several signs during the keynote that Apple finally “gets” the cloud. But it’s also a sign that Apple is taking the concerns of iOS and Mac developers more seriously than ever. Just last year, : the massive, mostly reliable infrastructure that Apple builds its apps on top of, and the hodgepodge of networking and syncing protocols that developers were handed with the first iterations of iCloud. Because it wasn’t using the same underlying technology, Apple didn’t run into the same issues in features like Core Data syncing as your average iOS application developer, and thus didn’t take their problems as seriously. As Panzarino wrote: One thing that could help is if Apple dogfooded more of iCloud’s developer API features in its own apps. Dogfooding, the process of a company using its own creations internally, is a well-respected method of ensuring maturity and stability, especially in complex services like iCloud. Apple currently only uses Core Data syncing in its iTunes Trailers app, which serves a lot of video but isn’t exactly the most complicated application. Because Apple doesn’t use these features of the API as much, it doesn’t run across the problems that are being run up against by developers. The result was that many developers simply gave up on iCloud for their own apps and instead began to roll their own cloud syncing functions or integrating competing services from Amazon, Dropbox, or Google. It seems that Apple’s hoping to change that. As , the company showed off a bunch of impressive cloud-based functions in iOS 8 — and they’re built on the same CloudKit frameworks that anyone who downloads Apple’s tools has access to: Hence one could suggest that Apple loves the cloud, just not the web (or, not URLs). This is obviously a contrast with Google, which has pretty much the opposite approach. For Google, devices are dumb glass and the intelligence is in the cloud, but for Apple the cloud is just dumb storage and the device is the place for intelligence. And it’s built a whole new set of APIs, CloudKit, to enable this for developers, which it is (for the first time, I believe) dogfooding, building the photos product on it. The new photo editing tools in iOS 8 aren’t the only new features built on frameworks that anyone can use. The company also says that the new “Handoff” feature in Keynote, Safari, Mail, Maps, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders (which lets you seamlessly move between apps on your iPhone and your Mac to complete a task) is built on the same public APIs available to third-party developers. Everyone benefits from Apple and third-party developers working on the same playing field. Apple will spend more time making sure that its frameworks for developers work in order to keep the quality of its own apps up to snuff, while developers won’t shy away from adding convenient cloud components that “just work” behind the scenes. |
MotionSavvy Is A Tablet App That Understands Sign Language | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | There are plenty of things to take for granted in this life, and the ability to hear is one does. But not the team at . MotionSavvy, which emerged from , is building a tablet case that leverages the power of in order to translate American Sign Language into English and vice versa. The entire is deaf. The MotionSavvy case embeds the Leap, and the MotionSavvy software leverages the Leap’s 3D motion recognition, which detects when a person is using ASL and converts it to text or voice. The software also has voice recognition through the tablet’s mic, which allows a hearing person to respond with voice to the person signing. It then converts their voice into text, which the hearing-impaired receiver can understand. Founders Ryan Hait-Campbell, Wade Kellard, Jordan Stemper and Alex Opalka met at the Rochester Institute Of Technology, which includes a deaf-education branch, and built the prototype over a year ago. The original MotionSavvy won third place in the ZVRS competition, which is what convinced Hait-Campbell that the product could eventually have consumer legs. Right now the prototype only understands about 100 words, but Ryan and Alex hope to eventually crowdsource the “massive” number of signs necessary to make this an effective tool. There are many thousands of signs in ASL alone, and various different “accents” or ways it is spoken. Over 800 deaf people have signed up for the beta test, and Hait-Campbell hopes that a consumer-facing product will eventually hit the market in September 2015. He is playing around with a $600 price tag for the case itself, which includes a Windows tablet and a $20 per-month subscription for the software. MotionSavvy eventually wants to build apps on Android, iOS and Windows Phone, and have the hardware work with any mobile phone. “This will allow a deaf individual to feel as if the product is an extension of her/himself,” Hait-Campbell says. Hait-Campbell views this pricing as competitive with that of an average interpreter, at around $60-$100 an hour, but doesn’t think MotionSavvy will put interpreters out of a job. In fact, Hait-Campbell argues that MotionSavvy will create more jobs for ASL translators, as many more deaf people will apply for higher-level jobs because of the increased ability to communicate with colleagues who don’t know ASL. This is especially poignant for international users. The mandates a certain level of accessibility for U.S. workplaces and public utilities. Many countries do not have such an act, and thus deaf citizens do not get the services they need. “This will give deaf people the power over their lives, the power to lead the lifestyle they want to have,” Hait-Campbell explains. “That is all accomplished by being able to communicate. Being deaf is very similar to moving to a foreign country but never being able to learn the language of that country (and doing that for your whole life).” MotionSavvy is in the process of raising a $1.5 million seed round, with SOS Ventures ( ) being its only current investor. Despite immense demand, it is still taking beta sign-ups .
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Science On The Edge (Of Tomorrow) | Contributor | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | Editor’s note: There are plenty of reviews available for those of you looking for advice on whether or not the new military sci-fi flick “ ” is worth seeing in theaters. This is not one of those reviews. My purpose in screening the film — and in getting an inside perspective from the film’s director, — was to peer into the depths of the fictional reality created for your entertainment, and consider its scientific merits. That said, I love a good action film, and this movie did not disappoint — it was filled with powered armor battle suits, aliens, fast-paced battle scenes, and it was in 3D. If this stuff is for you, then so is this movie. The story is an adaptation of a short Japanese military sci-fi novel by , called “ ,” and centers around Major William Cage (played by ), a military public relations official who finds himself stripped of his rank and thrown in with the new recruits on the front line of a massive assault against octopus-like aliens, called Mimics, that have invaded Earth. Luck on his side, he manages to kill an alien. However, he dies in the process. The upshot is that the dying alien bleeds all over him, which dooms him to repeating the day over and over again in a -esque time loop. We find out that one other soldier on the battlefield, Rita Vrataski (played by ), has experienced a similar time loop, which allowed her to learn more about the Mimics they are fighting, and to win a battle at Verdun. She becomes Cage’s mentor as they both work to discover the location of the Mimics’ control center, the Omega alien, so that they can destroy it. All right, that’s the basic story. So what about the science? The first and most obvious place to start is with the technology. We are led to believe with media clips about the alien invasion that events are taking place in the not too far off future. Communication technology like phones and television are very similar to, if not the same as, the tech we use now. Military technology is always a bit ahead of the curve compared to what the average consumer can access, but in the film there is some really neat tech — like powered battle armor and troop transporters — that is definitely still some time away from becoming reality. However, Liman, explaining how rapidly military tech evolves during wartime, told me: “We looked at what [Defense Advance Research Projects Agency] is currently building and envisioned if we were five years into a war, and everything else just stopped, and the best minds in the world and the manufacturing prowess focused on building these suits of armor, where would we be in five years.” The battle suits themselves are entirely believable, and I think it comes from the approach used by Liman and his team in designing them. According to Liman, they used current DARPA designs as a starting point, but necessarily had to make changes to take use and movement into account. “We really started from a function-versus-form point of view,” he said. “I wanted to start with how would it actually work. And, in this case, what enemy are you fighting, and what piece of equipment would you build to fight that enemy? And I wanted to build something that actually functioned. And that’s the big difference, because in every other movie that’s had a suit of armor like this, it’s been computer-generated. The level of sophistication that went into designing these suits was unlike anything that I’ve been exposed to in movie-making or in real life, and they’re made up of hundreds of parts that all work together.” was also a critical concern. Liman suggested that in the movie, world battery technology has taken a major step forward to enable these battle suits to operate without being plugged in, but “as futuristic as “Edge of Tomorrow” is, it’s not unintentional that Emily Blunt steals Tom Cruise’s battery the first time they meet on the battlefield; we’re always going to be looking at our battery meter and wishing we had more juice.” Interestingly, Liman said his suits were functional enough that he wanted to power one up, but ran out of time. Personally, I hope he gets to this item on his to-do list because I’d love to write the story about the Hollywood director eclipsing DARPA in battle-armor development. The Mimics themselves are completely unlike mankind in (body structure) and behavior. Yet, their apparent social structure derives from a theme any science fiction or insect-lover will find familiar: the or collective consciousness. Other movies with characters belonging to species having similar behavioral abilities include the Kaiju of “ ,” the Eywa in “ ,” and the Bugs in “ ” (from television, you probably recall from “Star Trek” and from “Dr. Who”). In all of these films, the different species are able to communicate in a way that allows the whole of the species to know what an individual knows. Sometimes the information passes through a central processor organism, while in others there is more distributed processing through some kind of network. The interesting twist for the aliens in this story is that they have also either evolved a biological ability or developed technology that allows them to send messages backwards in time in order to warn themselves of potential threats to their survival. This is what Major Cage taps into when he inadvertently gets covered in alien blood. There is something in the blood of certain Mimics, the Alphas, that connects to the leading Omega allowing information transfer about experiences between individuals and through time. We could postulate about the exact mechanism here, but Liman said, “I really bought into the idea that if in fact we were confronting an alien race, we would not understand them. They would not be anthropomorphic. We wouldn’t understand their motives. We wouldn’t understand their communication. We would not understand even what it is exactly they want from us. I mean just imagine an ant trying to understand a human who accidentally steps on their anthill.” But in the film, he added, “we understand the end result of what they’re doing. And one of the things they’re doing is they’re predicting everything — our every move — and they are doing it because they have some way of manipulating time to repeat the same day to go back in time. To send a message to themselves. And for me, specifically, what’s happening is they aren’t winding the clock back. They are just sending a message back to themselves 24 hours in the past, so they can warn themselves about something that is about to happen.” I’m going to guess this ability could result from one of two possibilities: either resonating on a specific frequency or at the cellular level. Who knows how that could evolve, but this is a big universe where we can’t even begin to fathom the kinds of selection pressures potentially at work on life-supporting . In reality, according to our current understanding of physics, time loops could exist due to a theoretical quantum mechanical principle called . Researchers like at the University of Washington think nonlocality is possible and are working to provide experimental proof. If experiments work out, we probably won’t be able to send messages back in time, but we might see instantaneous communications from Earth to Mars enabling real-time rover control using virtual reality interfaces. I emailed Cramer to ask about the possible physics of the fictional situation: Standard is ‘linear,’ a mathematical property that describes how quantum states are superimposed. There are proofs in the physics literature that if one could find a situation in which quantum mechanics was slightly non-linear, then the door would be opened to nonlocal communication, which would include back-in-time communication… I would think that this would be your best bet. Let the alien’s blood contain that make quantum mechanics nonlinear, so that the rest of the scenario could proceed. Another explanation for the time-loop phenomenon is that rather than being a loop, each experience is taking place in an alternative parallel reality. We see them sequentially for the sake of the story, but the individual receiving the message perceives all potential outcomes at once, and is able to proceed down the path with the best survival benefit. For the Mimics, that would mean the Omega, receiving information from the experiences of all its Alphas, would tell the population as a whole what steps to take to win this battle for Earth. For Major Cage, it means that he knows how to bring the story to its action-filled climax. I’m not even going to comment on the science of human physiology and . Humans are capable of amazing feats of strength and endurance, and action movies have been asking us for years to believe that their heroes are able to withstand great physical trauma in order to win the day. This film is no different. So, Cruise’s character falls from a great height, landing and tumbling in such a way that he should have been a broken puppet, only to continue running and fighting strong as ever. Whatever. Suspend disbelief, and enjoy the action. |
Google Music Could Get Touchy-Feely If It Does Acquire Moody Playlist App Songza | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | “Google Play Music All-Access”. That tongue-twisting name says a lot about how well Google understands humans. It’s also why the that Google is in talks to buy for $15 million seems like a smart move. While Google Music has playlists, they’re generic, static, and totally unorganized. Songza lets you say what you’re up to or what you’re feeling, and provides pre-made playlists perfect for those situations. Songza’s mood and activity playlists Buying Songza could both juice user count and give it a more curated experience that appeals to casual listeners. On-demand streaming music services suffer from the decision paralysis imposed by a search box connected to the history of recorded music. It takes music knowledge to know what to search for. Contextual playlists let users find music to suit their mood without having to recall specific artists or songs they like. The ability to keep the tunes flowing without constant input has made Pandora hugely popular with mainstream listeners. More recently, Beats (now owned by Apple) has focused on pre-made and contextual playlists that highlight great tracks within a theme or use a Madlibs-style fill-in-the-blank sentence to cue up songs that fit a user’s current activity. Spotify has gone it’s own way, centering music discovery around social recommendations from friends and public figures, but that approach hasn’t gained much steam. If Google acquired Songza and integrated it into Play Music All-Access, it could better compete with these other streaming services beyond the search box. Hell, it could even just use the Songza name and ditch its rambling moniker. Google Music’s haphazard, messy playlist browser One issue is that since Songza doesn’t let you pick specific songs you want to hear, it gets to , as MP3.com founder Michael Robertson noted on Twitter. Being integrated into Google Music could force it to pay higher on-demand royalty rates. Songza’s Playlist Suggestions For Coding Now might be a smart time for Songza to sell. As other streaming services get more serious about playlists and offer their own options for delivering mood-specific songs, Songza could be commodified. Unless it can prove it’s much better, listeners might just go to more full-featured streaming services where they can also play specific songs or personalized radio stations. A cheap Songza buy is much more fiscally feasible for Google than the scuttled . If Google wants to get really serious about upping its footprint in streaming music, it may need to shell out to buy Spotify with its 10 million paying subscribers and 40 million total listeners. However, since Spotify has traction, revenue, and has , the price could be in the high billions. Songza has raised just and has less momentum, so Google might be able to buy its technology and brand…for a song. |
Apple’s Home Automation Success Rests With Hardware Evangelism | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | At its WWDC conference this week, Apple unveiled a scaffolding of sorts that allows developers to control smart home devices like light switches, thermostats, garage doors and more. This is called HomeKit, and it promises to be flexible and powerful — but its success will lie in hardware adoption. HomeKit is, at its heart, a spiritual companion to Apple’s Bluetooth direct and multi-peer frameworks. It allows a developer to use a simple set of controls to toggle the states of devices or send commands to them. Unfortunately, all of this is dependent upon those devices being part of the Made For iPhone (MFI) program, which requires a specific wireless chip and software package to be integrated into the devices. That’s not too outlandish, and Apple’s requirements for the MFI program have gotten much lighter over the years. But it does preclude an indie developer firing up a HomeKit-compatible app and an off-the-shelf Arduino controller to roll their own home automation. HomeKit, therefore, is a facilitator for the home automation industry, and not a “hacker kit.” HomeKit provides a way for every enabled app and accessory to access a single repository of information about your home’s smart devices with permission. This means that any new HomeKit-enabled app you install can instantly see all of the rooms, devices and homes you’ve defined before. Adding smart devices to your home, then, is not like starting over every time. You just buy a new thing, plug it in and add it to your already existing suite. Siri is considered a primary system interface of HomeKit, though individual apps will no doubt continue to have their individual controls. So “turn on the lights in the back bedroom” will be a recognizable Siri command as long as you’ve installed and defined that accessory and room. Names of devices, accessories and homes, as well as the actions they can take are all recognized by Siri. A set of initial devices like door locks, garage doors and lights are defined in the HomeKit framework, but developers can specify an infinite amount of new ones. Apple is positioning HomeKit as an “open” system that allows for creation and definition of any device or automation interaction that you can think of. The internal system is actually very flexible, and doesn’t put a whole lot of restrictions on creating devices, scripting actions for those devices to take or anything else. But the open aspects of HomeKit do not extend to devices that are not MFI-compatible. End-to-end encryption is enabled for HomeKit accessories and to maintain what Apple calls “complete” privacy and strong security. HomeKit APIs can only be used when an app is active or open in the foreground; there is no such thing (currently) as an app using HomeKit that works in the background without user interaction. You can, however, script actions to take place under a set of given conditions, including ones that happen when the apps aren’t open. But those will have to be explicitly chosen by the user: “open the garage door when I get home,” “turn on the lights at 8pm on Tuesdays,” etc. And Apple’s iOS system handles those instructions, not the individual app. This makes it much harder for a malicious app to perform an unwanted action without your consent. Apple’s system also allows for “zones” that group rooms together in recognizable ways like “upstairs” or “downstairs.” And you can group services, too, letting you “turn on all of the lights.” Until the MFI products become available, developers will be able to “pretend” they’re controlling devices with a program provided by Apple that simulates hardware devices like lightbulbs or garage doors or what have you. That’s not to say that customers will have to re-buy all of their smart home equipment for it to be controlled by HomeKit-compatible apps. Apple has created a provision for a piece of “bridge” hardware that will translate the languages that current devices use to accept commands over to the new language Apple is using. A bridge will give your iPhone the ability to control your home equipment using HomeKit even if they can’t connect directly to those devices. There’s no word on what shape those bridges might take, but I’d imagine that one of Apple’s hardware partners will likely create a “hub” of sorts that you can install in your home to link everything together. Several current protocols are duking it out for supremacy in home automation. Among those are ZigBee, Z-Wave and Insteon. In the past, Apple might have positioned itself as an absolute authority and refused to even acknowledge that these other protocols exist. The fact that HomeKit not only acknowledges that the smart home might have components that are not part of the MFI program is yet another signal that Apple is playing more nicely with others and considering ways to open up its system in strategic ways. iCloud Drive’s exposure of the file system and the ability to install third-party keyboards are other signs of this philosophical change. It’s a welcome change, and one that could help Apple gain a foothold in the automation industry — and give partners the chance to sell an additional piece of hardware. What we’re seeing here is the development of an ecosystem. By providing both an App Store and a standardized framework for developers, Apple is offering hardware manufacturers the services of its hundreds of thousands of developers. Sure, individual hardware manufacturers can integrate HomeKit into their own apps, but independent developers that would never have gone into hardware manufacturing or signed up for the MFI program will now be able to build standardized solutions for people looking to control their homes. Imagine, for instance, a home automation suite built by the creators of beloved apps like Tweetbot, Fantastical or 1Password that integrates with all of your separate pieces of smart home equipment. That’s possible with HomeKit. Only, however, if Apple is successful in getting hardware partners to adopt the MFI program and make their devices HomeKit-friendly. This means that Apple’s hardware evangelism team (yes, it has one) will have to kick into high gear over the next few months to get suppliers on board with the new system in time to have products on the shelves when iOS 8 ships, or soon after. There have already been some indications that we’ll see strong launch partners, as there was a slide shown with a handful of brands during the Apple keynote at WWDC. Notably, Nest was missing from that list — whether that was because of its recent troubles with a software recall or because it’s now owned by Google is anyone’s guess. But there’s nothing stopping Nest from complying with the MFI requirements and enabling HomeKit. Nothing but Google, of course, so we’ll see how that goes. One thing I would encourage Apple’s MFI team to consider carefully would be to allow side-by-side adoption of standards in potential devices. Rather than two smart door locks side-by-side on the shelf — one with a ZigBee logo and the other with an MFI logo — this would allow manufacturers to concentrate their efforts on one SKU and eliminate confusion for buyers. HomeKit does not offer a truly open system that allows communication directly with any connected device, regardless of MFI status. But the hub concept is encouraging. It displays a new, more flexible way of thinking that is pervasive throughout the company’s announcements this week. |
TrendKite Raises $3.2M For PR Analytics, Recruits Dachis Group’s Erik Huddleston As CEO | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | , a startup promising to help brands and agencies measure the effectiveness of their PR efforts, has raised $3.2 million in Series A funding. It’s also announcing that it has a new CEO — Erik Huddleston, former CTO and executive vice president of product at social monitoring company Dachis Group. Huddleston told me that when in February, he was “fully committed” to staying on-board. However, he was already an adviser with TrendKite, and shortly after the acquisition was announced, the startup’s founders took him to dinner and suggested that he join as CEO. It was, in his words, “a bit of an ambush.” And apparently it worked. Those founders will remain involved in the company — former CEO Matt Allison is now chief product officer, while his co-founders AJ Bruno and Patrick Brannen continue to serve as president and CTO, respectively. Huddleston said that even though companies like Sprinklr represent a broader shift in spending from IT to marketing, particularly toward data-focused marketing tools, most of those tools have been focused on advertising, leaving earned media (i.e. press coverage and consumer mentions that companies don’t pay for), “completely ignored.” TrendKite says it can provide companies with the PR data they need, with features including custom dashboards (tracking things like the most popular articles about your company, mentions by top influencers, and general sentiment and share of voice compared with the competition), email news alerts, and shareable PDF reports. Huddleston also praised the founders’ vision, as well as their experience in the industry and in sales: “The only thing they were really missing was the product component.” Not that he was criticizing the product itself (he recalled talking to customers who “raved” about it), just suggesting that the company needed someone with a strong product background at the top. The company’s new funding was led by Mercury Fund and Silverton Partners. It follows and will go towards expanding the company’s data infrastructure and its sales team. |
We Search More On Apps, Less On Google Now | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | We’re using apps on our smartphones and tablets much more to look things up now, according to a out from eMarketer. That means a serious drop in ad revenue for many of the major search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo. According to the report, Google mobile ads saw a dramatic 17 percent drop in revenue from 2012. The search giant owned 82.8 percent of the $2.24 billion search market just two years ago. While the U.S. mobile ad market brought in a whopping $17.73 billion this year, mobile search spending jumped to more than half of that at $9.02 billion — but Google’s piece of that pie dropped to just 65.7 percent. Basically, we’re on our smartphones a lot more when looking things up than we are on our desktops. And we’re fragmented in the way we search now as well. Google is all search for everything but can’t necessarily tell us in a click the best restaurant or what the price is on a coveted item. We use niche travel apps such as Kayak to look up travel info, Trulia to search for homes and local business search company Yelp to look up local businesses. A out earlier this year confirms the shift to mobile. We’re spending an average of 34 hours using the Internet on our mobile phones every month compared to 27 hours using the Internet on our desktop. According to the eMarketer report, we’re really big on local search. Yelp is leading the pack here in terms of ad-revenue growth. Predictions for the local business search company are at 136 percent, or $119 million in mobile ad revenue this year. While that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the spend for Google, Yahoo or Bing, it’s a telling shift in consumer behavior. Revenues are expected to triple by 2016 for Yelp. Meanwhile, Google revenue is expected to drop to 64.2 percent of the overall market by then. No word yet on what the “other” category is in the report. Also note that this report does not mean Google is losing revenue. On the contrary, it’s still growing — it’s just capturing less of the overall market than it was before. As mentioned above, the total mobile ad spend has jumped by nearly $7 billion in the last two years. That still gives Google close to $6 billion in mobile search ad revenue. The bottom line here is that niche apps are taking over the way in which we search online, and they’re doing this because we are spending much more time looking things up on mobile devices than we are on our desktops. |
CrunchWeek: Uber’s $17B Valuation, Houzz Raises $150M, Apple’s Big WWDC News | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | At least one of those things proved good fodder for this week’s episode of . In the video embedded above, watch Leena Rao, Kyle Russell and I gather around the big roundtable to talk about Uber’s new $1.2 billion funding round that puts the company at , Houzz’s new $150 million raise at , and the big takeaways from Apple’s held this past week in San Francisco. |
Want To Attend Google I/O? We Have 15 Registration Codes To Give Out | Elin Blesener | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | Happy Friday, friends. In case you missed out on being able to attend taking place on June 25-26 at Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco, don’t fret. We have 15 registration codes to give away to 15 people, which will allow them to buy previously sold out Google i/o tickets for $900. The giveaway starts now and will end Sunday, June 8, at 10 a.m. PDT. The winners will be contacted and will have until Monday at 11:59 p.m. PDT to . Keep in mind that you’ll have to have a Google+ account to register if you’re chosen as a winner. All you have to do to enter for a chance to win is follow the steps below: 1) 2) Keep your eyes peeled for a reply to your comments on Sunday morning. Also, if you aren’t able to attend, you’ll be able to catch all of our coverage of the conference . Congrats to the following: András Holló
Taaran Chanana
Ofer Ronen
Blair Elizabeth Spence
Thomas Lee
Ratnakant Sardal
Quinn Andrew
Varun Kochar
László Priskin
Jean-Luc David
Taufiq Husain
Parris Payden
Tavon Gatling
David Kochheiser
Jeff Feldman |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: WWDC, iOS 8, OS X Yosemite, And WWDC! | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | Apple might have skimped on hardware announcements, but the improvements to Apple’s desktop and mobile software are plenty. iOS 8 offers badass messaging, new camera software, and of course, Continuity, which lets you leave one task and pick it up from device to device. Meanwhile, OS X Yosemite offers a “dark mode”!! But at the end of the day, it’s the developers who won out with the introduction of an open TouchID, HealthKit, and HomeKit, among other things. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
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Talkz Thinks Talking Stickers Will Be The Next Big Thing For Mobile Messaging Apps | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | Sticker packs and emoji have become a go-to means for mobile messaging companies to generate revenue from what are otherwise free applications. Today, one such service, a called , is introducing a new way to upgrade the sticker experience in a way that leverages the speech background of Talkz founder and CEO Heath Ahrens, also the founder of iSpeech and DriveSafe.ly. Yep, you guessed it: Talkz is now doing talking stickers. When Talkz first launched, the company was thinking of competing in the broader mobile messaging market with an app of its own, which was then focused on having users sent both text and voice messages to each other. But it wasn’t until early this year that Ahrens came up with the idea for talking stickers, he says. To test the concept, Talkz built an online platform where users could create their own stickers by uploading pictures and their own voices. Initially, the team reached out to a handful of YouTubers known for doing impressions and invited them to the private beta. The overall idea is that sticker-building is something that a smaller percentage of the user base would do, but once created, the stickers could be used by anyone. Once available in the app, you could type out a message as Arnold, Xerxes (from the movie “300”), President Obama or any other impersonated talking sticker. Asked if he was worried about copyright-infringement issues, Ahrens says that many of the “characters” used would fall under public domain. In other cases, he believes the sticker impersonations would be considered “parody,” and therefore be protected. (This would work for now, at least, as the stickers are not being sold.) Talkz today has only a small user base in its own applications. But Ahrens explains that the larger vision for the company now is one that sees them licensing the talking sticker technology to other mobile messaging players. “Talkz is a showcase application,” says Ahrens. “If Talkz does really well, awesome…but, at the end of the day, all these big guys that have hundreds of millions of users – we’d love to put our talking stickers in front of them.” The company is already in “serious” discussions with two mobile messaging providers, he adds, as well as brand aggregators who sell stickers to multiple companies. What makes the product interesting to these companies, besides its consumer appeal perhaps, is the potential to sell “sponsored” stickers from advertisers, allowing them, for the first time in many cases, an entry into the closed world of private person-to-person communications. For example (only an example!), you could imagine that a company that had a well-known character of its own, like the Geico gecko, could create talking stickers featuring the official brand assets and voice. This could be one avenue toward monetizing Talkz, while another could involve reselling the user-generated stickers and doing a revenue share with the creators. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrn6L-zrNjY] Talking stickers may seem really silly, but sticker sales are turning into notable revenue streams for many messaging companies, especially in Asia. For instance, last year, $17 million of LINE’s $58 million in total revenue in Q1 2013 came from stickers. , sticker revenue climbed to $10 million per month. , Line reported that 20 percent of its came from stickers versus 60 percent from games. Meanwhile, when Path , it made more revenue in 24 hours than in its entire history as a company. And said that stickers drive nearly all its revenue. The new talking stickers are live now on all of Talkz’ applications, including , , and . Blackberry? W ? “Um…I can’t say,” Ahrens responded. “There are a lot of messaging apps that are interested in using our talking stickers to monetize their platforms.” |
Apple Acquires Spotsetter, A Social Search Engine For Places | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | , a social search engine using big data to offer personalized recommendations as to places to go, has been quietly snapped up by Apple, TechCrunch has learned. The technology, which involves layering social data on top of a maps interface could be used to beef up Apple Maps with features competitor Google lacks. The deal, we understand, was mainly about acquiring the technology and the talent of the two founders, ex-Google Maps engineer and (whose LinkedIn profiles also now point to their move to Apple). Some of the company’s team also joined Apple, but not all. Spotsetter debuted during , then later went on to raise $1.3 million in seed funding from Rahul Prakash, 2020 Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners in addition to AngelPad, . We don’t know the specifics of the deal terms at this time, but hear that the “investors are happy,” so to speak. Spotsetter looked to combine friends’ recommendations, trusted reviews and other signals in order to reinvent maps as a more social experience. Initially available as a web and mobile application, Spotsetter used a patent-pending algorithm to pull in users’ content from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, as well as venue content from over 30 review sites and lists from trusted sources like Yelp, Zagat, the New York Times, Michelin, and TripAdviser. As of last summer, the company said that it had processed 5 million user profiles, 40 million venues, and 1 million curated venue content items from around the world. Using the app, you could look up any place, category or keyword, then be presented with personalized results, as well as see what your friends had said about the places around you. The app would also highlight which of your friends were experts in a given area, like coffee or shopping or sushi, for example – and you could tag your friends as experts in order to influence the recommendations. In addition, you could use Spotsetter to discover new places by browsing the map to see where your friends have been and what they’ve shared. The end result was a social search engine built on top of a mapping interface. As VentureBeat pointed out , Spotsetter was similar in a way to Foursquare, which also plots social data on a map, but instead of being limited to one source, the app pulled from multiple platforms. Spotsetter was available, until recently, on both and , but the company had its eye on making its way into wearables in the future, including Google Glass, and the rumored iWatch, if such a product were ever released. As the company explained on its blog just a few months ago, recommendations done right on wearable platforms would seemingly work “like magic.” “Our users won’t have to explicitly search; they get a great recommendation at the appropriate time with the right amount of content,” wrote Lee. “Then they continue to enjoy the physical world without a thought about technology.” Lee’s final from last week hints that though Spotsetter is shutting down, the idea lives on: “We still have big dreams for personalized search for places and look forward to seeing great progress in this area.” Spotsetter had been in discussions with Apple for some time, but the deal quickly closed last week after other companies found out and became interested, we hear. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment, and will update if a response is provided. |
Happy Birthday, Tetris | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | Tetris is much more fun than current games. Today, we celebrate Tetris’ 30th birthday. I’m sure all of you already know Tetris, its catchy , and the frustration of seeing bricks pile up on the screen. Invented in 1984 by Alexei Pajitnov in the Soviet Union, the game became extremely popular when Nintendo released it on the Game Boy in 1989. It was one of the launch titles on the groundbreaking portable console. Rumor has it that productivity drastically dropped in Japan on that day as employees brought their newest Nintendo console to work. I wasn’t even born at the time. But it doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy Tetris. In fact, I have to admit something — I’m a Tetris addict. I played Tetris on the original Game Boy in the late 1990s, on many different computers, on the web, and even on multiple smartphones. There are two things that I know for sure: you can’t properly play Tetris on a smartphone, and nothing has come close to Tetris in all those years. There is this intrinsic challenge in Tetris that makes it so beautiful. Every time a game ends, you want to start again. Your score could be so low that you know you can do better. Your score could be so close to your high score that you want to try and beat it. Your score could be your new high score, and you still want to play to celebrate and see if you can do “just a little more”. I’m not the only one who has been obsessed with Tetris. There is even a very good recent documentary called that every Tetris fan should watch. You can see some top Tetris players competing to find out who is the best NES Tetris player in the world. Even more interesting, the NES version of Tetris is not an infinite game. There is a way to “max out” the game. As Chris Higgins , the score doesn’t go above 999,999 points, and level 29 is so fast that you can’t reach the borders of the screen. That’s why players call it the “death screen.” I didn’t expect Tetris to still have a group of highly dedicated top players who play countless of hours. Compare that to current games, studios are now throwing millions of dollars to organize esports competitions. It seems very artificial compared to Tetris, which is competitive by nature. Let’s be honest, it’s the only reason you hit the Retry button. We don’t see games like Tetris anymore. Blockbusters like Watch Dogs provide a much different experience. Multiplayer games are not about doing a better score independently from your opponents, they are about dominating your opponents, killing them. Maybe TrackMania still provides this arcade-like experience, but it’s an exception. And the most popular mobile games are riddled with in-app purchases, waiting times and ads — nothing like Tetris. As the E3 conference is right around the corner, I think the gaming industry has just moved on. It is now chasing a different audience who didn’t grow up with Tetris. But does it mean that companies should be making different games? Maybe the Tetris of this generation is Candy Crush Saga. if that’s the case, I think I’ll just go back to playing Tetris. Just one more time. http://vimeo.com/97506855 |
Announcing The Startups Pitching At The Austin And Seattle Meetups | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | TechCrunch is headed to Austin and Seattle next week. We’ll be in on Tuesday and on Thursday. There are still a few tickets available for each event, too. They’re only $10. Snag one or three before they’re gone. At each meetup, a group of the area’s finest undiscovered startups will pitch to a panel of judges, TechCrunch editors and a thousand attendees. These young companies have 60 seconds to make their case to the crowd. It’s rapid fire, raw and a lot of fun for everyone involved. The winner gets a demo table at TechCrunch Disrupt SF and the runners-up get tickets to the show. The startups are listed below. These meetups are equal parts neighborhood mixer and rowdy TechCrunch party. Put on your best hipster blazer, pack your pockets full of business cards and load your pitch deck on your phone. These nights are great and only cost $10. There are still some sponsorship opportunities available for each of the upcoming meetups. Email sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com for more info.
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ISPs Create Fake Grassroots Groups To Fight Net Neutrality | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | Right on cue, the big corporations who stand to lose the most from the treatment of Internet connectivity as a public utility are allegedly creating “grassroots” organizations that are really fronts for expensive lobbying operations. For example, one organization, Broadband for America, is funded almost entirely by the National Cable and Telecom Association. on the whole rigmarole. Writes Lee Fang regarding another “consumer advocacy” group, ACI: Thus far the net neutrality has turned out to be a fight between big ISPs and geeks with consumers either confused or ignorant of the ramifications of Internet fast lanes and the like. If general-purpose networking and computing are taken over by corporate interests it will cause ripple effect up and down the net that could raise rates, prevent competition, and destroy Internet freedom. Jon Oliver’s own rant on the subject garnered 45,000 responses to the FCC ruling and, given the energy of the nerd classes, I suspect this will be shut down in the same way PIPA and SOPA saw the wrath of . [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fpbOEoRrHyU] The bottom line is that corporations want to charge more for access to their infrastructure. This is not an effort to enable higher speeds for consumers nor is it a ploy to ensure valuable episodes of don’t go unwatched. It’s a money play and it’s an effort to jack up rates on what is essentially a commodity product. Big players like Google are already horning in on ISP territory and with mobile carriers like T-Mobile treating the airwaves like an all-you-can-eat roaming smorgasbord, there is little hope for the entrenched companies who want someone else to pay for their router maintenance. It make look like a consumer issue but it’s really a board room issue. ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon can Astroturf all they want, but one thing holds true: they are all out to milk the consumer for all they’re worth by offering high-cost, slow Internet feeds to people who don’t know any better. We’ve ridden far past the era of independent Internet providers but that doesn’t mean we need to be taken for a ride. |
Uber Raises Giant $1.2 Billion Funding Round At A $17 Billion Valuation | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | On-demand ride-hailing service has confirmed today that it has raised $1.2 billion in funding from a group of mutual fund managers and venture investors that values the company at $17 billion pre-money. The company said the total raise will end up being once it’s completed a second close of strategic investors. New investors include Fidelity Investments, Wellington Management, and BlackRock Inc., according to the , with Summit Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and Menlo Ventures also participating. The valuation comes at a huge premium over its last raise, which happened just last summer. That funding round brought in , and valued the company at around $3.4 billion. Altogether, the company has raised $1.5 billion since being founded in 2010. The raise places it in an elite class, only Facebook has raised money at a higher valuation so far. And the valuation places it well above companies like Dropbox and Xiaomi in the $10 billion club. But the size of the round also speaks to the pace of the company’s growth, and the larger business opportunity. Uber has been around for just four years, but it has grown rapidly in that short period of time. It’s now operating in 128 cities and 37 countries around the world, according its . In addition to expanding into new markets, Uber has also been adding new products and features over time. What began as a luxury app for hailing a black car — hence the tagline “Everyone’s private driver” — has morphed to offer lower-price, more accessible transportation in major metropolitan areas. In many markets its “UberX” fares are priced below the cost of a cab, and it’s looking to expand the low-cost option to more cities. Uber is also experimenting with new services, like its UberRUSH courier service or its UberFAMILY child seat offerings in New York City. Based on the success of those programs, Uber could make those offerings available in additional markets. After all, Uber has built a logistical framework for getting around various cities, there’s nothing to stop it from moving around things instead of just people. For now though, Uber seems laser-focused on the local transportation problem, and has been looking to raise awareness and distribution through partnerships with some major players. It recently got integrated with Google Maps, enabling users of that mobile app to hail an Uber while searching for directions. And last week, it announced a partnership with AT&T that would move drivers onto the mobile provider’s cell network, while also getting the Uber app pre-loaded on AT&T Android phones. While Uber has grown rapidly, it has also seen increased competition from other transportation and logistics or delivery services. Earlier this year, ride-sharing startup Lyft , matching the amount Uber had brought on the summer before. And there’s no shortage of local delivery services cropping up in metropolitan areas like New York City and San Francisco. Still, based on its massive war chest and huge valuation, Uber is clearly the market leader in the space and will be tough to beat on a global level. |
Fortune And Money Launch New Sites And Split Off From CNN Money | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 1 | Two of Time Inc.’s business and finance publications, Fortune and Money, are getting new online homes today. You’re probably familiar with the magazines, and you’ve probably read some of their articles online. But when you did, they weren’t on a standalone Fortune or Money website — instead, they were posted to , a joint venture between Time Inc. and CNN. Money Editor Craig Matters told me that CNN Money was certainly a success (citing comScore, Time says the site saw 17.6 million unique visitors in April). Unfortunately, it had the drawback of making Fortune and Money a little less visible online, at least from a branding perspective. (I’ve certainly found the setup a little confusing, when I was trying to credit the publications for scoops.) “It’s been something that we’ve been kind of itching to do for a while,” Matters said. “For Fortune and Money to not really have robust digital brands might have been okay in 2005, but it’s less okay once you’re out of the oughts.” What really “forced the decision,” he said, was , which means that the publications will no longer be under the same corporate umbrella as CNN (owned by Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting division). To gear up for the launch, both publications have been hiring — they said Fortune brought on 24 new team members in recent months, while Money brought on seven. Most of those hires will be focused on producing content for the websites, though Matters and Fortune Editor Andy Serwer both said the divisions between the print and digital teams are becoming more permeable. The goal for Money will be to post 20 or 30 pieces of content a day, while Fortune is aiming for up to 90. On the Money side, Matters said the team will take a broad approach, looking at “the big tent issues that everybody encounters” and trying to address them in a way that’s “a little more fun and a little more playful.” That also means doing more to highlight the big stories from the magazine — not just by posting them online and including one or two pieces of additional content, but coming up with related videos, quizzes, and more that can run throughout the month. As for Fortune, Serwer said he really wants to highlight Fortune’s writers and its big “franchises”, such as the Fortune 500 list. Not only has the relaunch been timed to coincide with the announcement of this year’s Fortune 500, but Serwer said the list (and others like it) will become more of “a living and breathing thing” that’s updated regularly with new content. The new sites will look similar to that launched in March. (By building on the same platform, Time says it was able to launch these new sites relatively quickly.) There’s a big story in the middle of the page, with most of the navigation pushed to the left-hand side. And that navigation will include both banner ads and native ads, i.e., sponsored posts that are labeled as “content from” the advertiser. That gave me an opportunity to bring up a concern that I’d seen around the Time redesign, something that will carry over to the new sites — the fact that native ads aren’t labeled as “sponsored” per se. Group Publisher Jed Hartman argued that even though the “content from” label appeals to advertisers, there’s an editorial reason for it, too, because putting the word “sponsored” on something can be confusing to a layperson. Sure, it tells the reader that the advertiser paid for it, but who actually wrote the content? By giving the advertiser their own byline, of sorts, Time is telling readers who wrote the article, Hartman said. “That is the real reason we’re doing it,” Serwer added. “We believe that this is most clear way to put it.” Both the Fortune and Money sites are scheduled to go live later today. (I’ll update This posts with links when they’re up.) . Existing Fortune and Money content will be moved to the new sites, and links to older content will redirect there. and are live. |
Apple’s New Retail Head Angela Ahrendts Didn’t Sell $5.3M In Shares | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | No, Apple’s new head of retail Angela Ahrendts did not sell $5.3M in shares. An reported on today shows that amount being withheld for tax purposes, though some sites are reporting she sold them. If you actually read the form, you’ll note that footnote 2 clearly states that, “Shares withheld by Registrant to satisfy the minimum statutory tax withholding requirements on vesting of restricted stock units. .” (Emphasis ours.) Ahrendts’s vesting schedule is laid out in the third footnote: This award was granted on May 1, 2014 for a total of 62,555 restricted stock units. 26% of the award vested on June 1, 2014 and the remaining restricted stock units vest 32% on April 1, 2015; 21% on July 18, 2015; 15% on June 14, 2016; 3% on June 14, 2017; and 3% on June 14, 2018. Late last year SVP Eddy Cue out of a grant of 100K that was awarded in September 2011. At the time, Cue withheld 25,420 shares at a price of $501.02 per share for taxes, a common, and well-known, practice for big companies. At the same time, CEO Tim Cook tucked away 38,028 shares at a current market rate of around $19 million to satisfy taxes and didn’t sell any of his 72,877 vested shares. Apple has a new vesting and bonus scheme that was tweaked to be more performance-based in June of last year. Apple’s return performance will be compared to the S&P 400, and if Apple is in the top third of the group, Cook will get his full annual award of 80k shares. The lower it goes, the more it will be reduced. Ahrendts joined Apple officially last month, after being named last year. And it’s probably a bit early for her to sell shares. |
Hiku’s Connected Grocery Scanner Is An “Amazon Dash” For The Rest Of Us | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | In April, it would begin testing a new connected hardware device called the “ ,” which lets you order groceries from AmazonFresh by either scanning a product barcode or speaking a product name into the device. But the Dash is only available in select markets where Prime Fresh operates, and customers have to be invited to participate in the device’s private trial. If you can’t get in on the fun, there’s a similar product already available on the market as it turns out: . Founded in January 2012 by two ex-Palm engineers, Rob Katcher and Rajan Bala (also of Blackberry), the startup began shipping its own version of a “connected” grocery scanner . However, the company recently ran into some issues scaling to meet demand after the holidays, and ended up with devices on backorder for a couple of months. But as of mid-April, the Hiku is shipping again, we’re told. The cool thing about the Dash is that it lets you create your shopping list from the kitchen, simply by scanning a product’s barcode or even just pressing a button and speaking into the device’s microphone. That’s how the basically works, too. And it happened to have launched ahead of the Dash, in fact, proving that the old adage is true: there’s as an original business idea. Currently, the Hiku works to create your shopping list in , so you can reference it while out at the store, making sure you don’t forget items. Its product database today includes over 17 million different barcodes, mainly grocery store items along with other common household goods, like toothpaste, diapers, soap, and more. Notes Katcher, Hiku’s main competition isn’t really the conveniences provided by something like Amazon Prime or other online stores, it’s really “pen and paper” – which is how most people continue to make their lists for local shopping today. As a Wi-Fi connected gadget, Hiku can stick to the fridge to capture your thoughts at times when your mobile phone might not be readily available. Katcher and co-founder Bala came up with the idea for Hiku as they were getting ready to leave Palm/HP. They realized that the next big trend following the mobile market’s maturity could be connected devices. Meanwhile, as a father of three, Katcher knew first-hand how families run today – you’re constantly restocking the house, making lists of things to buy, and yes, very often forgetting critical items while at the store. Now the company is in discussions with various retailers to add a level of automation to the product that goes beyond making lists for offline shopping. The team is in the process of signing deals with retailers who have e-commerce stores to enable Hiku users the option of having the device actually do the shopping for them. The first integrations of Hiku’s “shop for me” feature will launch in just a few weeks, but outside the U.S. However, the team is expecting that a similar option for U.S. users will also arrive this year. Unfortunately, the price point for the today is $79, which puts it more in the “nice to have” category, potentially limiting broader sales to a mainstream user base. (So far, sales have been “above the triple digits,” we understand). Hiku is by $750,000 in seed funding from Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures and Ash Patel at Morado Ventures. The company is also raising additional funds now. |
Domobio’s QT33 Can Dramatically Improve Sleep Apnea Patients’ Quality Of Life | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | More than , a condition that affects their breathing while they are asleep. Not only does sleep apnea impact their sleep quality, but it can also increase the risk of strokes, heart attacks, congestive heart failure, and hypertension. To treat the condition without surgery, patients use continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines or oral appliances that resemble retainers. Many oral appliances, however, are bulky and can cause pain in the temporomandibular joints below the ears. When , a Seoul-based dentist, realized how much sleep apnea decimated the quality of life for his patients, he began working on an alternative oral appliance called the QT33 and then spent the next 10 years tinkering with it until its hardware was as small as possible. Now Lee’s startup domobio, which , is seeking Food and Drug Administration approval and distributors in the U.S. for the device. QT33 is already available at . The QT33, which holds patents in South Korea, China, and the U.S., is molded from orthodontic resin and has a small metal fastener made from titanium alloy just behind the front teeth. Patients can “unlock” it by opening their mouths or sliding their jaws side-to-side, but when the fastener is engaged, it holds the lower jaw in the best position for proper breathing during sleep. Before creating QT33, Lee used , one of the leading sleep apnea oral appliances, on his patients. Some complained that it caused joint pain in their jaws, however, and so Lee decided to develop a slimmer alternative that would also be faster to prepare and make. He says that it only takes two ten-minute sessions with a patient to prepare the QT33: one to make an impression for the device of the patient’s teeth and then another to make sure it fits properly. Lab technicians can make up to three QT33 a day, compared to one for other devices. The current version of Lee’s QT33 device, which costs about $2,000, has already been used by 1,500 patients in Korea. Before working with sleep apnea patients and creating QT33, Lee says he saw being a dentist as just a job, because his father and grandfather had both been in the profession before him. “We’ve been in the dental field for the last 90 years. Being a dentist was just how I earned my living, but after I started treating sleep apnea patients, I changed my mind because they really, really appreciate it,” Lee says. “There are things that most people take for granted, like being able to sleep lying down, that some sleep apnea patients can’t do,” he adds. “Sleep apnea patients really suffer a lot. This is related directly to their quality of life.” For more information about QT33, contact Lee at sk.lee@domobio.co.kr |
Mobile Ad Startup TapSense Announces Support For Wearable Apps, Starting On Pebble | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | If you’re building apps for the Pebble smartwatch and other wearable gadgets, startup hopes to bring you into the wonderful world of mobile advertising. The company announced today that its mobile ad exchange will support wearable apps, beginning with those in the Pebble appstore. You can see a video demo of an ad below. However, as you watch the demo (as opposed to the mock-up above), you might notice a lack of actual smartwatches. That’s because TapSense isn’t running ads on the Pebble itself. Instead, it’s helping developers target ads at iOS and Android users who own Pebble devices. The company says those ads will link directly to the promoted apps in the Pebble appstore. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZRnHArBRG8&w=560&h=315] In other words, developers will be able to promote their apps through the same sorts of ads used by other mobile developers. TapSense founder and CEO Ash Kumar added that Pebble’s store (where users find apps on their phones, and those apps are then synced with their smartwatches) exemplifies a model where the smartphone becomes the hub for your other wearable devices. Having that hub is important, he suggested, because “the wearables market will remain fragmented for some time,” without any one device dominating. To a certain extent, this may be a bit of an experiment, allowing TapSense to explore wearables and giving them a leg up when and if the market really takes off. Looking ahead, Kumar said he plans to support other wearable apps in the same way. He started with Pebble because of its reach and the diversity of apps ( ). Kumar also said that, as far as he knows, TapSense is the first mobile ad company to build this kind of Pebble support. (I emailed Pebble for confirmation but haven’t heard back.) And yes, eventually he’d like to run ads within those wearable apps, too, particularly as they provide an opportunity to deliver real-time, relevant advertising that’s much better than “annoying banner ads.” |
People Are Going To Dress Up Like Star Wars Characters In SF Tomorrow To Protest Google | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | No one protests like San Francisco. The scene: Tomorrow, outside of Google’s I/O conference, an assemblage of protestors will dress up like Star Wars characters to decry Google and the economic impact of the technology industry. The goal, the group told TechCrunch in an email, is to highlight rising income inequality in San Francisco, a city now infamous for its spiraling rents. Google has become a symbol for the rapid change that San Francisco is currently undergoing. Protestors target Google’s buses that take its employees to and from work in the South Bay. Google’s I/O developer event, similar to confabs held by Apple, Microsoft, Box, Dropbox and others, will see a cluster of Glass-adorned techies swarming the South of Market area of San Francisco. Toss in a protest and what the group promises to be a “giant 10′ by 20′ banner of Darth Vader with Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ credo,” and this year’s I/O could be the most interesting yet. TechCrunch will be onsite all day. We’ve reached out to Google for comment on the promised protest. It’s worth noting that this is not the only planned protest of the search giant. Today, a number of net neutrality advocates set up shop outside of its Mountain View headquarters, demanding that the company work harder to ensure an open Internet. Google has been a public supporter of net neutrality since at least 2006. In other news, Google today that it has doubled the RAM that Glass ships with to 2GB. |
Congress Names 4 Countries To Anti-Piracy Watchlist | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | A Congressional caucus identified four nations that are failing to address high rates of digital piracy. As first , the released by the — formerly the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus — Tuesday zeroes in on China, Russia, India and Switzerland. “That’s why we started the Watch List – to alert those who are profiting by stealing the hard work of American creators and the countries helping them that we are paying attention and we expect our trading partners to protect intellectual property rights,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. India is the only new addition to the list that the country is experiencing a tepid decline in software piracy. In 2013, piracy rates stood at 60 percent, three percentage points less than in 2011. The report slammed China and Russia. China has a notoriously high software piracy rate, at 74 percent in 2013. The piracy issues there have plagued companies like Microsoft, which for decades. In 2012 the company tried to combat piracy there with sales of the Surface and Windows 8, but the company and government have recently clashed over China’s Switzerland was an unexpected addition to the list because it did not appear on the U.S. Trade Representative’s annual review of international trading partners’ protection of intellectual property rights, but China, Russia and India all ranked in the top 10. Switzerland was first added to the watchlist in 2012 due to a 2010 Swiss Federal Supreme Court decision that made it “virtually impossible for rights holders to bring actions against large scale peer-to-peer infringers,” according to the watchlist report. The caucus said the Philippines and Italy have made progress. Although online piracy rates remain high in Italy, the report found that Italian authorities have been more cooperative in combating the issue. The Philippines has moved toward addressing shortfalls in copyright laws. |
Silicon Valley Moguls Push For Campaign Finance Reform | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | When it comes to big money in politics, a group of tech magnates is — or super PAC with super PAC — according to . Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman have joined forces with the super PAC , which aims to reduce the influence of money in politics. The super PAC, which was founded by Harvard professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig, has raised more than $1.2 million through crowdsourced funding, according to the MayDay website. The committee hopes to raise $5 million by the Fourth of July and $12 million by the 2014 midterm elections. According to , Silicon Valley billionaires will be matching all donations to MayDay. In an explanatory , Lessig said the PAC will run a pilot campaign in the 2014 election, attempting to elect five candidates — showing that Washington money matters in elections and everyday citizens can have a voice. He then plans to expand the campaign in 2016 to elect a Congress that would favor reforming campaign finance law by 2017. Lessig has pushed for reforms to campaign finance law in the wake of the controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision in that ruled restrictions on campaign donations violated freedom of speech. The ruling struck down laws restricting the amount of money corporations can spend influencing elections. Later that same year, the Court ruled individuals could also spend as much money as they wanted, as long as they weren’t donating to just one campaign, leading to the rise of super PACs. Activists like Lessig say these rulings give the elite and wealthy a dangerous level of influence in politics. In another supporting the campaign, Wozniak outlined how big money corrupts “America’s operating system.” He highlights several areas he thinks big money in politics has failed the tech industry, ranging from net neutrality to the “overreach of the NSA.” “Right now if a politician wants to get elected, the most important thing is if they can make this tiny group of people happy,” Wozniak says. “What makes them happy isn’t necessarily what makes the rest of us happy. That’s how we end up having to fight both tooth and nail on stuff that’s so bad for the Internet and everyone who uses it.” Lessig Newsweek that Silicon Valley was “uniquely positioned” to play a role in changing campaign finance laws because unlike other industries, tech has not yet advanced to the point where it seeks to boost a profit through legislative reforms. That seems to underplay the role the tech industry has played in financing elections since the decision. In the 2012 election, the computer/Internet industry ranked 12 in the top 20 industries making campaign contributions on . The industry contributed more than $51.3 million to PACs, parties and candidates, which is not far behind the gas and oil industry’s $56.6 million worth of contributions. Let’s not forget the industry’s role in some major super PACs, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us. And Napster co-founder Sean Parker has been for years. If anything, recent controversies over net neutrality and the NSA’s bulk metadata collection program only increase the political clout Silicon Valley seeks in Washington and elections outside the Beltway. Just this week, Politico reported Google is its “army of lobbyists.” If MayDay actually focuses as Lessig says on electing candidates based on their campaign finance platforms, it could create reforms in Washington. However, with so much of its support coming from the tech industry, it’s possible this initiative could pit Silicon Valley against other industries. It’s hard to argue a super PAC symbolizes the support of the masses when moguls are matching donations. Only time will tell if this will lead to more billionaires throwing more money at elections or some meaningful changes. |
Jason Kilar’s New Startup Vessel Comes Out Of Hiding, With Backing By Greylock And Benchmark | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | Former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is finally ready to talk about what he’s been up to over the last year or so. Well, kind of. Today Kilar, along with ex-Hulu CTO Richard Tom announced that they are working on a startup called , “whose mission is to delight consumers and content creators alike.” Outside of that, though, the two didn’t really say much, except that they see an opportunity to improve the media world, and video in particular. Operating under the codename The Fremont Project, Kilar and Tom have , including former VP of Product Lonn Lee, Head of Recruiting Megan Healey, and SVP of Advertising Jean-Paul Colaco. It’s also nabbed funding from a couple of heavy-hitters in the venture space. Vessel is backed by Benchmark, Greylock Partners, and Bezos Expeditions. In separate blog posts, and announced they were joining the company’s board. |
ReplayLastGoal Instantly Tweets Video Of The Latest World Cup Goal | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | We interrupt our normal programming to inform you of a handy new service for those of us the World Cup in Brazil. is a Twitter bot that automatically tweets the video replay and animated GIF of the latest goal in the tournament. Handy right? There are plenty of ways to get the score fast – but this actually SHOWS you the goal. Awesome. The open source project is by , the Cofounder of @Storify (acquired by @Livefyre in 2013) and it’s seen its following rise since the the handy service sneaked out a week or so ago. “I thought of doing this Twitter Bot because given the schedule, all the games happen during working hours so I don’t have the time to follow them,” Damman told me. “The only thing I could find were bots that were tweeting the score. But when there is a goal, I want to see it. So I built this bot during my nights.” The bot records a live stream continuously with a 20 second buffer. When there is a goal, it records a short video, generates an animated gif and tweets it. With the recent support of animated gif on Twitter, it’s looking pretty good. The not for profit open source project has also source code available for anyone who wants to create a similar service for anything else – how about baseball? Maybe. Meanwhile, this is something the likes of FIFA should embrace – TV rights be damned… (Photo Credit: ) |
TC Cribs 50th Episode: We’re Back At Scribd, The San Francisco Startup Where It All Began | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | For its 50th episode airing today, we thought we’d bring it back to the place where it all began: , the San Francisco startup that veteran TechCruncher toured in the back in January 2011. Scribd today is still in its same space, though it’s grown quite a bit — this very well might be the last video tour we get of this office before the company expands to another spot. It was fun to see what’s changed and what’s stayed the same: There are more desks, more books, and more staff, but still lots of room for toys. I made a point to not watch Jason Kincaid’s in the days leading up to our tour, so it’s especially fun to see the similarities, expertly edited in here by our producer/editor . Pro tip for future visitors of Scribd: You’ve got to get a running start on the zipline, and no matter what, you probably will get the short end of the stick when it comes to the best Go-Kart. Try to choose wisely.
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