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Facebook’s Plan To Take On Twitter’s Stream | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | it the de facto place to discuss world events. But Facebook’s VP Of Media Partnerships believes his company has two big advantages in the battle to be the digital water cooler: audience size and real identity. It will need a lot more than that to wrestle public discussion away from Twitter, though. So Justin Osofsky tells me Facebook is pouring resources into its new Public Content Solutions team, hiring TV execs, acquiring startups that analyze real-time event chatter, and building new APIs so news outlets can visualize its data and remind us where to discuss world events. Several of these efforts have come to fruition through new partnerships. For instance, Facebook just announced that will show Facebook trending topics on a giant in-studio touch screen. The show’s hosts can tap and swipe the screen to show Facebook posts of people discussing the topics. will also use Facebook’s new Hashtag Counter API to let fans of car-racing show Street Outlaws vote for their favorite teams by posting to Facebook with the corresponding hashtag. The results will then be shown in real-time on the show. Facebook partner is powering both integrations. Facebook’s goal with these partnerships is to convince people that Facebook is where they should be talking about current events. This type of content connects users with shared interests and generates tons of engagement for Facebook as people come back frequently to see what friends and news outlets are saying about the day’s top happenings. Facebook can then turn that lucrative data about what people are talking about (and thereby care about) into ad targeting data, as well as time on site, into ad views. For any of that to work, though, Facebook has to beat Twitter. Real-time feeds aren’t just a component of Twitter, they’re an integral part of its makeup, so any attempt to disrupt Twitter’s dominance of this content style is going to be an uphill fight. While I post more touchy-feely life updates on Facebook, Twitter is where I go to talk about big sports matches, TV shows and world news. That’s because Twitter’s unfiltered, real-time feed means that when I post something urgent about that last play, last scene or latest breaking news, I know it gets seen immediately while it’s still relevant. Facebook’s relevancy-filtered feed shows me the best content from the past day or so, but not the most recent. If I posted the same content there, it might make little sense when it’s seen a few hours later. That hero I was rooting for on Game Of Thrones is now dead; the team I was making fun of won the game; or new information came to light in a manhunt or political debate. Facebook does offer a “Most Recent” option for viewing the News Feed, but it’s likely used much less than the traditional “Top News” feed because it’s relatively hard to find, especially on mobile. Facebook experimented with detecting when someone posted multiple times about real-time content and showing them in . However, Facebook couldn’t find a way to make this format more engaging than its standard, less-time-sensitive model, so it never rolled it out. To combine real-time public sharing with relevancy-sorted updates from friends, Facebook will have to shake the perception that it’s all about private content. That won’t be easy. On Facebook, sharing to friends-only is the default, which is without their posts being visible to the entire planet. But that also means users have to actively switch public sharing on or off. People come to Twitter specifically to share publicly. That’s the default expectation, and the way the vast majority of users tweet. So even if Facebook gets people chatting about events, they aren’t necessarily doing it publicly. But Facebook isn’t giving up on trying to own a piece of the web’s real-time action. Osofsky, who is also Facebook’s VP of Global Operations, laid out four big initiatives Facebook is using to build out its public content strategy: These are all steps in the right direction if Facebook wants a fresher feel. Still, the unfiltered feed gives Twitter a big advantage in sharing real-time content. Though it declined to comment, Twitter has been making moves of its own to lure in real-time event chatter. Facebook has essentially been running Twitter’s playbook a few years late, from hashtags and trending topics to courting TV broadcasters. Twitter is aggressively hiring for its media partnerships team, which just yesterday. It recently to build tools that surface potential news stories to journalists. Twitter has also been experimenting with exceptions to its chronological stream that will surface replies and other activity in your feed. And at its core, Twitter specializes in hosting real-time content. This isn’t some side business for it. But Osofsky tells me that Facebook offers a differentiated experience for two important reasons. The first is the sheer size of Facebook’s reach. It now has 1.28 billion users, including over 1 billion on mobile, plus another 200 million on Instagram. Osofsky says “There’s a scale of conversation, especially around public events. We have 141 million people talking about world Cup in week 1,” and those users created 459 million posts, comments, and likes. That’s compared to . Facebook hopes more users mean livelier conversations, but also that public figures will want to share on it because it could net them a bigger fan base. The second is real names. Facebook doesn’t allow people to sign up under pseudonyms that can let them post without accountability. Osofsky explains: Facebook is based on real identity so everyone on Facebook is their authentic self. It offers a really realistic lens in to the world around you. If you search for the World Cup on Facebook. you’ll see public posts from athletes and celebrities and important personalities around the sport, but also a very personal perspective from your friends. You’re seeing Wayne Rooney [of the defeated English team] exclusively posting his disappointment about the loss, but also post from the friends you grew up with. These elements make the experience on Facebook really unique. You might be able to get up-to-the-second thoughts from your interest graph on Twitter, but Facebook hopes its enormous network and the reactions of your social graph are worth waiting for. Osofsky did concede that the real-time conversation Twitter excels at is valuable. “For some types of events, such as the World Cup, the real-time lens is really important. Like seeing the reactions in real-time as people went from euphoria to disappointment [as USA squandered a win by letting Portugal tie Sunday’s game at the last minute].” He agrees Facebook needs a better way to capture this content. “Our job is to build the best surfaces so people can have both kinds of experiences,” Osofsky concludes. Facebook is doing everything it can with media partnerships to work around its private content focus and filtered feed. But don’t be surprised if it finds a way to detect when friends are talking about real-time events and make their voices heard immediately — just like Twitter. |
Jenn Allen Retracts Michael Arrington Rape Accusations | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has reached a settlement agreement with Jenn Allen. He’s , and it says that “Allen retracts, and expresses her regret for making, the Statements.” Apparently that covers accusing Arrington of abusing and raping her. Arrington, meanwhile, has dropped his lawsuit against Allen for allegedly making “false and defamatory statements.” Allen has not commented publicly on the settlement, which is dated April 24 — however, she does appear to have signed it. I’ve reached out to her and to her lawyer (who is apparently out of the office today). The settlement agreement does not mention any payment. The filing in which says that the suit is being dismissed “with prejudice” (so it can’t be filed again) and that both parties are responsible for their attorneys’ fees. Allen first made her , and she continued to repeat and elaborate on them on social media (and in the comments of related blog posts). Arrington denied the accusations, , and ultimately . The coverage of those statements stirred up other accusations, which . In , Arrington claimed that there were three things that led to the settlement, including Allen’s attempt to “coerce” another woman into corroborating her accusations, the statements of another ex boyfriend “that Jenn had been abusive and extremely delusional with him too”, and Allen’s own deposition, in which Arrington said she admitted to taking “a strong antipsychotic medication” beforehand. Arrington wrote: Unfortunately, when you have been accused of rape — even provably falsely as I have been — there’s no way to “win”. For the rest of my life, when someone searches my name on the internet, the word “rape” will appear somewhere among the results. And that person will always wonder whether or not I was capable of such a heinous act. by
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Snapchat Snags Facebook’s Mike Randall As Monetization VP | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | Facebook may be , but Snapchat is stealing Facebook’s employees, including a new one who could help it begin to make money. TechCrunch has learned that Snapchat has just signed the Global Director of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program as its new VP Of Business And Marketing Partnerships. Following this weekend’s highly successful launch of Snapchat’s new at the Electric Daisy Carnival music festival, Randall may have plenty of opportunities for Snapchat to finally start monetizing by working with other big events and brands. Randall started at Snapchat this month after four years at Facebook. As global director of the PMD program, he worked with Facebook’s biggest developer partners to help brands run ads, publish content through Pages, build apps, and analyze the results. Before that he spent three years as the Western region’s VP of Marketing Solutions. This experience will give him plenty of insight into how to help brands creatively embrace social media while raking in cash for his parent company. Mike Randall (left) with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and VP of Advertising David Fischer. Snapchat has plenty of directions it could go, like sponsored snaps sent directly to users or promoted accounts whose Stories they could follow. But a year ago, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel told TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook that “ . We think we can build really cool stuff people want to pay for. The app is now a part of everyone’s day-to-day lives. That means that they will — I at least would — pay for a more unique experience.” The hinted at one thing Snapchat could sell. The feature let those attending the music festival in Las Vegas to submit snaps to a curated public reel of photos and videos from around Electric Daisy Carnival that anyone around the world could watch. After hitting up EDC in-person and watching it on Snapchat, that was a vivid, accurate portrayal of what it felt like to be there. When Snapchatters went to submit their photos and videos from EDC, they may have stumbled upon something special. Along with options to overlay the time, temperature, or Instagram-esque tints, they could stick colorful EDC filters over their Snaps that featured the EDC logo and images like “Party Up,” seen here. Snapchat might one day sell these kinds of filters to let people “pay for a more unique experience” as Spiegel said. Behind the scenes, big music festivals and sporting events might pay Snapchat to make them an Our Story and promote it to users. And since an Our Story can be hundreds of clips long, it might be possible to slip in some branded snaps. Figuring out which of these and other opportunities will resonate with brands without alienating users will be Randall’s responsibility. Luckily he’ll have help from another former Facebooker, Snapchat COO Emily White, who was formerly Instagram’s director of business operations. Together, they’ll tackle the tough job of keeping Snapchat cool while turning it into a lean, mean, yellow money-making machine. |
The House Of Yo | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | Yo. This is not another “Yo” post…at least not an ordinary one. You see, the team of just set up shop at its official headquarters in San Francisco. Is it elaborately decorated with snow tigers, nap rooms and a giant buffalo greeting visitors in the lobby? Does it come complete with a inside? What have the founders done with the cool million beyond the simple app that launched a thousand eye rolls this past week? Naturally I went on over to take a look.
The company now flush with $1.2 million in funding is basically a guy in an Airbnb apartment. Yes, Or Arbel, the sole dude working on Yo, currently codes out of a studio apartment that he pays $150/day for in the middle of San Francisco’s Financial District. The woman who sublets to him has no idea this is Yo HQ at the moment. I’m apparently the first reporter he’s let inside. “This is where the magic happens,” Arbel says as he shows me the new app features he’d just pushed out 5 minutes before my arrival. The bed is unmade (it’s in the same room as the table and chair he works at), a lump of disheveled clothes sit atop a suitcase on the floor near a tiny closet. There’s a small bottle of Naked Juice on the table. He looks tired. I ask about that. Arbel tells me he hasn’t had what he’d consider actual sleep since his arrival. The phone rings non-stop as we’re chatting. He shows me his inbox full of VCs and people who want to talk to him about the app. Arbel definitely hasn’t shaved. Has he eaten? Oh, and despite the silliness of the app, he’s completely serious about its future. “People love to hate it but it’s a misunderstood app. It’s characterless, a new way to get notifications and to communicate. Nothing to open, no badge to remove…” Arbel could go on. He just landed in the States a week ago to network and meet influential people. And yes, he’s meeting truly influential people. All that is off-the-record for now, though. Arbel’s other half, Moshe Hogeg, is mostly working on their other projects back in Israel right now. “It’s just me. Surprise,” Arbel delivers this deadpan. A part of me can’t tell if underneath it all he sees this whole thing as a joke. But then he switches back to much seriousness and tells me the April 1st release of the of the app to the App Store was pure coincidence. The app was so simple Apple rejected it at first. They didn’t think it was actually complete. Arbel rolls his eyes when I ask about the hilarious app store reviews. There’s sarcasm in almost every review on the list. “This app saved the President,” “Yo the movement,” “I met my wife through Yo,” they say. “That just happened. We didn’t do it,” says Arbel. He’s worried people think it was all part of the marketing plan. Arbel insists the flood of recent PR was completely organic. “People think we paid. We didn’t even realize this app would be so popular,” he tells me. Yo just hit 1.2 million users and went #1 in the App Store at one point last week. It’s currently at #9 here, but still #1 on the charts in Israel, where the app was originally made…within 8 hours. Love it or hate it, we also can’t seem to shut up about it. even skewered Yo last week, asking Y. The new push this week means developers can now use the open API to create a “Yo” notice for their own site. We’re working on getting one for TechCrunch, but I am presently able to send you a “Yo” every time one of my stories hits. Just type in “TECHCRUNCHSARAH” to get that. There’s also a you can add to share notifications from your website now.
Arbel is also in the midst of planning a hackathon sometime this week. Just type in “YOHACKATHON” and Arbel will personally “Yo” you when those details are up on the site. I ask if the hackathon will be at the house of Yo. Arbel smiles and says, “Maybe.” |
Google Revises Glass With More RAM The Day Before I/O | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | Well, the timing is nothing if not interesting: before its I/O keynote, Google has just given the Glass hardware a small hardware upgrade. Without much fanfare, Google has quietly bumped the memory in newly shipped Glass units up from 682MB to a full 2GB. That gives Google (and Glass developers, for that matter) roughly 3x as much memory to play with. With I/O starting , it’s more than reasonable to assume they’ll announce some features justifying the RAM upgrade. But first, Google has also announced a few new small features launching today: Google also says that people notice better battery life and overall performance improvements, though many of the upgrades at play there have been rolling out over the past few weeks. If you’re part of the Google Glass “Explorer” program (or just keep a particularly close eye on Glass), you probably know: this isn’t the first time that Google has revised their hardware. Back in December, Google revised Glass to add support for a dedicated pair of microUSB stereo headphones and custom prescription lens. With that release, Google allowed existing Glass owners to swap their hardware for free. Alas, it doesn’t look like a similar deal is in place this time. If you’ve got Glass already, . |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 6 | null |
OUYA One Year Later: 840 Games, 36K Developers, And A New Console In The Works | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | OUYA was founded with the idea of creating a new, Android-based platform for building games that could be played on people’s TVs. After a , the OUYA console began shipping and went on sale in retail locations . Since launch, OUYA has continued to grow its user base, thanks to sales and distribution both in-store and online. The startup has expanded the number of locations in which the console is available. At launch, OUYA was sold in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., while today it’s also now available in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Brazil. It also continues to grow its developer base and the number of games available on the platform — it now has 36,000 registered developers, and is adding about 1,000 more each month. Those developers have now published more than 840 games for the OUYA console, up from about 170 games available at launch a year ago, and 575 at the beginning of this year. All this despite the launch of two new next-gen gaming consoles from Microsoft and Sony. While the launch of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One might have stolen some headlines, OUYA CEO Julie Uhrman says it hasn’t slowed down interest in the OUYA platform. There really hasn’t been any difference in sales since the launch of those new consoles, Uhrman tells me. “They offer something very different from OUYA. We have always strived to carve out our own niche, with a $99 console where majority of games are free to try,” she adds. That is in contrast to the newer consoles, which cost hundreds of dollars each and have games that are priced at $50 or $60 each. The microconsole’s games are also designed to appeal to a different type of gamer, as opposed to the high-performance, hard-core 3D shooters built for the PS4 or Xbone. But OUYA’s gamers keep coming back, on average launching more than 13 games a week on the console. According to Uhrman, the average number of games installed per player on OUYA is more than 30. That’s due in part to the variety of games that are made for the platform, and OUYA is trying to increase the variety and number of games through a number of efforts. That includes its to match the funding amount received by developers who raise between $50,000 and $250,000 on Kickstarter. That funding comes in exchange for the promise of exclusivity on the OUYA platform for some time. Pretty soon, developers will be able to program games directly on the OUYA console, Uhrman said. By connecting a keyboard and mouse, they’ll be able to code and immediately test their games. All of that is meant to attract a new breed of developer. About 50 percent of developers that code for OUYA had never written an Android game before. About 20 percent of developers with a game on the platform have already published a second game. While OUYA is enjoying steady growth, the company wants to expand things even further over the next year. That starts with the development of its own next-gen console, OUYA 2. While Uhrman said the company is working on the next box, she declined to forecast when it would ship. It’s also working to extend its footprint onto other platforms, which could include embedding OUYA into smart TVs and other devices. The idea is to take OUYA everywhere so that developers can reach gamers wherever they are. It plans to announce two specific partners for that initiative soon. That might seem like a lot of ground to cover in a short period of time, but considering how much OUYA has accomplished so far, it seems doable. |
Twilio Partners With Google And LiveOps To Launch A Chrome OS-Based Call Center In A Box | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | Setting up a call center is a major undertaking, and by the time it is up and running, the hardware that powers most of the phone connections is already out of date. , which has long offered the kind of APIs and services that allow companies to recreate their physical communications hardware in software, today launched a new service for call centers in partnership with Google and . Starting today, will offer its users a subscription service that bundles a Chromebook or Chromebox with a high-quality headset and Twilio’s VoIP services. The whole system is built around Twilio CX and will allow a call center operation to almost completely bypass any legacy hardware. As Twilio’s CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson told me last week, the company found that call centers are an area that can be especially valuable for its customers. Some of its enterprise users have built their own solutions on Twilio’s APIs, for example. But Twilio also wanted to be able to offer companies that don’t have that kind of technical knowledge in-house to be able to use its services. “With Twilio CX, we now have a full solution that doesn’t incur any capital expenses,” he told me. While LiveOps is currently the only company to offer a bundle like this, chances are that other Twilio partners will offer similar services in the future. |
Oculus Acquires Carbon Design, The Team That Designed The Xbox 360 Controller | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | Since the Facebook acquisition, Oculus has already snatched up just about all of the biggest names in virtual reality. Their next move? Grabbing amazing hardware designers. Oculus has just announced that they will acquire the Seattle-based Carbon Design studio. Even if you don’t recognize the name, you’ve almost certainly seen (or, more likely, used) one of their products. The Xbox 360 controller? That was their design. The original Kinect? That was theirs too. Beyond Microsoft projects, One little gem tucked into the announcement: turns out, Oculus has already been working with Carbon Design for sometime, though they won’t say on what. Just that they’ve “been working with Carbon for nearly a year on multiple unannounced projects.” The Carbon team will stay in their offices in Seattle for now, but will work with the Oculus R&D team down the road in Redmond. |
Microsoft’s Top Lawyer Calls On Congress To End The NSA’s “Unfettered Bulk Collection Of Data” | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | Earlier this morning, Microsoft executive vice president and general counsel made the case against pervasive government surveillance, arguing that reform is needed of this nation’s security apparatus. At a talk this morning, the general counsel couched his larger remarks in the historical context of general warrants, a key source of anger among the colonies that eventually boiled over and led to armed revolt and the formation of the United States, in his estimation. Smith called on Congress to “close the door on unfettered bulk collection of data” and argued for reform of the “role and nature and proceedings” of the FISA court and for the geographic limiting of warrants issued by the U.S. Regarding bulk surveillance, citing an NSA document, Smith intimated that Microsoft was the listed ‘Company F,’ that in 2002 declined to comply with the NSA’s request for “email content” in large quantities. Smith continued, indicating that Microsoft, in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, “had a hard time reconciling [the many] public reports of government access to large amounts of data, with the relatively small amounts” that the company, and likely others like it, had in fact provided. The answer, Smith stated, came in a report detailing that the NSA was of U.S.-based companies abroad. Microsoft had to assume that if Yahoo and Google were targeted — those were the two firms cited — it was likely also a target. Smith stated that the House of Representatives, which recently passed a controversially , made progress on ending bulk data collection, but that “we should all hope that the Senate can get us the rest of the way.” Regarding the FISA courts, Smith called for more transparency, and a more adversarial process. He did note that an advocate for the public has been proposed, but not yet made into law. Finally, Smith brought up Microsoft’s to end the U.S. government’s use of warrants issued in the U.S. to demand data stored abroad. The case, involving a foreign user and data stored in Ireland, led to Microsoft pushing back against the government’s request. Microsoft lost its first case and is appealing. Smith’s comments are noteworthy because they put Microsoft decidedly on one side of the current debate concerning privacy, and the actions of the government. As far as companies go, Microsoft is wealthy, , and not enthused with how the government is comporting itself. When you or I become discontent with the government, our disgruntlement doesn’t rest on a foundation as large as $344 billion in market cap. On rolls the Snowden Effect. |
Social Shopping Site Svpply To Shut Down, Nearly 2 Years After Selling To eBay | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | , the curated social shopping site meant to replicate the experience of traditional window shopping online, announced today that it will shut down on August 31. The shutdown will occur just a week short of the two year anniversary of , which occurred in September 2012. In the months immediately following the eBay deal, Svpply continued to iterate and , but in recent months development on the service has seemed to stagnate. In a on its website, Svpply announced the shutdown and provided instructions on how users can export their data:
“We regret to announce that Svpply.com and its associated apps — Svpply and Want by Svpply — will retire on August 31st. We appreciate that you took time to curate and share collections of your most loved products, so we want to give you time to export the links you’ve added to the site. You can do so through your Account Settings. The post goes on to recommend that Svpply users try out eBay’s personalized shopping and curation tools including “feed” and “collections” going forward, some of which have been developed and launched by the team that built Svpply. However, those products are small consolation for longtime fans of the famously well-designed original Svpply app: Say it ain't so Svpply! Why does everything I love go away? — JP (@jessiepeterson) Crap. I seriously know of no alternative to Svpply. — Max Bickley (@MaxBickley) Svpply is shutting down. :( Someone please make a Svpply → Pinterest/Amazon Wishlist transfer tool. — Amit superamit Gupta (@superamit) Sad to hear Svpply is getting "sunsetted": It's probably the "dead" webapp I still get the most out of day-to-day. — Buzz Andersen (@buzz) Of course, this is often what happens in the months and years after big tech companies acquire new and clever products — some key parts sometimes get integrated, and other beloved bits often get cut. We’ve reached out to people at Svpply and eBay for more information on the Svpply shutdown, and will update with any additional details we receive. The good news is that Svpply co-founder Ben Pieratt is about the planned shutdown, and has announced that he plans to (with a more ) to replace it. |
MadeSolid’s New 3D Printing Material Is Meant To Be Burned Away | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 24 | When you’re looking into what materials to use for 3D printing an object, the last thing you usually expect to hear is “this one burns really well!” , a 3D printing materials team out of Emeryville, CA, has just released a new resin specifically engineered to burn well. But why? Why would you want to burn your shiny new 3d-printed doodad? Lets say you’re a jewelry designer, and you want to use a 3D printer to design a wedding ring. Most people ( ) don’t have access to 3D printers that can print in metal… and you probably don’t want the final wedding ring to be made of plastic, right? So you print your ring in plastic, then use that plastic prototype to create a mold which you’ll later fill with molten metal. But first, you’ve got to get that 3D print of your mold, while leaving the mold itself intact. How do you do that? By . This process is known as “Investment casting”, and it’s actually something humanity has (without the 3d printers, of course.) MadeSolid’s new FireCast resin is the first resin engineered to be melted away as part of the casting process. You create a high-heat mold of your 3d print, then use a super hot oven to essentially evaporate the print within. After about 11 hours in the heat, the 3D printed model is completely burned away, leaving behind no ash or residue to screw things up. You pour your molten metal into the mold’s now empty void, let it cool, chip away the mold, and tada! Your 3D printed design is now cast in metal. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ERSCqVb3nE?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] Before you go ordering a batch of this stuff to stick in your MakerBot, note that this is a resin, not a filament. Not so well-versed on your 3D printing terms? Just know that there are primarily two types of at-home 3D printers right now: one — like the Form1 printer — that uses a special liquid (or resin) that hardens when hit by a laser, and one — like the MakerBot — that uses spools of plastic (or filament) that gets pushed out through a hot nozzle like a glue gun. Given the specialized nature of this resin, it doesn’t come cheap: This is the third specialized 3D printing material that MadeSolid has engineered and released so far. You can read about the other two — PET+ and MS Resin — |
CloudPhysics Grabs $15M In Series C Funding And Announces New Virtual Storage Predictive Analytics | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | has a vision for the data center: It wants to give sysadmins clarity and insight into possible issues that create bottlenecks in a virtualized environment, offer solutions when they happen, and help prevent issues before they even happen — all as a cloud service. And Jafco Ventures is giving the company $15 million in Series C funding to continue their work. They are joined by prior funders Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mayfield Fund. The latest round brings their total funding to $27.5 million, more than doubling their previous contributions. In addition to their funding announcement, the company also announced the release of the latest version of the CloudPhysics platform, which enables sysadmins to predictively troubleshoot storage problems in a virtualized network. John Blumenthal, CloudPhysics CEO and co-founder, says the company has been working on the new release throughout this year, and they very deliberately chose storage because their data showed them that storage was a big pain point for their customers. The beauty of the CloudPhysics approach, he says, is that it gives data center employees a single view of the problem. Instead of having to log on to multiple systems and try to piece the problem together, you can see the problem laid out visually with an explanation of what’s happening and what to do to fix it. The company uses data from its entire network of customers and combines that with data it collects from each individual customer data center to build a big-data collection of information that it can then use to help make predictions about the data center behavior, presenting it in a visual manner (as in the example above). Blumenthal says this approach generates a social aspect, too. Because of the highly visual nature of the information, it helps what have been traditionally disparate teams, such as storage and networking, see the nature of the problem and how to fix it — even in cases where they don’t really understand what the other team does. It’s all laid out there for them, and Blumenthal believes that should go a long way toward improving communication and resolving problems in virtualized environments more quickly. And he predicts it will usher in age of the data center generalist. People will no longer be confined to narrowly defined areas of expertise because the data will provide them the information and instructions they need to proceed without understanding the nuances of each piece. He said that the system can even help sysadmins decide if given their workloads and requirements, that investing in solid state drives will give them enough bang for the buck to justify the investment. Blumenthal says that the data center is simply too complex and generates too much data today for humans to keep up without help from a system like his. “They are all emitting immense amounts of data. There is tons of data that exists. Without a model to understand how these layers come together, which none of the vendors have created, there isn’t a way to get ahead of it.” To illustrate this, CloudPhysics claims to collect 140B samples a day, 50T to date and that’s only going to grow as they gather more customers, partners and third parties using the platform. While Blumenthal says they are highly influenced by companies like and , and he likes what they are doing, he says he doesn’t necessarily see them as competitors because they are delivering information to developers higher up in the stack. He says people like to compare them to and , but he doesn’t think it’s an apt comparison either because those companies deal with unstructured data, index it and search against it, whereas CloudPhysics deals with structured data and presents information directly to the user. Blumenthal said the storage piece is just the beginning and they hope to eventually have tools to analyze the entire data center. The platform is built to allow customers, partners and third parties to also build tools on top of it and he hopes that will happen over time. |
CEO Late For Dinner | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | Last week at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, sorry, “International Festival of Creativity”, Yahoo CEO had a bit of a tough time. First, she gave an on-stage presentation that some are saying was too — telling the ad executives in attendance what they wanted to hear, without actually saying anything genuine. Okay. Then, Mayer headed to a conference held by WPP, the reigning king of all ad companies. There, she was interviewed on stage by none other than WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell. The interview in some aspects, at least according to what a tipster told Business Insider and also what we’ve heard. We are also hearing that the Business Insider story is not entirely accurate, misrepresenting certain key details of that interview. That Tuesday evening, Mayer had an appointment to attend a dinner put on by Interpublic Group, meeting with executives representing the brands that are Yahoo’s advertising customers. Brands like Chobani, Mondolez and MillerCoors (one word). But Mayer was late — about an hour and a half late. The offers this explanation: But Ms. Mayer was nearly two hours late, and several dinner attendees including IPG Chief Executive Michael Roth ended up leaving before she arrived, people familiar with the matter said. Ms. Mayer told some attendees that she had fallen asleep, some of the people familiar with the matter said. As someone who has also fallen asleep before a dinner, this seems like a reasonable explanation. Yahoo of course would not comment, but here is our two cents: CEOs are sometimes late. Sometimes it’s because people won’t stop asking them for things, sometimes it’s because they’ve done meetings for five hours straight, sometimes it’s because they’re in a time zone that’s nine hours forward from the one they’re usually in. And sometimes it’s because they’re freaked out after an unpredictably difficult interview. It is weird that this is a Wall Street Journal story. It reminds us of the time Mark Zuckerberg and set the banking world on its axis. Oh the fun that was! Would a similar story about Google CEO Larry Page being late to a dinner get the same amount of play? I hope so, but it hasn’t yet, though I’m sure he’s been late at least once. Perhaps if Page wore a hoodie? Beyond the obvious , what we’ve got here is a culture clash: Wall Street expects deference, Madison Avenue expects reverence. When what they get from Palo Alto, or Mountain View or SOMA, is human weakness or even straight-forwardness they walk (or ). Someone was late in France: Ring the alarm. |
Google Makes Its Nest At The Center Of The Smart Home | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | down the heat.” Using Google Now, a homeowner will soon be able to talk to a Nest Learning Thermostat and complain about the heat. And that’s just the beginning. Google is turning the Nest Learning Thermostat into the hub of smart homes. With the “ ” developer program, announced today, gadgets, cars and universal remotes will all work with the Thermostat, providing automated actions agnostic of the brand. Suddenly the smart home world is much smaller. Nest’s Matt Rogers says the idea behind this system is to build seamless and practical experiences in the home and to sell more Nest gadgets at the same time. The smart home world is widely fragmented. Everything from smart light bulbs to web-connected thermostats are controlled by a separate app and live in their own world. Several gadgets have attempted to bridge brands and conjoin the worlds, but this requires another gadget and another app, thereby compounding the problem. With the “Works with Nest” program, suddenly, the center of the smart home is the de facto smart home gadget in the Nest Learning Thermostat. The program leans on the sensors within Nest’s products. The product’s motion detection and machine learning are all tapped and farmed out for use by other gadgets. Some of the most popular smart home gadget makers have signed onto the “Works with Nest” program, including LIFX, Logitech, Chamberlain and even Whirlpool. With Whirlpool, when the Nest thermostat notices the homeowner is away, a connected dryer will switch to Fan Fresh mode so the dryer’s cycle doesn’t end early and instead keeps running so clothes stay wrinkle-free. And with LIFX, the web-connected lightbulbs can flash red if a Nest Protect notices elevated CO2 levels or toggle the lightbulbs on to simulate someone’s in the home. Google also enlisted the help of IFTTT so home owners can program smart switches for the Nest Protect and Thermostat. For instance, with IFTTT, homeowners can program “If my Nest Protect detects smoke, then send a text message to my neighbors” or “If a Nest Thermostat is turned under 72 degrees when the air conditioning is turned on, then send a Twitter DM to me so I can yell at my kids.” Mercedes is also part of the program and select models can tell a connected Nest Learning Thermostat when the driver will be home, activating the heating or cooling at the exact moment so not one cycle is wasted on an empty home. Sometime in the fall, Google Now will become “Works with Nest” certified, allowing Android users to command their thermostats from anywhere. Lastly, Google worked with Jawbone to tie the Jawbone UP’s sleep tracker into the Nest Learning Thermostat ecosystem. “Integrating with Nest is brilliant for our users because it creates a seamless experience for our users,” Jawbone’s Jim Godfrey told me. Travis Bogard, Vice President of Product Management and Strategy, expanded on the thought noting “It’s based on great technology and two sets of insight and data — Nest and Jawbone — combined to create a great experience.” For Jawbone, the “Works with Nest” program aligns nicely with its core mission of providing an open platform. By pressing the UP’s only button, a Jawbone UP wearer can activate the sleep tracker and have the Nest adjust the climate to a nighttime mode. Likewise, when the wearer wakes up, a single press will change the UP’s mode and switch the Nest to a daytime setting. Several notable systems are currently absent from this program, including Philips’ Hue smart lightbulbs, smart switches from Lutron and any of the home locking systems. These systems are currently enlisted in Wink’s smart home platform. Dropcam will likely adopt the “Works with Nest” certification as it will soon be under Nest’s ownership. At first it’s a bit strange to think of a thermostat as the central hub of a smart home, but the Nest Learning Thermostat is packed with enough sensors to make the move logical. The thermostat has a motion detector, Wi-Fi, the goods to learn user behavior and currently untapped wireless protocols of Zigbee. In theory a true smart home shouldn’t need a control panel requiring constant user interaction, but rather actions that are carried out serendipitously. Google is not alone in its quest to unite the smart-home factions. Innovation powerhouse Quirky just introduced its game plan, which is strikingly similar to “Works with Nest.” Called , the platform integrates different smart objects into one ecosystem, and Quirky has lined up 15 companies who will offer nearly 60 Wink-enabled products by July, including GE, Honeywell and Philips, as well as startups like Rachio. essentially catapulted Google’s smart home ambitions ahead of Apple, which just announced its smart-home solution called . As following its announcement earlier this month, HomeKit allows a developer to use a simple set of controls to toggle the states of devices or send commands to them. HomeKit is the spiritual companion to Apple’s Bluetooth direct and multi-peer frameworks. It’s a powerful platform that has even more potential than Google’s plan. Yet HomeKit is in its infancy compared to that of Wink or “Works with Nest,” which both will have working solutions in days where Apple’s HomeKit will not bear fruit for months if not longer. Even an organization as brash as Google will not be able to make all the components of a smart home. Yet this Nest certification program is the next best thing as, if marketed correctly by Google and its “Works with Nest” partners, it could lead to mass adoption of the products it does make. And that alone puts Google in a commanding position. |
Net Neutrality Shouldn’t Be Up To The FCC, Republicans Say | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | House Republicans on Friday challenged the existing framework for how net neutrality rules are set and enforced. , the Republican members said the Federal Trade Commission, not the Federal Communications Commission, should have authority when it comes to net neutrality. Net neutrality, which requires ISPs to allow all legal content to move through networks uninhibited, has made waves on the Hill since the FCC a rule that would create “fast lanes” for companies that can pay more. House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte said the Internet has grown because it is deregulated, but noted companies should not be permitted to engage in “discriminatory or anticompetitive activities.” “I believe that vigorous application of the antitrust laws can prevent dominant Internet service providers from discriminating against competitors’ content or engaging in anticompetitive pricing practices,” the Virginia Republican said. “Furthermore, antitrust laws can be applied uniformly to all Internet market participants, not just to Internet service providers, to ensure that improper behavior is prevented and prosecuted.” The Republicans’ call for a shift to the FTC is likely spurred by the FCC’s history of questionable commitment to net neutrality, with some criticizing the agency for backtracking on the issue in recent years. In May, Rep. Bob Latta a bill that would “limit” the FCC’s ability to regulate the Internet. During the hearing, both former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell and FTC member Joshua Wright said that antitrust laws were better equipped to promote net neutrality than the FCC. House Democrats opposed the Republicans’ push on the polarizing issue. The Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, Rep. John Conyers, applauded the FCC’s attempts to rewrite its rules. Congress “must allow the Federal Communications Commission to do its job,” the Michigan member said. Columbia Professor Tim Wu, who the term “net neutrality” and testified at the hearing Friday, said the government’s concerns when it comes to net neutrality should extend beyond the jurisdiction of antitrust regulatory agencies because of the potential implication net neutrality has for freedom of speech. ISPs could potentially block websites, such as politically controversial sites or news sources. “I have the highest admiration for the antitrust laws,” Wu said in his testimony. “But I simply don’t think they’re equipped to handle the broad range of values and policies that are implicated by net neutrality and the open Internet.” Rep. Darrell Issa took a combative tone in questioning Wu and said the FCC could apply “the rules of the road for broadcast” to the Internet. He argued the FCC already blocks profane and obscene content from television and said if the agency had full reign when it came to net neutrality, such limits could be applied online. “You can’t put what some people consider pornography on broadcast television, can you?” the California Republican said. “On the Internet today it is limited today to only criminal acts.” Wu disagreed, and said net neutrality rules allow an “outpouring of speech from across the political spectrum.” |
Missouri May Amend Its Constitution To Require Warrant For Digital Searches | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | A proposed state constitutional amendment could grant residents of Missouri stronger digital privacy protections. The amendment passed the state’s legislature, and will be voted on by the general electorate in August. The amendment to Missouri’s constitution would delete a current section of the document, and replace it with a new section that has amended wording. Here’s : Section 15. That the people shall be secure in their persons, papers, homes, effects, and electronic communications and data, from unreasonable searches and seizures; and no warrant to search any place, or seize any person or thing, or access electronic data or communication, shall issue without describing the place to be searched, or the person or thing to be seized, or the data or communication to be accessed, as nearly as may be, nor without probably cause, supported by written oath or affirmation. Here’s what the ballot will say in August: Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended so that the people shall be secure in their electronic communications and data from unreasonable searches and seizures as they are now likewise secure in their persons, homes, papers and effects?” I have a sneaking suspicion that that will prove popular. If I am reading Missouri law correctly, only a simple majority needs to vote in favor of the amendment for it to pass. So, the bar here for enaction isn’t as high as you might have thought. was saying that the vote could have national impact: “If the people of Missouri are concerned enough about this issue that they’re willing to adjust our Constitution to make sure that they further secure their own rights of electronic privacy and communications, the rest of the country should take note of that.” While government at the federal level tries to find its keys when it comes to digital privacy and the like, it’s nice to see that states, those laboratories of democracy, are forging ahead on the issue. |
Inside Jobs: The Facilities Manager Who’s Been Google, Facebook And Now Flipboard’s Secret Weapon | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | On a perfect day for Scott Oligher, most of his coworkers will hardly notice the work he’s done at all. That’s because as the head of facilities at , Oligher is in charge of making sure everything that happens behind the scenes at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters runs smoothly. From the lights being switched on in the morning, to the air conditioning and heating working correctly, to the set up of special meetings and events, Oligher works hard to make sure all this and much more falls into place as seamlessly as possible. In many ways, facilities managers are the secret weapons that allow other staffers to fully focus on building a company’s core product. It’s a fascinating and crucial job role, so it was great to spend time with Oligher and learn about what he does for our series. As Oligher tells me in the video embedded above, he’s a 20+ year veteran of the facilities management industry in Silicon Valley. He got his start running facilities for a quickly growing startup during the dot com boom, and then moved on to work for Google during some of its fastest growing years from 2002 to 2009, and then at Facebook during a similarly booming time from 2009 to 2013. Now at Flipboard, Oligher is overseeing rapid growth once again, which keeps his daily to-do list long. I especially liked his thoughts about facilities managers being the true go-to people at a company: “I will never tell anybody no. I’ll say, ‘Let me find out.’ If I don’t know, and it’s not me [who’s best suited for the job], I’ll find out for them. And I’ll put them in contact, or I’ll just reach out and take care of it for them. It’s just what we should do. Hey, I’m here to support everybody, no matter what it is. That’s what I love about my job. That’s why it can be a million things at once. I’ve been asked questions where I’m like, ‘Wow, I’ve never had before. Now I’ll go figure that out.’ And that’s the fun part of it. It’s never the same thing two days in a row.” Check it all out in the video embedded above. This is a bittersweet post to write, since it marks the final episode in our 12 week long miniseries. It’s been such a pleasure to take a close look at some of the people who really make the tech industry tick, beyond the founders and CEOs. Here is the rundown of all our Inside Jobs episodes, including the pilot: |
Etsy Buys French Startup A Little Market In Its Largest Acquisition So Far | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | announced today that it has acquired a French company called , a Paris-based online marketplace for handmade items. Though terms of the deal were undisclosed, Etsy says that this is its “sixth and largest acquisition to date.” A Little Market will continue to operate independently. Previous acquisitions by Etsy, which , have , which specializes in selling artisanal goods wholesale; digital advertising company Adtuitive; and Etsy Lovers. One of Etsy’s previous founding rounds, in which it raised $40 million led by Index Ventures in May 2012, was earmarked specifically for international expansion. In its A Little Market announcement, Etsy, which , said at least 25% of its orders are shipped internationally. “As we’ve focused on international growth, capitalizing on the strongest economies in the world has been a top priority. France is the fifth largest economy and seventh largest e-commerce market globally, and it is Etsy’s strongest non-English market,” the company said in a statement. It added that its business in France is more than 90% import/export and that Little Market, where most goods are sold domestically, will complement its existing business. We asked Etsy about their future acquisition plans and a spokesperson told us: “As we grow, we’ll always consider our options to build, buy or partner, seeking partnerships or acquisitions that are highly mission-aligned as well as high performance. We have no specific plans for other acquisitions, but we’re always paying attention to the landscape and meeting with teams we respect and admire.” |
The Race To Ubiquitous, Free Cloud Storage | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | Two interesting things happened today in the realm of cloud storage: Microsoft , and Box . Both fit neatly into the current market arc relating to cloud storage: The price per gigabyte for consumers and customers is going to zero, and storage companies are looking to diversify their productivity offerings on top of their storage stacks. It’s worth marking this moment, as it crystallizes the trends we are currently seeing in storage. The marginal price of cloud storage for the average consumer is dropping quickly, which means that what companies can charge for a gigabyte of cloud storage is low and will continue to fall. Soon, cloud storage will be both ubiquitous and free for consumers. Given that platform companies must compete, we’ll see free, unlimited cloud storage from major players as a sort of table stakes for online services. Even if you can’t charge for storage, you can charge for what consumers can do with their data. So, if you have to eat the rapidly declining closet of cloud storage, what do you do? You extend your value stack. Hence Box Notes for mobile. Within two years, consumers will have several options for unlimited, free cloud storage. That’s to say that they will have a few terabytes to play with from a number of providers. The idea that consumers should only have access to a few gigabytes of free storage will quickly become as silly as the idea that an email account only needed a few megabytes of capacity. 2004, : Hotmail currently offers 2MB of free e-mail storage. Yahoo offers 4MB. Gmail will dwarf those offerings with a 1GB storage limit. See? |
Google Gets Into Domain Sales | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | So, you want to buy a domain name. Who do you go to first? GoDaddy? NameCheap? Whoever happens to have a sale going on right now? How about Google? For the past few years, anyone looking to Google to buy a domain has been met with , which proclaims that “Google itself doesn’t register or host domain names,” before recommending up a few partners who do. That changes today. Google has just launched a small private beta for a domain registration service that it’s aptly dubbed “Google Domains.” You can find the largely locked down landing page . And talk about timing: On June 9, GoDaddy finally filed for the IPO that it’s been mulling since at least 2006. Two weeks later, Google publicly announces plans to get into the domain registration market. Up until now, GoDaddy was even one of the partners that Google recommended. That can’t feel great. While it seems Google is still working out exactly what it’ll bring to the table, here’s some of the stuff it’s disclosed so far: The move makes enough sense that it’s actually kind if surprising that it’s taken Google this long. While domains aren’t generally considered a massive-margin business, they’ve always seemed like a glaring omission in Googles offerings; a missing puzzle piece, almost. Need email for your domain? Google does that. Need analytics for your domain? They do that, too. Want to buy the domain itself through Google? NOPE. Also fun to note: Google is promising full phone support for Google Domain customers, making it one of Google products with a support number tied to it. The only other one I’m aware of is Google Glass (update: and, as someone else just mentioned to me, Google’s Enterprise services). You know how many people are going to try to call that number for help logging into Gmail? Because it’s . The catch: as mentioned, this is a tiny private beta for now. Want to try to get in? Go to , click the “Manage my domains” button, log in, then hit the “Request an invite” button. Google isn’t making any promises on how many people they’ll let in, but it’ll at least get your foot in the door. |
Google’s Tepid Plan To Boost Diversity At Tech Conferences | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | Less than a month after , Google is committing to increasing the number of women and minorities in tech to better reflect society at large. This week Google promised . It will also be sending 100 women to Google I/O this week who scored well in its online competition, and it has established a Through the efforts, the company hopes to take on the short- and long-term diversity issues at Google and in the tech industry in general. The tech industry is often criticized for not being open enough for those outside of the white male techie demographic. Women and minorities often feel out of place at big events . When I spoke to Google CodeJam Project Manager Emily Miller, she emphasized the importance of getting more women who are already interested in tech to become more involved in the greater community. “It’s a chicken-and-egg problem,” she explained in a phone interview. The tech industry’s views and culture won’t change until more women are involved, but many women won’t feel comfortable until the culture changes. So Google is taking the initiative, paying the price of a ticket and $500 worth of travel expenses to bring 100 of the top scorers to I/O from the more than 500 who entered its competition. Furthermore, the company coordinated with the , , and more to “cast a wider net and attract under-represented groups.” Google is also launching to cover the costs of attendance and $500 in travel expenses for select tech conferences for women and minorities, which includes (but isn’t limited to) African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, persons with disabilities, women and veterans. Google also confirmed that those in the queer and transgender communities are also welcome to apply. Google is leveraging the existing networks established by groups like the to get the word out about its new scholarship program, sending applicants to events focused on a range of topics, from “professional development” to “neural information processing systems.” While the scholarship’s site is under the Google for Education banner, Google Diversity Lead Matt Howard tells me that the program is actually technically being run by Google Operations, putting it under the same umbrella as human resources at the search giant. That’s telling: the company is hoping that by helping the tech industry become more diverse, Google’s workforce will too, and vice-versa. Still, for a company with a ~$380 billion market cap, these early efforts seems fairly weak. Sure, sending 100 women to a conference is a step in the right direction, but that’s less than 2 percent of the 6,000 people who are expected to attend Google I/O this week. Google has told TechCrunch that it expects 20 percent of those in attendance to be women this year, so another 100 is kind of only nudging the needle. Similarly, Google’s scholarship program is a welcome opportunity, but the company is setting the bar pretty low for its first batch of conferences. Howard told me over the phone that the company hopes to send “at least one person” to each of the conferences it is partnering with in the next few months. Still, these are early efforts to fix short-term issues. As you’d expect from a software company, Google’s approach is iterative. It’s going to try out these smaller initiatives, see what works, then implement at an even larger scale. is a lot harder to criticize. The numbers show that the percentage of women getting technical degrees in computer science has fallen over time, so major efforts to get girls and young women interested in technology could have a far more significant impact in the long-term. |
SF Sends Cease-And-Desist To Apps Selling Public Parking Spots | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | Turns out you’re not allowed to rent away public property like parking spots as if you owned them. Parking app received a , which has also asked Apple to remove it from the App Store for violating local law. Two other apps and were also warned they’d receive C&Ds. The move could set a precedent against apps that earn money helping drivers avoid circling around looking for parking. While ridesharing services like Uber have successfully fought city laws, these parking apps may have a tougher time since they so directly break the law and charge for spots that are otherwise free or already metered. The apps each take a different approach to selling off street parking you’ve found. Monkey Parking lets users auction off their spots. Sweetch charges drivers $5 to take over a spot, but refunds them $4 if they then transfer the spot to another Sweetch user. ParkModo planned to launch soon and hire drivers to occupy spots and then sell them to ParkModo’s paying members. And they all sound exploitations of public resources. Under the guise of conservation and gas savings, each app tries to line its pockets and those of its users by selling something that doesn’t belong to them. Yes, it would be great if there was a more fuel-efficient way to find street parking in busy areas, and mobile apps might one day help. But layering a price atop public infrastructure seems slimy. The apps violate Police Code section 63(c) which prohibits anyone to “enter into a lease, rental agreement or contract of any kind” for public parking spots. The violations could incur $300 penalties per transaction, which would fall on drivers. The startups themselves could face fines of up to $2,500 per transaction due to California’s Unfair Competition law that can be used against businesses entirely built on illegal business models. City Attorney Dennis Herrera writes: “It’s illegal, it puts drivers on the hook for $300 fines, and it creates a predatory private market for public parking spaces that San Franciscans will not tolerate. Worst of all, it encourages drivers to use their mobile devices unsafely — to engage in online bidding wars while driving. People are free to rent out their own private driveways and garage spaces should they choose to do so. But we will not abide businesses that hold hostage on-street public parking spots for their own private profit.” Herrera copied Apple’s legal department on the letter, asking it to remove the parking apps for violating local law and being dangerous. Unless one has the money to fight the case, parking in San Francisco’s congested districts the Mission and Marina will remain a frustrating chore. But at least the situation will remain a more egalitarian first-come-first-serve model rather than letting wealthier smartphone users shut out other citizens. |
Yahoo Releases Aviate Homescreen For Android To Organize Your Life | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | Yahoo has today launched a new smartphone UI experience called Aviate, which is available for Android phones (English speaking only). The idea is that the company can dip their toes in the mobile OS waters without going all-in on anything, as Yahoo works to strengthen its mobile portfolio. Here’s what the has to say: Yahoo Aviate simplifies everything about your phone. It starts with a clean, new layout and apps automatically organized for you. But it’s not just about making your phone simpler – Aviate also makes your phone smarter by offering intelligent information throughout your day. Whether you’re on the go, at work, at a restaurant or just relaxing at home, Aviate automatically shows you apps and information that are useful to you based on what you’re up to. What type of information is that, you might ask? Essentially, it’s going for a Google Now type experience that is baked right into the UI. So, for example, Aviate users will get information around the weather in the morning so they dress smart. But it goes deeper than that. Aviate can integrate with your email and calendar information to give you single-click access to a conference call, or help you get to work on time based on random traffic changes. There’s also a twice-daily news summary baked into your homescreen, and Yahoo Aviate will automatically list your most popular contacts into a Favorites section. In other words, those who don’t enjoy the tedious process of tailoring your smartphone to all your own unique needs can potentially enjoy Yahoo’s automated version of that. Yahoo has made a big push in mobile of late, revamping old apps and releasing new ones to ensure the company doesn’t fall behind as the mobile ecosystem grows. This is yet another step in that direction, and as I said, one that tests the waters cautiously. Part of that effort includes an active M&A lifestyle for the company, and Aviate was but one of many big purchases for the company. Aviate was acquired in January for a . If you want to download Aviate for your Android phone, check it out . [gallery columns="5" ids="1020245,1020246,1020247,1020249,1020251"] |
Google Play Quarterly App Revenue More Than Doubled Over Past Year, Thanks To Games, Freemium Apps | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | How well the Android app marketplace on Google Play is performing is the subject of a new report from app analytics firm App Annie, ahead of . The report indicates that the past year has been significant for Android app publishers, as Google Play apps, downloads, and revenue have all seen what the firm referred to as “phenomenal” growth. Most notably, Google Play quarterly app revenue – a number that tends to trail that of Apple’s iOS App Store – has more than doubled over the past year, up 2.4x from Q1 2013 to Q1 2014, App Annie says. The report, unlike many in the industry, is not sponsored by or funded by the subject in question – Google; but the company is a customer of its products, App Annie notes. App Annie also estimates there are now “well over 1 million apps” on Google Play, after Google publicly announced the 1 million app milestone last summer. (App Annie did not have a more exact estimate on hand, when we asked.) However, it did note that the number of apps grew by approximately one-third between July 2013 and April 2014, if you wanted to ballpark it a bit. Downloads, as would be expected, have also grown – by 1.5x year-over-year. But raw numbers of apps on hand and apps on phone don’t mean much to mobile app developers if there’s not the potential for revenue. That’s historically been a challenge for Google Play, which has seen the Amazon Appstore competitor giving developers on this front, according . And iOS still generates more revenue for developers overall, though Google Play has been Today, App Annie says that the growth in Google Play downloads and revenue represents “an expanding opportunity” for developers, with quarterly app revenue more than doubling from Q1 2013 to Q1 2014. Revenue growth is also now outpaces download growth, and this is in large part due to growth of the games category, in particular. In Q1 2014, games accounted for nearly 90% of Google Play app revenue, up from 80% in the same quarter last year, although they make up just 40% of downloads. Downloads, meanwhile, are growing across almost all categories with tools and communication categories seeing particularly high downloads, and communication and social apps seeing high revenue growth. “Freemium” (i.e. “free to play”) was a huge factor here, too, with revenue from freemium apps climbing to around 98% of total Google Play revenue in May 2104. As for Google Play’s regional significance, the U.S. tops the charts in terms of downloads, followed by Brazil, Russia, South Korea and India. But it’s Japan that’s leading on revenue, followed by the U.S., South Korea, Germany and the U.K. In Q1 2013, South Korea was in front of the U.S. when it came to revenue, so this is a notable change. |
Google Glass Goes On Sale Outside The US | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | Ahead of Google’s , which kicks off this Wednesday, Mountain View has opened up sales of its augmented reality wearable goggles, , to people outside the US. This follows Glass being opened up to anyone in the U.S. to buy, not just , . But this is the wearable’s first international foray. Specifically Brits with a hankering to stick Mountain View’s voice-controllable heads-up display on their faces can now do so — provided they’re willing to shell out a cool grand (£1,000) for the privilege of becoming a Google-powered human camcorder. Truly there are cheaper ways to weird out your friends. Glass is up for grabs in the UK . It’s still the — aka the beta version for earlier adopters. Which, in any case, is evident from the crazy pricing. Heck, Glass is more expensive than the . UK guinea pigs willing to stump up to have data injected onto a small screen in close proximity to their eyeball have a choice of five colours of Glass plastic — including tangerine and sky — and can also currently get a free frame or shade thrown in by Google. Anything to make Glass look less nerdtastic. (Also today Google announced the sale of the first designer frames for Glass, — but those fancier frames are only available to buy in the US as yet.) First to the punch with UK glassware apps include The Guardian newspaper with an app that delivers updates and headlines; music identifier app Shazam; and gamified fitness app Zombies, Run!. |
BrightSky Labs Will Make It Easy To Share Videos From Your GoPro | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | People love their GoPros. In 2013 alone, the company sold nearly 4 million of its durable, portable video cameras. And those cameras have been used to capture millions upon millions of videos, including everything from drones to action sports. There’s just one problem: Most people don’t have the patience to sort through all the footage to find and share all the interesting moments they shot while skiing or surfing or skateboarding or ballooning. Over all the videos shot, only about 20,000 will get downloaded via GoPro’s own software (though admittedly, people can use other tools), and only about 6,000 videos will make it to YouTube each day. The rest of that video gets stuck either on the device or stored away on a hard drive somewhere. But there’s a new startup, called , that wants to liberate the videos that people shoot with their GoPros, and make it easier to find and share on all your favorite social networks. The company is in the early stages of building a mobile app that connects directly to a GoPro via Wi-Fi and allows users to scan the video they’re shooting (or just shot), as well as all other videos that are stored on the camera. From the mobile interface, viewers can look through video for interesting snippets, quickly crop those moments, and share them with friends and followers. The app isn’t designed for post-processing or video editing. There are plenty of other tools for those looking to edit together their clips into awesome best-of videos that can be uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo. “The whole point is to reduce the friction of sharing,” according to co-founder Ian McCarthy. That means quickly identifying clips to share and posting them to social networks like Facebook or Twitter, as well as being able to share via WhatsApp. The app works by pinpointing moments that would be interesting to the viewers, and over time it is designed to better learn what things to look for for each individual user. It also has worked to simplify the process of clipping by taking advantage of both the X-axis, for setting the start and end points of a video, and the Y-axis, which is used to lengthen or shorten clips. These clips are designed to be snackable, so they are designed to be under 30 seconds. That also increases the speed with which they can be shared. For now, BrightSky Labs has no plans to build its own social network, à la Instagram or Vine, but plans to simply be a “pass-through” tool for uploading to other networks. “We’re not letting what we want the user to do to get in the way of what the user wants to do,” McCarthy says. BrightSky Labs was founded by a trio of folks with a mix of hardcore expertise in wearable technology, along with experience building and using video production tools. The team is made up of CEO/CTO , COO & Head of Product , and head of user experience and design . Before founding BrightSky Labs, White was an entrepreneur in residence at Greylock Partners. Prior to that he was Head of the Interaction Ecologies Group at Nokia, which was focused on wearable computing and Internet-of-things technologies. He’s joined by McCarthy, who served as Director of Product Development for Sony Pictures and VP of Product Marketing at Orb Networks before turning up as Principal Product Manager at LinkedIn. Cleveland, meanwhile, worked with McCarthy as Media Designer at Sony Pictures and later became a Partner at production studio Quiet Little Place Productions. And it’s funded by a mix of venture capital and angels with experience in the media and video distribution space. The company has raised $1.6 million in seed funding, which includes money from institutional investors that include Greylock Discovery Fund, Foundation Capital, Lux Capital, Streamlined Ventures, and Correlation Ventures. Angels include MIT Media Lab head Joi Ito, former Sony Pictures co-chair Yair Landau, Chomp founder Ben Keighran, YouPlus founder Shaukat Shamim, Qwiki co-founder Louis Monier, SideCar founder Sunil Paul, Powerset founder Barney Pell, as well as current and former LinkedIn execs such as Mohak Shroff, David Hahn, Arvind Rajan, Ellen Levy, Doug Mandell, Ryan Roslansky, Scott Roberts, Adam Barker, Mrinal Desai. |
Invention Machine Quirky Spins Out “Wink,” A New Business Focused On The Connected Home | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | New York-based “ ” , a company which turns crowdsourced ideas into real-world products you can buy like this popular , these connected and , and even is now venturing further into the “smart home” space with the spin-out of a separate company it’s calling “Wink.” The new business will focus on developing a platform for so-called “connected devices” – wireless-enabled products that can communicate via the internet with other services, as well as with apps running on your smartphone. According to a profile on Quirky in today’s , the company is now fielding around 4,000 new product ideas per week, of which it selects three to take to production. And more recently, Quirky had been noticing that these product ideas were “internet of things” type products – meaning those designed to communicate with a smartphone or the home’s Wi-Fi network. So the idea with Wink, , is to set up a platform that will allow consumers to control these various devices from an app which will operate as a dashboard of sorts for everything in their connected home. The app works with more practical things than a smart egg crate, as it allows end users to operate things like lights or door locks, for example. The company has lined up 15 companies who will offer nearly 60 Wink-enabled products by July, including GE, Honeywell, Philips, and startups like Rachio, the Times noted. GE has also chosen Wink as its preferred connected platform, the company says. The first big distribution deal for Wink devices is with The Home Depot, which will sell the products in its some 2,000 U.S. stores and online in mid-July. Wink products will also be sold online on Amazon.com. As for Wink the business itself, it will be run as a subsidiary of Quirky, with its own leadership and development teams, and offices in New York and San Francisco. It will be headed by GM Chaz Flexman, previously a partner at leading VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Brett Worthington, previously of Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies (Nexia Home Intelligence makers) will be VP at Wink, and Nathan Smith is Wink’s head of engineering. Wink is not without its competition, however, and that could be a challenge. A number of companies big and small are betting on the “connected home” as being one of the next big markets to exploit, thanks to the rise of the smartphone and home wireless networks. Everyone from the mobile carriers to and Google (with HomeKit and Nest, respectively) are starting to move into the home. Smaller companies are also testing the waters, including those we’ve covered here like , , , and even small app makers like . There , too, including locks (August, Lockitron), security (Canary, Doorbot), lights (LIFX), home automation (SmartThings, Zonoff, Ninja Blocks, Ube, Berg, Twine, Xively, etc.), garden products (Bitponics, Click & Grow), bathroom appliances (Withings), nursery products (Sproutling), and more. So Quirky’s hope to be one of the leading companies in this broader “smart home” space will depend on more than just getting a handful of partners on board – it will also need to ship products that people like and want to buy more of over time – and that means careful product selection and development. In addition, the Wink software may need some tweaking too, it seems, if you go by what some Amazon shoppers think. Several early adopters trying to get the Wink-powered app to work with one of Quirky’s top products, the power strip, have left reviews. “I tried for almost an hour with a Samsung Galaxy S3 and a Note 3 with brightness maxed in a darkened room before the Wink would detect and log into my home network for programming,” wrote one. “I hooked one up, downloaded the Wink app, set up the acct [sic] and everything worked perfectly for about a month. Then there was the software update…It has only worked intermittently since,” complained another. If consumers are going to trust Quirky’s Wink to actually control important and even critical “connected” things in their home like lights, air conditioning, locks and plugs, or smoke alarms, Wink will have to get up to speed, and quickly. |
A Little Startup Called Cruise From The Socialcam, Twitch Founders Is Tackling Self-Driving Cars Too | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | From mobile-social video apps to self-driving cars? , one of the founders behind Justin.tv, Socialcam and Twitch, is getting back to his undergraduate research roots in autonomous vehicles with a new self-driving car startup called . He’s recruited a team of engineers and roboticists from MIT. The kicker here, though, is that Cruise isn’t making its own self-driving robotic cars in the way that Google has been approaching the space. Cruise has built a system that you can mount on an car and use to drive it down highways. It’s more than just standard cruise control, but it isn’t an entirely self-driving car, either. “Moore’s law makes this possible,” Vogt said, alluding to the . “The computation systems for self-driving cars were large and bulky when I worked on AV in 2004. We would have 10 servers and a rack in the back of a pick-up truck. But that kind of power is now available in your cell phone.” He added that Google had made a ton of regulatory and cultural headway in the space, as well. “Because of Google, people are ready. Ten years ago, people would’ve said that this is science fiction. But now, they’re not asking if, but when. There’s a perception that self-driving cars are coming and people are expecting them.” Cruise’s system has three components. There are sensor units that go on top of the car near the windshield and then there are actuators that control the steering and driving. There’s also a computer that goes in the trunk and takes up about one cubic foot of space. When you drive onto a highway and merge into a lane, you’ll be able to hit a ‘Cruise’ button on your dashboard. The system will take control of the car’s steering, braking, and acceleration to keep you in your lane. But the system doesn’t take the place of a human driver, so you have to stay alert to make sure you’re following all traffic laws. TechCrunch writer Colleen Taylor took a test drive below in this video: The inaugural price of the product is about $10,000 and they’re taking pre-orders for a launch sometime next year. Vogt said for now, the system, called the RP-1, works with just Audi A4s and S4s. “We realize this price isn’t for everyone,” he said. “The initial system has been expensive to develop.” They also have to go through additional testing hoops. Vogt said that the automotive industry already has standard practices for testing that it uses on adaptive cruise control systems. Like other self-driving car proponents, Vogt pointed out the moral justification for it in terms of saving lives. “There are 30,000 deaths a year from car accidents. Ninety percent of those are caused by humans,” he said. “When you put a computer in a car, each one of our systems has this corpus of knowledge from thousands of hours of driving. It never gets distracted and never falls asleep. If we have technology that can compensate for the shortcomings of people, we have a responsibility to do something about it.” Vogt didn’t reveal funding details about the investors behind his new company. Here’s its commercial teaser: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEQqQj_zyHI] |
Google I/O 2014 Preview: The Developer Conference Has A Design And Wearables Focus This Year | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | If you’re gearing up for , you might be wondering what the company will be doing with its full two-day event, which kicks off Wednesday. Google’s focus this year is expanding to include more information and value for the gamut of app and software makers. That means speaking not just to developers but also to designers and marketers. But for the average user, there’s still plenty to look for here in terms of news and excitement, too. A key focus this year, according to people familiar with the matter, will be Android Wear. , and released it to developers in beta form. It’s an extension of its mobile OS that is designed specifically for use on smartwatches and other wearable form factor devices, and we’ll almost certainly hear a lot more about it at I/O this year. Two manufacturers are set to debut the first shipping smartwatches running Android wear this year, including Motorola and LG. Both had promised a summer launch window for these devices, which are the Moto 360 and LG G Watch, and we’ve just entered into summer technically, so we’re almost guaranteed to hear more about these at I/O, if we don’t get a full-fledged launch of both. We’ll almost certainly get a good long look at Android Wear in a consumer-ready form, with more details and specifics on how it’ll work in terms of both basic built-in functionality and third-party support, and there will probably be a lot of attention paid to best design and development practices for the platform, given that Google and its OEM partners will be pushing for content to populate a wearable app store for the launch of consumer hardware. Apple has pushed its CarPlay infotainment integration a lot this year, and Google is expected to follow shortly with its own version. Officially , there’s not much known about the Android-powered in-car system, but already, partners including GM, Audi and Hyundai are on board and the tech is set to debut in new vehicles by the end of this year. Google is said to be planning a full-scale announcement and reveal of its Android car efforts, which would be in keeping with its other efforts this year to highlight how Android is expanding beyond just smartphones and tablets to cover a wide range of connected hardware and software. Google is said to be planning to make its in-car system directly web-connected, with a focus on making it usable separate from your device, but also complementary to smartphones. Google is looking to make this year’s show about Android above and beyond traditional mobile screens in general, and that means we could see updates on other projects that involve the broader Internet of Things. A couple of examples include its television efforts, which currently consist of Google TV. There’s said to be a competing Android TV initiative in development, which could break cover at this event. Android TV is reportedly more focused on content than apps and software, as opposed to Google TV. Beyond that, not much is known about it. Google also just acquired Dropcam with its Nest division, which is quickly becoming a hub for all things connected home, and we’ll probably see them talk more about this push and its growing orbit of devices and services. Expect talk around Google’s growing stable of first-party products, but also a focus on how third-party software and device makers can get in on the action. A new version of Android isn’t necessarily going to be launched at this year’s event, but we will probably get a taste of what’s to come. A recently revealed project called Quantum Paper looks to be set to bring a total redesign to Android software via distinct new guidelines, and Polymer is said to be a framework to hep make that happen via customizable, reusable interface elements. These would make for a very different, significantly redesigned experience not only for Android, but for Google everywhere, on iOS and the web in addition to its own devices. Google wants to really hammer down on design this year, and Quantum plus Polymer look like the best possible candidates to help it chart a path forward. Given how much emphasis is being placed on including designers in the event this year, these are likely candidates for further announcements and explanation. Google’s event this year will be heavy on those building software for its platforms, but it’ll also introduce a more inclusive definition of the “developer event” that extends to designers and marketers, too. Essentially, everyone involved in the process of building and selling software is meant to get something out of this year’s show, and that includes the old-fashioned developers too. We’ll have all the action for you over the two-day event right here, including live keynote coverage on Tuesday morning. |
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Patreon Raises $15 Million Series A, Revamps Site To Focus More On Content | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | Patreon, a subscription-based funding site for artists, has just raised $15 million in a Series A from , , , and a bevy of other tech entrepreneurs. There were 17 angel investors and VCs in all who contributed to this series, with of Index Ventures leading the round. Patreon founders Jack Conte and Sam Yam tell TechCrunch that they looked very carefully over the course of five months to curate the right investors for this round. “We wanted investors who believed in the arts and understand our mission,” said Conte. All of the investors, noted Conte, have some interest in the arts. Rimer, for instance, is on the Board of Trustees. Conte went on to say that his company could have raised even more if needed. Company revenues grew 10x in the last five months, allowing the founders some room to choose whom they would like to take investment from. Conte rose to as one-half of YouTube darling Pomplamoose. He founded Patreon with AdWhirl founder Yam as a way to support artists in their pursuit of a decent living while doing what they love. Conte also gave me an exclusive sneak peak into the new site design his team just pushed live today. You’ll notice the focus is much more on content instead of individual artists now as the main focus. “Think about why people love and share something online. It’s because of the content. We wanted to showcase what the artists were doing instead,” said Conte. Patreon is also going to start testing a limited beta for something called “Launch Mode.” This is a special page mode for artists to use during the initial launch of a new song or video. Some of the key features include: It will look very similar to a creation page, but the artist will have to turn it on to launch the ability to chat, etc. Only a handful of carefully selected artists will be using this mode at first. The plan is to eventually roll it out to everyone with a channel. There will also be a special half-day podcast happening from 9 am – noon Pacific time today to celebrate the site redesign. Founders, investors and several others will be on the channel during this time. You can tune in on Patreon’s own channel here: . Patreon engineers are in the midst of cranking out a mobile version of the site for iOS. And flush with cash, the company is now busy hiring as well. The founders tell me they expect to have up to 13 employees in the next week. |
Non-Profit Stupid Cancer’s Support App Instapeer Is Seeking Funds On Indiegogo | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | [vimeo 92144760 w=500 h=281] When Matthew Zachary was diagnosed with brain cancer at age 21 and told he had just six months to live, one of the hardest things to cope with was loneliness. Then a college senior and concert pianist, Zachary had to abandon his plans to go to graduate school and study writing for film and television. It was 1995 and there was very little in the way of online resources. “My family was amazing, my friends that didn’t abandon me were great, but they all went to grad school and I didn’t, so I was home alone and miserable,” he remembers. “Had I known what I know now, I would have at least asked the hospital if there is anyone else here like me. But you just don’t think to do that, plus you are terrified.” Zachary survived cancer, but it took him another seven years to meet a person who shared his diagnosis. “He was 10 years older than me, but he also had it in his twenties,” he says. “It was this incredible ‘aha’ moment to know that I was not the only college student to ever get cancer in the history of ever.” Inspired by his experiences, Zachary founded in 2007. Now the non-profit organization is developing an app that will anonymously connect users with other cancer patients and survivors. Currently , Instapeer will be open to everyone, but it is designed with the needs of teenage oncology patients in mind. Zachary hopes that it will give other young cancer patients the same ‘aha’ moment he had when he met his friend. “We’re such a small percentage of people who get cancer every year. So in meeting that guy, it opened up a whole new world for me and by that time I had rebuilt a whole new career for myself,” says Zachary, who worked in the advertising industry before starting Stupid Cancer. “By meeting him, I met dozens of other people, and this whole world opened up that I didn’t know existed.” Zachary hopes that Instapeer will give young cancer patients a safe place to discuss issues they might not want to talk about even with their family and friends. “I was impotent for two years after my treatment. I’d been infertile since day one, but I was impotent from treatments for two years and I never had anyone I felt comfortable telling this to until I met Craig. He said he went through the same thing and it totally sucked, and we commiserated on this incredibly intimate little thing that I felt so embarrassed to tell anyone else but him,” he says. While young cancer patients currently have online forums and chatrooms to turn to, Zachary says those resources have limitations, especially for people dealing with new diagnoses. “What I found for me personally, and what I’ve seen reciprocated with other people’s opinions, is that online forums are very intimidating. I mean, extremely intimidating,” he says. “It becomes a pissing contest for who has suffered more, and you can quote me on that. No one will disagree with me.” “Can you imagine being a new patient seeking peer support and going into a forum where people are arguing over death, dying, who’s worse off, and I’m better than you?” he adds. Many teenagers are also reluctant to call hotlines. “Teens will not pick up a phone and call a hotline and ask to speak to a stranger and tell a stranger their story, then have a stranger tell them, here’s another stranger to talk to, talk to the stranger,” says Zachary. He hopes Instapeer, which is HIPAA-compliant, will offer a higher level of “privacy, anonymity, confidential relationships, and trust.” Users who are matched with each other through Instapeer’s algorithm will see very little personal information about the other person, just a first name and last initial; their cancer diagnosis and what stage it is at; their city; a tagline; and recommendations from other users. “I think the fact that there will be no avatars, no profile pictures, no screen names, is critical to that safety that people need. I’ve meet so many people that are wallflowers,” Zachary says. “Cancer is still stigmatized and not everyone wears it on their sleeve like in the movies and TV shows all about it now. Not everyone is like that. There are still plenty of wallflowers that are scared, ashamed, and all the testing and survey groups I’ve done over the past three and a half years have shown that if you give someone the opportunity to feel safe, they will take advantage of that opportunity.” The app is being designed specifically for teenagers “because in the world of cancer, teens are the most underserved in terms of peer connections and their access to age-appropriate resources and care.” , Stupid Cancer’s national spokesperson, was pivotal in helping Zachary understand what it feels like to be a teenage cancer patient before she passed away last year. “She told me teenagers today don’t even make eye contact. They stare at their phones all the time and they text everything to each other. They use Snapchat and Instagram their life. If we are going to give them a support tool, it has to be SMS, it can’t be chatrooms. It has to be a very specific interaction with someone like them,” he says. The app’s first group of users will be drawn from Stupid Cancer’s network. The organization currently works with six major oncology societies and associations, 18,000 cancer centers, and serves as a partner for about 140 other non-profit organizations. Instapeer’s challenge is not building a community, but “scaling up once we open our doors,” says Zachary. Stupid Cancer is collaborating with , a mobile development team that has worked with and , on Instapeer. One of the app’s advisors is former eBay director of product , who is also a stage four lung cancer survivor and member of Stupid Cancer. Once Instapeer reaches the beta stage, it will be invite-only, including people who have donated money through the Indiegogo campaign. Then over the next six months, the app hopes to raise enough capital to scale up and launch a public app in the App Store by January. One of the things Zachary wants to focus on as the app grows is making sure there is scientific evidence that Instapeer’s model helps improve quality of life and well-being for young cancer patients instead of just focusing on user adoption. “We have a brand that is one of the most highly respected in the world of oncology at this point and we have a very delicate balance and line to tread in order to retain that reputation,” he says. Instapeer will work with an advisory board that includes clinical psychologists, psychotherapists, licensed social workers, and oncology nurses. “We’re trying to really cover as many bases as possible to make sure the app is not just cool and cool-sounding and innovative, and whatever other buzzwords there are in the industry, but also meaningfully valuable to the medical establishment, and that’s important.” For more information about Instapeer, . |
The Mission’s Digital Divide And Why Fixing It Matters | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | Between and the regular anti-eviction and Google Bus protests that roll through Guerrero and 18th Street, the Mission District is the epicenter of San Francisco’s Gentrifi-pocalypse. Just last week, a developer bought a shuttered auto repair shop in the neighborhood . So whatever these condos ultimately end up selling for once all the construction, permitting and marketing costs are filtered in will be much higher. Yet the income disparities in the neighborhood are still stunning. I paid a visit last week to the , a non-profit that has been serving the local Latino community for the last 40 years. Nearly one-quarter of the students that they serve in the Mission’s four lowest-performing public schools . At MEDA’s Get Connected events, the Mission-based non-profit gets families signed up for Internet access and does giveaways or sales of refurbished laptops. “It means that if they’re doing a research for a paper, they’re forgoing using the Internet or using a smartphone,” said , who is MEDA’s technology manager. Abisla’s work is part of a new federal effort that’s trying to replicate the ideas of the Harlem Children’s Zone and its creator Geoffrey Canada, who figured prominently in the documentary, “Waiting For Superman,” in other neighborhoods across the country. Canada’s idea was to pair reform-minded charter schools with a wealth of non-profit services serving children all the way from birth to college. A at and found that the program astonishingly closed the black-white achievement gap for middle school students in math and cut it by half in English, although the Harlem Children’s Zone has since received criticism . Nonetheless, President Barack Obama has allocated to copy the model in other neighborhoods. The Mission was chosen as one of them. So Abisla’s spending his time trying to convince local Mission residents to buy things like routers and Internet service for as little as $10 a month. “We hear them say a lot, ‘Oh, that’s not for me. I don’t speak English. I didn’t go to school,'” Abisla said. “Our approach has to be multi-pronged. We have to de-mystify technology for parents, especially newer immigrants who have never approached it before. We have to explain to them that it’s a necessity for their children to do well in school.” MEDA also recently started a program called “Mission Techies,” that runs classes for neighborhood teenagers and youth on programming. They’ve been able to recruit Facebook and Google engineers to moonlight as volunteer teachers. On Monday night, Facebook Messenger engineer was teaching Android programming a group of 17 to 24-year-olds at MEDA with a friend . They were running students through modules from , to make computer science education much more mainstream. “There’s a feeling that tech workers aren’t involved with the community,” Nusbaum said. “I wanted to prove that wrong.” MEDA has run one eight-week session of Mission Techies already. Edwin Gonzales, a twenty-two-year-old who returned to San Francisco from El Salvador to live with his parents in Bayview, was able to get an internship at Jones IT doing diagnostics after being part of the last group. Even though he finished the program, he keeps coming to class. Before, he was working at the Franciscan Crab Restaurant on the city’s touristy Fisherman’s Wharf. “I’m very passionate about computers,” he said, explaining that when he was 14 years old, he helped his high school teacher in El Salvador build a computer. “I need to keep growing my skills.” 1) Even though the U.S.’s inner cities are seeing less crime and more economic prosperity compared to 30 years ago and tech entrepreneurs are tackling urban problems like transportation and logistics, the dark flipside of this story is that Today, only one-third of MEDA’s Latino clientele still lives in the Mission. About one-third of them come from other neighborhoods in San Francisco like Excelsior or Visitacion Valley, and the rest are commuting over from suburbs and exurbs in the East Bay like Richmond and beyond. This is a local incarnation of a national phenomenon. You can see it in and too, in these in-depth stories from The New York Times and Politico. Today, the U.S. has . It’s a problem because the transit-rich density of U.S. cities actually makes them far more effective at delivering services to low-income populations. A generation ago, the national conversation was about inner city ghettos. But today, these communities are being gentrified out and suburbs have the infrastructure to deal with entrenched poverty. On top of that, the federal and city programs and non-profits that cater to these communities have literally taken decades to develop. So there is a pretty deep irony that while tech startups are increasingly addressing urban inconveniences like food delivery and ground transportation, a poorer population is being physically marginalized from job opportunities and the largely city-based social services that were designed to lift them up over the last 40 years. In recent weeks, both Google and LinkedIn have made the gutsy moves of sharing . It’s always characterized as a problem. Not enough minorities and women come out of four-year computer science degree programs, because not enough minorities either get the chance to go to college or get exposed to technology during childhood or in the K-12 system. A vicious cycle continues because there aren’t enough minority role models in the system to shepherd others into the industry. There are several existing programs that are running local classes in computer science for K-12 students like , which uses volunteers from the industry in San Francisco’s public middle and high schools. Then there’s , an Oakland-based non-profit that teaches technical skills to students and recently won a grant from Google. There are also many jobs at growth-stage tech companies like QA testing that don’t necessarily require four-year computer science degrees and where a lot of the training happens on-the-job. Surely, if Google and Facebook are the kinds of companies that envision being around for at least another 10 years, they could do more to support a diverse pipeline for that long-term future by being more systematically involved in local public schools. (Hell, I learned how to type as a five-year-old on Mac SEs donated by Apple.) This is hard to do given that we are at or near full capacity regionally in housing and transit, creating huge pressures for rent hikes and no-fault evictions. San Francisco’s population has never been higher and . BART is expected to be at full capacity by 2016 and the city Activists complain about the Google buses and the city turning into a bedroom community for suburban tech campuses. But what they don’t realize is that we have several companies headquartered in San Francisco that will need to grow their headcount by a significant amount over the next five years. Dropbox. Square. Salesforce. Twitter. Uber. Airbnb. Stripe. Not to mention all of Y Combinator’s other up-and-comers, many of which want to be headquartered in San Francisco. Mayor Ed Lee has a goal of building or preserving 30,000 units by 2020. But barring a macro-economic correction in the near future, this might actually be too conservative. San Francisco is already really behind, having added only 4,776 housing units from 2010 to 2013 while the city grew by 32,207 people. , the city’s politics around land-use and heights are complex. Then there’s a counter-intuitive set of political alliances that have emerged between wealthy, homeowning NIMBY-ists and affordable housing activists who add extra restrictions to the planning process that are well-intentioned but end up exacerbating the housing shortage. On near record-low turnout a few weeks ago, . It will require developments exceeding current height limits — usually around 40 feet — across much of the city’s waterfront to face a citywide vote. Proposition B’s passage , Forest City and a new San Francisco Giants project, containing around 2,500 housing units, will have to go and be placed on the ballot starting in November. A few affordable housing activists were skeptical of extra waterfront construction, saying that it would be pretty much all be luxury condos. The thing is, if new housing isn’t created regionally (including on the waterfront, down on the peninsula and the Western neighborhoods) on criticism that it’s just for the ultra-rich, existing homes elsewhere like in the Mission, Bernal Heights and maybe eventually Bayview end up becoming luxury-priced. Furthermore, the city subsidizes the creation of below-market-rate housing with market-rate construction through a policy called . The ratio of market-rate to affordable units is a huge point of contention. But right now, without the federal or state support that the city has historically received, more market-rate construction is a key way the city uses to generate funds for preserving or building affordable units. It’s all rather complex. But if you want to change the existing political dialogue from something that pits tech against the city, mutual good will and understanding needs to be built now. Education and the digital divide is a great place to start, and it’s right here on our doorsteps. It would kill many birds with one stone. |
I Hath Seen The Future Of Video Games! | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | The is often difficult to parse. On the one hand new title and platform revelations engender an enormous buzz around all things video game, a buzz that’s hard to ignore. Old or new, innocent or jaded, something always comes out of E3 that catches your eye, some reason to fall in love all over again. And you’ll see that reflected in social media feeds, so there’s a sense of a giant love-in. But then there’s the depressing feeling, where the intransigence of E3’s vision of videogameland gets to you. E3 is a lens, a specific spin on what games are. E3 is shooters, , gore and guts. E3 is big-budget, front-loaded and Hollywood-esque. E3 tells a story of the future of games. based around the big, the splashy and the loud. The future is “graphics”, “emotion” and “experience”. The future is . The future is sitting on your couch with your video game console and having your socks blown off. Most of what comes out of the conference is the continuity of pre-existing marketing stories, platforms and franchises. Different faces appear on stage over the years making the same old promises, conveying the same old ideas. From the lurid green stage of Microsoft’s Xbox visions to Sony’s pontifications on how it’s bringing movies and games together, EA’s latest touting of the realism of its sports games or even Ubisoft’s rebel-rebel swearing on stage. There’s a pattern to it. As it has always been, as it was always meant to be. E3 is where the faithful gaming media gather to hear familiar sermons and from there go out and spread the good word: that the future of games is approaching (a heavenly final form) based on the console paradigm. So in a sense E3 tries to present a vision, but what it actually presents is division. Having had the privilege of consulting across many sectors of the industry, I am always amazed at how little cross-pollination happens between them. Indie people know little about the casual space, for example, and casuals are only tangentially aware of how so-called “core” gaming works. None of the above know much about the casino gaming scene (and vice versa), nor the social scene. All of the above know less than they’d admit about the virtual world/MMO market, the e-sports scene or the world of gamification. I don’t even know if we can really say that there is one games industry, but rather several games industries. Each operates according to its own logic, and members of each tend to assume that theirs is the heart of the industry around which all others orbit. Many indies consider E3 essentially irrelevant as to them “the games industry” is a world of diverse gaming imminently forming part of a larger culture, and big shooter games are a carnival sideshow to that movement. Meanwhile many core game types consider indie gaming to be a nice-to-have diversions for a break from “real” (i.e. their preferred kind of) games. Games are unique among all media in being so divided, and much of that is because of their symbiotic relationship to host platforms. Most other media tend to just be what they are, in a manner of speaking, and the platform is simply the host. Watch a movie on your phone, on your Fire TV or on your laptop and it’s much the same thing. However because games are all about the interaction, the manner of how you interact changes everything. New platforms bring about new ways of interacting, new and (in game designer argot) and environments. And beyond the raw gameplay, the relationship of the platform to its users molds their preferred aesthetics and the underlying economics. As a tablet is used in a different way to a console, so the games that work on a tablet are different to those that work on a console. So the division of platforms and platform types leads in turn to the division of the industry. Division has many interesting side effects. One is a sense that a created space gets explored relatively quickly and runs out of steam, leading to a constant appetite for the next division. Another is the comparative lack of a forming of a literature of games (an interature?) beyond a very small group of diehards. Games expire as their platforms do, bar the valiant effort of some archivists and emulator developers to preserve them, so their history is unfamiliar to many. Anyone can still access Samuel Richardson’s and read it as they like, but not Tim Schafer’s classic . The primary effect of division, however, is the way that it works against diversity. For example in the gaming media E3 is all about the five big press conferences. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft host a sequence of staged infomercials and the core gaming world tunes into watch and comment. These events are make-or-break for the hype cycle because they frame the wider narrative that journalists will talk about for the next year. But this also means that games and products which don’t work on those stages become invisible. So it becomes more important to have a set of games that will give good presser, leading to a narrowing of product choices to a handful. Diversity, such as showing some chosen indie games, becomes more of a plot point in the narrative than an end goal. Just in case you think I’m only talking about console, it’s a similar story on other platforms. The App Store exercises a dominant control over the software on iPad, which means that making big bones on that platform has much to do with impressing Apple. Facebook exercises no editorial control, but the rules of how that platform is set up have a similar lensing effect. Division of platforms and concentration on sub-audiences pushes innovation down certain lines, and that’s why there’s no cross-pollination. For all the unlimited-future aspirations of events like E3 the reality is that each division’s future is but a pale shadow of what might be. No one platform can do everything. But maybe that can change. Part of what props up our existing divisions is that some games only work in certain settings. Big games (a perhaps) need capable screens to show rich graphics as well as input methods like joypads, mice and keyboards to deliver precision. Lighter games (a , say) are the opposite. They work best on the go and so they need to be easily accessed, quick to start up and put away. So to play each game you need the right platform, and to do that you need to buy multiple devices. But these constraints are becoming softer. Tablets have grown light enough that they are often used for gaming on the go – and when people play with them they do so in a more concentrated fashion than their phones. Technology for graphics in mobile also continues to advance at a fierce pace, with retina screens and leading the push. Small-scale interface systems are also getting better. The PS Vita’s twin sticks and buttons are a little fiddly, but you can see how they might grow really nice in the next generation. With the right touch screen size, say enough to sit comfortably in the hands while occupying enough of a field of view to become immersive (10 inch diagonal), that might be the bridge. See, the thing is that the Wii U is a good idea in a bad wrapper. What it promises is a kind of ultimate platform, a game system that can handle all of the verbs that currently exist in multiple paradigms and bring them under one roof. It does this by trying to combine the ideas of the pad controller with a tablet, wrapping one around the other. The problem is that the actual device that represented this idea was too bulky, too poor in battery, equipped with too crappy a screen on the controller and too constrained by needing a console to work. It only went half way toward where we needed it to go. So does the iPad. So does the PS Vita. So, even, do projects like Razer Edge. Where? Towards a unifying platform: A thin but powerful tablet-sized handheld with pad controllers along each side. Powerful enough to render rich graphics and be immersive. Sleek enough to fit neatly in a bag. Interface-capable enough to handle all of the known verbs. Communications-capable with fast cellular, WiFi and Bluetooth technologies. Able to interact with media streamers or similar devices to broadcast to TV. Looking nice, and with a battery that lasts. A platform, in other words, that can handle every kind of game. Is that really so inconceivable? I don’t think so, but getting there needs a company that likes to make proactive platform-sized bets. Given that what I’ve described above is essentially an embiggened PS Vita, you might think that I mean Sony. But actually I’m pondering whether this is the kind of bet that needs Nintendo. As I’ve written before, Nintendo gets to be because nobody expects the company to outspend to win. Rather everyone expects Nintendo to strike out into blue oceans. Sometimes what we see from the company doesn’t hit the mark, but sometimes it blows the mark away. The N64 and Wii, for example, were transformative. On the other hand the GameCube and Wii U proved tough sells. Nonetheless Nintendo perseveres, and in so doing it serves as an important source of inspiration for the rest of the industry. The industry didn’t really have analog sticks until Nintendo did, and then everyone did. The industry didn’t really care about motion control until Nintendo did it, and then everyone did. Not all of these innovations take but enough do to make them worth trying. And even though Nintendo might not be the primary beneficiary of an innovation, it certainly thrives off them enough to keep going. The push to break out of our divisions is more likely to come from Nintendo than anyone else. However it comes down to whether the company is really thinking that way. The component technologies are all in place and Nintendo is able to make the great gaming content that such a move would need, leading to a next generation of … I’m not even sure what we’d call them. Ultra-handhelds? Gamedecks? Who knows. Things. I know this all seems implausible to some of you, but then so did the laptop once. So did the idea that the mobile phone would be a major computing platform prior to the smartphone. So, even, did the games console in the days after Atari but before the NES. Big bold changes can happen when the stars align – and just such an alignment is coming. I hath seen the future I tell thee, and the future is a device class that brings union over disunion and gathers all our gaming industries together. |
Apple CEO Tim Cook Described As Less Hands-On, More Interested In Broad Implications With iWatch | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | Apple CEO Tim Cook is the subject of a new profile in the today, and the profile includes plenty of background information about the executive and his commitment to human rights and environmental issues. But it also contained some information about the rumored iWatch project, how it’s being put together behind the scenes and when it’s slated for public release. Cook is said to be less hands-on in terms of product development than former CEO Steve Jobs, who was known to be maniacal about even the smallest details of new devices. Specifically regarding the iWatch, the NYT’s sources say that Cook is more content to give over responsibilities for the finer points of product development to other executives, including design chief Jony Ive. Instead, Cook is said to be more focused on the “broader implications” of the iWatch, including its abilities to monitor heart rate and other key vital signs, and how those could help make health and doctor care more informed and effective. Based on this, it’s reasonable to expect that will be a big part of what the iWatch has to offer consumers. One final detail shared about the upcoming iWatch, whose development still hasn’t even been acknowledged by Apple itself – it will supposedly arrive in the fourth quarter, according to the NYT’s sources. That’s in keeping with other rumors we’ve heard in the past, including a prediction that it’ll arrive alongside new iPhone hardware in September, or , per Japanese business newspaper Nikkei. |
#Love: My ‘Friends’ Don’t ‘Like’ Me | Contributor | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | author of a new book called , which focuses on social media’s influence on our personal relationships. Stolz is a bit of a social media celebrity after stints on America’s Next Top Model and years of work for MTV News as a broadcast reporter. These days she trades with Citi Group and is in the midst of promoting her book, which is available for . When I was writing , I read an article by , evolutionary anthropologist, which said that humans cannot process more than 150 friendships at any given point in our lives. This really resonated with me as I had been feeling spread thin on social media, only getting glimpses of the people I wanted to interact with because of the multitude of posts from distant acquaintances who I had met once and impulsively “friended” or strangers whom I had thoughtlessly accepted friendship requests from. I went on a Facebook rampage (you know the kind) and began unfriending every person that I did not consider worthy of my definition of true friendship: you know, the people you trust, call when you’re going through a breakup and invite to your birthday party. I started that day with 1,462 friends and ended it with 984. It felt great to let go of those 478 strangers that I’d shared my most intimate thoughts and family photographs with for the past few years. I felt renewed and rejoiced in the notion that I’d cleaned out my virtual closet. The next day, I posted a photo of a day of wine tasting on a vineyard in Bridgehampton (you know, one of those posts that everyone sort of rolls their eyes at but you do anyway). I sat back and waited for the usual likes to come in on Instagram and Facebook. The “like” is an interesting form of social currency. We give them out with an effortless click (or double click) but the receiver on the other end enjoys a multitude of positive emotions. Every time we see that our “likes” have grown, we get a mini-boost of self-confidence. If someone we like or have a crush on likes our photo, our thoughts spiral into whether they might like us too and begin to imagine life events with them like marriage or having children. If an ex likes our photo, it can be the first step in getting back together. And so we post things to see what we might get back. I know my Instagram “likes” formula pretty well at this point. Something funny = 140-150 likes A fancy cocktail = 125-140 likes A pretty view = 100-125 likes Photos of me under age 8 = 100-110 likes An obnoxious photo from a vacation = 90-100 likes Obligatory “it’s after 2am and I’m drunk posting” = 75-90 likes Anytime I try to self promote = 50-75 posts (I get it) Sidenote: The only “like” experience I don’t understand is the flower upload. Every time I post a photo of flowers or a garden or something along those lines, I get like 200+ likes. Is there an underground flower mafia on Instagram or something? So weird. But, moving on… On Facebook, the “likes” and comments work in similar proportions but in smaller size as I have around a thousand Facebook friends but six times that on Instagram. And so having posted my new photo on Facebook, I waited for all my “friends” to acknowledge my gorgeous day at the vineyard. An hour went by and what usually would have garnered 40 or 50 Facebook likes currently stood at only four sad little likes. I didn’t understand it. Did all my friends hate me? Were they mad at me? Was my social life over, as I knew it? I had to get to the bottom of this. I went back through my Facebook posts to see who had given me my likes in the past. Scrolling through, I recognized so few names that I went back to the top to make sure I was looking at my own page. I began to click on the names and I was given the option to add each one as a friend. I didn’t understand. Didn’t I have my privacy settings so that only my “Friends” could see my photos? And then it hit me. The vast majority of my past “likes” had been given by the 478 strangers I had just unfriended. I had unliked my likers! For years, I had felt excited and popular and loved by my friends when truly the pings of dopamine that I was getting each time I saw that my photo had “50 likes” were from full strangers whom I neither cared nor knew anything about. I was crushed. My digital presence on social media had created a false bubble of security that I had been living happily and unknowingly inside. When I saw 150 likes on my Instagram photo, I hadn’t cared or thought about who was liking it, just that I was in fact getting “liked”. The social currency of the “like” made me feel rich in popularity. Now, as the bubble burst, I felt sort of lonely and embarrassed, knowing I had let my digital self (my actual self?) take so much pride in a bunch of strangers double-clicking my photos. I had let myself become so thinly spread on social media that I had lost track of the digital lives of my real friends as I was being constantly inundated by the photos and updates and likes and comments of the randoms and distant 4th. Facebook feeds can’t tell the difference between our actual friends and those we have randomly confirmed. A year ago, one of my best friends from high school got engaged and, as we do, posted it on all of her social media before the ring was even fully on her finger. Scrolling through my feed of 984 Facebook friends, I missed it. A few days later, she wrote me a passive aggressive email about not congratulating her. I swore I hadn’t known but she reminded me of my social media addiction (I did write a book about it after all so I guess that was fair game) and refused to believe me. Even though she was mistaken and I actually had not known, the experience also confirmed for me that she and I were no longer as close as we used to be. When I got engaged, I called my eight or nine best friends to tell them the news and let the rest of the world and my peripheral friends find out via social media. I remember being sort of annoyed when one of my best friends (one of the ones whom I had called) failed to “like” my engagement photo on Instagram. I brought it up with her (so annoying) and her response was a very defensive “I screamed in happiness on the phone with you! Couldn’t you tell I was happy then? You need a like to confirm that??” My friend was right. Why would I need a double click on an Instagram photo to confirm for me that my best friend (and a bridesmaid in my wedding) was excited about my life change. But the fact is, we have become so used to measuring and evaluating our popularity and strength of our friendships by our digital presence and social media interactivity that we’ve begun to lose sight of what a friendship truly should bring to the table and how to have healthy emotions around our real life interactions. The amount of stimulus we are receiving on a second-by-second basis when we scroll through our Instagram, Facebook, Vine, Foursquare, Twitter, Snapchat and every other social media app we check between five and ten times per day makes us less capable of having normal reactions and feelings about the few posts that actually contain important information. As humans, while we fool ourselves into thinking otherwise, in reality we’re actually not skillful multi-taskers. When we hear bad news via social media, we barely have time to react before something else catches our eye. I have found that I also feel less empathy for people when I communicate with them via social media rather than in person. In fact, Robin Dunbar found that emotional closeness declines by around 15% per year in the absence of face-to-face interaction. So if our empathy is going down, our minds and hearts are being spread thin on social media and the number of strangers we display our lives to is going up while the number of friends stays constant, the question becomes why do we like “likes” so much? How can they be so fulfilling to us? The fact is that each time our phone lights up with a notification, the uncertainty of what it could be and the fact that we are getting attention releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine into our system and we get a mini-euphoric feeling. We crave that attention and the unknown of what the notification is and whom it is from. So are we all becoming narcissists as we get increasingly addicted to that digitally induced dopamine fix? Are we liking others’ photos just to get more of our own? Do we post just for attention or is there a deeper more genuine reason? Is there anything really wrong with “likes” if they truly do make us feel good? We can be having a terrible day and then someone likes a #selfie of ours and suddenly we feel pretty and attractive. The problem is that as we become more narcissistic and addicted to fueling our digital egos, we stop caring about each other. We stop picking up on the emotions that our friends and loved ones are putting down. We can’t listen because we’re distracted and trying to multi-task social media and real life. The other day I received some bad news and instead of my usual distraction of scrolling through every bit of social media I could find, I picked up the phone and called a friend. Hearing her voice and letting her hear the sadness in mine made me feel a thousand times better than a thousand “likes” would have. I was happy to know that I was still a little bit human, rooted in my desire for real, true life interaction. I appreciated her help and immediately told her so on her Facebook wall. She “liked” my post and that made me feel good. That post ultimately only got one “like” but it was from a real life friend. I liked that better than the 262 likes I got when I uploaded the tulips blooming on Park Avenue. It’s only a small step away from my digital narcissism, but it’s something. |
Former BuzzFeed COO Jon Steinberg Joins Daily Mail | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | Jon Steinberg, former COO and current advisor at BuzzFeed, has landed at the Daily Mail heading up American operations for the UK-based mega news site, according to . Steinberg had previously worked four years at BuzzFeed, where he led the site alongside Jonah Peretti. He was the fifteenth employee and has helped grow revenue to $60 million. His departure was , with some talking about vested shares and others suggesting disagreements over salary. The most well-reported rumor speculates that Steinberg left after Peretti refused to sell BuzzFeed to Disney . Steinberg tweeted this today: Liking =) this Beatles lyric today "His son is working for the Daily Mail" — Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg) Before joining BuzzFeed, Steinberg was a strategic partner development manager at Google, after founding a VC-backed real estate software company called iBuilding. You can read more about his forthcoming work at the Daily Mail . |
‘51%’ Fears Rattle The Bitcoin Community | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | In January, there was worry in the bitcoin community regarding GHash, a mining pool. It controlled a rising share of the total bitcoin computational power used to mine the cryptocurrency — it’s share was creeping towards the 50% mark. Here’s a sample of in January, when GHash was at a still-distant 42%: “[That percentage puts] uncomfortably close to the 51% hash power mark, which some argue is the Achilles heel of bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies.” Why? Because of the potential of what the bitcoin community calls a ‘51% attack.’ In short, once you control more than 50% of the total hashing power of the bitcoin network, you can do nasty things, like spend bitcoins twice, and reverse and block transactions. GHash , and held that rate for a period of more than 12 hours, it became generally known on Friday. This was not well received. A well known bitcoin developer publicly of his holdings in the cryptocurrency, and the price of bitcoin fell to the $550 mark. It was trading recently around $670. Previously, GHash said that it would not break the 51% mark. “Reaching 51% of all hashing power,” the company , “is a serious threat to the bitcoin community.” I contacted the firm, asking why they went over their prior promise. I’ll update this post if I hear back. A 51% attack is something you do willfully. So, GHash would have to want to behave badly. As Ars Techica , GHash was less than a year ago of “using its considerable hashing power to attack a gambling site.” As such we’re not dealing with an actor that we should implicitly trust. Ittay Eyal, and Emin Gün Sirer, both of Cornell, . To them, this is “armageddon.” Their critique is simple: GHash is in a position to exercise complete control over which transactions appear on the blockchain and which miners reap mining rewards. They could keep 100% of the mining profits to themselves if they so chose. Bitcoin is currently an expensive distributed database under the control of a single entity, albeit one that requires constantly burning energy to maintain — worst of all worlds. The two advocate a “hard fork” in bitcoin, to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. It isn’t clear what is next. If GHash can in fact keep itself over 51%, it makes bitcoin unstable, which could harm the cryptocurrency’s price. At the same time, GHash’s percentage could spur others to bring more computational power online, and thus make it harder for GHash to have a shot at staying over the 50% level. This is the sort of issue, I think, that could keep regular folks from adopting the crytocurrency. Imagine sitting your parents down and telling to shunt their bitcoin into litecoin until GHash is less powerful and thus bitcoin is safe to use again. Not going to work. If the implicit trust that undergirds bitcoin is denigrated, or destroyed all together, its price will hit the skids. Harder than it recently did. |
Meet The Pitch-Off Winners Of The Austin And Seattle Meetups | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | , exhilarating week hunting down the coolest new startups in Austin and Seattle, I’m proud to announce the winners of our recent TechCrunch Pitch-offs. They triumphed through a sixty-second pitch, stood up against a barrage of questions from local venture capitalists and TechCrunch editors, and most importantly, impressed hundreds of potential users in the audience. So without any further ado, meet the winners: First place – TeVido BioDevices is an early-stage life sciences/biotech company using 3D bio-printing of a woman’s own living cells to build custom grafts for breast cancer reconstruction. Their first product is targeted to improve nipple reconstruction and later fill lumpectomies. Second place – Peep is a piece of hardware that attaches to your door’s peephole. By connecting to an app on your smartphone, you can see who’s at your front door whether your home or not, and people can even leave in-person voicemails when you miss them. Audience Choice – Stretch Recipes Stretch is a life-made-easy app that helps people pair their budget with food dislikes to make purchasing decisions at the grocery store. Stretch provides nutritional chef recipes while letting users earn points towards coupons. First place – EssayMentors is an online and/or in-person mentoring program that helps teenagers write their college application essays. The company partners with schools and non-profits to provide tools to students. Second place – VetCommander is a platform that connects veterans with the right job. The service offers the chance to create an interactive video resume, ensuring the vet always gets feedback (whether the interviewer responds or not) and offering a better way for the employer to get to know them. Audience Choice – Canary is an on-demand mobile marijuana delivery service aimed toward medical card holders in Seattle and Denver. The app lets you filter by strain or dispensary and promises delivery within an hour. The company hires medical card-holding, knowledgable couriers to ensure the end user gets a great experience. All of these winners will attend TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this fall, with the first place companies getting a table in Startup Alley. We had a blast in Austin and Seattle and thank both cities for welcoming us. Until next time, . |
That Time McDonald’s Launched A Digital Incubator in Silicon Valley | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | The fast food joint with over 300 billion served just opened shop in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. The twist is they’re making digital products, not hamburgers. The company’s tech hub at 658 Market Street has already hired a few engineers from PayPal, Facebook, AOL and Yahoo – and they’re looking to hire at least 20 more. Much like Starbucks fast food joints, the company has already jumped into testing digital payments in the U.S. McDonald’s also got into World Cup fever this year with a downloadable augmented reality app posted right on their french fry packaging. This new digital outpost is the brain child of , who came to the company from Amazon last fall to help boost a waning younger, more digitally adept audience. A spokesperson from McDonald’s said the move to Silicon Valley was a strategic one: We want a presence in the heart of the tech community enabling us to attract world-class talent. Being in this epicenter will also help us establish key relationships in the digital space. The move to Market Street is part of a larger trend for tech giants. Companies such as Twitter, Yammer, Square and One Kings Lane have all moved into this section of town as part of a rehabilitation effort in the city. It’s now a strange mix of destitute beggars and homeless people buried under blankets, and the hip nouveau riche of the tech scene. It’s not clear what exactly execs will have their programmers working on just yet, but what is clear is that this is another indication of how technology has permeated our culture, right on down to a crispy, golden french fry. |
After Moving East, AngelPad Tries To Bridge The SF And NYC Tech Worlds | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | Back in April, accelerator held a demo day at the San Francisco bar and restaurant 25 Lusk. The choice of location masked a big change — even though the accelerator was founded four years ago in San Francisco, and even though it still has offices there, AngelPad partners Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas have actually moved to New York City, and the accelerator’s home base followed suit. When talking about the move, Korte and Magescas can seem a little coy, as if relocating from one side of the US to another was no big deal. Korte acknowledged that living in New York was a personal preference (I can sympathize with that part, since I moved from SF to NYC last fall), but “overlaid” on top of that, he said, was the conclusion that as long as the partners and companies are in the same place, “It doesn’t matter where we are.” He added, “We set out as a charter that we’re going to be in both places.” In other words, AngelPad’s seventh batch of companies (i.e., the ones that had their demo day in April) may have been the first ones to be based out of the the New York office (pictured above), but they still spent a significant amount of time in the Bay Area. There were three week-long trips out to San Francisco, including the one for demo day. And speaking of demo day, despite the move, AngelPad hold an equivalent event in New York. Korte said he’s certainly hoping that the startups meet with and raise funding from New York investors, but after “debating that for a long time,” he and Magescas concluded it would diffuse the energy and excitement to hold more than one official demo day. Korte also suggested that the move has resulted in more applications from New York-based founders (who seem particularly uninterested in relocating). In the most recent batch, he estimated that one-third of applications came from New York, one-third from San Francisco, and one-third from “somewhere else.” And at the end of the session, “almost half of the companies” chose to stay in NYC. Korte also offered a few updated numbers about how AngelPad companies are doing in general. They’ve raised a total of $200 million (particularly well-funded ones include , , and ), and they’ve also seen $400 million in exits — the biggest by far being (and that’s going by the initial price — the stock deal is worth significantly more than that now). Now that one group of startups has made through the new AngelPad structure, Korte and Magescas seem to think their experiment in bridging the East and West Coasts is working. “We really want to see the two cultures melded together,” Korte said. “In Silicon Valley, you see audacious goals, crazy moonshot projects, and everyone’s starting a company. Versus New York, where founders take a look more seriously at how the company will make money.” And there are two more weeks before the June 29 deadline to . |
Gillmor Gang: Apple Jack | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 6 | 15 | The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Benedict Evans, and Steve Gillmor — bask in the continued reverberations of Apple’s stunning reveal last week at WWDC. Many of us in the Apple Polishing business (I’m an unrepentant fanboy) remain enthralled by the details of iOS 8 and its growing impact on OS/X Yosemite — Extensions, Notification Widgets, HandOffs, CloudKit Storage, and the new Swift programming language. Surely Apple has piled the developer plate high with a feast of improvements in enterprise security, privacy controls, and Apple-does-Android enhancements, none surprising in specific but comprehensive in aggregate. But the degree to which Apple has opened app and deep link access to the AppStore and therefore develop
er and startup enlistment goes way beyond the Apple we knew to something even bigger. @stevegillmor, @benedictevans, @scobleizer, @borthwick Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Following COO Resignation, Twitter’s Head Of Media Chloe Sladden Departs | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | Following , Twitter’s Vice President of Media Chloe Sladden has also announced her departure. “Now it’s time for my next chapter. #staytuned #thankyou #sleep,” . The news was , as well as a about supposed changes at Twitter’s media team. Isaac said the team be will now be reporting to the marketing and communication group, where its goal will be to make the product easier to understand “from a person’s very first tweet.” Rowghani’s resignation is part of a broader restructuring at Twitter, which will see the growth team reporting to a “triumvirate” that includes CEO Dick Costolo, VP of Engineering Alex Roetter, and VP of Consumer Product Daniel Graf, . Senior Manager of Internal Communications , though a source said Schauer’s departure was unrelated to the bigger changes. [image ] |
AdColony Says There Is No Deal With Opera | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | Mobile video ad company AdColony published this afternoon denying a TechCrunch report that . “There is no deal with Opera Software,” wrote CEO Will Kassoy. At the same time, he doesn’t deny (or confirm) that the two companies were in negotiations: “By strategy and in honor of our fiscal responsibility to our customers, employees and shareholders, we routinely speak to companies about potential partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, especially if it can accelerate our company’s vision.” If you’re wondering why it waited two days after publication to comment, AdColony said: “Neither company commented on the TechCrunch story because it’s not a good policy or use of time to comment on rumors and speculation,” so it’s only posting now because of the response to the story. The rest of the post touts AdColony’s continued success, with Kassoy sayng that the company continues “to kill it.” I’m discussing the blog post with one of my initial sources to try to get additional context and will follow up if I hear more. |
Samsung Aims To Reinvigorate Its Tablet Line With The New Galaxy Tab S | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | Samsung has announced a new tablet family that presents a marked departure from the parade of mostly forgettable slates that the company has been pumping out the past few years. The company unveiled the Galaxy Tab S line of devices at a special event in NYC today. Available in July, the Tab S comes in both 8.4 ($399) and 10.5-inch ($499) flavors in white and titanium bronze finishes with LTE-equipped models in the pipeline. The new Tab S boasts a Super AMOLED screen that’s really the star of the show. It has adaptive settings that change based on what kind of activity you’re doing on the tablet, much like many modern TVs, and will offer richer color rendering, better contrast and viewing angles, deeper blacks and more pure whites overall. Screen resolution is a whopping 2560×1600, which means that it can output better-than-HD-quality content, and it’ll do things like soften the intensity of the screen for reading while pumping it back up for blockbuster movies. Along with the stunning new screen, Samsung’s other marquee features with the Galaxy Tab S are its physical specifications. The device is only 6.6mm thick (the iPad mini is 7.5mm for comparison) and the 8.4-inch version weighs only 10 ounces, while the 10.5-inch version doesn’t tip the scales too much more at 11 ounces total. Other new hardware features include a built-in fingerprint scanner that can support up to three fingerprints per user and PayPal-facilitated mobile payments, as well as an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a 2.1 megapixel front-facing shooter for video chats. The processor is a 1.9GHz quad + 1.3GHz quad octa-core Samsung Exynos 5 processor, and there are 3GB of RAM on board. The tablets have 16GB of built-in storage, and boast up to 128GB of additional capacity via micro SD cards. Special accessories include the new Simple and Book Covers, which click into new button-style clicker fasteners on the tabs themselves. Software features unique to the Samsung Galaxy Tab S include a specially designed version of Milk Music, the streaming service Samsung originally introduced for Galaxy smartphones; Quick Connect, a feature that lets it easily detect and share files with nearby devices like the Gear 2 smartwatch or Galaxy S5 smartphone; and SideSync 3.0 , which can share screens, windows, call forwarding and other options between Galaxy devices and PCs. These look like a decent upgrade for Samsung’s tablet line, which hasn’t really had much in the way of dramatic design changes in recent memory. It’s still an Android tablet, with all that entails, and the ecosystem for Google-powered slates just isn’t up to snuff with iOS and the mature iPad software space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwpfT9jtsMk |
Former Microsoft Employee Involved In Windows 8 Leaks Given 3-Month Sentence | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | After , former Microsoft employee Alex Kibkalo will pay a $100 fine and serve three months in prison for stealing trade secrets. His case picked up wide notice not due to the nature of the crime — trade leaks happen every day — but instead in terms of how he was caught. Kibkalo leaked code to a French blogger, and Microsoft account for evidence regarding the source of the leak. The company was within its legal rights to do so, given that it has the right to examine data on its own servers. However, when it became known that the company had done so to pursue its legal ends, and had peeked through the missives of someone involved with publishing — no matter how loosely you define the niche — there was blowback. And fairly so, in my view. Microsoft had been critical of Google reading email algorithmically to serve better ads — Google has for a subset of its users in response to a lawsuit — and here was the Redmond-based software company doing it by hand. To its credit, Microsoft quickly instituted a that would see an external third-party oversee data retrieval. The company then , promising a greater turn towards law enforcement and other official channels to handle similar cases. It was a quick turnaround by the company. Today we end the odd saga with a short sentence and a minute fine. But, the larger outcome of the episode is that we erected another fence of privacy between others and your personal data. Microsoft declined to comment for this article. |
Intel Rises 5.5% After-Hours On Raised Q2 And Full-Year Revenue Expectations | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | After ending regular trading all but flat today, on the strength of for its second quarter and full-year revenue, and a slight change to its gross margin. For the second quarter, Intel expects revenue of $13.7 billion, plus or minus $300 million. This is greater than its prior expectation of $13 billion, plus or minus $500 million. So, on the top and bottom, Intel could see revenue of $14 billion in the second quarter, up from its lowest prior guidance band of $12.5 billion. According , consensus forecast for the quarter’s revenue was $13.02 billion, and Intel will beat that handily. For the full year, Intel now expects its revenue to grow, up from expectations that it would be flat. Gross margins are also expected to bump up 1 percent to a “mid-point” 64 percent. What’s driving the better-than-expected top line for Intel? “[S]tronger than expected demand for business PCs,” according to the company. I reached out to Microsoft for its thoughts on the business PC market, and it pointed me to its last quarter results, particularly the , Amy Hood: “Businesses are clearly expressing their overwhelming preference for Windows. Windows Pro revenue grew 19 percent driven by growth in business PCs, mix shift to developed markets where attach is higher, continued strength in the enterprise, and an increased mix of Pro in small and medium businesses. Windows Volume Licensing also had a solid 11 percent revenue growth.” Put another way: The Windows XP death march continues. As , Windows 7 recently scooted back past the 50% market share mark. Why would Windows 7 pick up new market share, this far into the Windows 8.x era? Businesses are getting the heck off of Windows XP and picking Windows 7 over 8.x. That’s not much of a knock against Windows 8.x, as Microsoft companies that were working on a transition to Windows 7 to keep at it, and not switch mid-stream to 8.x. Enterprise market share for XP has , so how long this momentum can last isn’t clear. XP’s death march will induce many businesses to buy machines running Windows 7. Intel’s chips power most of those machines, so the sales will be a boon for the chipmaker. Even though WinTel is a past era, what’s good for the PC market is still good for both Microsoft and Intel. Rumors of the death of PCs have at least been modestly exaggerated. |
Just Tell Me What To Buy | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | Yesterday, tech and culture website The Verge revived This Is My Next, a brand that the core team had used to transition away from their places at Engadget into their new home at Vox Media. It’s not a new site, but instead a new vertical or type of post that tries to give a concise, authoritative answer to people wondering what gadget to buy. The move is the latest in a trend: Using high-level editorial commentary to contextualize the vast array of information available on the web into digestible, actionable atomic units. At its heart, it’s a buying guide, but in the aggregate, it’s an explainer. The first edition of This Is My Next is “ ,” which, the site says, is the iPhone 5s. That decision is backed by a series of reviews of various smartphones from The Verge over the past several months, which were tapped to build the final piece. The recommendation is coupled with a typically (for Vox) well-produced video which can act as a companion to or standalone version of the article. “We talked about doing these types of reviews since launch and we never really had,” says Verge co-founder and Editor In Chief Joshua Topolsky. “We were so busy building and just making new stuff that we never sat down and said, “Okay. If we were going to do the…‘just tell me what to get review,’” or the Buying Guide Review, how do we do it, from a technology side?” Topolsky says plans to resurrect the TIMN brand — which has been used a smattering of times over the course of the site’s 2 1/2 year history, but not consistently — began around six months ago. The Verge is already well-known for its extensive reviews of gadgets, with polished design and video components. Some of that was carried over from Engadget, where many of the founding members previously worked together. But there has been some evolution of the style, with less primary focus put on specifications and more on editorial opinion. Still, Topolsky says that the reviews were not always suited to the kinds of recommendations that they wanted to give. And, it’s easy to understand, not every purchase is worth writing or reading a 2-3,000 word review of. Some purchases are about getting the best value for the cost and making sure you’re not wasting your money — but not necessarily absorbing all of the technical information available on a topic. Sometimes you just want to know what the best thing is, period. “I think we all do the same thing internally,” says Topolsky. “Even I do, when I was going to buy a new camera. I’m not, look I’m nerdy but I’m not going to review every camera to figure out which one is the best camera. I’ll go to David [Pierce] and say, ‘David, break it down for me, what’s the camera?’” Pierce, who came to The Verge from PC Magazine, is familiar with granular, spec-driven reviews, but says that they’ve been thinking about doing reviews differently for a while. “We had an all-hands meeting and were thinking about the future of each individual piece of what we do…and my whole sort of crusade was, let’s make reviews about more than just numbers. Let’s tell interesting stories and start to treat them more the way people treat film reviews and art reviews…let’s take these things as cultural criticism as much as buying advice. “There’s this sort of Stockholm syndrome that can set in where you get something, and even if it’s not great or even good, you just — it becomes all that you know. And that just — that bums me out because, like, I just want to tell people it can be better. There’s better out there,” says Pierce. For the moment, Topolsky says, This Is My Next will not become a separate site, but will remain part of The Verge brand. “If we’re going to launch a new site about technology or about the future, it’s not just going to be about gadgets,” he says. “Increasingly, I think that as gadgets had become mainstreaming and normal like your grandmother has a smartphone and downloads apps and talks about her favorite Twitter client or whatever. This particular combination of aggregated review information from experts in the field, presented with a solid recommendation and some alternatives, was pioneered by Brian Lam at , a site in The Awl network. There are some similarities, and some differences, in the way that the two sites are approaching the model. The Wirecutter, for instance, links heavily to outside sources like expert reviews, consumer reports and independent product reviewers, and includes information from those experts in its recommendation essays. This Is My Next will pull wholly from reviews on the site — though Topolsky says that, in areas the site has not tackled, it will review items specifically to make a This Is My Next recommendation. Both Pierce and Topolsky credit The Wirecutter for pioneering in this area. “I love the Wirecutter first off and I think that Brian’s done a really awesome job with it and all of the spin-off stuff as well,” says Topolsky. “When you’re building something new, you’re going to look at everything that could be considered competition on this and the space. Honestly, for us, we’ve actually have done sort of like, ‘hey, which thing should I get?’ before. We actually did a, ‘here’s the smartphone you should buy on every area’.” Topolsky says that the impetus for This Is My Next was to improve on the aggregated review model of sites like CNET, which have long relied on a numerically ranked database to provide buying recommendations. “For us, I think that the big take, it was how can we actually make this digestible? That was a big one. Because I think that you read buying guides and…their goal is to be digestible but they’re really not. So we [said], ‘Is there a technology and an editorial standpoint that we can take that will make this more digestible?’” In addition to having a distinct design, This Is My Next will also be using affiliate links to monetize the recommendations. This is an approach that has been taken by other publications, like The Wirecutter, but was previously seen as a tool for small independent publishers. “Ultimately, we wanted to be able to give people the springboard to go buy something. Obviously, from a business perspective it makes sense,” says Topolsky. “But as a user, I was like, ‘what use are recommendations when there’s no action you can take after them?’. If you look at all our reviews and the way we approach gadgets and making recommendations to people is, how can we give you enough detail that you’d get the true sense and soul of the product without overflowing the info and making it not a approachable or readable document.” “We didn’t make money for 18 months because it’s a huge moat in terms of Google. They hate lots of black hat affiliate sites that are scum,” says The Wirecutter founder Brian Lam. Lam founded the site in 2011 after leaving Gizmodo, where he served as Editorial Director. Google, which is famously prickly about sites that it perceives as “hacking” search engine optimization to garner unwarranted page views and clicks, proved to be a difficulty early on for The Wirecutter. Because the site uses affiliate links for all of the products it tests, recommends or mentions on the site, it was slow going at first. That algorithmic challenge, says Lam, acts as a sort of defense mechanism for The Wirecutter. Because the site was not funded by an outside firm, he had the freedom to play the long game and wait out the time it took to get the affiliate model to start paying off. “If you were to pitch a startup and you [said] ‘our startup is to make really long reviews that are never going to get good ad money and never do more than support themselves in a rich way.’ All VC’s that were smart would be like, ‘I mean that’s a good product, but it doesn’t sound like a good business.’” Lam says that his experience, especially through the formative years of blogging, has given him a template by which to build a ‘traditional’ media company that could make a lot of money — for example, sites that produce shareable content that doesn’t require expertise in a specific area. “If I wanted to build a media company that was going to make a lot of money, I know how to do that: make a lot of inventory, like lists and stuff that you can hire anyone who’s talented or not to do. That’s not that hard, I think.” One of the things that Lam holds up as different with The Wirecutter is that its editors always seek out the best places for information on an item and the most experienced people in those fields. It then links out prolifically to those sources of information. It also generates its own testing and research, via the work of about 10 full-time staffers and 60 monthly contributors. Lam says he will also include links to and information from This Is My Next, as he has with The Verge in the past. “I think there is room for people to do this sort of thing. What I think I’ve seen in the past and I don’t think this is respectful, and I’m not saying [The Verge] is doing this, but I’ve seen this from other publications. We’ll do like a hundred hours of research on something and then someone else will do a blog post saying, ‘oh I like this by the way.’ And it’s a totally esoteric find that was at the bottom of the barrel that turned out to be the best thing by twice and half the cost, and it’s like, just link.” Lam says The Verge getting into the space with a similar (though differentiated) model doesn’t change anything about the way The Wirecutter will proceed. “I’ve been making up new ways to do editorial my whole career and we’ve got some more stuff under our sleeves, too. We’re not sitting still. “I think a part of what we did is not reviews; it’s just simulating the buying process, which is infuriating and terrifying,” says Lam. “People’s money is at stake and we never forget that. We don’t think this as another piece of content to monetize. We take it as, ‘what’s the most honest like truthful answer that we would give people we care about after doing dozens and dozens of hours of work? What would we get ourselves?’ And never really straying from that and that’s it. We’re focused on that. “I tend to hire people that have really good work-life balance and like to go on little adventures because I need people who understand context and not just treating this like a factory job where [they’re] just pumping out content, but they’re really remembering every single reader is buying something and they’re trusting us with their money and it’s like — as long as we stay to that, I feel like we’re doing our thing and I’m satisfied.” I have a feeling that the framework being tapped into by TIMN and The Wirecutter is a natural evolution of the gadget blog. There was a point when blogs were the only sites that got down and dirty with every kind of gadget that spun up labs in apartments to test manufacturer claims and to be a consumer advocate. That was a valuable thing, and it became an obsession for a certain segment of the populace. Now, however, technology is in the mainstream. It’s in the ground water. Sites (or verticals) like these are also symptomatic of the fact that companies are specifically designing their products to not promote specifications; instead they’re being made to emphasize the user experience (something that was totally foreign to many industries just a decade ago). As the devices themselves de-emphasize their inner workings — the iPhone is carefully designed so that anybody who’s ever touched the thing can use it — this is reflected in public perception. People are busier than ever and have been educated by the industry to care about how something works, not why it works. And sites like this are reflections of that. When technology is everywhere and everything, how do you contextualize it? I don’t think that there is anybody saying, “I want more noise and less signal.” I think that goes for the man on the street, just as much as the gadget-obsessed person who’s at their desk at work saying, “Crap! I read about this all the time but my phone just broke. Now I have to actually do something, not just absorb information. I need to make a decision. What phone do I buy?” There have been some interesting moves in this direction in the past. Obviously PC World, Cnet, Macworld and other sites have been creating detailed, valuable review databases of products for a long time. But a database alone, or even a hyper-detailed review, does not always lead to a cleanly drawn consumer decision. GDGT, founded by Gizmodo and Engadget alum Peter Rojas and Engadget editor Ryan Block, (and ) took another interesting stab here with user-contributed ratings and product matrices. This brought us one step closer to an answer to the “what to buy?” question, but an over-reliance on numerical ratings and a lack of contextual glue caused it to fall short. I’m not thinking that everybody chooses that path, but it’s cool how much stuff like The Wirecutter translates into the real world, which is where you just need stuff to be good. You want things to work, work right, and work a long time preferably so that you can concentrate on spending those two hours with your kid or your spouse or your mates or your partner or whoever — instead of figuring out what the best phone or sheets or chair to buy. Who knows how far this will extend, but I think that it fits into the overall landscape in that the Internet is such a massive source of raw information. And it’s very thoroughly indexed and searchable for the most part. But having access to the information does not mean having access to the context — to the understanding. And that, if they’re smart, is where the next generation of publishers should be focusing their efforts. “One of the things I was thinking is people now talked about — they’re like, ‘Yeah, everything’s mobile. You should think about mobile.’ The next thing is you’ve just got screens and interfaces and connected devices everywhere and it becomes so much bigger and so much broader and so much more ingrained in everything that we do,” says Topolsky. “The devices are changing, people’s attitudes on those are changing and I think that the coverage has to change.” |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 23 | null |
Facebook Messenger Adds Tap-And-Hold Video Sharing, Another Snapchat Feature | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | Why tell with text when you can show with video? Facebook Messenger is diving deeper into visual communication with a new option to instantly record and send short videos, similar to Snapchat. The feature comes to today and is rolling out to . Messenger in April, but now you can tap and hold the camera button to fire off a mini-movie. The updates come days after Facebook’s full-fledged Snapchat competitor Slingshot leaked into some international versions of the iOS App Store before being swiftly removed. The app’s core mechanic is that the ephemeral photos and videos you receive can only be viewed if you share a reply. The accidental release foreshadows an imminent official launch of Facebook’s latest standalone app which will have to build an audience from scratch. But quick video messaging has already proven itself a hit, so Facebook giving it to Messengers 200 million-plus users. The camera defaults to the front-facing selfie mode, but you can flip it around to show off what you’re seeing. This is not the , but instead asynchronous in-app video messaging. Also in this update is the ability to tap and hold the ‘thumbs up’ icon to send a bigger Like instead of typing “k”, “cool”, or “alright”. Snapchat has found huge success through visual conversations where people shoot photos and videos back and forth in rapid succession, like text messaging but more personal. Still, while Snapchat has grown popular, it’s widely thought to still be smaller than Messenger in total user count, and dwarfed by Facebook’s total population of 1.28 billion. Companies get a lot of deserving flack from journalists for cloning each other. In the end, though, what matters is making the largest number of people happy. Great artists steal, right? But no matter what Facebook steals from Snapchat, it’s the fun-loving, trend-setting community that’s invaluable. |
Amazon Prime Music Is Actually About Selling More Physical Goods | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | We are entering the age of the omnibundle, where companies “give away” services to get you to buy what actually makes them money. Take to its $99 a year Prime club. The goal is to lure more people into Prime because its free two-day shipping encourages more impulse purchases of physical good, which is where Amazon makes the big bucks. That’s why it doesn’t have to be better than Spotify. It just has to be good enough to make Prime more tempting. Amazon even as “the newest benefit available exclusively to Prime members,” which number somewhere around . Getting more Prime subscriptions helps Amazon by providing a consistent revenue stream, and if people forget they have it for long periods of time (like I have) and don’t order any packages, that $99 a year is a tidy profit. But even better for Amazon is if the two-day free shipping gets people ordering things they’d buy at the grocery store, Wal-Mart or Best Buy. Over the next few years, we’ll see a big battle play out between standalone subscription services and omnibundles. How many people will pay for separate top-notch music, video, e-book and gaming subscriptions, which can run $5 to $15 a month? And how many will prefer a cheaper omnibundle like the $99 a year Amazon Prime that offers decent versions of each of these? Cable TV, phone, and Internet providers have been hawking bundles for years, but these were more about getting three services you’d pay for combined at a lower price and then locking you in due to high switching costs. These new bundles are about monetizing one thing while giving away others. Amazon’s omnibundle now includes the 2-day free shipping it was built on. That drives its monetization, as do Prime Music; Prime Instant Video with 40,000 movies and TV shows; the Kindle Lending Library, which lets Kindle device owners “borrow” one e-book a month; and Kindle First, which offers early access to editor’s-pick books. Prime Instant Video doesn’t offer nearly as much video content or exclusives, such as House Of Cards, like Netflix does, but it may be good enough for casual film and TV buffs looking for something to watch after work. And the cheapest standard definition Netflix streaming plan costs just a few dollars less per year than Prime as a whole. Prime Music hosts only 5 percent of the music Spotify does and lacks a radio feature, as well as tons of big artists, but it may be good enough for casual listeners looking for older albums or playlists to rock to while at the office or gym. And Spotify’s full mobile access plan costs $20 more per year than all of Prime. The situation isn’t zero sum. I’m a big enough music lover to keep my Spotify subscription even now that I have access to music through Prime. But with each bonus Amazon packs in, Prime becomes more seductive to a wider set of people. Compared to 15 years ago when monetizing recorded music meant selling albums in brick-and-mortar stores, bundles have had a massive impact. The music landscape gets even more interesting when you look at what each provider is really trying to sell: While Amazon Prime Music might seem far inferior to some of its competitors, it’s likely to get better fast. Prime Instant Video started with a tiny collection, but it quickly expanded to become a more viable Netflix alternative. Signing a deal with the world’s biggest record label, Universal, to get its music onboard would shore up huge holes in the catalogue. An that puts a play button on songs for immediate streaming without having to add them to a collection first would make Prime Music less clunky. In the end, though, how many songs streamed or time spent on Prime Music won’t be the measure of its success. What matters is if they make subscriptions more attractive, because e-commerce revenue is Amazon’s true prime directive. |
Happiness Is A Cyber Gun – How We Can “Do Something” About Mass Shootings With Technology | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | We incessantly discuss gun control, argue on social media, and try to grasp why this keeps happening — why our children continue to get shot in what seems like a weekly occurrence. And yet, even with that could solve several issues here, gun culture . There’s currently a gun floating around out there and in the US for the past several years, despite the school shootings since . And after all that, The President proposed just ago that background checks should focus more on the mentally ill. Yes, I know “2nd Amendment, we have rights!” Here’s the thing, we actually have technology in place via so called “smart” or “cyber” guns already available that could prevent a lot of these shootings from ever happening. And is trying to stop it. Silicon Valley’s own well-known angel investor and gun reform advocate Ron Conway offered $1 million in funding via the earlier this year. The first ever cyber gun in the US this last February. The German-made Armatix iP1 is a Bond style .22 calibre pistol that only shoots if the owner is wearing the accompanying wrist watch with the identifying RFID tag built in. But just as soon as this new tech became available to increase gun safety, gun rights advocates began to protest . A was physically threatened and actually had to bar himself in his own store to protect himself after revealing he’d be the first in the US to sell the weapon. We can’t even get these guns in the United States at the moment because the fear of technology seems to be bigger than the fear of allowing a gun to get into the wrong hands. We’ve been working on building better gun tech since the 90’s — guns that would be trackable, only fire by identification through a fingerprint or the grip of the owner or some other way like the aforementioned RFID tag. One was even on the patent approval records as far back as 1982. There have been three such actual smart guns created to date. The Armatix iP1, the Intelligun pistol, by Utah-based Kodiak Industries; and iGun Technology Corporation’s M-2000 shotgun. On the gun rights advocate side, there’s about these new weapons. They argue the tech would fail us in the moment or make it easier for the government to track their weapons. Sarah Palin even came out with that the government was trying to make every gun owner wear a wrist watch to identify themselves. There’s currently not a centralized database of just where all the guns are and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can’t even of the dozens of their own, government-issued guns at the moment. So angry young men continue getting easy access to guns we can’t track because is afraid of technology and progress. President Obama even pointed out this week that Congress can’t seem to pass a watered-down gun control law. As quoted on PolicyMic when referring to the Sandy Hook shootings: “I will tell you, I have been in Washington for a while now. Most things don’t surprise me. The fact that 20 6-year-olds were gunned down in the most violent fashion possible and this town couldn’t do anything about it was stunning to me,” he said. And the American people, after every single shooting continues to say “something must be done.” Yes, something can be done. That something, at least one thing beyond waiting for any kind of government action, is to – gun nut or not – . The fact is, we probably won’t get rid of guns or gun culture. This is a deeply embedded, sacredly held part of American culture that is not going away. Ever. Guns are here and there are a lot of them. Stopping them from ending up in the wrong hands is nothing short of a huge undertaking. But we do have the technology in place to put a stop to these evil, psychotic murderers. What we need is for the NRA to stop freaking out over their precious gun rights being taken away and start realizing that it’s not worth bashing technological advances over the prevention of the next, inevitable mass shooting. We do not need one more dead American child. |
Taking BMW’s Electric Car Sharing Program DriveNow For A Spin Around SF | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | But it turns out BMW has been in the car sharing space for a couple of years now, with a small but growing program called . DriveNow, which is active in five German cities and the San Francisco Bay Area, lets people rent electric BMWs by the minute. I thought it was an interesting and somewhat unexpected initiative coming from BMW, so I met up with DriveNow’s CEO Richard Steinberg to learn about the program and why the company is getting into car sharing, and see how it measures up to other car sharing services. Check that out in the video above. |
Trusper Adds Music, Movies, And Books As It Partners With Focus Features | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | The tip-sharing social networking mobile app has rolled out a music, movies, and books category and a feature that lets users purchase suggested content in-app, as it begins to experiment with paid, brand-related tips on its service. Trusper is working with Focus Features to promote “ “, the latest film from former “Scrubs” and “Garden State” writer, director and actor ( ) . “We thought this would be a good way to seed the content,” says Trusper chief executive and founder, . The company is also using its top tippers, culled from the application’s 15 million strong user base to create tips on music, movies, and books for their followers. “There’s a bunch of tips created from the stars of films that they’ve done,” says Jia. Trusper has built a following on both iOS and Android applications with its community of tippers, who offer up mostly homey advice on beauty, recipes, health, relationships and almost anything else. With the addition of these content-related tips, the company is starting down a path to monetization. The app is integrated with Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, and other content platforms offering a simplified way for users to browse for content to post while within the app, and use that to populate their tips with tips that their followers can then act to purchase the recommendations. Eventually Trusper could even work with consumer packaged goods companies to sell their products through the app. Although Trusper’s top tippers might be selling company products or recommending content that leads to sales through the site, they won’t get any monetary benefits from their tips. Rather, they’ll be paid in the app’s own points-based currency which can be redeemed for incentives through Trusper’s partners. |
Twitter Rises 3.5% In Down Market As COO Exits | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | Rumors of an at Twitter became a reality today as the company’s COO Ali Rowghani . In a down market, Twitter rose 3.5 percent in regular trading, and is up a fraction after-hours. The major indexes slipped more than 0.6 percent apiece. Given the general dearth of news surrounding Twitter at the moment, it is not overly bold to ascribe at least a portion of its momentum today to the departure of Rowghani. User growth under his tenure has been , causing Twitter to dip steeply following both of its public earnings reports to date. Rowghani also in Twitter when the recent unlock period expired. Other C-level executives . The move was embarrassing for the company, even though the 300,000-share sale itself was too small to damage Twitter’s price. Rowghani also recently and sold those shares, as well. The COO’s exit by itself won’t stoke Twitter’s growth engine, but it could create internal room for a different direction that could bolster the company’s monthly active user count. Investors appear at least optimistic that a reformed leadership structure could help the company. Why does user growth matter for Twitter, when it is performing strongly from a financial perspective? If Twitter can’t grow its user base in the short term, its ability to make more money down the road could be impaired. The company closed the day at $36.79 per share, up sharply from its 52-week low of $29.51, and sharply down from its 52-week high of $74.73. Twitter did not reply to a request for comment. |
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Outlines New Cybersecurity Paradigm Led By Private Sector | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | Earlier today, outlined his agency’s plans to address to the American Enterprise Institute. Wheeler’s approach would see the private sector, not the FCC, take the leading role in addressing new cyber security threats, leaving his agency to monitor and guide, stepping in only if a market-based approach fails to adequately protect networks. The FCC appears to think that due to the rapidly changing technological landscape, a more standard regulatory structure is less feasible than it would normally be. Wheeler said his proposed private sector-led effort “must be more dynamic than traditional regulation” and that it will “harness the dynamism and innovation of competitive markets to fulfill our policy and develop solutions.” Component to the proposed policy is effective collaboration between private sector firms, and the FCC and other relevant government entities. Heading up the new cybersecurity push will be the chief of our Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, Admiral Dave Simpson. The goal of the new effort and task force will be to — paraphrasing the FCC, here — identify what constitutes risk, create tooling to combat that highlighted risk, deploy the tools, and then keep an eye on their performance. So, we’re at the head of this, not the tail. Chairman Wheeler’s remarks are a decent outline, calling for both the protection of openness online and privacy, but the final result is a long way out. The risk is real. Let’s hope we can address it both competently and quickly. |
Tile, The Lost-Item Tracker With Millions In Crowdfunding, Was Worth The Wait | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | The first thing you’ll notice about , the crowdfunded lost-item finder that attaches to bags, keys, bikes and more, is that it’s big. I mean, I know the company provided the device’s specs beforehand, but it’s still a surprise to see this large white square — bigger than a Wheat Thin and slightly smaller than a matchbook — sitting there in the black foam padding. The second thing you’ll notice, during setup, is that it’s musical. Yes, Tile actually plays a little song for you when you’re connecting it with your phone, and later, when it confirms it was successfully activated. What’s Tile? For those who need a reminder, Tile was a breakout, viral success story, demonstrating crowdfunding’s potential. The – far more than the $20,000 it was looking to initially raise, to top off the earlier $200,000 from Silicon Valley accelerator . But the buzz around Tile has been both a blessing and a curse. Instead of being able to scale slowly, the company had more orders than it was prepared to handle. “It really changed the dynamics of manufacturing this in a really good way. However, one of the bad things it did was add delays,” Tile CEO Nick Evans says. “We had to go and find a different manufacturer — our current manufacturer couldn’t produce enough.” And, he adds, “we needed to make sure if we were shipping that many units, that they’re really, going to work.” Nearly a year after Tile achieved its multi-million-dollar crowdfunding raise, , and today the company is still working to get the device into the hands of those who’ve paid. That means some Tile customers won’t just be asking themselves if Tile was worth the money (one Tile is $19.95 on preorder), they’ll be asking themselves if it was Some percentage (a vocal minority, the company would say) are not happy, as you can tell by . “WHERE’S MY ORDER?? WHEN WILL I GET MINE??” shouts one customer in the comments. Complains another: “From those I know who are ‘backers’ who ordered a year ago, THEY have NOT received any such emails about THEIR orders. I am not making this up.” Some even want their money back: “You guys keep pushing the date out further.. Now it’s not until next year.. How do I get a refund?” And so it continues. Evans admits that there may have been some problems with people receiving the backer emails, but he chalks this up to them having bought Tile under a different email account than the one they currently use, in some cases. To make certain everyone knew what was going on, the company . And last week, . From the looks of it, Tile will be working through its pre-orders until September 2014. What that means for those buying from the website today is that their Tiles won’t ship until late September to early October, says Evans. After that point, Tiles will ship out more quickly, but how quickly may remain to be seen. So how many Tiles has the company sold so far? On that point, the CEO declines to comment. However, he would say that there are 150,000 customers and most are ordering a four-pack as opposed to a single Tile. In terms of the final product, which apparently I’m fortunate to have, it’s fair to say it was worth the $20, at least. Whether it’s worth the wait may be a more subjective claim, but I’d have to say it was. The product itself, though larger than some others, is attractive and slim. The app is smartly designed and well-thought-out, with numerous subtle touches. One of Tile’s more heavily touted features — “Community Find” — has fortunately made it into production. This feature lets you find your Tile by leveraging the network of Tile users running the app on their phone. For this to work, Tile users only have to download the app and launch it once. The app will take a bit of your battery, though — less than 10 percent, says Evans, and they’re working to bring that down. Meanwhile, a sharing feature, which will let you explicitly share your Tile device with family and friends, is set to arrive in version 1.1 of the app, which will be arriving “soon,” we’re told. You’ll also “soon” be able to mark a Tile in the app as “lost,” allowing you to get a push notification when it’s found by another Tile community member. Tile is also unique in the space for not having a user-replaceable battery – something that was a very deliberate decision on the company’s part. “I grew up with four sisters, and when the remote control was out of batteries, the remote control was broken. There was no way they were going to replace those batteries,” he says. “If I wasn’t hanging around and wanted to replace them, that remote control was ‘end-of-life,’ it’s done.” The overall point here is that replacing batteries is a hassle (not that girls can’t do it, let’s be clear). And that’s especially true for coin cell batteries, which aren’t just lying around the house. What would be better is to buy a new Tile, the company believes – and by the time you’re ready to do so, it will be a newer, better, smaller and, yes, even more colorful Tile, if you choose. (Colored Tiles are coming next year.) The company is even considering turning Tile into a subscription-based service, where reordering is automatic. [slideshow ids=”1015456,1015455,1015453,1015452,1015451,1015449″] As for the Tile you can use today, it’s easy to get going. The app is well-designed with clear and simple steps that help you connect it to your iOS device, name it, assign the appropriate permissions in iOS, and more. The app first has you register for a Tile account, and as an added precaution, it has you verify your email, which though it slows you down a bit, is an important step in terms of account security. Then you add the Tile to your app by pressing on the lowercase “e” in “Tile” printed on the front of the device. And this is when Tile sings. The device offers up a little melody to let you know it’s ready. The company actually contracted an L.A.-based composer to write the song Tile plays, and it’s one of the many small, but delightful additions that improve the experience of using this app versus its now-numerous competitors, including , , , . Next, you place the Tile directly on your iPhone’s screen (as you do with the Misfit Shine, for example) and it makes the connection. You can then name your Tile (e.g. “Keys,” “Wallet,” “Purse,” “Luggage,” etc.) and assign a photo – which is helpful if you bought a pack of Tiles and want an easy way to identify it in a longer list. It also makes that list look nice, aesthetically speaking, as each tracked item now has a rounded photo thumbnail next to it. When you’re done, you tap on “Activate” and when the process is complete, you’ll hear the Tile play a tune again. You can then attach Tile to your keychain, bag, bike or anywhere else you want, thanks to the included sticker. After your Tile or Tiles are set up, you can launch the app at any time to see them in a list view with their location noted underneath, or you can switch over to the map view to see them plotted there instead. If the Tile is within Bluetooth range, you’ll see a green circle around your item. And if it’s out of range, that circle is gray. When it comes to actually finding a missing item with a Tile attached, it’s just a two-tap process. You tap the Tile in the list and then tap “Find.” The Tile will again play a tune, allowing you to find it if nearby. This is handy for finding keys under a sofa cushion, an iPad mini that slid under the car seat, or a misplaced wallet. As an added bonus, a somewhat hidden proximity feature will actually show you how you are to that missing item. In the Tile “Detail View” (the screen where you tap the “Find” button) you tap on the Tile image itself and it flips around, showing you a signal strength indicator instead of a solid, green ring. Tile’s range is anywhere from 50 to 150 feet, the company says. My Tile got well over 50, but fell short of 150. Your mileage may vary, as they say. If your item is out of Bluetooth range, Tile will offer its last known location thanks to the above-mentioned “Community Find” feature. What happens next when a missing item is tracked down is sort of up to you. Like “Find My iPhone,” if you believe the item has been stolen, it may be better to get the police involved. But Tile’s size (and its attention) may lead to savvier criminals who know to rip these things off of snagged laptops, bikes or bags. You may want to be smart about how visibly the Tile is positioned, in that case. As for Tile the company, they’re now an 11-person team based in San Mateo. And word has it that those millions in crowdfunding may be only the start. The company may have some additional funding news in the near future, we hear. |
CoinVox Brings Bitcoin Donations To Politicians | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | Sending a isn’t that hard – if you know what you’re doing. But since the Federal Election Commission OKed the use of bitcoin by political action committees, things have gotten a little hairy. , a service created by Christopher David, is looking to smooth the path from your bitcoin wallet to your favorite politician’s war chest. The service is fairly simple: you sign up for a limited number of accounts and then announce you’re accepting bitcoin via CoinVox. The service simply takes the BTC and forwards the cash to the particular PAC. Easy peasy. What it’s really selling, however, are compliance and advisory tools in order to ensure everything is done by the book. “In addition to its donation platform CoinVox offers technical support advice and access to the best legal experts, donors, and consultants from the Bitcoin community,” said David. “We plan to be the one-stop shop for connecting politicians and nonprofits to the Bitcoin economy.” By working with campaign finance attorneys, the pair can ensure that the money is properly reported and accounted for. It also provides data on donors to maintain compliance with Federal Election Commission rules. The laws regarding cryptocurrency in political financing are only now becoming clearer. For example, the generally accepted maximum donation is $100 in BTC to any one candidate, an arguably wee number. But the FEC also stated that total BTC donations would be capped at $2,600 per campaign and $5,000 per PAC as well as nearly $100,000 for national party committees. But, according to the thinking is that no one will be sued for sending more than $100 in bitcoin. If that sounds confusing, that’s mostly why CoinVox is in business. “We charge no added fees per transaction. For the remainder of the 2014 election cycle we will charge no setup fees for our basic donation platform. We will only charge for advanced integration or consulting,” said David. He thinks of the service as a sort of Bitcoin outreach for Washington. “In addition to its donation platform CoinVox offers technical support advice and access to the best legal experts, donors, and consultants from the Bitcoin community,” he said. Considering the maze of campaign finance law, everyone needs all the help they can get. |
5app Raises $5.1M Seed Round For Its BYOD Enterprise App Store And Builder | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | As the BYOD wave continues to wash over the enterprise market, different companies are taking different approaches to having their employees use their own phones and tablets for work. Many clamp down completely on this practice, but others take a slightly more inclusive approach. London-based , which today announced that it has raised a $5.1 million seed round led by Beckman Group and a number of private investors, wants to help companies make it easy to offer a to their employees without taking full control over their devices (like our parent company AOL wants to do with our Android phones here at TechCrunch). In addition, the company is working on an Apache Cordova-based app builder for enterprises, which will use the store as its main distribution channel. As the team tells me, the idea behind the store is to simply make it easier for employees to find the right apps. “We don’t believe you should force employees to do anything on their own devices,” 5app’s CEO Stuart Mason told me earlier today. “What we do believe is you can make it easy for them to do the right thing.” The service comes in free and premium versions. With the free versions, enterprises can curate apps from iTunes and Google Play into their own store, which should just take a few minutes to set up. With the paid plan ($4 per month and user), enterprises can then also publish their own custom apps, as well as apps from other distribution points, to the store. Access to them is managed via Active Directory groups, and the company is mostly targeting mid-size enterprises right now. The 5app app builder is currently in beta, and Mason expects it to go live by the end of July. Just like similar cross-platform services, it uses Apache Cordova to allow developer to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to write these apps. It includes a basic cloud-based IDE, but as Mason told me, a drag-and-drop app for making it easier for non-developers to create basic apps is also on the company’s radar, but it wants to see if its customers are actually interested in this. As Mason told me, the app builder was actually at the core of the 5app’s plans. Once the team started working on this, though, it realized that deploying custom apps isn’t all that easy. “So by integrating the Build Service with the app store, we solve this problem.” |
Outsource Your Bitcoin Mining To HashPlex, Which Just Raised A Seed Round | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | Are too many Bitcoin mining rigs making your office or home unspeakably hot or noisy? You can just outsource it to someone else. Or at least that’s the premise behind , a cryptocurrency-miner hosting company that just raised $400,000 from investors including SecondMarket co-founder Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin Opportunity Corp. and Facebook engineer Jason Prado. Basically, you just ship your hardware to HashPlex, which is based in Seattle, specify what mining software you want to use, and they say they’ll take care of the rest for anywhere from $89 per Kilowatt used constantly over the course of a month to more expensive, custom levels of service. A very loose analogy would be AWS (Amazon Web Services) for Bitcoin mining. In the Bitcoin world, some people like to buy the crypto-currency outright on exchanges like Bitstamp. But others “mine” it. In , there’s this process by which a fixed and predictable amount of Bitcoin is released at different intervals of time. Bitcoin miners solve complex, crypotographic math problems in order to both compete for this Bitcoin and keep up the public record of Bitcoin transactions that have taken place. As Bitcoin has become more valuable, it’s become more resource and energy intensive to “mine” coins and hardware makers roll out more sophisticated and dedicated mining rigs every year. “Right now, people sort of do it in their basement or their mom’s basement, but we can build out a facility that irons out the frills,” said co-founder . Rihn worked in thermal design at Apple, while his co-founder is a mechanical engineer who trained at Stanford. They’re using the money to build out their very first so-called “HashCenter” in Central Washington. If you calculate out their rates, Rihn says it works out to be something like $99 per month for a KNC Miner Jupiter to $297 per month for a Butterfly Labs Mini-Rig. You can check out There are competitors like , where you can pay something like $299 for 40 Gigahash a second in mining power. But Rihn says those costs work out to be around ten times the amount you would have to pay if were to buy your own hardware. |
The Vessyl Is A Smart Cup That Knows Your Body | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | Have you ever tried to lose weight, taking every precaution to cut down on red meat and cheese and bread and really get healthy, and yet still don’t lose a pound? Oftentimes, liquids are the culprit. They’re the most ignored source of calories, mostly because it’s hard to measure out the exact caloric value of every beverage you consume throughout the day. That’s where the comes into play. After seven years of research and development, CEO and co-founder Justin Lee has developed a smart drinking cup, that not only measures the amount of liquid you’ve consumed, but how many calories are in that liquid. Because the cup is packed full of sensors, which can measure the contents of the cup on a molecular level, the Vessyl can tell the difference between a McFlurry, water, coffee, wine, etc. I even tested out syrup, and it could tell what was going on. Not too shabby at all. [gallery columns="4" ids="1015522,1015524,1015525,1015528"] Beyond simple calorie tracking, Vessyl also has a unique feature called Pryme, which measures your hydration and energy levels throughout the day. With an LED screen right on the side of the cup, users can see if they need more water, or are good to chill for a second, from right on the cup. Alongside Justin Lee, Vessyl was also designed with the help of . You may have heard of him. He helped design the Jawbone Up and the JamBox, and is one of the most iconic designers of our time. Eventually, Mark One (the company behind the Vessyl) has the opportunity to create an entire line of dishes, bowls, wine glasses, etc. to ensure that the whole family is tracked. For now, however, the team is focused on getting the Vessyl into the hands of consumers. You can pre-order the device , or wait and get it after launch for $199. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4ukHmXKFU&w=640&h=360] |
PayPal Launches PassPort To Lure More International Sales From Merchants | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | and its owner have been through a few tough rounds in the ring these last few months, facing calls from Carl Ichan to (finished for now), a with a departing, annoyed employee, and getting its . Today, however, comes news of a tamer sort for the company: it is rolling out a new site called , aimed at merchants using its platform as a resource for stats, tips and general information on selling internationally. At a time when eBay and PayPal marketplace competitors like Alibaba are ramping up their international and , the idea of PassPort is to generate more international sales. Anuj Nayar, PayPal’s senior director of global initiatives, tells me that one quarter of PayPal’s business is already cross-border, working out to some $45 billion in gross merchandise value. There is some interactive information on the PassPort — for example a timeline that charts sales activity on PayPal over the course of the year, showing which parts of the world see the most sales at any given month, and it will be updated regularly with details about peak holiday sales times for different markets so that merchants can plan their own shipping and marketing activities better (one such example of how this looks is illustrated here). Nayar says, however, that this is not really a place for detailed analytics or a dashboard for merchants to track their own specific activity — although it will encourage them to link up with specialists at PayPal who would be able to give more of that kind of direction to sellers, and is in line with to add more analytics and transparency for merchants on the platform. To me, this initiative seems to have two purposes: one is to give PayPal a slightly more helpful face and position the company as being a business facilitator as much as a simple billing platform. The idea is that if you get people using this portal, it might lead them to speaking more with PayPal and perhaps shifting even more business through the service. In a market where there are increasingly more options for how merchants can collect money — from simple API-based solutions like Stripe to bitcoin — and sell items — with sites like Alibaba and Amazon also being potential marketplaces for them to use — PayPal and eBay want to make sure that they remain in a prominent position. The other is a lot more wishful thinking than reality: if PayPal were actually interested in promoting the idea of providing useful data to small businesses, it could potentially offer a very interesting service in actually offering analytics specific to individual merchants. That’s something that PayPal knows, and is now . |
MobileIron Pops 17% In Public Debut | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | This morning the public markets welcomed MobileIron to the NASDAQ, sending its shares up 17.67 percent at the time of writing. MobileIron is a mobile-IT provider for large corporations. MobileIron’s IPO was viewed by some as a proxy for the larger technology markets, given its quickly expanding revenue in its most recent full-calendar year, as well as its deepening losses. Like a number of other technology companies looking to go public, MobileIron is growing its recurring revenue at the expense of short-term losses in the form of sales costs. In its , MobileIron detailed its first-quarter 2014 results, in contrast to its first-quarter 2013 results. Revenue grew, modestly, from $25.82 million to $28.21 million, but “Subscription” revenue jumped from $2.73 million to $5.96 million. Investors could be focusing more on that figure than the firm’s net loss for the three-month period that widened from $3.14 million in the first quarter of 2013, to $13.96 million in the same quarter in 2014. During that interval, sales and marketing costs expanded from $13.76 million to $21.76 million. The company’s last reported pre-IPO cash tally totaled $64.44 million. MobileIron picked up , going public at $9 per share. It is currently trading around the $10.60 mark. The company priced mid-point in its proposed range. Given that the market appears to have welcomed MobileIron, other companies with expanding losses and expanding revenue could now find the time ripe to hit go. and are obvious candidates. |
Survival Of The Digital Fittest | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | In just under two weeks from now at Google I/O, Google wearable fitness functionality that Apple at WWDC. Next year at WWDC, Apple wearable fitness functionality that Google at I/O. Jokes aside, the competition between Google and Apple to “own” wearable health has reached -level proportions. After Apple announced its mobile health data-tracking platform at WWDC, we hear (and have confirmed a Forbes ) that Google will be announcing its own health data-tracking platform, “Google Fit,” at Google I/O. Yes, the names do rhyme. We’re hearing that Google envisions Google Fit, which will be unveiled on June 25th, as “a fitness ecosystem” — Android for fitness if you must. Google, like Apple with HealthKit, hopes that the Fit API will enable developers to create smarter fitness apps and manufacturers, like Misfit and Jawbone, to create smarter wearable fitness devices. From what we’re hearing, Google Fit will track all sorts of health data, such as weight, heart rate, run times, body-building stats and more. Fit APIs already exist for sensors, data reporting and app history. End users will be able to sync their Google Fit profiles to their Google IDs, which will make their data portable no matter what app or device they’re using. Like an OAuth for fitness, Fit will “make fitness tracking a basic functionality for phones.” Unlike HealthKit and Health, there will not be a separate Fit app. For what it’s worth, Google tried and failed at something similar to in 2008. My guess is that mobile adoption (Android now has 80 percent of the market) will make or break its try this time. Indeed, we’ve heard Google is laser-focused on mobile; it’s rumored that employees have a mandate to work on a tablet once a week. Of course, Google and Apple are not alone in their health kick, though they do have the best chance at winning the health-tracking game, especially Apple with its knack for humanizing software. Microsoft is also planning to launch a smartwatch later this year, Samsung already has its Gear wristlet and its own health platform, , and Qualcomm has . It just makes sense that the giant tech companies are making a grand foray into health: One might say that there’s nothing more important in life. Health-care spending in the U.S. is rapidly increasing and is expected $4.8 trillion by 2021. And because of regulatory hurdles, existing health-care systems have been resistant to technological change, even around as simple an issue as doctors sending emails to patients. This sluggishness is due to , including HIPAA statutes, privacy concerns and FDA compliance. But this is changing due to actual initiatives like the $35 billion HITECH Act, which to electronically optimize their data. And the increasing realization that a good portion of health care is preventative at the consumer level: That fitness tracker that forces you to go on runs is also helping lessen your risk of heart disease. VC investments in digital health grown 39 percent year-over-year to $1.9 billion, so the Google Fits and the HealthKits of the world have plenty of venture-backed competition, validating the market. May the best Fit or Kit (or Fitbit) win. My bet’s . |
Court Orders Department Of Justice To Privately Produce Secret Surveillance Court Documents | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | Today, of the ordered that the Department of Justice relating to five Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) decisions. The documents won’t be released to the public, but the decision grants the Judge the ability to review in private the material that the government doesn’t want released. The Electronic Frontier Foundation brought the suit. The group is as “another victory” in its effort to demand documents from the government so that it can better understand “how the government uses Section 215 of the Patriot Act to secretly gather communications records from millions of American citizens.” The documents in question aren’t random. Judge Rogers states in her order that “the Court finds that the public’s interest in the documents withheld is significant. [As the] scope and legality of the government’s current surveillance practices of broad swaths of its citizenry is a topic of intense public interest and concern.” The decision isn’t without its sharper points, with Judge Rogers at one point stating that there is “evidence” that in the past, whole documents were withheld from the public when “a disclosure of reasonably segregable portions of those documents would have been required.” It’s up to the judge to decide what happens with the document next. But as the EFF notes, the order “reveals an appreciation of the civil liberties concerns, as well as skepticism of the government’s blanket refusal to release any portion of the opinions.” It’s been a for those in favor of surveillance reform. Good news is a welcome respite. |
Behind The Scenes Of The Daily Show’s Devastating Google Glass Segment | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | The Daily Show’s Jason Jones that highlighted so-called “discrimination” against Google Glass wearers. And I was the butt of a lot of its jokes. The show invited me on after of San Francisco. I won’t spoil the segment, so be sure to watch it before scrolling further: Rather than respond to the show’s criticisms of Glass (because, let’s face it, they have a point), I thought it would be fun to shed light on what it’s actually like to film a segment on The Daily Show. First off, we all knew exactly what we were getting into. I was contacted by a producer of the show who identified himself as such. There were no attempts made to trick any of us with claims that they were a news team from out of town. We were all told that the show was considering doing a segment on Google Glass and that they wanted to feature people who had incidents wearing the gadget out in public. He asked me about my experience with Glass in general, the mugging, and how I . About a week later, the show confirmed that it would film the segment and gave us a date and time to meet at a hotel in San Francisco for the shoot. When we arrived, they took us to a small conference room where cameras were set up and staff was ready to do makeup: Google Glass user Nick Starr getting his makeup done for The Daily Show. While Glass was the only piece of wearable tech that I owned, my fellow Glassholes were all equipped with at least one more piece of smart tech somewhere on their bodies: You wouldn’t know it from the segment, but our group interview took the better part of four hours. We each took turns answering several pages of questions that the show’s producers had prepared ahead of time, with Jason Jones occasionally asking whether we should film a response again or telling one of us to stop laughing. At the end of it, the producers gave Jones a series of fun comebacks to some of the nerdier things we said during the interviews — so yes, we knew about the out-of-context jokes before the segment aired. |
Building Code To Break Poverty In Bangladesh | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | Teaching people in the third world how to code seems to be a that may just help to break the world-wide poverty cycle. Danish-based microfinancing operation is starting to do just that with a test group of 100 Bangladeshis. “Nine out of 10 coders on sites like oDesk suck,” says CodersTrust co-founder Ferdinand Kjaerulff. It’s a problem he and cofounder, Skype angel investor, wanted to solve. They saw a big opportunity with coders in the third world and created their microfinance organization to give those below the poverty line a chance at better education, starting with Bangladesh. CodersTrust works by first identifying people on oDesk who seem to have a good work ethic. The founders then approach them about going into the program and offer them a micro loan of $2,000. The loan comes in increments tied to their progress. For example, they get paid a certain chunk each time they pass certain classes via Code Academy. Coders can then start to pay back the loan as they start to improve their skills and earn more money. The organization is backed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Grameen Bank to supply the funds needed while Bangladeshi candidates learn programming skills. “It takes time to get an education so those living below the poverty line are going to be thinking of how to find their next meal, not taking classes if they can’t afford to learn,” says Lund. One in four people in Bangladesh currently make it on less than $2/day. That’s more than 39 million people living below the poverty line on a daily basis. All they need to break out of their circumstances, according to Kjaerulff, is a laptop and to understand English. Kjaerulff was running a software development startup at the time he came up with the idea for CodersTrust. He’d previously served as an officer during Iraq, supplying Internet and education to the people there and so understood how much of a need there is for education in the third world. oDesk late last year, making it the biggest player in the digital temp industry, which is expected to grow to $2.7 billion this year. While it does offer online skill , the main mission is to simply provide the workers, not give them classes or a way to improve. That leaves the 500K Bangladeshis on the site without much support. Grameen has distributed microfinance loans to over 24 million Bangladeshi women for things like goats and small businesses. With the help of CodersTrust, it can now give a leg up to anyone with a desire to code. This, Lund says, is the way for those in Bangladesh making $2/day to start making $10/hr instead. This is just a test program for now, but Lund and Kjaerulff say they hope to get about 100,000 people on the platform and expand to more Middle Eastern countries in the next couple of years.
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Ubisoft Shows That The Video Game Industry Needs To Work On Its Priorities | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | The video game industry, like the tech industry at large, has a poor history of welcoming women into its culture. That’s not exactly an original sentiment, but it’s something that can’t be said too often. This was recently demonstrated by the uproar this week over Ubisoft eschewing the option for gamers to play as a woman in the latest entry in the Assassin’s Creed series. The company claimed that developing female characters While misogyny and exclusion have been issues in gaming for decades, it’s only the in past few years that video game launches have become Those issues have manifested in outrageous ways, like strippers who players or , but subtle exclusion can be just as embarrassing for the medium: the video game industry's ridiculous priorities in one screen grab RT : lol sob — Kyle Russell 🚀 (@kylebrussell) At a time when technology has given developers the ability to add minute details like , developers still excuse the exclusion of women with “it’s too much work.” Seriously. When questioned about the fact that Assassin’s Creed Unity wouldn’t let gamers choose to play as female assassins, Ubisoft technical director James Therien : “We wanted to make sure we had the best experience for the character. A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation, a lot of costumes. It would have doubled the work on those things.” Okay, it’s fair to argue that the realities of development might get in the way of adding the “feature” of being able to play as a woman. But on Wednesday, industry veteran claimed that Ubisoft’s excuse doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny: In my educated opinion, I would estimate this to be a day or two's work. Not a replacement of 8000 animations. — Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) Animator added: Another thing- go out and watch people. You'll find that many women and men move EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. Hips, arms, wrists and all. — Tim Borrelli Tim Borrelli All I Hear is Tim Borrel (@Anim8der) Which Cooper then backed up with the fact that a prior female protagonist in the series shared a significant number of animations with a male lead: Fun fact #2: Aveline de Grandpré shares more of Connor Kenway's animations than Edward Kenway does. — Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) There’s also the fact that Ubisoft previously showed off a fancy technology built specifically to make it easier to create these kinds of animations: See also: AC: Brotherhood's Trans Blend System was created to replace character-specific animations easily — Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) To be fair to Ubisoft, there are other expenses involved with adding a female playable character: voice acting, character modeling, resizing outfits, etc. Those are less eye-roll-inducing than some of the other excuses given by those in the game industry, like “girls don’t play action games!” But in this day and age, almost none of those reasons reflect the realities of women in gaming, but instead follow “common sense.” The Guardian’s Keza MacDonald used; I’d rather you read through her post than rehash her points here. It should also be noted that not everyone in the video game industry fails in this regard; one need only look at the character options in series like or to see that some developers give plenty of opportunities to let players become empowered women in their games. Hopefully, the push back from gamers will make Ubisoft and other publishers realize that they need to straighten out their priorities. If they really want gaming to be a mainstream form of media, it has to be inclusive. If they don’t, people will notice. |
A BMW Can Now Control A GoPro Camera Because Why Not | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | As a result of a new partnership between GoPro and BMW, it’s never been easier to record your hoonage antics. Select late-model BMW cars will soon be able to control GoPro cameras directly from the dash. Just click record on the dash of the car and the connected GoPro cameras click to life. Starting in July, the owner of a 2012 or later properly equipped BMW or Mini will be able to control Wi-Fi-enabled GoPro cameras. The GoPro app has to be installed on an iPhone connected to the BMW. Once connected, the driver can select the GoPro app through the BMW ConnectedDrive or Mini Connected menu. From there, the driver can view the camera’s field of view and control recording. The camera streams near-live video to the dash while the vehicle is stationary. But once the tires spin, the preview clicks off. This integration addresses the cumbersome, on-camera controls of GoPro cameras. Almost all of my GoPro videos start with a few seconds of my head as I fumble with the controls. Previously, GoPro introduced the Wi-Fi-enabled GoPro Hero 3+ camera that allows owners to use smartphone apps to preview camera placement and initiate recording. BMW takes that thought one step farther. This sort of integration is the next step for gadget makers. Car companies are increasingly looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the rest and embracing consumer brands, like GoPro, Apple and Google, is a keen way to gain an edge. |
Bitcoin’s Price And The Public Interest | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | When bitcoin’s price skyrockets, the printing presses kick into high gear. And when Bitcoin collapses, a new crop of stories go out. Something interesting is happening at the moment, however, as we have recently seen a decoupling of bitcoin’s price and the public interest. In short, bitcoin’s recent rally hasn’t been matched with rising consumer interest in the currency. We can measure consumer interest by using Google’s provided Trends data. The correlation between bitcoin’s price and spikes in interest have gone hand in hand. Note that we’re not trying to establish causation here; instead, we’re merely pointing out that when bitcoin is going up, more people take a look at it. That’s all. At least until now. So check the following long-term bitcoin chart ( ): Here’s : To be fair, the June data, that flat bit, is partial. But the steep rise in bitcoin’s price that we saw recently took place nearly completely in May, so that factoid probably doesn’t mean much. It actually makes sense that Bitcoin’s price rallied without a commensurate rise in public interest, however. As TechCrunch , total bitcoin transactions weren’t going up. Instead, the total amount of bitcoin traded was. So, people were buying in larger chunks. The average person, the sort we might look to find in the Google Trends data, wouldn’t be buying in bulk like that. So what caused the upswing and the large purchases? Your guess is as good as mine, but we could be breaking some new ground. |
CrunchWeek: Twitter’s Leadership Shuffles, Amazon’s New Music App, And Leena’s Last Day | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | In today’s episode, Leena Rao, Ryan Lawler and I talked about the latest C-level shuffles at Twitter with the departures and VP of media , and Amazon launching its new (and the rumors that a is up next.) We also popped a bottle of bubbly to toast to my dear friend and CrunchWeek cohost Leena Rao, who is departing from TechCrunch this week after five and a half years to join Google Ventures as operating partner. |
Yelp, Zillow And Groupon Rise In Wake Of OpenTable Acquisition Announcement | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | The bounced a number of companies’ share prices today, including a 3.91 percent rise for Groupon, and a 2.39 percent bump for Zillow. Yelp, however, shot north 13.79 percent. Investors seem to be betting that, in the wake of the OpenTable deal — executed at a more than 40 percent premium — other companies that are local and location-focused could be takeover targets, as well. As such, they piled in, and sent some of those firms up. Yelp has OpenTable integrated into its platform, powering restaurant reservations and making it more than an adjacent service. Yelp’s comparably higher market capitalization of $5.36 billion, makes it a harder piece to swallow, but still potentially in play. Local data is valuable. Amazon has . Google . Google also collects review information from its users. Microsoft’s Bing . And that, perhaps, Microsoft or Apple might snag Yelp and bake its dataset into their larger platform offerings isn’t out of the question. With the OpenTable deal setting a per-share premium threshold for the market, Yelp especially, and other firms that face the local and location markets, have calculable upside. Keep in mind that incumbent technology firms are currently very cash-rich and looking for an edge. Yelp declined to comment. |
Netflix Will Shut Down Public API Support For Third-Party Developers On November 14 | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | Netflix is getting a lot stingier with the way that third-party developers can use its content, announcing that it will stop supporting its public API by the end of the year. In a letter to API partners, Netflix VP of Edge Engineering Daniel Jacobson announced that it would retire the public API program effective November 14. The decision to shutdown its API seems a long time coming. , the API originally provided third-party developers a way to access and point to content that users could get from Netflix in its streaming and DVD catalogs. That helped the company grow, as subscribers could use third-party apps to check the availability of titles, reserve DVDs, and even link directly to streaming content on the web. At the same time, it gave developers a way to build new experiences around Netflix content that they weren’t licensing themselves. But with more than and another 12.5 million internationally, the company apparently no longer needs third-party support to help it grow. Instead, it’s decided to limit API access to the apps that it builds and those from select partners. Over time, Netflix has cut back on what developers could do with the API, and that in turn limited development around the platform. Most websites and apps that use the API primarily do so to enable another layer of search and discovery while deep-linking to the official Netflix experience. Then last year, the company announced it would stop issuing new API keys to third-party developers, but it grandfathered in apps that were already using the API. Now, it’s taking that away as well, according to an email sent to API partners. The following email, forwarded to TechCrunch, was sent to third-party developers earlier today. Netflix API Developers,
As Netflix continues to grow internationally, the emphasis of our engineering efforts is to satisfy a growing member base and a growing number of devices. To better focus our efforts and to align them with the needs of our global member base, we will be retiring the public API program. Effective on November 14, 2014, public API developers will no longer be able to access Netflix content. All requests to the public API will return 404 errors.
Thank you to for participating in the ecosystem throughout the years.
Daniel Jacobson
VP of Edge Engineering In a , Netflix said that it would continue to work with a small number of select partners, including: We’ve reached out to Netflix for comment on the change, and will report back when we know more. |
Gillmor Gang Live 6.13.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | – John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Benedict Evans, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session for today has concluded. . Also |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: E3, Vessyl, And Parrot Mini Drones | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | This week, , and designer Yves Behar (and friends) unveiled . All in all, it’s been a hugely successful week for gadgets. So sit back, relax, and enjoy, because we discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
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Intro Music by . |
Court Upholds Dismissal Of $1B Lawsuit Against Facebook | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | Facebook enjoyed a legal victory today, when an earlier dismissal of a lawsuit that it called a “publicity stunt” was upheld by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The lawsuit, alleging that Facebook did not take down a page urging violence against Israel’s Jewish population quickly enough, was filed in 2011. The lawsuit sought to prevent Facebook from hosting similar content, and also included more than $1 billion in what today’s decision refers to as “compensatory and punitive damages.” The page in question, , impelled Palestinians “to take to the streets after Friday prayers on May 15, 2011, and commence an uprising in the vein of the first two popular intifadas. ‘Judgment Day will be brought upon us only once the Muslims have killed all of the Jews,’ read the call. The page reportedly garnered more than 340,000 fans.” Here’s a screen grab from our prior reporting: Facebook took the page down, and issued a comment stating that it monitors pages, and when such pages host calls to violence, or “expressions of hate,” would “continue to take them down.” Facebook also noted that the page had “began as a call for peaceful protest,” something that would help explain why the company didn’t take it down sooner. The company , . Today, that dismissal was upheld. The decision, written by Judge Patricia Millett, rested her argument on the Communications Decency Act, which required dismissal of the suit provided that Facebook met three stipulations: That it is the provider of “an interactive computer service”; that the controversial information was “provided by another information content provider”; and that the aggrieved wish to “hold Facebook liable as the ‘publisher or speaker’ of the information.” In each case, the tests were “satisfied” in the court’s opinion. This seems reasonable: Facebook, not being the publisher, but merely the platform provider, isn’t held legally on-the-hook for what its users say. If that weren’t the case, Facebook would immediately be snowed over in lawsuits from, well, just about everyone. “We are pleased with the court’s decision,” Facebook’s Associate General Counsel Pankaj Venugopal said in response to a request for comment. |
The FCC Is Investigating The Netflix-Verizon Scrap | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | The FCC is investigating the fight between content companies and ISPs, which has seen Netflix that Verizon’s network is “crowded” at certain times, Verizon fire back that , and the content company respond by making a Chris Christie-esque pronouncement that the ISP is . This is one front of the wider net neutrality struggle. ISPs are irked that certain content companies take up much of their capacity and thus want to extract revenue from them. Content companies, in contrast, find that ludicrous, as they are merely providing content to paying customers of both parties, customers to whom ISPs sold faster connections using the promise of smooth video delivery. The FCC isn’t picking a side yet. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the following this morning in a statement: Consumers pay their ISP and they pay content providers like Hulu, Netflix or Amazon. Then when they don’t get good service they wonder what is going on. I have experienced these problems myself and know how exasperating it can be. Consumers must get what they pay for. As the consumer’s representative we need to know what is going on. I have therefore directed the Commission staff to obtain the information we need to understand precisely what is happening in order to understand whether consumers are being harmed. The arguments above deserve a squaring. If we don’t find some sort of working order, we’ll see endless sniping among parties that have countervailing economic interests, with consumers — that would be you and me — caught in the middle. When asked for comment, Verizon provided TechCrunch with the following statement: Internet traffic exchange has always been handled through commercial agreements. This has worked well for the Internet ecosystem and consumers. We are hopeful that policy makers will recognize this fact and that the Internet will continue to be the engine of growth of the global economy. Netflix also provided TechCrunch with a statement: We welcome the FCC’s efforts to bring more transparency in this area. Americans deserve to get the speed and quality of Internet access they pay for. Both statements essentially re-indicate their already stated views. Comcast reached out TechCrunch with a detailed statement Sena Fitzmaurice, its VP Government Communications that is worth reading: We welcome the Chairman’s attention to these important issues in the Internet ecosystem. Internet traffic exchange on the backbone is part of ensuring that bits flow freely and efficiently and all actors across the system have a shared responsibility to preserve the smooth functioning and highly competitive backbone interconnection market. We welcome this review which will allow the Commission full transparency into the entire Internet backbone ecosystem and enable full education as to how this market works. We have long published our peering policies for example, and are open to discussions about further disclosures that would benefit consumers. We also have voluntarily shared a vast array of information about our peering and interconnection practices with the FCC. We also agree with the Chairman that the broadband consumer should be the focus of this inquiry and not any particular business model. We look forward to continuing to work with the FCC on these issues. As a final note, Chairman Wheeler cited a consumer note sent in via email as thought-provoking on this issue. So if you did have a view, one way or the other, sending it to the FCC might be a decent use of your time. |
This DIY Game Boy Pocket Uses A Raspberry Pi To Bring You Absolute, Unending Joy | John Biggs | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6JuB0zOHGeg] Imagine if I told you, almost 20 years ago, that you could put every single Game Boy game (plus a bunch of others) inside of your Game Boy Pocket without having to buy or swap out cartridges. “Forsooth, what wizardry is this,” you’d say. “Tell me more, time-traveler.” Prepare yourself, twenty-years-ago-you, because your brain is about to explode. This how to remove the guts from your old Game Boy Pocket (a smaller Game Boy variant) and stuff in an SD card, a battery, and a Raspberry Pi board. By wiring the old controls to the board, you can build what amounts to the best thing in the entire known universe. Using a version of the Raspberry Pi operating system called , Brown has fitted all of the components inside the old case and found that the battery lasted three hours on one charge. He also removed the inner structural parts as well as a lot of the controller PCB. By wiring in new connectors to the Pi, he was able to recreate the original Game Boy controls using an emulator. Then all it took was a quick ROM download and he was in business. If I knew I wouldn’t hurt myself doing this I’d totally rip apart an old Game Boy this weekend. Therefore, I leave that as an exercise for the reader. |
Pinterest Improves Its Search Engine Again With Smarter Place Search | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | Yep, . Following this week’s about the arrival of a feature called “Guided Search” on the web, Pinterest today says it’s now rolling out smarter “Place Search,” too. The changes being introduced will make it easier to map a Pin to a Place Board in just a few clicks on both iOS and web. This is really about making the Place Search experience “more intuitive,” the company explains on . Previously, Place Search allowed users to search within a city, within the current map view, and globally. But Pinterest says that users were just entering in the “what” (place name) and “where” (location) in the same search box, just like when they were using Pinterest’s site-wide search interface. So the company made a few changes. For starters, it’s now using open source geocoder technology written by Foursquare called to identify the geographic names in searches. And in the case where there are several places with the same name — for example, Springfield, MO or IL or MA or VA, etc. — it will show you all the possibilities, prompting you to select the appropriate one. Pinterest is using Foursquare place data to help identify the , as well. The end result is a one-box Place Search interface, where results are returned in a ranked list. This is an important step, the company points out, “because Pinners will judge the quality of our place search results based on what’s included in this list and whether their intended place appears near the top.” Or, in other words, Pinterest just became a different way to find places than Google Maps, and it’s based on Foursquare data. The changes are live now in the Pinterest iOS app and on the web, with Android coming soon. The new search engine will also make it easier to map a Pin to a Place Board — a feature that was . Place Pins and Place Search are key areas Pinterest is aiming to get right because of its potential to break out beyond the female demographic, which still heavily dominates Pinterest today. We had that Pinterest in April would be announcing a related travel product to take better advantage of its Place Pins feature. That didn’t turn out to at the time, but the rumor itself holds up, generally speaking. Pinterest is focused on bringing more men onto the platform (especially affluent ones), and travel (and Place Pins) can help with that. Pinterest users are largely pinning places that would be related to travel or the outdoors, it seems, with over 30,000 Pins related to hotels, 20,000 related to the great outdoors in general, and 19,000 of just beaches. The company says that in the six months since it launched Place Pins, more than 1 billion places have been Pinned, more than 4 million Place Boards created, and more than 300 unique countries and territories are represented. |
Jeff Bezos Sent Me A Book | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 13 |
Odd introduction to a TechCrunch post? Sure, but it’s also not every day that Jeff Bezos sends you a copy of his favorite childhood book — — to hype Amazon’s next major event. Mr. Pine lives in the world’s most boring suburb (though to be honest, most of them are boring anyway…). To make his house stand out, he first plants some trees in front, but just like the neighbor who has to buy a new car right after you bought yours, everybody goes ahead and does the same. Then he decides to paint his house purple and forbids everybody else from doing the same. What does that have to do with Amazon, you ask? Well, the expectation is that Amazon will launch a phone next Wednesday and from what we’ve heard, it’ll do a bunch of clever tricks and include to power some 3D features. “I think you’ll agree that the world is a better place when things are a little bit different,” Bezos writes in a short memo that came with the book. Just like Mr. Pine in Bezos’s favorite childhood book, Amazon wants to do something different. Lots of colors for a phone isn’t all that new, but like Mr. Pine, Amazon needs to do something to set itself apart from the rest of the smartphone vendors. Just another black slab of phone with a nice screen on top and Android as the OS won’t be enough to differentiate itself from the rest of the field. I’m sure the gadget kremlinologists will have a field day with these books, but I doubt there are any other clues here besides that Bezos himself will likely keynote the event in Seattle. It’ll definitely be interesting to see what Amazon has in store for us. We will be there and keep you posted, so come back next week for more on Amazon’s new phone. |
Apple Is Taking Action Against Fake Ratings On The App Store | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | App developers know that having good ratings and reviews means more users will be wiling to download their app. And thanks to , it will help their app be better discovered via the App Store’s Top Charts as well. Because of this, some — okay, many — developers manipulate their apps’ positions by posting fake ratings and reviews. It’s sort of these days, in fact. Any brief, glowing, five-star review is immediately suspect. As it turns out, it’s suspect to Apple, too. And now the company is doing something about it. For some period of time — it’s unclear exactly how long — Apple has been removing fake reviews from the App Store that have unjustly helped certain apps climb higher in the charts than they would have otherwise. There was back in May, when a handful of developers noticed that a good chunk of their reviews went missing. None admitted to having bought reviews, however, which is sadly a practice now. Developers often post jobs on freelancer marketplaces asking for reviews, or buy them in bulk from shady, third-party providers. “I know some developers that were buying 50-100 reviews and ratings… all 5 star at one time. It was pretty obvious,” writes one developer in the forum. The problem is, when you see things like this — that is, the changes the developers were complaining about — it’s always hearsay. You never know if this was just an isolated incident, a widespread policy change on Apple’s part, or a bug. But after spotting an interesting that seemingly caught Apple intervening once again, we dug in. And guess what? It’s true: Apple intervening, in some cases at least, to remove fake App Store ratings. In the example below, a sort of spammy app called “Better Fonts Free…” had all of its June ratings disappear overnight. The app, at the time we looked at it, had a few thousand ratings. But before the change, there were well over 20,000 ratings. 20k ratings gone overnight? Without update ? Mmm — Ouriel Ohayon (@OurielOhayon) The only way for ratings to disappear like this would have to be from Apple’s intervention. That’s because there’s really no other way for a developer to remove their ratings, short of pulling the app down and then re-releasing it as a new application, going through Apple’s sometimes lengthy review process along the way. That was not the case here; the app was always live, but the ratings just disappeared. Another explanation is that this was a bug, but that’s also not the case here, from what we’ve learned. Instead, what happened was Apple step in to remove this app’s ratings due to attempts by the developer to game the system. What’s more, this is not the first time the company has done this, we now understand. In fact, any time Apple finds credible evidence of ratings fraud or manipulation, it can and “often” does take action to remove the ratings associated with that activity. How exactly Apple hears of this fraudulent activity in the first place, however, will vary. Sometimes, the company finds evidence of manipulation or gaming itself; other times, it’s brought to Apple’s attention by others. We’re not sure how Apple spotted the above app’s fraudulent behavior, but it would have been pretty obvious to anyone who looked that the developer was gaming the charts. [ : apparently, the issue in this case was not so much with “fake” – meaning bought-and-paid-for reviews but with “incentivized” reviews. That is, the developer was manipulating users in triggering them to post 5-star reviews in exchange for free fonts.] As to whether or not this will be something that Apple formalizes into a process like it has with App Store submissions is unknown. But we’re not there yet: The App Store continues to be filled with apps that clearly still have faked ratings and reviews. However, this does indicate that Apple is aware of the wide-ranging attempts at rank manipulation going on, and is starting to take steps to prevent it. This may be known in parts of the developer community already, of course, but it’s far from being common knowledge. To all the iOS developers who actually play by the rules, though, it’s going to be good news. |
Fab.com’s David Lapter Joins MakeSpace As CFO | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | , the NY-based startup that thinks of itself as a Dropbox for physical objects, has recently announced that it secured Fab.com CFO as new Chief Financial Officer, and SVP of Business Operations. Lapter is a serial startup CFO, and most recently comes from Fab.com where he joined in 2011. At the time, the ecommerce platform was but a few months old. Fab.com now brings in revenues of over $100 million globally. Before Fab.com, Lapter was CFO and EVP of business operations at KickApps, as well as CFO at CTSpace. Both companies were acquired during his tenure at them. Here’s what MakeSpace CEO and founder Sam Rosen had to say in a prepared statement: Bringing David on board to help guide our growth is a huge win as we scale locally in New York and accelerate our expansion to new markets. I’m ecstatic to welcome David as an integral part of our management team and I look forward to working alongside him to implement our long term strategic vision for the company. MakeSpace is a service that lets you tag and store items that you own with the help of an app and MakeSpace’s on-demand pickup and drop-off service. Not only does it save the user time commuting to and from storage spaces, but actually saves time based on sheer organization, as the folks at MakeSpace know exactly where each item is at any given time. When you request your old soccer ball, they just grab it and bring it over to you. In the past year, MakeSpace has picked up a from Upfront Ventures, Lowercase Capital, High Peaks Venture Partners, and Collaborative Fund. And in . |
null | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 12 | null |
Priceline’s Swallowing Of OpenTable For $2.6B Investigated For Being Too Low | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | Travel behemoth Priceline this morning that it planned to gobble up restaurant booking service OpenTable for in cash, news that sent OpenTable’s by nearly 50 percent to over $104 per share. But, a little like a belch after a big meal, swiftly on the heels of that news comes another development: Former SEC attorney Willie Briscoe and securities litigation firm Powers Taylor say that they are going to investigate the deal for being priced too low. “The investigation centers on whether OpenTable’s Board of Directors is acting in the shareholders’ best interests, whether the board is properly negotiating a higher share price for the shareholders, and whether the board has employed an adequate process to review and act on the proposed transaction,” the firm writes in a . It’s appealing to OpenTable investors who believe they are affected by the deal to get in touch to find out more. (And who knows, perhaps Name Their Own Price?) Briscoe and Powers Taylor are not strangers to weighing in with investigations on big acquisitions of public companies on the heels of them getting announced. The pair did the same when in 2013. That deal ended up , it seems, without a hitch. It seems that here they may have an even bigger challenge in claiming the price is too low. The $103 per share offer that Priceline has made is just shy of the share price’s rise earlier today (after the news was out) but still nearly $20 higher than OpenTable’s highest price in the last 12 months prior to today. Priceline’s stock price is , but is currently still just over $1,204, giving it a market cap of nearly $63 billion. |
We Need To Talk About Depression | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 14 | Building a startup is like climbing a mountain and being told you’ll only get the gear you need–harnesses, helmets, bottled oxygen–as you struggle toward the peak. Long hours away from family, responsibility to investors and users, and the fear of failure are extremely stressful and they sometimes coalesce into something more severe. I’m not a startup founder, but as a TechCrunch writer I’ve gotten to know many, some quite well, and I’ve seen how entrepreneurship can put even the most optimistic people at risk for depression. That’s why I was glad to read a from Y Combinator president Sam Altman about founders and depression. Psychological issues of every kind are stigmatized, but it seems even worse for people working in tech. As Altman writes, “There is a huge amount of pressure as a founder to never show weakness and to be the cheerleader in all internal and external situations. The world can be falling down around you—and most of the time when you’re running a company, it is—and you have to be the strong, confident, and optimistic. Failing is terrifying, and so is looking stupid.” I hope that Altman’s high profile in the startup industry and his post might help ease some of the stigma surrounding depression, encourage people to seek help, and start a conversation about an extremely important issue. Of course, being an entrepreneur is not an inherently depressing thing and making the decision to launch a startup does not automatically put you at risk for burning out. But depression is a serious problem, especially when its sufferers must also bear the suffocating burden of silence. No one should have to feel isolated. People in the tech industry who have written about or talked about depression include Brad Feld, the co-founder of Foundry Group and , who after the deaths of and wrote in about his own experiences. He followed up his article with a post about . A partial list of others who have described their experiences or those of people they know include ; Rescue One Financial CEO Bradley Smith in an interview for an Inc article titled “ ;” Ben Huh, founder of , who wrote a blog post called ; of ; , co-founder of ; and , currently a venture partner at . I know how corrosive silence can be because I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder when I was a teenager and continue to deal with recurrent episodes. I’m open about my experiences, but as I write this article, I worry that it will make people who are depressed feel even worse if they don’t speak out. It’s an extremely intimate issue and deciding to share it is a very personal decision. Thanks to my experiences, however, I know how important it is to build a network of people you can talk to about depression. There was a time I refused to talk about my depression because I was so embarrassed by it. In college, after a year without symptoms, I even convinced myself that I was “cured.” When I began to feel the first signs of a recurrence, including suicidal ideation, severe insomnia and a low appetite, I was scared but I still didn’t want to seek help. I joked with my friends. I threw myself into my schoolwork. I went to parties. But I couldn’t make my problems go away with willpower. Long story short, I ended up in a psychiatric ward twice in one semester and was nearly forced to take a leave of absence from my school. My breakdown meant that I had to finally tell my friends and professors about my depression. I was worried that they could reject me. I didn’t want to be seen as “the fucked up girl,” crazy, or unstable. The warmth and support I was greeted with instead humbled me, and I believe it saved my life. To be sure, not everyone was kind. One friend told me “If you are depressed, don’t tell me, because I don’t care if you kill yourself.” It hurt, but in hindsight I’m glad I got the chance to cut her out of my life. There will always be people will try to trivialize your experiences or tell you to just cheer up, as if you enjoy being depressed. Whenever I encounter individuals like that, I want to slap them with a copy of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem in which he beautifully describes the nightmare and agony of depression: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. While I was struggling to recover and taking extensions on my papers, I apologized to one of my professors, a person I deeply respected, for my weakness. He told me “You are vulnerable, but you are not weak.” That’s something I often repeat to myself. Asking for help makes you vulnerable, but it does not mean you are weak. It does not mean you are deficient. Asking for help when you are depressed is one of the bravest things you can do. If you are reading this and suffering from depression or beginning to , please take this post as a personal plea from someone who has been there before and never thought my life would be worth living: talk to someone. Talk to your family, your friends, anyone you trust. Find help. You will most likely find other people who have been through similar experiences or are close to people who have. If someone approaches you about their depression, please treat them with compassion–it means that they trust you and probably hold you in extremely high regard. If there is one thing that people working in tech truly need to disrupt, it’s the stigma surrounding depression and other psychological issues. Working at a startup may feel like climbing a mountain, but it’s not a trek that anyone needs to take alone. |
Tech Giants Join Microsoft In Calling For US Gov To End Use Of Warrants To Demand Overseas Data | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 14 | Microsoft’s case to prevent the United States government from using search warrants to demand data that is not stored in the United States has picked up a number of high-profile backers, including the , , and, recently, Apple and Cisco. The final two filed a , which details their protest of the practice. Microsoft lost its initial suit, as it expected, and has refiled the case. I reached out to both Apple and Cisco for additional comment. The United States government had issued a warrant for data stored on the company’s servers in Ireland. Microsoft didn’t think that it was reasonable for a United States-specific warrant to apply to overseas and extra-national data. As TechCrunch , it’s a reasonable point. What’s noteworthy now is the amount of backing that Microsoft has picked up. More than a trillion dollars in market capitalization are behind the cessation of this specific practice. That’s institutional heft of the material sort. I wouldn’t be surprised if other technology giants joined in the fight. Why do companies give a whit if their data overseas is out of the reach of the United States government? Read the question again, and see if you don’t have your answer. Glibness aside, tech companies are now segregating data for certain clients. European firms don’t want to use a storage solution that the United States government can easily demand access to. Thus, if Microsoft et al want to sell cloud products or communications tools to global customers, they need to be able to say that the data involved is safe. And if the United States government can simply access that data, even when stored, say, in Ireland, with a non-local warrant, tech firms from this country aren’t going to sell much of anything abroad. |
Yo Facebook, Ban Links With Fake Video Play Buttons | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 14 | Oh, cute cat video? Let me watch that for a second in the News Feed. Click the play button. NOPE. It was a lie. Just a static image of a play button designed to dupe me into clicking out to some crappy website. Feed reading, interrupted. User experience, injured. Likelihood I’ll click legitimate videos in the future, diminished. Facebook. Seriously. This BS needs to stop. [ : Three years later, .] I get it. Sites are trying to convey they have video content to share, so they stick a fake play button on the link preview thumbnail image. But what they really want is my ad views, and they’re willing to trick me to get them. That play button is fake. ARRRGGGHH! They could have put “Watch:” or “[Video]” in their link’s headline, but then I’d get to make the choice if I wanted to click away from Facebook to watch. Instead, they just make Facebook worse. They burn YouTube’s credibility too as most of these sites use the YouTube play button to fool us. And the most annoying part is that often, the videos they’re trying to get me to watch on their own websites are: Even worse. Sometimes these posts seem to get into my feed because the websites are paying Facebook to promote them as ads. Let’s take “Hidden Camera Proves The True Nature Of Pit Bulls. Must See.” from the slimy site PetFlow.com. Judging by the look of this Facebook story, you’d think you could click and watch the video in-line, right? Wrong. Another fake play button. BOOOO Click that play button and instead you end up here on this ad-filled monstrosity surrounding a standard YouTube video: Crappy, ad-filled site these fake play buttons lead to This cantankerous strategy expands beyond video to GIFs as well. Facebook won’t play them in-line, which is simultaneously a bit annoying though it also probably saves us from tons of inanity. But slapping a fake play button on them so I click out to your site makes hope a meteor lands on your server farm. They’re evolving! The fake GIF Here’s how to spot real videos that are safe to click. Facebook and Instagram videos show a gray play button and often will auto-play if you hover over them. They also won’t show a link to any other website. Real YouTube Videos have a little half-width video preview thumbnail with a white on gray play button on the bottom left of the News Feed story and say they point to YouTube. Vimeo have a full-width preview image and say they point to Vimeo. Both have play buttons that animate slightly if you hover over them, letting you know they’re not a fake, static image. What a real, in-line playable YouTube video looks like on Facebook But you shouldn’t need instructions to know the different. Facebook needs to take a stand. Don’t show anyone posts like this. Don’t run ads that bait-and-switch people like this. And destroy the News Feed visibility of any business who tries to share these. If this vile trickery is already prohibited, do a better job of enforcing the ban. Otherwise, you’re teaching us not to click video posts on Facebook. That’s a dangerous call considering videos are one reason the Internet is better than going outside. |
Seoul’s Sprouting Startup Scene | Sebastien Park | 2,014 | 6 | 14 | A couple of years ago, a compared cities like Berlin, Tel Aviv, and London to get at what made startups successful. There wasn’t enough data to compare Asia at the time, but there’s one city in the region that’s quietly been developing into another important tech hub: Seoul. When you first think of South Korea, you might think of Samsung, the singer/songwriter PSY, or even the occasional . Take a closer look and you’ll find that , the country is among the , or that it’s been ranked first by (based on things like density of public tech companies). While these might be interesting to know, boils down to the quality of talent, entrepreneurs, startups and capital sources in a given locale. Silicon Valley is historically significant due (in part) to these very factors, and already-established cities like New York have become prominent as these same “ingredients” matured. In Seoul, a city nearly , the startup scene is still nascent. Ask anyone on the street about startups though, and you’ll find that an increasing number of young professionals are working on something startup-related. There are whispers of an IPO on the horizon for , and , recently with the nation’s second largest internet portal Daum Communications. Consider these, along with the companies like and that have achieved a $1 billion-plus valuation. There is still a ways to go before Seoul can be billed as the next Silicon Valley ( ), but success stories like these are creating a positive signal. This is especially the case when it comes to drawing more talent in to the tech industry, away from the more traditional employment route with large conglomerates like Hyundai or SK Group. Instead, startups like ( ), , and (voted ) have been raising the profile of entrepreneurship in the region. Capital sources have been taking notice, too, with growing interest from overseas VCs, such as SoftBank Ventures, Rakuten Ventures, GlobalBrain, along with the rise of angel groups, accelerators, event organizations, and press that promote and support entrepreneurship. Take a look at , , and . This emphasis on creating a community and supporting founders is crucial, and has been a long time coming for Seoul. The government has been playing an important role, as well. For example, South Korean president has made a fairly significant bet on the tech sector (and the ) by in startups over the next three years. According to her plan, the government will also ease regulations on industries like healthcare, education, finance, and software. In Seoul, Mayor Park Won-Soon has focused on his administration’s policy efforts is the (the in Asia) which aims to invest in solutions to societal problems. This has led to the growth of a social entrepreneurship community, as well, with investors and incubators paving the way, like — started by the founder of Daum, , and . Resources like these focus on advising and supporting the next crop of social entrepreneurs who are building businesses (e.g. ) that are both for profit and, more importantly, pushing the world forward. Despite some of the real challenges that face a nascent ecosystem, I’m a passionate (and optimistic!) observer of the community being built there. As , architect and curator of , put it, “Asia today is a vast experiment in what makes a city.” Seoul falls into this very ethos of imagining the future, and my hunch is that the exciting things being built there will have a broader appeal towards making the world a better, more interesting place. |
Google’s Push Past Search | Peter Yared | 2,014 | 6 | 14 | As a recent analysis indicated, Google’s traditional search is as well as it did on the desktop web. Sifting through organic search results on a mobile device is a sub-optimal experience, especially when compared to the push notifications and personalized streams of cards that have made mobile apps from Facebook, Twitter and Tinder so habit-forming and successful. Google is getting well ahead of its mobile organic search problem, especially on Android where it has full control of the end-to-end mobile experience. Google has strung together push notifications, a stream of predictive answers and an answer box in an attempt to answer a search query before showing organic search results. No. 1 – Notify you that something important is happening before you even ask Google’s primary push play is its much-maligned Google Now, which is increasingly becoming more functional and relevant, especially for Android users. Google Now uses mobile notifications for important events. This feature has initially focused around calendar appointments and location, with more recent additions such as sports scores for teams you follow. When you have an upcoming calendar appointment, Google Now checks travel routes and notifies you when you should leave in order to arrive at the appointment on time. Google Now sometimes gets confused about where you are going and doesn’t know when you are going to work or skipping an appointment. However, when it works, the feature really feels like magic. As Google Now learns what you are interested in, this notification feature will likely incorporate big stock swings in your portfolio, major news events of interest to you and important emails from your boss. The calendar notifications themselves will likely be a lot smarter, with features like Refresh or RelateIQ that provide context around a meeting. Right now, Google Now is a lot like type-ahead: when it works, it’s great. When it doesn’t, it’s a real pain. But it is slowly getting better and more context-aware. No. 2 – Show you things you might search for before you even search In an ideal situation, Google Now would anticipate what you want and deliver you a card before you even thought to ask. Perhaps Google will get there one day. In the meantime, Google wants its users to form habits around its Google Now cards as much as possible. When you type a Google search on a mobile Android device, Google automatically pushes the Google Now stream, which attempts to predict what you might be searching for by showing a stream of updates to websites that you have recently visited, new content for search terms you have searched, real world events such as a new episode of a television show whose website you have visited, and nearby places in case you are looking for a café or a restaurant. Google uses your search history and profile information to build the cards, so the cards are generally very relevant. Google Now is becoming increasingly anticipatory about new search results you might find interesting by incorporating the Google knowledge graph into search. It can tie various web pages together based on distinct entities such as a band. When you search for a band and listen to its YouTube song, Google Now will tell you when they’re coming to town to play a show. Yes, Google is not only crawling the entire web, it is now and flagging pages it thinks will be interesting to you. In addition, Google is even trying to figure out things like where you parked and if you are on public transport to notify you when it’s your stop. No. 3 – Answer your query with an answer box If Google fails at answering what you want with a push notification or its predictive stream of cards, it still shows you a card above the search results. The Google “Answer Box” is where Google really shines, delivering cards that contain the answer to many common and even obscure queries. Google takes in context such as location and responds to voice and written queries with the answer to a question. The thing to realize is that most answer boxes will eventually become a Google Now card, delivering answers to questions before you even ask. As users become increasingly accustomed to Google answer cards, they will be less and less surprised when these cards start to materialize before they have even entered a search query. No. 4 – Show the search results that we once loved and now disdain on mobile Yes, Google’s organic search, which we have known and loved since the late nineties, is now a failure condition of a failure condition of a failure condition. Going through and clicking on search listings on a mobile device is just painful. Every time I get the search results, I wish Google had instead returned an answer box – why can’t the Google knowledge graph just show me the date of the event I’m looking for? The shift away from showing organic search results on mobile devices will have a profound effect on websites that rely on Google for traffic, on top of the devastation wrought by the Google algorithm updates of the past few years. Wait, haven’t we seen little boxes of relevant data before? Google Now in some ways is the new, smarter portal that figures out what you should know. Google Now doesn’t show your entire stock portfolio, it only shows the top movers in your portfolio. It is not a coincidence that Google launched Google Now for desktop Chrome soon after it killed its iGoogle portal. It is ironic that Yahoo, which essentially invented the portal category, is now trying to reinvigorate its search product, while Google is moving past search and what is effectively a next generation portal. Google is the stalwart of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 “Pull Computing,” with interaction hinged around a user deciding to search for something and sifting through results and advertising. Google is now reinventing itself on mobile with a “Push Computing” paradigm. Push Computing, where server computers curate and organize content to send to a client, is the backbone of successful mobile companies. There were attempts in the late 1990s to push-enable portals with products like PointCast, but they were cluttered with too much content to consume and required too much bandwidth for the time. Google is addressing those problems by curating what is sent to clients with extensive machine learning. The Google search experience was not going to carry Google into the future, and Google is getting well ahead of the problem by predictively pushing cards into notifications and a stream. And just like they did last time with search, they can figure out how to monetize later. Google Shopping’s answer box is entirely paid ( ) and on a mobile screen there is plenty of room to add a single, very expensive AdWord ad to every answer box. As Google learned the first time around, there are a lot of ways to make money when you’re the on-ramp to everyone’s Internet. |
Gillmor Gang Live 06.14.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 6 | 14 | – John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Benedict Evans, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording has concluded for today. . Also |
Sand Hill Road’s Consiglieres: August Capital | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 6 | 14 | book “Give and Take,” Adam Grant argues that the fourth ingredient to success — aside from hard work, luck and talent — is the ability to connect with people. After 10 years of research, he chose Sand Hill Road’s David Hornik as a prime example to prove his case that good guys can finish on top. If venture is a long game, then long-term relationships are paramount. In fact, story begins with a long-term relationship between a young VC, Dave Marquardt, and a friend-of-a-friend named “Billy Gates.” It was 1980, and 30-year-old David Marquardt was a young, hotshot VC at Technology Venture Investors looking for his next deal. He heard through the grapevine that another young hotshot, “Billy Gates,” was having success with a startup called Microsoft, so he called one of Gates’ employees and former classmate at Stanford Business School, Steve Ballmer, to get a meeting. At the time, Marquardt was a rarity in the VC world filled with ex-bankers; he was a design engineer and deeply technical. This resonated with Gates and Ballmer, and Marquardt spent the next year going up to Redmond almost every weekend to spend time with Gates and his team. Sometimes they would go to University of Washington football games, and other times they would brainstorm. But in that year, Marquardt sealed the deal, and became one of the investors in Microsoft’s Series A in 1981. At the time, Marquardt and TVI invested $1 million for 5 percent of the company. Thirty-three years later, he still sits on the board of Microsoft. Relationship building and company building has been Marquardt’s ethos as a VC; and he carried that view of venture capital to August Capital, the firm he co-founded with fellow TVI colleague John Johnston. “The venture business is an intensely personal relationship business. And it’s not an industry that scales well,” explains Marquardt. He says he would never consider adding a value added service. “Companies should do that themselves,” he adds. Bill Gates wouldn’t let me bring in outside PR people and marketing talent — that’s what founders do, Marquardt maintains. “My view is that the CEO is ultimately responsible and accountable for everything, and they are the ones that make the decisions. The VCs are there to support and be steady” Marquardt says that he’s seeing a lot of VCs who are closet operators who have been on boards and start pointing fingers at founders when things go wrong. “That’s not our style. Our style is more like telling the CEO, ‘Have you thought about this approach or this hire?’ We don’t believe we are there to make the decisions.” While August may not have the marquis WhatsApp deal in its portfolio, or did not back Instagram early, the firm has had a number of early wins, such as Seagate, as well as quiet successes like Zulily and Splunk, which have helped its returns over the past few decades. And it’s clear that August isn’t all that concerned with getting some of the hype; the firm continues to be focused on its entrepreneurs and providing the kind of support Marquardt provided for Gates. By the time Marquardt and Johnston teamed up to found the firm in 1995, they had already backed Microsoft and did the Series B in Sun Microsystems. (Marquardt went to business school with the company’s co-founder Vinod Khosla). Their fellow TVI alum Bob Kagel went on to found Benchmark. The company closed its first fund, of around $100 million, and brought on Andy Rappaport. Andrew Anker joined the firm in 1998. The mid-nineties were an inflection point in the VC world, explains Marquardt, as many firms were starting to split based on ideological differences. Some VCs wanted to do more packaged consumer goods, but some ‘renegade VCs’ were betting on technology and networked computers. One of the firm’s earliest investments was in Cobalt Networks, the developer of low-cost Linux-based servers. The company ended up going public and then being sold to Sun Microsystems for $2 billion. Cobalt drove the firm’s first fund, and made it easy for the second fund to be raised. The bubble, says Marquardt, started in late 1996. “People out of Stanford Business School who had a PowerPoint presentation were raising $10 million at a $500 million valuation, and then going public six months later,” he says. But because the firm had placed more of its early bets on the enterprise, August Capital didn’t engage in some of the craziness like some VCs (Marquardt notes that the firm didn’t come out unscathed; its mistakes just weren’t that consequential to overall performance). In fact, one of the firm’s most successful deals took place in 2000 — storage technology company Seagate. After raising a third fund in 1999, the firm, which generally didn’t do buyouts, joined an investment consortium that included Silver Lake and others to take the company private in 2000 for $20 billion (August put around $135 million into this). At the time Seagate sold some of the company to Veritas, and then the rest of the company remained private. “When we did the deal at Seagate, everyone thought we were crazy. It took courage to put that much money into hardware when everyone was fleeing,” he adds. Seagate ended up going public again in 2002. The firm started to think to the future and brought on some fresh new talent, including lawyer-turned-VC David Hornik. Hornik was the counsel in the board meetings on the firm’s portfolio company Evite, and Marquardt says he was bringing more value into the board meetings than most of the VCs in the room. In 2003, the firm also brought on Vivek Mehra, the former VP of Engineering at Cobalt Networks, and then seasoned VC Howard Hartenbaum, who led one of the earliest investments in Skype, joined in 2008. When thinking through bringing on new talent, Marquardt maintains that the more diversity of opinions, the better. “You want a group that is going to challenge each other but also shares the same values,” he says. “The challenge is to create a balance of personalities.” After the Seagate success, the firm started to get much more deal flow, especially in late-stage investing. So August raised a special opportunity fund to do some of these late-stage deals on an individual basis. For the fourth fund, August raised $350 million for early-stage investing, and $250 million for the special opportunity fund. The firm has continued to make investments in later-stage growth rounds out of these funds, but the majority of the firm’s focus is on the Series A and Series B. To manage this fund, the firm decided to bring on Eric Carlborg. On Carlborg’s first day on the job, he came to the partner meeting with a potential deal — Zulily. The then-fledgling e-commerce company for moms was raising a Series B, and August ended up leading the round shortly thereafter. Zulily of course went public a few years later, and is now a $5 billion company. Most recently, August added former private equity whiz Tripp Jones who has helped work on investments in AvantCredit, Paperless Post, and Rocketmiles. August’s partners are relationship builders, explains Hornik, and around ten years ago the firm thought about how it could actually broaden that to entrepreneurs and leaders in the industry outside the August Capital family. Thus, The Lobby, a curated, off-the-record, invite-only event for founders, CEOs, VCs and thought leaders in the tech and media industries, was born. There’s really no VC firm or even company that has been able to organize something as special as The Lobby — most of the other VC events are day-only conferences. It’s worth noting August also co-hosts a annual cocktail party with TechCrunch for the broader tech community each Summer. But there’s something that Hornik and his team have been able to master when it comes to actually building lasting relationships out of The Lobby. It’s similar to Allen and Co’.s Sun Valley conference, with less emphasis on business and more focus on fun and bonding. “We saw this as an opportunity to provide value to entrepreneurs in general,” Hornik explained. “It’s an opportunity for them to speak about business, give context about their decisions, but it’s also about creating a broader community and sharing knowledge. I don’t think it is possible to create a company without the help of a broader range of entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs and investors. The Lobby is a place to meet those people.” The event itself is traditionally set in a tropical location, and actually is less about tech and more about sharing ideas and experiences. There are some bonding exercises but the primary format around conversations at The Lobby are called User Generated Conversations (a play on user-generated content), in which people participate in small groups. An example of a tactical user-generated discussion is how to create a call center, explains Hornik. But user-generated discussions can also swing to some of the personal challenges a leader in the tech industry might face (i.e. work-life balance). I’ve attended the event as a partner to my husband, but haven’t actually been an attendee. In term’s of who is there, and what’s talked about, that’s all off the record and Hornik prefers for the dialogue to be open and honest without fear of leaks to the general public. Similar to the Allen & Co. conference, it’s common for partnerships, fundings and deals to be initiated or even made at The Lobby. The list of attendees is kept private, but you can see some familiar faces on the conference’s . The guest list is carefully curated, and it’s a mix of entrepreneurs; execs from Twitter, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Uber, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, etc.; as well as execs from CBS, MTV, Turner, Lifetime, Fox, Universal Music, and HBO. Of course, there is long-term benefit for August — all of the firm’s partners attend, and can interface with some of the tech world’s up and coming entrepreneurs, CEOs and potential founders. But that’s not the firm’s primary goal for sponsoring the event, which isn’t a money-maker, Hornik adds. At best, The Lobby breaks even, and at times, August covers the loss. This year, the firm decided to expand The Lobby to a second conference focused entirely on enterprise entrepreneurs and investors. The original Lobby had started to be dominated by consumer-focused discussions, and it made sense to assemble founders, investors and CEOs of the most interesting startups and companies in the enterprise world (think the CEOs of companies like Cloudera, Fastly, Odesk, Nimble, Okta, Pure, Tegile, GitHub, Zuora, Salesforce, Splunk, Workday, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, VMware, HP, etc.). Hornik says that the conference does help with deal flow. “But our thinking is unlike many VCs. We’re relationship-driven and many in our industry are transaction driven. August is driven by relationships, and that is not about extracting every last penny of value. We don’t want more of the pie. We want the pie to get bigger,” says Hornik. Case in point — many VCs from competing firms are invited to and attend The Lobby. “What’s different about the conference is that we don’t think of it as a utility,” says Hornik. One element that is central to how August works is its flat structure–the firm has only seven active partners. Benchmark is one of the only other firms in the Valley that holds a similar structure where each partner has equal equity as well as an equal voice on investment decisions. But how does that change the dynamic? As Howard Hartenbaum explains, every investor around the table is incentivized to help the other companies in their portfolios, even if it’s not one of the companies they source or are involved in at a board level. For example, he sourced the firm’s but Carlbourg joined the board because it was the right fit. Mehra adds that the investment team is purposefully kept small with each VC coming from a diverse background. This prevents group think, he says. “We rarely look at deals with the same eyes, which helps us make better decisions.” And each partner is doing the diligence on their deals, he says. Often times at other VC firms, the first deals get judged by junior associates. “I do diligence calls myself, and so does the entire partnership.” “Our partnership is different from an operational hierarchy. We’re a small group but we have very little turnover,” says Hartenbaum. Only a handful of partners have left the VC firm, and when they do, it’s because they have wanted to pursue operational interests. “We want to be a place where we work well together,” he adds. And there are some practices in the VC world that August doesn’t stand for. Often if a company isn’t doing well, a general partner will be switched out for someone more junior, Hartenbaum says. Not the case at August — the firm stands by its companies through the good and bad. Much of that is attributed to the firm’s long-term view of its companies and company building. August has seen some of its best returns come from companies they’ve been backing and working with for nearly 10 years. August funded Splunk in 2004. The company didn’t go public until 2012. eBates, a company August funded in 2000, is a nine-figure-dollar business that is making millions of dollars, and Hornik has been going to board meetings for 14 years. And eBates is rumored to be eyeing a . “It’s not just about making quick money,” Hartenbaum says. “It’s about building great solid, free-standing businesses.” “I have no time frame, and no target for what is the outcome of a business when I invest,” Hornik says. “I go into every business thinking they could be next Microsoft, Splunk or Zulily, and it takes anywhere from 7 to 13 years to build those kinds of businesses.” Another differentiating factor for August is how they work with their CEOs and founders — think more consigliere than mob boss. As Marquardt mentioned above, the approach is helping founders when they need help. There is not a “helicopter VC” mentality amongst any of the partners. “I give them my opinions but I understand that I only think about them for a few hours a week because founders and CEOs are thinking about their challenges 80 to 100 hours per week. I never get upset with a founder if he or she doesn’t take my advice,” says Hartenbaum. Mehra sees his and the firm’s value not being in recruiting, marketing and other functions. “We gravitate towards founders who want to own those functions. We want to help with the other stuff.” , founder of payments company WePay, agrees. “Some firms are trying to build agencies, but August Capital is not like that. They are really lean, and the partners are all on the same page,” he says. He emphasized that the firm really feels like a real partnership, with no politics among partners for deals. Clerico adds that while Hornik led the investment in WePay, Mehra and Hartenbaum have been instrumental in helping him, as well. “August is in it for the long haul.” “The approach August takes around the long play is rare,” says Rohit Kshetrapal, founder and CEO of hybrid flash storage appliance developer Tegile Systems. “The partners are genuine and are committed to being there during the ups and downs.” For , the founder and CEO of in-store analytics company RetailNext, August was one of the few VCs that took the time to try to understand his business at a deeper level. He adds that he could have received a higher valuation from other investors, but took a 10-15 percent cut in valuation to go with August. Why? He says that first meeting he had pitching one of the partners was at a mall, where Agratchev could show the tangible value of the software he had developed. Most other VCs wouldn’t take the time, he explains. And once he was part of the August family, the entire partnership threw their support behind him. When he went on to raise another round of funding, he talked to each partner at least twice around his pitch strategy and more. “We rarely lose a deal if entrepreneurs do references on us,” says Hartenbaum. But what about August’s Limited Partners? It’s one thing to be beloved by founders, but what about the people that are counting on your returns? While August hasn’t pulled Instagram or WhatsApp into its portfolio, Hornik says that in the history of the fund, the firm has always “made people money” and outperformed the financial markets. “We just don’t talk about it,” he adds. There were some funds, like the 2000 fund, that was one of the best-performing funds of its time and some that haven’t performed as well as others. But it’s clear in talking to the partnership that creating blockbuster returns isn’t the primary focus. “Our legacy is Microsoft, Splunk, Sun, and Zulily, but just because you didn’t turn out only billion-dollar-plus businesses doesn’t mean that your aren’t making a difference and adding value,” explains Hornik. The firm is centered around the belief that it derives value from being helpful to companies, he says. “This isn’t about creating the best venture brand of all time.” Is the approach scalable? Probably not. But “the firm is not looking to scale,” says Mehra. Thirty-three years later, Marquardt still sits on the board of Microsoft, and the partners that have since joined all line up around one core principle: to be as helpful as possible to entrepreneurs. Spend real time with the partners, and you’ll be introduced to an ethos of “giving” that feels borderline spiritual. And while it’s one thing for a firm to have “giving” as their tagline, it’s quite another for a firm to spend decades building and operating with consistency and discipline around that core belief. While the industry has changed over the past few decades, their position has not. And the result is an outpouring of gratitude and loyalty from some of tech’s top entrepreneurs. When I first started writing at TechCrunch, I was taught that relationships don’t just lead to returns in the venture business — relationships are the return. If you believe that, then chalk one up for the good guys. |
Portland Gets One Step Closer To Getting Google Fiber | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 14 | In a few years time, when you come to , chances are that you will be able to subscribe to Google Fiber. Earlier this week, the city in allowing Google to expand its gigabit fiber network to “fiberhoods” in the city by approving a franchise agreement with the company. Google plans to invest over $300 million in this project, the Oregonian earlier this week, and because this is Portland, somebody has an IPA to celebrate the vote. Portland is part of Google’s wider expansion plan for Fiber, which it . In total, are on Google’s list. All of them are at different stages in the process of evaluating Fiber and working with Google, but it seems Portland has been moving the fastest so far (which makes me happy, because that’s where I retired to a long time ago). Besides the city of Portland itself, Google is also working with officials in the suburbs of Beaverton, Lake Oswego, Tigard, Gresham and Hillsboro (the home of Intel’s largest fabs). Unlike other franchise in the city, Google will not have to serve every neighborhood but will get to pick its own “fiberhoods” based on local demand, just like it did in its pilot markets . To illustrate the issues around local ISP monopolies, it’s also worth noting that potential subscribers in apartment buildings may not get to enjoy Fiber anytime soon. Because building owners have likely already signed agreements with existing cable providers, Google will have to negotiate with them separately to bring Fiber to those buildings (which in the case of Portland means some of its may actually be the last to get Fiber). Google, however, also plans to launch a city-wide WiFi network, so even those who can’t get access to Fiber itself will likely benefit from this project. It’s worth noting that Google itself has not made a final decision that it will actually build out Fiber in Portland — or any other city — yet. The company has always said that it would announce its next steps by the end of this year, but it seems unlikely that Google would jump through all of these bureaucratic hoops just to abandon the project in the end. |
Nutmeg Is The Answer To Your Sad, Gif-Free Existence | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 14 | Because I love you, I’ve interrupted my regularly scheduled Saturday morning programming to bring you this breaking news update: THERE IS A NEW APP IN THE APP STORE THAT MAKES SENDING GIFS IN TEXT MESSAGES SUPER EASY! It’s called Nutmeg, and it brings an experience similar to Giphy to mobile. When you first open the app, you’re given a set of responses, which include So Excited, Oh Hello, Ugh Fail, Awesome, and HaHaHa. Within each category are a set of gifs that fit those descriptions. When you click once on a gif, it plays. When you click twice, the app pushes you directly to the messaging app with the gif ready to be sent. Simply add a recipient and shoot it off. The app is brand new, and thus lacks a of selection, but the team is working to expand the offerings as we speak. The app also features a section at the top that focuses on current events. Right now, for example, the app has a World Cup section. If you’re itching to get your gif on, check out the app on the App Store . |
Pirate Radio, YouTubers And Video Games | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | , , , , . These and many more represent the new frontier of gaming media. They are episodic, usually comedic, shows. YouTubing (and similar through services like Twitch) has been gaining momentum for a while, but this year it seems to have broken through into the wider consciousness. Some channels have attained enormous followings and are starting to exert huge influence. Many indie developers report, for example, that YouTubing is far more successful in driving sales than the traditional PR/press machine. Many attribute the initial flocking of users of to YouTubers. Lots of folks have heard that PewDiePie is monetizing his 28m viewers to the tune of . Often the videos that YouTubers broadcast are less about journaling and more about community. plays it relatively straight for instance, providing deadpan lengthy previews, reviews and commentary about games. On the other hand, is more play-for-laughs in nature, and it’s these latter kinds of channel that attract the largest viewership. Viewers like to really see what’s under the hood of a game, but they also like to laugh along with The range of channels is also impressive. Many are made just for fun with no expectation of revenue of any kind. Some are more passion-projects devoted to certain aspects of games. For example, journalist Leigh Alexander produces a series called , wherein she plays obscure emulated Apple II games lost to time. YouTubing is very hip, very community-Internet, but it raises some difficult questions. In an article on Gamasutra earlier this week, Mike Rose asked , and while the general consensus seems to be “no”, the sentiment that it has become a key part of the landscape is undeniable. The games press and the industry it covers have long had a complex relationship. Like all media reporting there’s a persistent tension between serving the audience versus the paymasters, and those waters are often muddy. Access is valuable, thus the need to preserve it. Top games draw major traffic and big publishers pay for advertising on those same sites. Yet readers expect sincerity, and those forces are often at odds. So YouTubing could be characterized as the citizen journalism of gaming. Many YouTuber videos feel very raw compared to the canned essays that more official organizations create, and this sort of quasi-legitimate voice connects with millions of viewers because it acts and sounds like they do. This makes a variety of game makers pretty unhappy. The perception of many developers is that YouTubing is not really journalism, but rather pirate radio. In this vein the game is seen as content, and thus the idea that someone out there is re-broadcasting that content for laughs, and making lots of money from doing that, is wrong. Support for this position (or something approaching it) is pretty broad in the industry. One reason why is the sense that too much honesty is bad for business. For example many developers feel like they shouldn’t release demos for their games. The data tends to indicate that free levels or content because once players have seen the first few minutes of the game and scratched that itch, there’s no reason to buy. On the other hand games that feature sexy trailers but no demo sell very well: to scratch the itch the customer buys. So the relationship that games have had with video has long been about being showy without, if you’ll pardon the pun, giving the game away. From small indies through to major publishers, everyone tacitly understands that stoking the desire of sales is often best done by keeping the audience at one remove from the product, and the more cynically minded tend to think that everything that happens post-purchase is the buyer’s problem. Therefore they fear overexposure. Another reason is the perception of content ownership. Well-known indie developer Phil Fish tweeted that he believed YouTubers should for using his content. Nintendo went several steps further, first with legal injunctions and then the establishment of . Of course this perception is not universal, but it is curious how many game makers (and some fans) have this “broadcast” view of their work. They see it much as Metallica saw Napster et al in the 90s, and especially so the more successful they become. They essentially say “I made the content you’re using to make your show. Pay me.” When I asked on Twitter for some views on the issue, a game designer named Jeff Atom : if you assume that a game is made up of 3 components. Artwork, story, and interactivity, let’s plays have taken 2/3 of the game. But here’s thing with that: Hasbro may sell you a copy of and own the rights to it, but do they own the rights to you filming a session of played with your friends? That’s a stretch. We don’t see board game makers claiming that Will Wheaton’s show pay them for featuring their games, even though those shows can be very long and spoilerific. A 2.5 hour recorded session of isn’t “stealing it” to “make money from our work” through YouTube advertising. It’s covering, and therefore promoting, it. Paraphrasing what the Supreme Court said the other day , just because it’s on computer doesn’t mean that video games are different. A digital game is just as much a set of play pieces and rules as a board game or tabletop roleplaying game is. A play session of Phil Fish’s is not much as a play session of is not . This is where the analogy of pirate radio breaks down. Mojang may own , for example, but it would be hard pressed to claim that it owns all of the expressions of work made in . Rockstar may own , but it’s harder to claim with a straight face that it owns VanossGaming’s series. That would be like Microsoft claiming ownership of all Word documents. The fact that you’re viewing someone’s play of the game is not necessarily derivative. It could be construed as satire, for example, which enjoys special protection in most countries. It could even be construed as wholly creative work in some cases. It could be a function of unfamiliarity with YouTubers that leads publishers to fear the new and the strange, and in some cases it could be short-sighted greediness that makes a developer think he’s owed money from having his game covered, but it feels like more than that. Perhaps it’s about respect. The same game makers who feel a bit weird about YouTubers are generally very happy when gaming site Giant Bomb posts a “ ” of their game. What’s a quick look? A 20/30 minute length preview of the game complete with humorous commentary and side-conversations, just as is seen with many YouTubers. The difference is that the tone of the coverage is usually more favorable, less about poking fun. Developers like Fish are at least half-right. While it’s a bit of a stretch to try to tap as a source of revenue, it is true that much of YouTubing’s success is based on a liberal reading of intellectual property ownership combined with lax enforcement. At the very least devs should have some way to choose to opt-out of being YouTubed and not having their game spoiled. From a legal perspective the middle path seems to have much to do with sensible licensing. , a well-known video game lawyer and blogger, says this: As it happens, I wrote a guide to Let’s Play and the law . It’s drafted mainly for Let’s Players and only tangentially addresses the question of game developers’ stance on monetisation. It’s quite simple: if you want to support Let’s Play videos, use some simple (but legal) wording on your site. If you don’t want to have Let’s Play videos of your games, then have wording that says that instead. If you want to prohibit Let’s Plays temporarily (e.g. while a game is in closed beta) or if you want to have Let’s Plays only if the Let’s Player contacts you first to discuss terms, that’s OK too. Clearly though there might be questions about what those different kinds of words should say, so in the next couple of months I’ll prepare and release under Creative Commons some simple wording that devs can use for each kind of situation. I hope that will help. Mayhap. It certainly seems as though a boilerplate license, one that’s quickly referable by YouTubers and easily implemented by developers, would help. That way if the Phil Fish’s of this world didn’t want their game covered then they can say so easily. Combined with technologies like YouTube’s Content ID, hopefully a good middle course can be struck between the needs of the YouTuber audience to see the whole game and that of the developer to craft a package, leaving almost everyone happy. In looking at Let’s Play I’m moved to wonder whether we’ll soon see Let’s Learn, Let’s Tech, Let’s Read, Let’s Write and numerous other styles of community shows emerge. I also wonder whether we’ll start to see existing media, or even publishers, attempt to get in on the action by creating their own YouTuber channels. Whatever your take, there’s no denying that the YouTubers have opened the door to something very big. Right now they may be operating by the seat of their collective pants but they’re sitting on top of a massive asset. The prospects for what it might do are grand indeed. |
The Only Tragedy Of This War Is That One Day It Will End | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 6 | 14 | Did you know that the book publishing industry is at war with itself? No, wait, you’re a TechCrunch reader, wrong question. Did you know that the book publishing industry still exists? …This is kind of an awkward time for those of us who love both books and technology. It’s almost like you can’t cheer for both. This week’s example: the ongoing dirty war between Amazon and Hachette. Background: basically, traditional book retailers are doomed, and publishers are in trouble. In 2012, “ .” (2013 numbers aren’t yet available, which says a lot about traditional publishing right there, but I expect online purchases broke the 50% mark last year.) In the UK, e-books are “ .” And , and at the of the Nook, the e-reader on which Barnes & Noble had pinned its hopes. Now mighty Amazon is books published by Hachette, a tentacle of a megacorporation with a market cap of a mere few billion dollars. If that isn’t Goliath vs. David, I just don’t know what is! I’m torn, I tell you, torn. On the one hand, mine is an Amazon Prime household, and I have grown to view Amazon as an essential utility more than a company. On the other, when not writing software or TechCrunch columns, I , were published by Hodder & Stoughton, one of Hachette’s UK imprints, whose editors are, in my experience, intelligent people who treat authors well. (Alas I cannot say either of those things about my US publishers.) And yet I’m a techie who believes in doing things sensibly and efficiently, which means that the publishing industry seems to me like a shambling Rube Goldberg monstrosity which ought to be put out of its misery posthaste. The ran two Op-Eds about the Amazon-Hachette battle on the same day. of “engaging in predatory pricing, a violation of federal antitrust laws,” with a few passing words of regret for how Apple and the Big Five book publishers, um, settled with the Department of Justice after accusations of price fixing. (A bit awkward for our David-vs-Goliath narrative, that; as if David was coming off a season-long suspension for juicing.) The other Op-Ed : Unfortunately for the publishers, their brilliant idea turned out to be an illegal conspiracy … On some level, the book industry has never fit comfortably in the contours of big business. But over the years, as one house after another was bought by conglomerates, as they merged with each other, as they tried to increase profits with the kind of regularity that pleases Wall Street, they began the process of commoditizing books. Jeff Bezos? He’s only taking that process to its logical extreme. Bang on point. The publishing industry would like us to believe that what’s good for them is good for books and authors; but that’s not necessarily true. People are beginning to ask: “ ” and “ ” and also that the e-book royalty rates which the Big Five publishers pay to their authors are actually very low, especially compared to those paid by…er…Amazon. Could it be that authors will actually benefit from this war? Could it be that Jeff Bezos is actually on the side of the angels? So far so pass-the-popcorn good … except that virtually everybody, other than Stratechery ( ) and the great Charles Stross ( ) is completely missing what’s actually happening here, which is a shame, because a) it’s actually all about the technology, b) the irony is so sharp it could slit your throat. That longwinded lamentation in the asks, rhetorically, “How did Amazon attain such power? By providing valuable services?” No, you fool: . Remember, this battle is over e-book pricing; e-books are no longer the future of publishing, they are now the ; …and Amazon acquired their of the e-book market, at the expense of competition like the Nook, in large part by . I refer of course to . Publishers were so terrified that books would go Napster that they insisted that all e-book sales be locked down DRM, untransferable, trapped in the platform where they were purchased, … meaning that every single book they sold to a Kindle user sealed that user deeper into the Kindle ecosystem, lest they lose their entire purchased library. Kindle readers switch from Kindle to another platform, because . This inevitably triggered a rich-get-richer partitioning of e-book market share, which in turn led to today’s sterile domination. Amazon’s immense market power was, in large part, forced on it by the publishers, who are now shocked and appalled that Jeff Bezos is actually using the weapon they pressed into his hands and aimed at themselves. You have to admit, the irony is delicious. Kindle-published books don’t actually have to be DRMed. (I should know; as rights revert to me from publishers, , DRM-free.) And a few imprints, notably , have seen the light and no longer chain themselves to that sinking ship called DRM. But it’s probably too little, too late. Publishers could have fought to keep books DRM-free, but they were too terrified by the prospect of Napster-esque piracy; so now they’re trapped between that perceived Scylla and the very real Charybidis of Amazon, which essentially owns the (growing) e-book market, in addition to dominating the (shrinking) market for physical books. Despite my techie contempt for their business practices, I really do want traditional publishers to survive, because their employees — unlike, I suspect, Amazon’s — tend to genuinely love books in the same way that I do, and because good editors are worth their weight in gold. But it’s hard to see how they can thrive fighting like this. In the long run their only real hope is to disrupt the Kindle ecosystem with a paid subscription model — a “ ,” if you will. I’m not sure how successful that will be. Books are not like songs. But it’s hard to see where else their future lies. Never mind the current Amazon vs. Hachette skirmish; that’s just a sideshow. Book publishers essentially conceded their long war with Amazon before it ever began, without even knowing what they were doing. |
The Ring Of Fire: Of Pirates, Popcorn Time And Dynamic Pricing | Razmig Hovaghimian | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | At 36,007 feet up in the air, somewhere between Alaska and Russia, with the Aleutian Islands someplace below us, my child and I are sharing a blissful moment. My one-year-old is sleeping peacefully and I finally have an opportunity to catch up on Game of Thrones. I’m four episodes behind, and I need to what happened in that trial by combat. I would pay dearly for each episode during this rare window of time, high above the Aleutians, but that’s not even an option. It should be, though. It’s high time to bridge the gap between the needs of passionate fans and business. It’s not a zero-sum problem, so: Dear Studio Heads: I know you’re not fans of disrupting your tried and tested distribution model: international geo-blocks and distribution holdback windows for releasing new TV shows and movies. I don’t blame you. After all, a whole industry was built on carefully parsing out content rights. But technology and passionate fandom can be punishing, and it has led to an MPAA reported $20+ billion a year piracy problem for the top U.S. studios alone. Twenty-five percent of all Internet traffic now goes to piracy — 5X growth in the last five years — and that pace of growth is picking up fast. You’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ad campaigns teasing out your latest releases, and you’ve left us fans needing our fix. Your stuff is good! But instead of embracing pirates as fans, some of you turn to intimidation, threats of 10 years in jail, crackdowns, raids, eclipse attacks, hijacking browsers of paying customers, and on and on. Fun stuff. Pretty much all of your content is available online within a five-minute search anyway. Before bringing out the big guns, why not at least give fans the option to pay? The idea is simple: . What if we give fans a choice to access what they want, when, where, and how they want it, but pay what you want to charge them? I won’t get into how Apple nailed it or the headway that many other startups in the space are making, but it’s clear by now that access means a drop in piracy, and net growth in sales. Let’s briefly look at the possible macro implications of working with fans. An discovered that 432 million people worldwide “explicitly sought” copyright infringing content online. This was in January 2013, when the Internet population was a third smaller than it is today. Adjust for Internet adoption and about 10 percent growth in piracy every year, and we could be looking at 750 million fans a month. This doesn’t include those who searched for illegal content but didn’t go through with it. 750 million. And growing. That’s a third of the global online population. You don’t even have to find them. They find you. That’s the beauty of treating “pirates” as fans: untapped and concentrated demand. Beautiful. Now assume you convert 5 percent of them to pay users (some would argue that the number is closer to 50 percent). Besides the NBCU study, a great deal of data shows that pirates would consider paying if they had a reasonably priced option, Australia aside as of now—don’t ask. That’s 37.5 million people. We’re talking about the size of Netflix here. Now imagine if each of them generates a $5 ARPU (some can pay $1, and some $100) per month, and the revenues go into the billions. Even at 1 percent conversion, it’s huge. Geo-block and leave out the 15 percent of them that are in the U.S., and that’s still huge; and additive, where you don’t trade volume for margin. is a manifestation of this massive demand, for what people really want. The platform is clean-cut, with one-click streaming of top shows. The kicker is that all the effort is crowdsourced for the fans, by the fans. You don’t have to search for torrent files or figure out how to play them anymore. It’s simpler than Netflix or HBO Go even. Pirates are even disrupting themselves. Why not use a Popcorn Time-like technology and add dynamic pricing to create a market-clearing price for your content? At a product level, think of Popcorn Time, but with variable prices and holdback windows that you get to control. Fans just pay for what they want per video stream. No ads, no subscriptions, and you can block any country you want, especially where theatre chains and cable companies still take you hostage. As an out, you can also choose to leave out some of your flagship titles (or recent seasons) until the economics make sense. If you want to be adventurous, you can even start with content that is already illegally available online and just gate it. The idea is neither a first nor is it novel. It’s just the right time. Dynamic pricing isn’t that complex, either. Take a page out of the e-commerce playbook and adjust for dozens of variables, from content recency, to country of viewership, to competitor pricing, to social chatter, to the number of torrents seeded or leeched, to the quality of the original video file, among many others. You can also track search terms and adjust prices in anticipation, or even involve the search giants to seed pay users and give them a cut. Both sides would win. You’d need kick-ass data scientists, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you get a world-class team of volunteers lined up to work on it. Would some fans pay $100 for a season of Game Of Thrones in a country where HBO is not available? Maybe. Would fans pay $50 for a simulcast of a new release if they’re in Asia? Likely. How about $10 for a six-month-old title still not on Netflix? Yeah, for sure. Or two dollars in India? Yes, if not more. Here’s a fairly fresh example for just one show: BBC’s Happy Valley was the No. 1 global trending topic on Twitter recently, yet one couldn’t see it outside of the UK. Six million people watched it in a week. That’s 10 percent of the UK population. How would it have done had it been available with dynamic pricing, even after the UK broadcast ended, at $30 for the series of six episodes? Probably way more than they will make from the DVD (hint) sales that will be available this week. In order for it to work, when and where you choose to make the content available, you have to go all in — with your latest and greatest shows, starting at the head of the curve. Make some of your long tail shows, which you’re not monetizing anyway, available for free even, so you can up-sell fans on your newer shows. When you fine-tune this model, no part of it would be net cannibalizing to your existing revenue base. Let technology help you reduce theft, reach new fans, and in the process, increase the size of the revenue pie for all involved in making your great content. There are convenient reasons to say no, from the fear of setting a precedent of negotiating with pirates, to “breaking” what’s working, or creating price transparency. You may even view this as your Zugzwang (in chess terms, as I know you play the long game); you’d rather pass when it’s your turn, than make a move that would put you at a disadvantage. Coming from both the studio and technology sides, let alone as a fan, I worry that the only wrong move here is not moving at all. You are fighting your adoring fans, especially fans that on average pay far more for your content than any other group. You turn them off, and that could be catastrophic. When we spoke about this in L.A. last month, Mr. Head of Antipiracy at “Studio X”, I felt we agreed, at least privately, that with calculated availability, not only can you eat into piracy, but also unlock significant revenues in the process. You know who you are. Take the leap, man. Open this up. It may take just one “yes” to start. Okay, don’t open up U.S. rights, and don’t even shrink the international distribution windows for your core markets, but at least give us the rest of the world. I don’t even mind waiting weeks for what I love. Studios and fans *are* actually on the same side. We’ve discussed this for years, and I’ve seen your cards. It’s time. This “winter” is coming. To the rest of us: keep embracing the madness and connecting the dots. Signing out from the northernmost part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the Aleutians, Silicon Valley and Hollywood connect. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 13 | null |
A16z Invests $90 Million In Tanium, An Enterprise Systems Management Startup | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | on Twitter. The firm is investing $90 million in , an enterprise security and system management startup which lets IT control an entire network using natural language in a search engine-like interface. Here’s how Andreessen Horowitz board partner Steven Sinofsky describes the software in a : Orion popped open his laptop and navigated to Tanium’s web-based “console”. At the top of the screen, we saw a single edit control like you’d see for a search engine. He started typing in natural language questions such as “show computers where CPU > 75%” and “show computers with a process named WINWORD.EXE”. Within seconds — just like using search — a list of computers scrolled by as though it were an existing spreadsheet or report. Sinofsky goes on to explain what that enables you to do: You can literally ask almost anything of an endpoint — such as configuration, patch status, software inventory compliance, performance, reliability measures, telemetry, network activity, files, and more (basically anything you can ask of a running system) — and get answers back in seconds. Not only can you ask questions, but you can take actions as well: distribute and install updates, shut down processes or executables, remove or quarantine files, and so on. All of this happens in seconds, across your entire network of endpoints, across LAN segments and the WAN, from branch offices to headquarters to the data center. You can watch Tanium CTO Orion Hindi give a demo of Tanium’s software in the video below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDMCKWN9VJ8 In the tweet announcing the investment, Andreessen noted that it was the since the company was founded in 2007. notes that the startup was already profitable (explaining how the company managed to not raise any venture capital for seven years) and operating at full scale, with “dozens of customers in massive, mission-critical, and global deployments.” An Andreessen Horowitz spokesperson sent TechCrunch the following statement: Tanium wanted to make sure that the product was rock solid before announcing it publicly. They operated without a sales or marketing staff for five years, and instead focused their time, energy and resources on building an incredible tool for enterprise systems management. That said, Tanium has hundreds of customers right now, all of which you can find on the Forbes 1000 or the Global 2000. The company works with large, established enterprises across a range of verticals, including banking and finance, telecommunications and retail. |
Bing Looks Abroad | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | Microsoft is working to expand Bing’s international footprint. A , , speaks plainly: “Bing is embarking on the most ambitious geographic and product expansion in its history.” Well then. Microsoft hasn’t taken down the listing, so it’s likely not too concerned about having its plans aired publicly. What this signifies is that Microsoft is not backing down from its services strategy. Bing, along with other online products, have long been for their parent company. Microsoft had plodded along all the same. Search is an interesting area in tech. As technology companies , search has a relatively low number of protagonists. There are essentially two general players — Google and Microsoft — and niche participants that focus on a differentiation point — privacy, natural language procession, and so forth. Apple has a stab in play with Siri, which competes with Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Google Now. But when it comes down to broad, web search efforts, Google and Microsoft are somewhat alone. Not that that is all Bing is to Microsoft. It’s the company’s search layer that it hopes to leverage across its platform. But it is useful to recall that Bing does challenge Google’s core offering. What is Bing up to? Neowin’s take, based on the view that Bing abroad has been a “second-class experience,” summarizes the news thusly: This is not a simple expansion either as Microsoft is going all-in on bringing local content to these new markets. The job posting says that the successful candidate will be required to ‘drive and execute strategic partnerships and tactical deals in key search distribution and content areas (which may include local, shopping, entertainment, music, books, video, social, news and apps), for the web, mobile/tablets, Xbox and other devices.’ While the project appears to be in its infancy, seeing how quickly Microsoft has been rolling out in other products, we are quietly hopeful that these markets will get content sooner, rather than later. It’s certainly true a large chunk of the technology press looks at their industry with a US-focused lens. I can’t confess to having tested Bing much outside the country while traveling. For now, Microsoft is staying the course, building a wide set of services that reach across technological silos. The company still isn’t much at social — Xbox Live aside — but it seems that on other key areas Redmond is refusing to give up. |
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