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Control VR Opens The Door To Virtual Offices | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | is a startup which has created a wearable system that captures precise motion data for virtual reality applications. On its (which has raised $388,000, or more than 150% of its goal with 13 days left to go) the most intriguing use shown for its gloves and armbands is using its exact finger-digit tracking to simulate a keyboard in virtual reality, which could open the door to a number of productive VR applications beyond gaming and teleconferencing. The control schemes available for use with virtual reality headsets like the are great for gaming or other experiences where you’re mostly just moving around in your environment. You basically only need an analog stick or direction pad to control movement and a few buttons to control interactions with the environment or to bring up menus. But some of the more useful applications for virtual reality, like being able to use a vast number of virtual displays instead of being limited by the number of physical monitors you own, don’t work too well with complicated physical controls like keyboards because you can’t see what buttons you’re pushing. Take a look at this photo of Andreessen Horowitz board partner Steven Sinofsky testing out a Bloomberg terminal in virtual reality, for example: Look, a prototype of Bloomberg on Oculus… infinite monitors on your desk… — Roy Bahat (@roybahat) You could have a vast amount of information available to you in a VR office, but it would be relatively difficult to be productive with it using only a mouse and the keystrokes you can memorize. With the ability to finely track finger location and movement, you could bring up a keyboard in the virtual space and forgo the hardware altogether. Just as the iPhone dropped most hardware buttons for a screen that could only show the buttons you need at any given time, virtual interfaces could be built specifically for each application from familiar gestures. Control VR CEO and co-founder Alex Sarnoff thinks that its wearables working in concert with the cameras that will come with Oculus Rift and its ilk will enable these kinds of interfaces. In an interview via email, he told me: The sensors and software we use provide for incredibly accurate clean data and are a testament to many years of research, development and progress by our founders. “Virtual Office” is an application we are extremely excited to see come to fruition. The input solution virtual reality needs for perfect accuracy will be a combination of our wearable technology combined with data from the camera supplied with headsets. Of course, virtual reality headsets have nowhere near the market penetration for most offices to consider putting anyone into a virtual environment any time soon. To appeal to the gamer crowd that Oculus and Sony (with ) are going after, Control VR also shows several other uses for its sensors, including an Iron Man-style flight simulator (and an unfortunate amount of virtual beer pong):
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Someone Made A TechCrunch Parody Site And It’s Hilarious | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | Something odd popped up in my Facebook Newsfeed over the weekend: Notice the link in this post says “Trapcrunch.com.” Someone went and launched an Onion-like imitation of . , a clear parody to TechCrunch, claims in its tagline to be, “Breaking technology news from verified sources.” The site was just 10 days ago by someone who might live near the Lower Nob Hill portion of San Francisco. Just follow link and you can get a contact for the person behind the site ( Update: Verified). There are just 5 articles up on the site so far, with silly titles like “ ” and, “ ” The style and content of the site are clearly poking fun at TechCrunch. The latest, that aforementioned “Hey” article, seems to be a jab at our “Yo” coverage storm this last week. According to inner sources, Hey was designed and coded overnight by Mr. Zuckerberg himself. It’s dead simple: click on a friend’s name and he instantly receives a notification saying “Hey” from you. Hey. That’s all. Trapcrunch even incorporates the same green and white colors and layout as us. Just look at the “T” and “C” in the TrapCrunch logo. It’s practically the same but with the colors reversed.. TechCrunch is pretty much synonymous with what people think of Silicon Valley and tech blogging. Even HBO’s Silicon Valley refers to us throughout the show. Producers replicated an entire conference in studio that made plenty of folks wonder if they’d actually filmed the show at Disrupt: This is not the first time to our site, of course. Some of you may recall a mirror spoof that fooled a lot of people into thinking Andreesen Horowitz bought Y Combinator a few months back. We also have a parody on Twitter.
However, TrapCrunch is the most elaborate form of imitation we’ve seen so far. Personally, I have to applaud their effort. Satire is not as easy as it seems and there are plenty of Onion-like imitations out there to prove it. We could take this imitation as a blatant dig on what we do here. But you know what “they” say – imitation is the sincerest form of flattery you can get. |
Google Invests $50 Million In “Made With Code” Program To Get Girls Excited About CS | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | This week, Google launched a new initiative called Made With Code, aimed at getting young women excited about learning to code and close the gender gap in the tech industry. The idea behind it is to show young girls that the things they love, from apps on their smartphones to their favorite movies are made with code, and they can apply the skills they learn to their own individual passions. Google is investing $50 million into the program over the next three years, and Made With Code has a host of partners to help foster the community including Chelsea Clinton, Mindy Kaling, MIT Media Lab, Girl Scouts of the USA, Girls Inc., Girls Who Code, the National Center for Women and Information Technology, and TechCrunch as a media partner. The Made With Code website will offer resources and projects for kids to learn how to code, communities to discuss different lessons and projects with each other and mentors, as well as information about regional events. This is all in an effort to get women in the driver seat when it comes to the technology of the future. Looking at the numbers, women have actually lost ground when it comes to getting Computer Science degrees in the U.S. Google X EVP Megan Smith explained that there are a number of factors that can turn this around, all of which are well within our grasp. The first is to encourage young girls to try coding, even if the person doing the encouraging isn’t technical. “You don’t have to know how to code to encourage someone else to code.” Smith also identified that for some girls, there isn’t a clear avenue to try coding, and that there are no heroes for girls to look up to. Even in television shows, men are represented as the computer scientists far more than women. Made With Code looks to solve these problems, as well as encourage others to take steps to encourage young girls to try coding, and give them people to aspire to be like. We checked out the launch event and spoke with the people involved, which you can see in the video below. |
A Tale Of Two Patents: Why Facebook Can’t Clone Snapchat | Billy Gallagher | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | , its second attempt at an impermanent sharing app, last Tuesday. The app borrows heavily, in concept and features, from Snapchat, as well as smaller startups like Frontback and Look. Slingshot and the same photo and video recording interface–a very user friendly mechanism where you tap the main button to take a picture, and hold that button to record a video. There’s just one problem: Facebook may be violating , that was approved over a year ago. Representatives from both Facebook and Snapchat declined to comment for this story, but the patent appears to describe the way both companies’ apps record media: “An electronic device includes digital image sensors to capture visual media, a display to present the visual media from the digital image sensors and a touch controller to identify haptic contact engagement, haptic contact persistence and haptic contact release on the display. A visual media capture controller alternately records the visual media as a photograph or a video based upon an evaluation of the time period between the haptic contact engagement and the haptic contact release.” To some extent, this copying is commonplace in a playing field where ideas and features overlap significantly. But Snapchat isn’t the only startup involved with a patent claim. debuted the idea of a messaging app in which people have to send back content to view friends’ messages at the TechCrunch Los Angeles Pitch-Off, which it won. Look’s website has a “patent pending” sticker near the top; while Look CEO Megel Brown wouldn’t comment directly on whether Facebook violates Look’s patent application, he did note, “We never imagined Facebook would use our messaging mechanic to compete with Snapchat. Neither company has reached out to us. However, we have been in contact with a major Silicon Valley player about our app after Facebook initially released and pulled their app from the App Store.” A second Snapchat patent may show how each company thinks about this space–and why I believe Snapchat will continue to beat Facebook. The patent, describes the way users view content in Snapchat Stories. Particularly, when you view another user’s story, Snapchat only shows you content you haven’t seen yet: “A computer implemented method includes allowing a user to access a user-controlled social network profile page with posts in a specified order. A user is permitted to traverse an interface element across the specified order to establish a set position for the interface element. Access to posts is provided on a first side of the set position to define a viewable profile. Access to posts is blocked on a second side of the set position to define a non-viewable profile.” The most interesting aspect of the patent? It was filed on November 8, 2012. So, when , Poke, on December 22, 2012, Snapchat was already thinking far ahead. with better design and more features, but failed to gain traction. While Poke struggled to gain any traction (and was eventually pulled from the app store), Snapchat pushed on, in October 2013. Now, less than a year after its debut, Stories are viewed more per day than direct Snaps; Snapchat are viewed per day, up from 500 million per day just a couple of months ago. In creating Stories, Snapchat created two complementary content silos: messaging and Stories. By having both direct, private one-to-one sharing, and public but not permanent sharing, Snapchat has captured users’ attention and an enormous amount of content. The dual silos also make it much harder for companies like Apple and Facebook to simply bake in an ephemeral element to their messaging apps to defeat Snapchat. After failing with Poke and failing to acquire Snapchat, Facebook is now trying with Slingshot. Some aspects of Slingshot are great–Facebook is finally trying to put its own spin on an ephemeral experience rather than just copying another app. But the forced reply is simply awful. The content on Slingshot is boring, and I think a lot of this can be attributed to the requirement that you send someone back a picture before viewing their picture. Once again, Facebook has launched an app aimed at the Snapchat of today, while Snapchat looks to tomorrow. On the same day that Facebook launched Slingshot, Snapchat called : “When we introduced My Story we never could have imagined how powerful it would be to string those moments together into a narrative. We love watching the day unfold with our friends. But My Story has always represented a singular, personal experience. We wanted to build something that offered a community perspective – lots of different points of view. After all, our friends often see the same things in totally different ways. We built Our Story so that Snapchatters who are at the same event location can contribute Snaps to the same Story. If you can’t make it to an event, watching Our Story makes you feel like you’re right there!” Snapchat only piloted Our Story at the EDC music festival in Las Vegas for this weekend, but it’s clear they have ambitions to try this out in some greater capacity. Our Story was well received on social media and . The medium is intriguing and could grow in a number of directions; EDC’s Our Story was location based, so only people at the event could add Snaps to it. This model could do very well for everything from major events like concerts and sports events, to way smaller networks like a party. Snapchat could also let users create “Our Story” with a small group of friends, bound by self-moderation of who can add content rather than geography. Our Story would also be very easy to monetize, as Snapchat could merely slip a few advertisements into a long stream of content; and users can tap any Snap to move on to the next one–for advertising, this could work a lot like YouTube’s skip button for ads. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZeDPfHiBC8] One of the most undercovered strengths of Snapchat is the sheer quantity of video shared on the platform. While Instagram, Vine, and others vie for control of public video sharing, users are sharing crazy amounts of video both in messaging and on Snapchat Stories. Facebook needs a way to counter that–and I’m not at all convinced Slingshot is a successful response. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if Facebook can legally clone the features and technology of Snapchat. Snapchat’s patents may just make that harder. What the patents really show us is how far ahead Snapchat and Spiegel are so far in thinking about ephemerality. Duds like Slingshot show why Facebook is willing to shell out billions for Snapchat. And if video continues growing on Snapchat, and Our Story can do well, that price tag will rise. Significantly. |
Heartbleed Isn’t Dead Yet | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | There’s a really good reason why security researchers were so spooked by the Heartbleed bug: there’s just no silver bullet. Even if we somehow banded together to get of the world’s systems patched, a chunk of the Internet would likely be left vulnerable. Sure enough, Heartbleed beats on. (Not sure what Heartbleed is? Need a refresher course? ) First, the good news: when word of the Heartbleed vulnerability first hit, a scan by security firm Errata turned up 600,000 vulnerable servers. Within a month, as all of the major sites and web hosts rushed to patch things up, that number had plummeted to 318,239. That’s nearly 50%! The bad news: another month later, the pin has stopped moving. 75 days after the disclosure of Heartbleed, still finds 309,197 vulnerable servers. That’s an improvement of in month 2. Progress is progress — but at this point, progress has seemingly plateaued. What this means, oversimplified: while almost all of the Internet’s most popular sites (the top 1000 or so — the biggest, most obvious targets for attackers) are no longer vulnerable, lots and lots of smaller sites/systems are still at risk. And based on the patch rate just 2 months later, after the appropriately huge hype surrounding the bug has tapered, that… probably won’t ever change. What can you do, as a user? The best thing is to be particularly strict about your security practices. Avoid logging into older, less-maintained sites that haven’t confirmed that they’re patched against Heartbleed. Most importantly, perhaps, is to use a different password everywhere. That way, if logging into some tiny, long-abandoned forum leads to your password being exposed, you’re not exposing all of your other accounts too. |
The Term Sheet Mating Dance | William Hsu | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | There is no word more sacred and yet over-used than “term sheet” in the entrepreneurial circle. The pursuit of the mythical VC term sheet has blinded entrepreneurs from the real goal of building a business: revenue, customers, users, engagement and retention. Securing a term sheet is about more than money — more than survival. It’s validation. It’s the exact moment when the entrepreneur, the beggar, turns into the auctioneer of precious equity. It is, in the immortal words of Mark Zuckerberg, when a struggling entrepreneur gets to turn the table and declare to the world, “I’m the CEO, bitch.” It turns out there is a big difference between the technical “terms” of a term sheet and the complicated dance of actually receiving/procuring/pillaring a term sheet. From what I’ve learned over the years as an entrepreneur and now as a VC, the mating dance of term sheets can be put into a few genotypes. If they actually teach in business school how this game is supposed to work, they would tell you that the scenario goes something like this: You have a catch-up with your favorite VC at a coffee shop. You get invited to meet a partner, then it becomes more than one partner in the next three to four meetings, all still casual and friendly. The lead partner makes a call to confirm mutual interest. Then there’s an early Monday morning presentation in front of all the partners and ! You receive a “clean” term sheet in the inbox just slightly below the expected valuation within 24 hours. A couple more calls are made to increase the valuation 20 percent. There’s a handshake and you sign on the dotted line another 24 hours later. Unfortunately only a small percentage of transactions actually fit this mold. VCs, like teenagers, do not want it widely known that they got rejected by the hot girl/guy entrepreneur at school. Nothing is worse than writing a term sheet and having an entrepreneur “shop” the offer to another firm he or she would rather work with … and then having the girl/guy entrepreneur blather about it to all their friends. Why put yourself out there with a printed term sheet that can be framed and memorialized as a permanent record of having been “passed” by an entrepreneur? Instead, many VCs do everything they can to make sure no trace of having made an actual offer exists. (Snapchats for term sheets?) Some will write a term sheet but only deliver it by hand. They show up to the company’s office as a team – usually at least five people deep – from an associate up to the main partner (aka the one who blogs), and just for effect, some random famous guy (it’s MC Hammer!) to create some shock and awe. They will not leave until the founder signs their term sheet. At the end of the stalemate, they will walk away and take the unsigned term sheet with them. Without the actual piece of paper, no one could ever prove it ever happened – at least so they think. Some VCs like to just flirt. I’m never sure if it’s because they are afraid of straight-out rejection or they like to play the field. Either way, it’s a never-ending cycle of meetings, catch-ups, lunches, coffees, and even drinks … but at no point can you actually nail down whether he or she is actually planning to write a term sheet or simply enjoying your company. Sometimes the term sheet might actually be “on the way” but always needing another “catch-up” before appearing out of thin air. Is this actually considered “getting a term sheet?” I don’t know. Maybe it’s the VC version of the friend zone. This one starts out exactly like the case study. Everything goes according to plan. “We are definitely interested/excited/committed to working together,” is muttered constantly by everyone on the deal team. Except that some junior “partner” is making the last round of customer reference checks or finishing up a cohort retention analysis. Some agreement has already been reached around valuation, e.g. “mid teens” or “high forties.” A promise is made that a term sheet will be coming after the weekend, except when Monday comes, no term sheet, just a voicemail to call the lead partner back. Some deals are just hot. The word has already spread that the entrepreneur has multiple term sheets; in fact two partners at Sequoia are fighting to lead the deal. Even though it’s only coffee, the VC shows up with a term sheet in hand and is already negotiating against himself/herself hesitantly handing it over to the entrepreneur – afraid of insulting the entrepreneur. There is no shame in begging – sometimes being direct is the only strategy left. Entrepreneurs do it all the time; VCs know how it works, too. For the entrepreneur, it’s good to be king. The entrepreneur has such a great business model and execution that she actually doesn’t need capital. The entrepreneur rarely talks to VCs. In fact, she completely ignores all LinkedIn requests from anyone with “venture” or “capital” on his LinkedIn profile. If a VC gets frustrated enough, he might actually write the “ad-lib” version of a term sheet — basically a term sheet with blanks for key things like valuation, essentially telling the entrepreneur that she can decide the terms of the engagement. I’ve only heard of this a couple of times in the last three years I’ve been investing. I hope to witness it one day or maybe even try it out myself. I understand the gripe entrepreneurs have about this complicated mating dance. I don’t blame them. Not when the fundraising process continues to be a black box. Not when high school dating rules of engagement seem more decipherable than getting money from a VC. Not when there is only a tenuous connection between fundraising success and real customer satisfaction, retention, and engagement especially at the early stages. Not when hype and blog posts have as much correlation on valuation as revenue. Do I blame the VCs for creating this song and dance? Not really. If investing were a science, then we wouldn’t need to second-guess ourselves or rely on others to give us additional data points. If we could project the 10-year future of a company with today’s numbers, we would be able to hang out at Bucks and just gossip every other day. In the end, we are players in this game just like the entrepreneurs. In the immortal words of Ice-T, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” |
Why Apple Dropped Yahoo For Its Weather App In iOS 8 | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | On Friday, into the maneuvers that led to . That’s a huge loss, considering Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s efforts to Yahoo had basically been acting as a go-between all this time, repackaging data from The Weather Channel. But the Weather Channel wasn’t providing Yahoo with everything at its disposal, so its CEO David Kenny was able to step up and offer better location-aware weather data, and forecasts reaching farther into the future, directly to Apple. This is an unfortunate loss for Yahoo, as the company’s leadership had hoped to tighten its relationship with Apple A bold undertaking, considering Yahoo isn’t particularly well-known for its search technology and that That hasn’t stopped Mayer from trying. Two major internal projects, aimed to make the company’s technology competitive in the algorithmic search and search advertising arenas. The company has also been partnering with companies like The effects of Yahoo’s efforts have only recently started to pop up in its major apps — thanks to some of its search acquisitions, , greatly expanding the amount of content that’s searchable on the network. Even though its technology is improving, Yahoo doesn’t seem to be in a great position to become the default search engine in iOS any time soon. Its biggest problem is that Apple has been forming data partnerships of its own since Siri’s launch in 2011. There’s no need to go to Yahoo when Apple can just go straight to Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB and cut out any go-betweens. In fact, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that in the future: it’s been acting as a middleman for the data in the iOS Stocks app for years, a precarious position considering the many sources available for market information. Ironically, the company most likely to take over search in iOS is long-time Yahoo search partner Microsoft. The new puts Bing at the center of Apple’s desktop user experience while seamlessly drawing in data from many of the same sources as Apple uses for Siri. With that in mind, it seems like Yahoo ending its arrangement with Microsoft in order to expand its own search offering would be ill-advised, to put it mildly. |
Apple Might Finally Solve Photo Storage Hell | Brenden Mulligan | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | We take a bazillion photos with our phones and digital cameras. The digital images mostly just sit, clogging up our hard drive(s). This has been a problem for as long as digital photography has existed and it’s getting worse. Camera resolutions are getting bigger and with it, the file sizes of our digital photos are growing. Although many companies have taken a crack at this problem, I think Apple’s upcoming iCloud Photo Library could be the perfect solution — if they do it right. I currently have a 100GB iPhoto library on my Macbook Air’s 250GB hard drive. I look at the photos approximately never. But I’m not going to delete them. They’re my memories, and even though I don’t look at them often, I want to preserve them. I could move them to an external drive or cloud storage, but keeping an iPhoto library on an external drive can be messy. I have them backed up through , but that requires I still keep them on my computer. Same with Dropbox (without more advanced configuration). The point is, there isn’t a turnkey solution to: Sure I could design a complicated storage solution for myself, but most users won’t do that. Over the past four years, a bunch of startups have tried to solve part of this problem. had a nice solution but went into the deadpool last year. was scooped up by Dropbox early and is now . was acquired by Shutterfly. And a few more never made much of a splash. In my opinion, no one has done it right. In 2011, I prototyped a solution. It was called . It worked by: The business model was simple: Users would pay for the service according to how many photos they saved. I was so compelled by the idea that I put a concept pitch together and sent it to some friends. The feedback on the idea was positive. People agreed the problem existed and this would be a great solution to it, but ultimately I decided to not build Photobank for the following reasons: I don’t think people are willing to pay for photo storage on top of their normal file storage. That led me to the conclusion that if anyone was going to solve this problem, it had to be Apple, Google or Dropbox. Users need to understand value from a service in order to pay for it. Dropbox and Evernote users experience the magic of the services slowly and usually only need to pay when they’re already hooked (because they’re using it so much they run out of space). With Photobank, users wouldn’t get it until their entire photo library was imported. This is a huge load for the service for each user and would be really hard to scale. There were already enough players in the space and I wanted to see how things shook out over the next few months before diving into the idea. Personally, the most compelling part of Photobank was the collaboration aspect. But the way I wanted collaboration to work would only happen if a user’s social graph was already storing all their photos on Photobank. That kind of saturation would take a long time, and I didn’t want to wait for that hurdle for users to access the collaboration features. Instead, I co-founded to focus purely on aspects of photo collaboration and left solving the storage problem behind. At WWDC 2014, to its Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, a service that claims to be the ultimate backup system: This sounds amazing, but it sounds like it’s limited to iOS devices, which doesn’t solve the problem of my computer being full of photos. However, Apple also announced a , which seems like it’ll eventually be an iPhoto replacement for the desktop. This has me hopeful that they might be closer to building something actually worth paying for. Knowing that Apple is moving in the right direction, I wanted to put together a brief wish list for the iCloud Photo Library. As you’ll see, my hope is that the service isn’t much different from what I initially envisioned for Photobank. Here’s how it would work: If they set it up this way, photos would no longer clog up my hard drive, always be safely backed up, and completely accessible whenever I wanted. A dream come true. As for the expense, Apple has already announced very reasonable new iCloud pricing; $50/year for 200GB is great. For comparison, . This is my hope for iCloud Photo Library. I have a feeling it’ll be a fraction of this at first, but over time grow into the service I’ve always wanted. Although this would obviously only work for people who have adopted the Apple ecosystem, I think it could be one of the most straightforward, turnkey solutions that could exist, and would be very appealing to Apple’s entire customer base. |
#Love: Hacking Social Isolation | Contributor | 2,014 | 6 | 22 | is a clinical psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. For professional inquiries, visit her website The evolution of technology into our everyday lives is allowing us to do things more efficiently than ever. The act of finding, experiencing and ending relationships is all now widely available at the touch of a finger to a screen. For many of us, that’s a good (if not great!) thing. We enjoy curbing at least some of our social needs with the app(s) of our choice. We feel socially connected scrolling through people’s blogs, tweets, updates, photos, comments and texts. Online engagement gives us a chance to be creative, indulge our interests, explore new tech developments, and interact with people in ways we don’t in real life. We appreciate how technology lets us avoid awkward first encounters, sidestep uncomfortable topics, and avoid people’s reactions. Want to end a connection that’s taken a turn for the worse? A response isn’t even necessary- voila! No response says it all. Tech developers profit on people’s desire for new, lightweight ways to communicate. The new million dollar app YO lets users communicate the same generic ‘yo’ message to anyone, leaving it up the receiver to infer meaning. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) social psychologist Sherry Turkle’s book, “Alone Together” explores the ways online social networks and texting culture are changing how people relate to society, their family and friends. Turkle maintains that people who spend the majority of their time online are more isolated than ever in their non-virtual lives, leading to emotional disconnection, depression and anxiety. As a clinical psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area work, I work with generation Y folks struggling with how to navigate face-to-face social interactions, and manage feelings of confusion and insecurity in response to their ephemeral online relationships. The trend of avoiding the emotional risk associated with live encounters has become wide-spread. Jason, age 25, in treatment for mild depression and social anxiety speculates “why would I want to go outside and try to meet random people that will most definitely reject me? Nobody talks to anyone in person these days, not even the people they DO know and like already. I have a better chance of meeting new people from my couch with my iPhone. Plus, my Netflix queue won’t watch itself you know.” Natalie, age 27, in treatment for panic disorder, struggles to manage her symptoms in response to dating, both on and offline. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to think when the guy I’m dating is ‘online now’ whenever I check his profile on the site where we met. When we’re actually together I can’t stop thinking about it, and it’s totally undermining my confidence. I feel like a loser for checking and there’s no way in hell I’m going to ask him about it.” So what can we do when it feels impossible to meet people offline, or enjoy actual, in person experiences together? People use carefully selected profile pics and behave differently online, showing others only a fraction of who they actually are in real life. Accept that difference, and learn to appreciate the wholeness of real people. Whole people are the foundation and currency of real intimacy and lasting relationships, not online profiles. Even if you have a popular profile with tons of views, it’s not your profile that feels lonely and bored, it’s YOU. Start paying more attention to your life offline, invest in real time activities and the people around you for the purpose of enjoyment rather than the chance to ‘share it’ online. It’s going to feel uncomfortable or unnatural at times, and that’s normal and healthy. When your eyes are constantly glued to your screen and your ears are filled with earbuds, you’re missing out on the subtle cues around you that could lead to opportunities to connect in person. They are there. A first smile, a second glance, or someone who’s come in close proximity for a brief conversation waiting to happen are all opportunities to build your social world. Watch others who initiate and sustain conversation and make acquaintances with people around them. Consider using a few of the techniques they use. Comfort and confidence comes with real-life practice. Small steps helps take the edge off the anxiety you’ll feel from taking interpersonal risks. No one dies from feeling awkward, it just feels like it. Deciding you don’t want to first, as a way to avoid the sting of that rejection won’t help you increase intimacy, it will only keep you isolated. Caring less can feel like a contest. Winning at it is actually losing a chance at real intimacy. I promise, the internet will be there when you get home. Appreciate the difference between ‘missing out’ on what’s happening online versus ‘missing out’ on real life experiences. Pay attention to the pace that other people are opening up to you in real life and try to match them. While feeling vulnerable and at risk for being judged can be hard to tolerate, being preoccupied with your own feelings can prevent you from connecting with others. You’re more likely to build friendships with people you come into contact with regularly. Starting and sustaining conversations with them in person becomes easier when you’re sharing a mutual experience. It’s incredibly easy to jump to conclusions about a person’s intentions when online communication is vague, and time stamps, online activity and other evidence are all visible for the world to see. If there are inconsistencies that you are worried about, be patient. Sooner or later you’ll have more information, and will see patterns that can help you make a decision about investing more time and energy in an offline relationship. |
Bio-Tech Startup WISErg Raises $5M To Brings Its Food Waste Recycler To California | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | , a bio-tech company that recycles discarded food into organic fertilizer while harvesting data from the scraps, announced today that it has raised a Series B round of $5 million from private investors. This brings the total WISErg has raised to $7.75 million and will allow the Redmond, Wash.-based company to expand into California. WISErg makes food recycling units called Harvester which are currently used by stores in the Puget Sound area of Washington, including branches of Whole Foods Market, Town & Country Markets, PCC Natural Markets, and Red Apple Markets. The Harvester processes scraps from meat, seafood, deli, and produce department, and turns them into organic fertilizers that is then sold to commercial farmers and retail customers. The Harvester also collects information about the food scraps so businesses can better manage their inventory. CEO Larry LeSueur told me in an email that the majority — or 80 percent — of food scraps end up in landfills. “Until the Harvester, grocers who wanted to do something more sustainable with food scraps often turned to composters. But that approach has inherent problems. We believe the Harvester is best suited to reduce the amount of discarded or wasted food destined for landfills and to capture reusable nutrients from it. Unlike traditional composters that simply concentrate on decomposing material, the Harvester uses a patent-pending oxidative conversion process, extracting valuable nutrients from food scraps before they become waste,” LeSueur says. The Harvester measure 4′ x 7′ and is made from steel. Workers dump food scraps into the unit and then enter a code to identify what department they came from. Then the food scraps are liquefied and pumped into a holding tank, where they are treated with enzymes and other organic materials, LeSueur explains. Then the liquified scraps are transported to WISErg’s facility to be processed into fertilizer. “There are several other important differences between the Harvester and traditional composting. While we see benefits to composting, we believe it is best suited for yard waste. Composters aren’t sealed or technology enabled. Therefore, decomposing food scraps can get messy and smelly. But more importantly, they provide no usable information for grocers to identify the root cause of waste,” says LaSueur. The Harvester collects data entered by workers as well as the food scraps themselves to tell grocers where they can improve their inventory management. For example, it can report if a store is stocking too much inventory or discarding undamaged produce before its necessary. This in turn can help grocery stores reduce food waste and improve their profit margins. The company says that in addition to its expansion in California (where 10% of all grocery stores in the U.S. are), which will take place later this year, it will also invest its new capital to develop the Harvester’s technology and WISErg’s marketing operations. |
One Month Raises $770K To Teach All Of The Coding | Samantha O'Keefe | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | What did you accomplish in the past 30 days? If you’re a student at (Formerly One Month Rails), you could have a fully functional web application. Yesterday, the Y Combinator-backed company announced it closed a seed round of $770K to bring accelerated programming instruction to the masses. YC led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Winklevoss Capital, Funders Club, Innovation Works, Lew Moorman and Wefunder, among others. One Month Rails has condensed learning to code in Ruby on Rails into a one-month program. The company plans to tackle other languages and toolkits from Swift to Web Security and it’s safe to assume they have their eyes on longer-form, online education at some point in the future. Since its launch in August 2013, One Month has seen 150,000 lessons completed and over 14,500 students take its Ruby on Rails course. But we’ve seen impressive sign-up numbers before. And the space of online content, One Month is certainly not alone. From Thinkful’s class and mentor model, to Udemy and Udacity’s fully digital courses, to gamified experiences like CodeAcademy or Treehouse, there are more than enough locations to learn coding online. Perhaps the reason for One Month’s traction is its targeted approach to content. As we’ve , rather than promising to produce well-rounded or hirable developers, the company is focused on teaching a finite set of skills that enable students to build products immediately. As a wider variety of jobs and hobbies involve technology, we’ve seen the-learn-to code market grow rapidly. After all, some of the most recognizable names in America are technologists like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey. And as the space heats up, providing the opportunity to actually build something tangible while you learn, as One Month does, could be a deciding factor. One Month is also focused on helping learners when they are most vulnerable — at the beginning. “When it comes to learning a new skill, the first 30 days are the most important to determine whether someone is going to quit or not,” according to founder and CEO Mattan Griffel. Reporting a class completion rate between between 20-25 percent, or about 3x better than the average for most MOOCs, One Month is clearly onto something. |
Watch Our Wrap-Up Of The Google I/O Keynote And Day One | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Google’s I/O developer conference kicked off today, and the company held its keynote address to give an overview of all the news it revealed at the event. The changes included a preview of the upcoming version of for now, which brings a new design paradigm to Google’s OS that helps it work across different types of screens and devices. There were ups and there were downs during the nearly three-hour keynote, but ultimately, Google unveiled a lot of amazing new stuff. The company also spent a lot of time talking about stuff that even developers would have a hard time getting excited about, at least when presented on stage. They really did paint a vision of a unified future of Android and Chrome on the desktop, on mobile, in your car, on your wrist and beyond – in a way that isn’t just an awkwardly forced translation of one way of using software across each different usage scenario. Overall, we were impressed, as you generally are when a multi-billion-dollar corporation spends a sizable chunk of money on cool stuff. But may have won the day in the end. |
US Promises EU Citizens Stronger Data Privacy Rights | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | The Obama administration has committed to pass legislation granting European Union citizens some of the same privacy rights as Americans in U.S. courts, . The U.S. has completed negotiations on an agreement that will grant EU citizens the right to seek reparation in U.S. courts if personal data their home countries share with the U.S. government for law enforcement purposes is willfully disclosed. Americans already enjoy this right “In a world of globalized crime and terrorism, we can protect our citizens only if we work together internationally, including through sharing law enforcement information with and by E.U. Member States and other close allies,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in . “At the same time, we must ensure that we continue our long tradition of protecting privacy in the law enforcement context.” Pressure for such a measure mounted in the wake of revelations of former government contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks about the NSA’s far-reaching data-collection programs. When information from the Snowden documents was first published by The Guardian and the Washington Post last June, the Obama administration responded to growing political pressure by reassuring t from government spying. Many Europeans who are not protected by the U.S. Constitution of the surveillance, the documents revealed. Attorney general Eric Holder pledged legislation would be sent to Congress that would expand the U.S. Privacy Act to EU citizens at a US-EU meeting in Athens, according to The Guardian report. Although EU, privacy groups and human rights groups have pushed for such measures in the past, The Guardian said they were skeptical about the news. And they’re right to be. Although Holder’s announcement could be viewed as a step in the right direction, it’s simply an announcement. Other nations should question a promise that undoubtedly controversial legislation will pass through one of the most polarized Congresses in recent history. Negotiations over personal data protection between the U.S. and EU have been going on for several years now, but obviously became a more hot button issue in the wake of the Snowden leaks. The announcement occurred in the lead-up to the U.S.-Germany Cyber Bilateral Meeting in Berlin Thursday. The most fallout in the EU from the NSA revelation occurred in Germany. Last October, German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to news that the NSA had been listening to her phone calls by saying that “spying on friends is simply unacceptable.” She that it was too soon to “return to business as usual.” According , Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reforms were expected to be central to the deliberations in Berlin Thursday. Cyber crime in Eastern Europe, defense against cyber sanctions from Russia and Chinese government hacking will also be on the table. |
Hands On With Google’s Incredibly Clever Cardboard Virtual Reality Headset | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Each year at I/O, Google gives all of the developers in the audience a gift. Some years it’s a tablet. Some years it’s a laptop. This year? It was a piece of cardboard. Yeah, yeah, , too — but that cardboard! Once you tear the seal on Google’s lil’ slab of cardboard, it becomes clear that this is no mere corrugated fiberboard. This is something more! If you can bust out the skills you picked up at the University of Ikea and work your way through the the not-so-intuitive folding process, you end up with something wonderful. Paired with your Android phone, that origami’d cardboard transforms into a cheap, on-the-fly virtual reality headset. Google calls the project “Cardboard”; I’ve taken to calling it the Mockulus Thrift. I’ve been playing with it since the Keynote ended and.. it’s actually kind of freaking wonderful. Is it an Oculus Rift killer? Hah — of course not. It’s . But it’s still awesome. Once you finish contorting Cardboard into shape, a rubber band and a velcro’d flap hold your Android phone in place. Like the actual Oculus Rift, two plastic lenses built into the face of Cardboard help to distort your phone’s screen in a way that helps wrap the image around your eye. That would have been enough, really. But Google took it one step further. Midway through bending Cardboard into shape, you’ll notice a stray, circular magnet stuck to one of the flaps. It’s the very last piece of the construction process; the last thing you put in in place. Once everything is all folded up, you plop the magnet into a small groove on Cardboard’s exterior. If you’re like me, you assume it’s just to hold everything in place or something. Then you launch the Cardboard app. Right off the bat, a tutorial begins “Turn your head to look around the app”, it reads. Okay, easy enough. “To select an item, slide the magnet down then let go.” Turns out, these Google guys are pretty freaking clever. This funny little cardboard faux-Rift has something even the original Rift itself does not: a built-in button. The magnet slides within its groove, then automatically slips back into a place because of another magnet on opposite side. Your phone is able to sense the magnet’s movement, allowing it to act as a ridiculously clever little button. Yeesh. The cardboard app comes with 7 “experiences”, and each is pretty darned neat in its own right: Want one? Unless you’re at I/O, you might be out of luck. Fortunately, I managed to end up with an extra one. Still sealed and everything! Like everyone at I/O, you’ll have to bring your own Android phone. If you want it, drop a comment down below — I’ll pick someone at random this weekend. |
NSA Denies Any Record Of Snowden Emailing Superiors About Concerns | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) query, the NSA today informed that it could not locate email pursuant to his request for “any and all emails written by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in which Mr. Snowden contacted agency officials through email to raise concerns about NSA programs.” Snowden, the force behind one of the largest leaks of classified material in the history of the United States, has that he internally about NSA activity. The NSA denies that. An NSA statement from is clear: “after extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention.” Today’s FOIA response maintains the NSA’s previous position: At the end of the response, there’s an interesting paragraph: So, that the NSA released previously, in which Snowden asked questions relating to executive orders, and Department of Defense regulations, didn’t match Leopold’s request in the view of the NSA. Therefore, if there are other Snowden emails asking similar questions, they would not have been included in the NSA’s response, perhaps. Here’s the released email:
What we need now is a new Edward Snowden to Edward Snowden Edward Snowden’s old correspondence en masse. I’m kidding. The NSA declined to comment. |
Investments Decline As Education Technology Grows Up | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | for summer, but the nation’s education-focused technology startups are still hitting the books, drumming up new business and new investments to capitalize on overwhelming demand for innovation from primary and secondary schools and colleges. New government initiatives are underway nationally — where education spending — and , cheaper technologies are making their way into the classroom, and . In all, it’s a good time to be a technology company selling into the land of learning. With all of the newfound interest and spending on education technologies, startup companies and established vendors alike are making moves in the market. Today, the test-prep giant said it has acquired the Dev Bootcamp for an undisclosed amount, making it a formidable force in the growing market of software development training. Kaplan said it would be folding the Dev Bootcamp business into its New Economy Skills Training group, which already includes Metis — a business unit providing training for product design, Ruby on Rails, and data science. Meanwhile, , which sells web programming and development training services online, is expanding its reach through a partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative. The company has committed to partner with regional and local governments, workforce investment boards and community-based organizations to provide 150,000 unemployed and underemployed workers an opportunity to train for software jobs. Outside of continuing education, startups like , , , and , have all launched major initiatives. Looking to take advantage of the wind at its back the New York-based education management platform Schoology has raised $15 million in a new round of financing, led by Intel Capital, with participation from new investors Great Oaks Venture Capital and Great Road Holdings. Previous investors FirstMark Capital and Meakem Becker Venture Capital also participated in the financing. Earlier this month the company signed a contract that will see it supply every school in Uruguay — covering up to 620,000 students — with access to its learning management system. “We’re seeing lots of activity coming from Latin America,” says Schoology chief executive Jeremy Friedman. “[In Uruguay] they bought 620,000 and they really needed a platform for teaching learning and collaboration.” The country chose Schoology. “It’s definitely not a one-off type of deal internationally,” Friedman says. “Latin America in particular has been really interesting [and] we see a big opportunity.” International expansion is just one reason why Schoology’s tapped the investment community to raise cash. The company is also looking to climb up the educational ladder and knock on the doors of the lofty, hallowed halls of higher education. “On the U.S. front we’ve started making a more significant investment in higher ed as well,” says Friedman. The company , the country’s first fully online state university, which was created by the Colorado State University System Board of Governors seven years ago. Schoology’s new round comes on the heels of a down quarter for education investment, when it seems venture capitalists caught their breath after the breakneck pace of investments in the first quarter of the year. For the second quarter, venture firms invested only $218 million in 66 startups, down from over $500 million in the first quarter of the year. Yet, even as some in the industry worry about an , chief executives, like John Baker the CEO of the well-funded edtech startup are unconcerned. “I don’t see a bubble in the space given the sheer under-investment in education relative to other industries,” says Baker. “If you look at it on a percentage basis, investment from private equity and venture capital into e-learning or ed-tech is relatively small.” And his company is still expanding its reach. At this point, the company is integrating applications from 891 different startups, student designed programs and large businesses in the edtech market, including content from the massive publisher . That content will appear in front of roughly 15 million users, giving it one of the broadest customer bases in the industry.
Schoology and Desire2Learn aren’t the only companies making waves in education. Earlier in June, Instructure announced its own deal with Unizin, a consortium of universities including Indiana University, Colorado State University, the University of Florida, and the University of Michigan. Operating on the service distributed among this consortium of colleges and universities, the company’s Canvas learning management and collaboration system will be shared among institutions on the network. “This follows a trend that we’ve been talking about for a while, which is that the online [education] world is not a for-profit world only,” says Knewton chief operating officer David Liu. “Not-for-profit institutions are going online to offer real classes.” And they need learning management systems to help monitor, manage and operate online offerings. As learning management systems like Instructure and Schoology move into higher education, companies like are expanding their professional services capabilities. The company announced that to build products for nursing, health professions and medical students in the coming years. “We’ve been very focused in the K-20 world… mostly in K-12 and universities,” says Liu. “With nursing, and medical students we’re extending into graduate level and vocational domains. These are the highest growth education domains on the planet.” According to Liu, the partnership with Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, will be among Knewton’s most significant in terms of size, scope, and subsequently, revenue.
These days, education investments are concentrating on technologies that operate as a management and distribution system for content creators, rather than on the content itself, according to Schoology’s Friedman. No startup embodies this platform approach more fully than Clever, which announced its in May. The company launched in 2012 with a service that integrated educational content from several vendors on a single platform. Now it’s offering its users the ability to have single sign-on ability so young students don’t have to memorize several passwords for applications from different vendors. “We’re at a tipping point,” says John Krull, the Information Technology Officer of the Oakland Unified School District. “It’s sort of a convergence of common core and technology. Those two things have come together to create all this demand.” |
Facebook Diversity Report Shows It’s 69% Male, 57% White, Charts Compare It To Google And More | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Facebook just released its t, and here’s our chart comparing it to Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn. While you could conclude that Facebook is a bit more diverse than Google and a bit less than the others, for being heavily skewed male, white and asian. Facebook comes in at 69% male worldwide, while in the US it’s 57% white, 34% asian, 4% hispanic, 2% black, and 3% two-plus races.
As for the breakdowns by job type, Facebook’s technical talent is 85% male, while non-tech team members are 53% male, and senior level employees are 77% male. As for ethnicity across job types, Facebook technical employees are 53% white, 41% asian, 3% hispanic, and 1% black. Non-tech employees are 63% white, 24% asian, 6% hispanic, and 2% black. And senior level employees are 74% white, 19% Asian, 4% hispanic, and 2% black.
prompted the trend of more diversity transparency when it released its report last month. and followed suit, and now Apple and Amazon are beginning to stand out for not releasing theirs. Facebook outlined a number of initiatives its Strategic Diversity team has been working on to enhance equality amongst genders and ethnicities. is a program that provides undergraduate freshmen from underrepresented groups with internships at Facebook. It has partnerships with Girls Who Code, Code 2040, the National Society of Black Engineers, and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and Management Leadership for Tomorrow. It’s working with Yes We Code to help connect 100,000 “low opportunity youth” to computer programming education programs. Facebook intern class of 2013 Facebook also provides unconscious bias training to employees to help them nullify racism and sexism they may be expressing without knowing it. It also has an inclusive benefits program that aids employees across the sexual preference spectrum, and Employee Resource Groups that help support employees from different ethnic backgrounds, the LGBTQ community, and military veterans. Women have long been known to be underrepresented in tech, but the real issue these reports highlight is that non-white, non-asian people are widely absent from the industry. Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn are all 89% to 91% white and asian. Blaming these companies isn’t the answer, though. While hiring practices could certainly improve, they’re dealing with systemic inequality. Women and non-asian minorities are not getting the same encouragement in science, technology, engineering, and math that could prepare them for jobs at the tech giants. Without this education early, they aren’t enrolling in computer science programs at top universities like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT where the big tech companies recruit. |
Aereo Faced With Few Options After Supreme Court Loss | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Aereo, , now has to find one after its . But none of its options are looking very good. “We did try, but it’s over now,” Barry Diller, one of Aereo’s top investors, . Despite Diller’s call of death, some believe the TV streaming service may have a few options left to pursue. Aereo’s CEO and founder, Chet Kanojia, has not been as defeatist as his key investor. In a the Court’s ruling, Kanojia said the company would continue, although he was vague about how. “We are disappointed in the outcome, but our work is not done,” he said. “We will continue to fight for our consumers and fight to create innovative technologies that have a meaningful and positive impact on our world.” Aereo has received almost $100 million in funding over the past several years. Kanojia made headlines as recently as April when . However , Kanojia hinted the company had been thinking about a backup plan, even if it hadn’t been formulated yet. He implied the company could consider paying retransmission fees to broadcasters. Gus Hurwitz, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska College of Law, before the ruling about that possibility, saying the startup had the option “to work with the broadcast industry, instead of trying to disrupt it.” “Aereo would bring a known and trusted brand and working distribution platform to the market and could, conceivably, license content from local broadcasters,” Hurwitz told the Journal. Retransmission fees, or the fees broadcasters charge cable companies to carry their signals, are projected to rise in the wake of decreasing advertising revenue, according to the same Wall Street Journal article. The draw of a service like Aereo is that it frees consumers from the high fees cable companies charge for bundled packages, allowing them to pay for live TV at subscription prices comparable to Netflix or Hulu. Even if the company manages to find a way to work with broadcast companies, it won’t be as cheap. Subscribers currently pay a fee of $8 per month for a base plan, and the service has fewer than 500,000, . Aereo’s other option would be to petition to change the copyright laws. The Supreme Court based its ruling on the idea that the company’s use of tiny antennas to capture broadcast signals and deliver them to subscribers’ devices violated existing copyright laws. Harry Cole, an attorney who has specialized in broadcasting and represented clients before the Supreme Court, told me that this is the “most obvious” plan B Aereo could be considering. He said they might have some weight, considering many subscribers and reviewers have had favorable reviews of the service. “Moving Congress right now to undertake some kind of significant legislation is a tough order,” he said, expressing that he was skeptical such a measure would pass. In the wake of the decision, House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders released statements calling for an update to the Communications Act, which was enacted in 1934 and has not been updated in 17 years. “While the court ruled that Aereo had overstepped, invention and innovation are at the heart of America’s global leadership in communications and technology development,” said committee chairman Rep. Fred Upton, R-MI. “This case underscores the mounting need to modernize the 80-year-old Communications Act, which serves as an important, yet outdated, framework for the communications industry.” Another option Aereo could pursue to avoid legal hot water over copyright would be to offer only DVR services. In addition to streaming video online, the service also currently offers subscribers the option to record programs. Cole said Aereo’s other option is to basically buy time. He didn’t know how long it would take for the injunction to set in, but he speculated Aereo’s legal team could try to get the Supreme Court to rehear the issue. Even though Cole called that “the longest of long shots,” it could potentially allow Aereo to continue to operate longer because the Court is approaching its summer recess. “Once that injunction kicks in, it’s about time to put the tag on the toe,” he said. |
All The News From Google I/O 2014 | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Google I/O is in full swing and the company just dropped a cluster bomb of news at its annual keynote. During the two and a half hour event, Google announced major changes to Android, announced Android TV, revealed key Android Wear details and it was even interrupted twice by protesters. All of the action can be found right here. |
Hands On With The Samsung Gear Live, Its $199 Smartwatch Shipping July 7 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Samsung has a new Android Wear device that it didn’t really make too much of a fuss about before: The Gear Live smartwatch. It unsurprisingly resembles its brethren the Gear, Gear 2 and Gear Neo, but it doesn’t use Tizen or Android (like the first gen Gear) and it doesn’t use the same interface Samsung has been pushing on its other wearable devices. [gallery ids="1022126,1022125,1022124,1022123"] It does however bring an optical heart rate sensor to the Android Wear camp, which is not something that the offers, and it also comes with a physical button, which is likewise something not offered by the LG G Watch. Google is clearly pulling the strings with regards to the launch date, as pre-orders kick off today but this doesn’t ship until July 7, but Samsung has a price advantage over LG out of the gate thanks to the groundwork laid by the Gear line. The Gear has a screen that does appear to pale in comparison to the LG G Watch, however – literally, as in colors are more washed out. But It performs similarly to the G Watch in terms of touch response. On the wrist, it has a clasp with snap buttons that work not quite as naturally as the G Watch’s standard watch band, and the G Watch also features standard lugs that work with any 22mm watch bands, which the Gear Live does not. Samsung’s effort essentially has the same merits and drawbacks as the rest of its smartwatches, and it likely required very little in the way of development time to get it up and running on the new OS. But whether it stands up to hardware designed specifically for Android Wear in long-term testing will require further examination. |
RelateIQ Snags Ex-Twitter VP Of Search | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | , the former vice president of search and content engineering at Twitter — who left the company in April and became an advisor — will take a job at relationship management software developer, . Belkin, who will officially join the team as Vice President of Engineering on August 4, previously worked as Twitter’s Senior Director of Engineering, Search and Relevance. Belkin has been serving as a member of RelateIQ’s board of advisors for a couple of months, as well. Before Twitter, Belkin was a top engineer at LinkedIn, in charge of content and community products including: LinkedIn Today, LinkedIn Signal, LinkedIn homepage, inbox, email platforms, groups and insights products. The relationship management software developer raised $40 million in a late stage financing earlier this year. Investors in the round included top flight investors including: Redpoint Ventures, KPCB, Felicis Ventures, and News Corp. A story in placed the company’s valuation at $245 million following the round. RelateIQ uses large-scale data-mining technologies to automate relationship tracking in the enterprise and CRM world. The company’s software eliminates the manual data entry required to get more insight into professional relationships. The connection to search stems from the company’s use of algorithms to better understand actions in the workplace, capturing data from email, voice, social networks and calendars, and using natural language processing to analyze those communications. |
Google Fit Warms Up | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | has risen as part of a prodigious, that included everything but the kitchen sink ( ). Today during its annual developer conference, Google announced a platform preview , a set of APIs that will allow developers to sync data across wearables and devices. Google Product Manager Ellie Powers demonstrated Fit’s powers with the weight loss app , which communicated with Powers’ in order to keep tabs on her daily cookie habit. Also mentioned during her presentation were and a partnership with that will make Nike Fuel data available to Google Fit developers. The dream here is the bundling of user fitness data, with the user’s permission, of course. And Google is not alone in this aspiration, with Apple’s among the many products aiming to aggregate your health zeros and ones. As the SDK for the platform will be available in a “couple of weeks,” it’s hard to know how far Google Fit could go once developers get on board. But, along with Withings, Adidas and Nike, Google has already enlisted a formidable group of fitness brand logos for its presentation slide. Here is the only way I see this playing out well for Google: A separate Google Fit app, like Google Docs or Google Calendar for fitness, that syncs with RunKeeper and your scale, and that you can access on a laptop or even your iPhone. The fitness data market is very closely tied to the wearables market, and neither has gelled yet. this space. |
The Elephants In The Google I/O Room: Glass And Plus | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Google’s at its I/O conference today was filled with developer news. A new design language for Android, cross-platform concessions, watch apps, a health platform and much more was shown off. But even a stretch of presentations that had in his chair apparently wasn’t enough runway to allow a mention of two troubled Google children: Glass and Plus. Google+, the company’s attempt to unify its various products with a webbing of identity and social, was barely, barely mentioned at all during the keynote. Last year it took up a major chunk of the presentation and the year before it felt like a Google+ plus Glass keynote (complete with skydivers and biking on the roof of Moscone) with a smattering of other stuff thrown in. This year, Glass wasn’t even mentioned, and no presenters wore it on stage. Even when the discussion turned to wearables — an ideal time to work in its face computer — Google had nothing to say. Not Google Glass Instead of Glass, Google gave us — a clever corrugated paper device that turns your Android phone into a crude VR headset. VR, ironically, is a divergent fork of next-generation visual computing from Glass’ augmented reality. Both of these products have been intensely high-profile efforts for Google over the past couple of years. To see them get almost no stage time at their major developer conference raises some questions. For Google+, the lack of mentions are likely due to several factors. First, the ‘father’ of Plus, Vic Gundotra, . Around that time, that certain aspects of Plus, like the wonderful Photos product, could be getting the standalone treatment. And the ‘rest’ of Google+ would be relegated to a single sign-on service that acted as a platform, instead of a holistic ‘product’ of its own. Maybe this is just a ‘rebuilding’ year for Google’s Plus, or maybe it’s the beginning of its transition into a supporting, rather than starring, role. As far as Glass goes, this has been a bad year for publicity. The inclusion of a camera on the device was probably inevitable, as shooting hands-free photos and video was its marquee ability at launch. Without that, it didn’t do a whole heck of a lot. Unfortunately, the camera also opened up Glass to an intense allergic reaction on the part of folks who feel that the way it allows unobtrusive recording is invasive. Even if that group of people is relatively small, the cause has not been helped at all by a series of really crappy ’spokespeople’ who have been aggressive and obtuse about the way that they both use the devices and advocate for them. When I spoke with Google X head Astro Teller earlier this year, he made a fairly eloquent case for widening the conversation out to all cameras and surveillance, rather than focusing on Glass, which he called the “ .” But Google has certainly pulled back from trumpeting the device during its keynote, if today’s program was any indication. Even a hardware revision announced this week didn’t warrant a mention. “Glass announced all of our news earlier this week and ahead of I/O so the Chrome and Android announcements could take center stage today and “Glass’ presence this year is similar to last year’s. We have a basecamp demo areas on the first floor [of I/O], more demos on the second floor and a bunch of breakout sessions.” I’m personally of the very much like Glass, if not Glass itself, is going to be a part of our computing future. The experience, when it works well, is just too compelling. There is a metric ton of privacy and convenience issues to sort through first, of course, and Glass as it stands is certainly physically and psychologically off-putting to some. Back when I with Glass, I said that “using Google Glass really makes me believe that the wrist computer will be the defining wearable computer which breaks the ice, not the ‘face’ computer,” and I still think that’s true. But, to paraphrase here, I do think that the concept of Glass as a way to remove layers of interface and interaction that stand between us and the power of a connected device is certainly worth iterating on. But I fear that Google may have flown Glass a bit too close to the sun too early. Yes, it has plenty of money and resources to keep iterating on the concept, but are not the way to do it. Glass is a very cool hardware prototype that was given to the public too soon. Now, even if the end result is amazing, it faces an uphill battle against years of misconceptions and mishandling. If the project had been mentioned at the event, it would certainly have gotten some positive feedback from the (many) Glass Explorers in the audience. But would it have drawn much of a response from the world at large? We’ll never know, and if Google is rethinking its approach to the Glass rollout, we may not next year either. More applause than the (scant) mention of Google+ integrations? Google in India and a Flappy Bird parody called Tappy Chicken. No chance of applause for Glass. |
Google Acquires Mobile Testing Platform Appurify, Will Keep It Open On iOS And Android | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Google just announced at I/O that it has , a startup that lets developers automate testing and optimization of their mobile apps and websites. Appurify will stay open as freemium cross-platform service but get a big boost in distribution as it becomes integrated into the Google developer tool stack. Appurify’s big value add is helping developers handle fragmentation. It permits wide-scale testing on a of gadgets, so devs can catch bugs and other performance issues on devices they can’t test on themselves. That’s an especially big deal for Android. earlier this month, saying the fragmentation issue makes Android a “toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities”. But beyond security, just making sure apps run properly on devices from different OEMs with various operating systems and screen sizes is a challenge. Appurify gives Google an in-house testing service it can point developers to. The service will slot in amongst a variety of Google development tools like Android Studio and Google Cloud Messaging. Appurify has raised a total of from investors including Google Ventures, making it another example of Google investing before it acquires companies. Data Collective, Radar Partners, Felicis Ventures, and Foundation Capital also invested in both Appurify’s 2012 seed round and $4.5 million Series A from March 2013. Google Play manager Ellie Powers came out on stage to announce the acquisition. She explained that “You’ve told us that testing can be painful and we want it to be easy…Appurify is leading the way in replicating how you app performs in the real world and we’re excited to help them further scale and bring their expertise to your app development process.” Along with testing across devices, Appurify can also make sure apps run all over the world, even on shotty connections in emerging markets. Powers explained “Appurify’s service can simulate a specific mobile network, and can even simulate what happens if the connection is weak or drops out completely.” This feature makes Appurify like an open, software version of for testing across weak international networks. In its blog post announcing the move, Appurify says “For our existing customers, Appurify’s tools for mobile developers will continue to be available for the time being. Longer term, we look forward to working closely with our new colleagues to incorporate our tools into Google’s developer platform.” Google’s purchase of Appurify makes Apple’s testing toolset seem incomplete. last year and just rolled out a new way to . But Testflight focuses on usability testing with real humans while Appurify gives Google’s developer clients more automated ways to investigate backend, connectivity, and fragmentation issues as well. With Google’s help, Appurify could make Android’s ‘toxic hellstew’ easier for developers to swallow. |
Google I/O Attendees Gifted Brand-New Android Wear Smartwatches | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Get ready to be jealous, Google fans. Google I/O attendees will walk away from this week’s annual developer conference with some brand-new Android Wear-powered smartwatches. They’ll be able to choose between one of the introduced earlier today, including the Samsung Gear Live or LG G3 Android Wear. In addition, they’ll also receive the forthcoming Moto 360, when it becomes available in a few months. That’s right: not one, but two smartwatches. Because there was no Chromebook underneath their seats, and Google felt badly? Maybe that’s why they also handed out (yes, actual cardboard – a poor man’s virtual reality device) as the attendees left the venue. More on that in a bit. they weren’t kidding, btw. It’s really just a piece of cardboard. Bahaha. — Rob DeMillo (@UberRob) It may be interesting to see which of the two smartwatches attendees initially select: the LG or the Samsung. Android Wear, which was previously introduced, was shown off during the keynote this morning, where its various features, including a card-like design and integrations with Google’s smart assistant technology Google Now, were on display. The company also for developers, allowing them to build custom user interfaces, control sensors, tie into voice actions, and send data back and forth between watches, tablets and phones. The new smartwatches, which to the general public, will also have a few new functions, including swiping to dismiss messages and displaying contextual information to the wearer. |
Google Play For Education Goes Beyond Tablets, Now Available For Chromebooks, Too | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Last November, Google , a portal for teachers and schools to more easily buy Android apps, books and educational YouTube video, and distribute them to their students. At the time, the program was solely focused on tablets, but starting today, the team also launched support for Chromebooks. With the revamped Google Play for Education, teachers can now give students access to Android apps and Chrome apps, books and videos from a single site. According to Google, about 10,000 schools currently use Chromebooks (and some of them use both Chromebooks and tablets). As Rick Borovoy, Google’s product manager for Google Play for Education, told me earlier this week, the team decided to start with tablets because it was especially interested in the use cases that tablets enable in a classroom. At the time, Borovoy wasn’t completely sold on the idea that schools would be interested in having students read books on their Chromebooks or that they would be interested in Chrome apps for their students. Teachers, however, immediately started asking Google for a Chrome OS version of the store and Borovoy and his team started piloting this program earlier this year. On the Chrome OS side, Google Play for Education works very much like it did before. Apps are curated by a select group of teachers, for example. Borovoy noted that consumer app stores tend to provide users with an overwhelming number of choices, so the team wanted to give teachers a smaller number of apps that were previously vetted instead. Just like in the old version, they also get access to Google’s bookstore for schools where they can then rent or buy books for their students starting at $1 per student for 60 days of access. Borovoy noted that most of the interest from schools right now is in trade books and that most aren’t all that interested in textbooks in e-book form. Schools can also set up purchase order accounts with Google, so that it’s easier for teachers to go ahead and make purchases for their classes or just for individual students who may show an interest in a specific topic, for example. Previously, this often meant that teachers would pay out of their own pockets and then try to get reimbursed — which doesn’t always happen. With Google Play for Education, schools can simply give teachers the ability to make purchases (up to a set limit). “Our goal is to find the pain points and untapped opportunities,” Borovoy told me. By offering support for both tablets and Chromebooks, he said, “schools don’t have to think device first.” They also don’t need to involve IT when they want to add an app to their students’ laptops or tablets, something that can be a major hassle and take away any spontaneity from teachers, especially in school systems where the IT departments are often understaffed. |
Hands On With The LG G Watch, Shipping July 7 For $229 U.S. | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Today at developer conference, Android Wear was a central topic of discussion. The LG G Watch was one of the devices on display, and it’s going live for pre-order at around 4:30 p.m. PT today. The Android-powered wearable device is set to retail for $229 and ship to buyers starting July 7, but I got a chance to use it early at a special press event today. [gallery ids="1022071,1022072,1022073,1022074,1022075,1022076,1022077"] The G Watch ships with a rubber band and its weight is around the same as you’d expect from an average quartz timepiece. It holds an IPS touchscreen display that runs Android Wear, bringing you notifications and contextually relevant information as they come in. The G Watch screen is very responsive, bright and easy to read, even in fairly bright light. Resolution on the screen is great, and it renders colors pretty faithfully based on quick impressions. Navigating the UI, which is my first experience with Android Wear at all, is pretty intuitive, despite the lack of buttons and 100 percent touchscreen interaction. It handles voice input really well, too, translating speech to text accurately and also picking up the sound even in a relatively loud room. LG is among the first to market, so it’ll take further testing to see if this really is a fully baked device, or something more like a placeholder designed to get their foot in the door before other OEMs (or at the same time as Samsung, of course). But based on first impressions, it’s a solid (if spare) model of what Android Wear could be. |
Google’s Redesigned Drive Focuses On Speed, Office Compatibility And Security | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Google today its a major redesign today and with it, it is also bringing a number of new features to its Docs, Sheets and Slides productivity apps on mobile and the desktop. Maybe most importantly, Google has now built ‘s technology, which the company almost exactly two years ago, right into its productivity apps. This means you can now open and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in their native format thanks to the new Office Compatibility Mode. Just like Google’s Sundar Pichai more than a year ago, Quickoffice in the browser will use Google’s Native Client technology to render documents quickly in Chrome. Because of this, however, this feature won’t work in any other browser for the time being. While Google is also building Quickoffice into the Drive Android apps, iOS users will still have to wait a little bit longer. With all of this functionality folded into Google Drive, the existing Quickoffice apps will soon reach their end of life. As Google’s director of product management for Google Drive Scott Johnston told me earlier this week, the team wants to ensure that users don’t have to worry about formats. The other thing they shouldn’t have to worry about is editing documents while offline, so with this release, any platform that Google’s productivity apps are available on now will support offline editing. When I asked Johnston why it took Google this long to finally integrate QuickOffice, he noted that it took a long time to get the two code bases together and make them run at Google’s scale. He also argued that the team wanted to ensure that everything worked really well. “We are on so many devices now that we can’t put anything out that is half done,” he told me. Upon launching the new Google Drive, the first thing users will notice, however, is the new look. As Johnston noted, the main idea behind this was to simplify the experience and to make the web app feel more like a desktop app. I’ve had a chance to try the new Drive on the web for the last day and it does indeed feel faster and more fluid. Google also made a number of more subtle changes. The “Shared with me” folder, for example, is no simply called “incoming.” The Drive tool bar has been simplified a bit and as far as I can see, Google did away with the upload dialog in favor of going all-in with dragging and dropping files and folders from the desktop. One nifty feature Google implemented on Chrome is the ability to select any native desktop application as the default program to open a file from Drive. Say you have a Photoshop file in Drive. You can now have Drive automatically open the file in Adobe’s photo-editing application. Google kept the biggest changes for the mobile apps. The activity tab, for example, is now also available on mobile, and sharing a link only takes a single tap. Johnston tells me the team also managed to increase upload performance. In addition to all of this, the team has now enabled new security features that ensure that every document you store on Drive is encrypted both at rest and in transit to your browser and between Google’s servers. |
Getting More Women Into Tech Is Going To Be Awkward | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | Big tech companies are pushing hard to get the word out about their efforts to be more inclusive for women, people of color, and other minority groups. We recently covered , including sending “at least one person each” to upcoming tech conferences via a new scholarship program and committing $50 million over three years to a massive new initiative to get girls into coding. These are only early efforts. The demographic imbalance in the tech industry is so embedded in its culture that it will likely take years for the initiatives to propagate into wider network effects. The actual interactions between people who’ve been affected by these initiatives is what will lead to more women earning technical degrees and a decline in the rampant “dude-bro” mentality at industry events. Until that happens, things are going to be awkward. As Project Manager Emily Miller told me, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem: The culture won’t shift until there are more women in tech, and many women won’t feel comfortable in the tech industry until the culture changes. In the meantime, efforts that force progress will make some uncomfortable or seem insincere because they don’t move the needle enough. The other tech elephant in the room, Apple, isn’t new to these kinds of efforts. An Apple spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the company has been working with the (one of Google’s partners on the ) since its founding 10 years ago. And we’ve heard that Apple has started an internal team called Women@Apple-Tech that aims to increase the number of women in technical roles both within the company and elsewhere. Yesterday, the company noted its participation in an . Despite its experience, Apple’s initiatives face criticisms of their own. For an example of the awkwardness involved with getting these discussions started, we can look at Apple’s “Women in Tech Get Together” session at WWDC earlier this month. The session was reportedly attended by over 400 people, most of whom were women: The most women I've seen at ever! — mimi_sf (@mimi_sf) The session had speakers from Apple as well as from elsewhere in the industry. We’ve been told that the group included representatives from , the National Center for Women and Information Technology, and : Three female engineering leads from Apple at women in tech get together — Christina Warren (@film_girl) Some developers who went to the session feel that it paid lip-service to women in attendance rather than provide substantial information. While the session highlighted women who were given opportunities to succeed within Apple, it didn’t have much to say about how those opportunities could become prevalent elsewhere. Kleiner Perkins partner Megan Quinn was one of the session speakers. In an email, she told me that the session was “energizing for both the attendees and leaders.” Her portion of the session had to do with turning ideas into companies, teaching women interested in becoming entrepreneurs about “reaching VCs, the various stages of raising capital, developing pitches, hiring teams and so on.” She continues: For some of the attendees, I was the first VC they had met. For nearly all, I was the first woman VC. So, there was a lot of discussion about how to foster women entrepreneurs and the differences between pitching men and women VCs. My impression is that attendees were appreciative that Apple provided them with the opportunity to interact and ask questions in a casual, comfortable atmosphere with several technology leaders. Quinn also reiterated a point made by : It was also great for attendees (and me!) to meet and spend time the women executives from Apple. Apple has a pretty homogenous executive team if you just look at their , but it was refreshing and enlightening to hear from the women VPs in the hardware, software, and App Store divisions. It’s clear that Apple is cultivating a strong roster of women leaders we just don’t have the opportunity to hear from very often, but that are guiding and leading core parts of Apple’s business. I just can’t wait to see some of them on stage at WWDC! , an iOS developer and organizer for the , told TechCrunch that while she felt the session , “I’m glad they at least were trying, however minimal the effort was.” She was One speaker during the “Inclusion and Diversity” discussion also demonstrated the counter-productive bias that can emerge when some women are able to succeed within the industry’s current culture: they think that because they have done well with their particular privileges and life paths, that those struggling are facing issues that exist : This lady from Autodesk tells women that women should put gender aside because the issue exists only in the woman's head. — mimi_sf (@mimi_sf) When it comes to increasing diversity in the industry, criticism, awkwardness, and defensiveness are always going to come from all sides. What one person sees as a positive step forward looks like a tepid move to another; one woman’s success looks like privilege to those who haven’t had doors opened to them; and sometimes positive intentions will be interpreted in ways that companies and individuals don’t expect. That’s why it’s tricky to evaluate these initiatives from the outside. There will always be more to do, even for those pushing the hardest, and because of that, positive steps can easily look just like half-hearted PR stunts. |
After School Is The Latest Anonymous App Resulting In Student Cyberbullying And School Threats | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | : The app is for downloading on the App Store. Meet , an anonymous Whisper-like app that hit the App Store in October 2014. And of course it’s causing issues in countless schools like and did before it. After School allows users to post anonymous messages that only other students at their school can see. It’s not limited to a location like Yik Yak, but when used by the same demographic of school kids, the results are the same: cyberbullying and threats to schools. Claims of cyberbullying stemming from the After School app are quickly popping up: Schools across metro Detroit about it, and a gun threat posted on the app resulted in a heightened level of security and police presence earlier today at another school, . A student at my former high school in Michigan has even to get the app banned from the App Store. It has received over 1,500 signatures on Change.org. Following cyberbullying issues, another Michigan community took to Twitter with the hashtag to encourage others to delete the app. After School needs to take a hard look at the type of problems that arose when Yik Yak was used on high school campuses. Unlike Yik Yak, After School was designed specifically for this demographic and it does not have a 17+ rating, making it much more difficult for parents to stop their teenagers from downloading it. Worse yet, users report that students can easily trick the system to allow posting to other schools. Following a bomb threat posted on Yik Yak, the National Association of People Against Bullying and asked them to disable the app at middle and high schools — something that would cripple After School. Yik Yak did just that. Yik Yak itself took steps to prevent the app from being used in schools across America through a series of geofenced safeguards that prevented the app from working in locations known to be schools. The company essentially turned off access to one of the most treasured demographics. “Certain things should always be kept out of children’s hands,” Anna Mendez, Executive Director at the National Association of People Against Bullying, told TechCrunch at the time. “Kids are at a different developmental level than adults. Physically, the frontal lobes of their brains aren’t fully developed. That’s the part of their brain that helps them recognize future consequences from current actions. At the same time, their hormone levels are escalating. Middle school and high school are some of the toughest years where kids begin having self doubts and bullying starts becoming more violent,” she says. Even if the app is pulled or not used, it won’t stop cyberbullying. It will sadly move from this platform to another. Yet everything possible needs to be done to curb the hate. Apple, Google and other app distributors need to take a stronger stance on ratings based around apps that facilitate behavior known to be harmful to minors. Even that will only stop the honest bullies. After School’s publisher did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. |
Gangnam Style Has Been Viewed So Many Times It Broke YouTube’s Code | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | Whoops! Just a fun bit of trivia for the coders out there: PSY’s Gangnam Style has been viewed so many times that it broke YouTube’s view counter, making it the very first video to break the reaches of a 32-bit integer. Not sure what the hell that means? Just know that when you’re coding, you often have to consider you’re storing data like numbers. Do you want a 32-bit integer, or a 64-bit integer? A 32-bit integer* takes up a bit less memory, but can only be used to store numbers from −2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. A 64-bit integer is a bit heftier in its memory usage, but can store numbers from −9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. You know the , where things freak the hell out after level 256? Similar idea, just with 8-bit numbers versus 32-bit. As of yesterday’s landmark and subsequent code change, YouTube can now theoretically support videos with up to 9 quintillion views. Get to watchin’. |
Prenetics Raises $2.65M To Bring Safe, Accurate DNA-Based Prenatal Testing To Asia | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | You don’t often hear of five-year-old companies raising multi-million dollar seed rounds, but that’s exactly what’s happened in Hong Kong today where biotech firm closed $2.65 million for its next-generation prenatal DNA testing. Prenetics has also got itself a new CEO: Danny Yeung, who led Groupon’s East Asia business until April of this year. Yeung, who is not drawing a salary and participated in the round in a personal capacity, helped bring other investors to the tablet, including , (a fund Yeung co-founded this year), Groupon’s APAC lead Joel Neoh, and Singapore’s . The company began as a research department at City University Hong Kong before it was spun off in 2009. It offers a range of DNA-based services, but today it officially launched ‘Prenetics V’, a Non-Invasive Prenatal Test ( ) that uses DNA to test for 16 different health conditions in a fetus. The test uses a blood sample from the mother from as early as the tenth week of the pregnancy, and it has a detection rate of more than 99 percent. The idea is to give couples peace of mind about the health of their child, and identify any potential problems early in the pregnancy. NIPT is standard in the U.S. and other parts of the West, but that’s not the case in Asia. Expectant parents who want to screen their pre-born child have fewer options in this part of the world. Most weigh up the merits of invasive tests — such as probes or needles inserted in the mother’s uterus — despite the risk of pregnancy complications and a 10-20 percent chance of misdiagnosis, or simply go without a test. By comparison, NIPT poses no risk to a fetus and, Prenetics claims, it can be 200 times more accurate with its results. Prenetics wants to change all of this with its new product, which is sold to medical professions rather than end consumers. That said, the company is running a consumer-facing marketing campaign in Hong Kong to build its brand and raise awareness among the population and medical industry. Yeung sold his group buying site uBuyiBuy to Groupon in 2010 but stayed on as part of that deal until this year. Initially he founded SXE Ventures following his departure, but his “entrepreneurial instincts kicked in” and now he is getting back into business, as he explained to TechCrunch in an interview. “I believe I can help the company make a big impact. There’s a great team of 16, including four PhDs, and I’m here to commercialize the product, package it and educate pharmaceutical companies and consumers alike of the benefits,” he said. “The pregnancy industry is a billion dollar one but, beyond that, this technology has the potential to really impact lives,” Yeung added. “A lot of people in Asia simply don’t know [DNA prenatal testing] exists, it should be a primary screening.” Prenetics V is the company’s primary focus but Yeung says that there are plans to expand its offerings to other products in the future. That may require more funding, he added, pointing out that Prenetics could have raised a larger amount this time around but chose not to. As someone with two children who were born in Asia, I fully understand the peace of mind that this test can bring to parents because it was something I never had the option of. The fact that it is available in Western markets but not widely in Asia is something that Yeung said a number of companies — Prenetics included — are working to fix. That makes absolute sense, and his job is to ensure his company is the one that changes this. |
Uber Hires A Mobile Team In Amsterdam To Staff A New Mobile Dev Shop In The City | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | In between , and , and denying it will , ’s global expansion continues. To spearhead its mobile growth, Uber is setting up a mobile development shop in Amsterdam, led by one of its earliest employees and staffed by a set of new hires: a team of Dutch developers who that have served as advisors to the company since 2009. (Update: Uber clarifies that it was a team in California that was in charge of the Spotify project.) Uber is expected to announce the mobile push in Amsterdam later today, along with the news that the office will be headed by Uber’s first engineer (and employee number two), . In the meantime, Netherlands blog has published more details. It reports that Uber has effectively taken on 10 former employees from Dutch firm , including the founder Jelle Prins, who will oversee design, while Whelan will run engineering. Uber has not acquired the whole agency. (“There is no question of a takeover,” Prins tells iCulture.) That’s partly because Moop functions as a collective of engineers and designers. And while the team moving to Uber have worked on other transportation apps, Moop’s people have also taken on other projects that have very little synergy with what Uber is today. Those projects, and Moop, will continue. In the meantime, it sounds as if Uber is going to tackle the process of building up that new office with typical Uber aggression. The aim is to build the team out “to up to 30 people within a year and more in the years ahead,” Whelan says. Some of those may come from the community of developers in the city or elsewhere in Europe; others will come from Uber’s HQ in San Francisco. Projects on the mobile roadmap include more global improvements to both the rider and driver apps; developing the integrations for future partnerships; and probably other features that Uber does not want to divulge to nosey journalists. Uber’s European shift, and hiring a whole team from another startup to fuel it, are not unprecedented moves. In 2013, Facebook set up an headed by Lars Rasmussen. That team works on existing services like Graph Search but also interesting projects still in stealth, such as . And just last month, we uncovered how the bulk of the team of defunct UK mapping app Pin Drop. Similarly to Uber and Moop, Apple did not outright acquire the bigger app shop, Caffeinehit, that made the app. The fact that the Moop team was already based in Amsterdam, and apparently didn’t want to make the move to the U.S., is part of the reason why Uber decided to bring the mountain to Mohammed. The other is that Amsterdam also happens to be the location of the company’s international headquarters. “We’re also using Amsterdam as our European Headquarters, so it made sense to also have engineering there,” Whelan explained. But as flat as the lowlands may be, they are not without drama. Amsterdam has been one of the many cities where regulators have attempted to . In this case, the controversy had to do with Uber’s use of “amateur” drivers — those not licensed as taxi professionals. Officials posed as casual passengers in a sting operation that netted fines for four drivers working under Uber’s basic service. Uber Black and Uber Lux drivers and services have been unaffected. |
Saavn Partners With Twitter To Bring Tweet-Powered Radio To Its Streaming Service | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | India-focused music service is upping its social game after it partnered with Twitter to introduce a tweet-powered radio station for its users. The company serves up “millions” of Indian music tracks and international hits, offering a Spotify-style choice of an ad-supported free version or a subscription-based, ad-free model. It launched its radio mode one year ago, and now it is taking requests from users who tweet to the account. The station will also mix in tracks that Saavn users are sharing to Twitter from the service, although the company said specific requests will be prioritized over social shares. Saavn Co-Founder and CEO Rishi Malhotra told TechCrunch in an interview that the radio feature already accounts for over half of all activity on the service and, since a large number of users are already active on Twitter, the union was a no-brainer for him. “Music streaming has always been an inherently social service, we [at Saavn] already see lots of activity from users worldwide and identified a natural opportunity to create a radio station. This puts the power of programming into our users’ hands,” he said. Malhotra also hinted that Saavn is preparing more social features next year, but he said that these new releases will be within the Saavn service itself, such as collaborative playlists. “So far we’ve avoided adding our own social features as we want to get to a certain scale first,” he explained. Saavn hasn’t revealed user numbers since 2013, when it claimed 10 million monthly active users thanks to the benefits of Facebook’s then algorithm, which has since been tweaked to dial down the viral effect of apps. Saavn recently told TechCrunch that it will release updated figures in the coming month or two. with its own music service, and these days it is seemingly content to be a platform for dedicated music players like Saavn, SoundCloud and others. “Saavn is the perfect company to work with as we look to contribute to music accessibility and music discovery for our international users, particularly in the Asian market, in an age where social sharing has no borders,” said Arvinder Gujral, Twitter’s Director of Business Development for India and Southeast Asia, in a statement. Malhotra further revealed that the two parties began discussing this coming-together as recently as September, which makes its introduction today particularly impressive and speedy. “We’re very deliberate and thoughtful about our partnerships,” the Saavn CEO added. Saavn claims strong levels of social sharing across many parts of the world — click the graphic to enlarge it New York-headquartered Saavn, which also has offices in India, raised undisclosed funding this summer and it has wasted little time cranking up its promotional efforts with some innovative partnerships. Last month, the company to offer three months of its Pro service to Android shoppers for free, and this deal with Twitter is likely to further raise its visibility and also help Twitter’s efforts to grow in India. |
Rumor: Web Content Management Firm Ektron Sold To Private Equity Company [Updated] | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | A source told TechCrunch this week that , a web content management firm based in Nashua, NH has been sold to an unnamed private equity firm for around $48M plus taking on $50M in debt. The source said the actual cash exchanged in the deal would only be in the $30M range, which is pretty low for an established enterprise software company. It’s worth noting that the company has refused to comment to this point in response to several requests for confirmation. One source close to the company told us they couldn’t comment on it, but didn’t refute it either. An industry source we’ve spoken to reported hearing a similar rumor, but cautioned that there have been rumors of this sort in the past, adding they believe this one will pan out. And a third industry insider told us it was worthwhile pursuing, but couldn’t say more. Ektron has received $4.5M in funding to date plus an undisclosed amount from private equity firm Accel-KKR earlier this year. We have been unable to confirm if Accel-KKR is the buyer, although an industry source told us “It would make sense to me that their primary backer would make an acquisition.” Ektron has been in the web content management business since 1998, coming to the industry fairly early on, and they have a large install base. Customers include Walmart, National Geographic, Lloyd’s Bank and John Hancock Long-term Insurance. Web content management systems help companies create and manage web sites with various degrees of complexity. Ektron seems to be doing well, but WCM is currently very much in flux as the industry shifts from a pure web focus to a broader multi-channel view, with a bigger emphasis on mobile devices. That’s because more people are accessing the web or interacting with brands increasingly on mobile devices. In a presentation yesterday at the Gilbane Conference in Boston, Brad Kagawa, VP of Technology Content Management Systems at the New York Times, said in April, 2013, 50 percent of their web traffic to article pages came from mobile devices for the first time. He reported that by August that number had surpassed 50 percent, suggesting a significant change in usage patterns in which the New York Times is very much a canary in the coal mine for the industry at large. Meanwhile, web content management itself has become increasingly commoditized as vendors share a common set of functionality, making it much more difficult to differentiate products in the market. One way companies including Ektron are trying to do that is to have a greater digital focus. In fact, the entire industry is pivoting to what they are calling customer experience management where they attempt to provide the optimal experience for the customer, however they interact with a company based on what they know about them. This means that increasingly companies are trying to provide a more customized experience, rather than give everyone the same generic content. is trying to provide ways to tell marketers more about visitors and present more customized content based on what they can glean from them, even when they are anonymous. You can still understand things like device, IP address and other information even when customers don’t choose to share information explicitly about themselves. Against this backdrop, Ektron has remained in the middle of the pack in the $30-50M revenue range, in July. What would make this sale more surprising if it turns out to be true is that one of the companies that shares that revenue category, Telerik, . Telerik had more to offer beyond its content management tool, but it’s still significantly more money than what Ektron has reportedly received if the sale rumor is accurate. Update 12/5/14: Ektron released a press release today stating they had received additional investment from Accel-KKR, but did not call it a sale. They would not say how much the new investment was or what stake Accel-KKR has in the company, but company president Tim McKinnon told TechCrunch that the investment was primarily for liquidity purposes to pay off early angel investors who were ready to cash out after 15 years. |
SoftBank Invests $250M In GrabTaxi, Uber’s Archrival In Southeast Asia | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | Not content with and as part of to startups in India, Japanese telecom giant SoftBank has now turned its attention to Southeast Asia and sunk $250 million into , Uber’s major rival in the region. Neither party has confirmed what the deal values GrabTaxi at, but the company’s valuation is likely to exceed the $1 billion mark. The duo did confirm that SoftBank has become GrabTaxi’s largest investor. The round is the highest raise for a startup in Southeast Asia to date — Rocket Internet companies aside — and it is GrabTaxi’s fourth funding activity this calendar year, taking it past $320 million in capital from investors. GrabTaxi’s previous and was led by Tiger Global — which also invested in Uber rival Ola — while . was announced in April. GrabTaxi was founded in Malaysia in 2012, has over 500 staff and is live in 17 cities across six countries in Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia. Its core offering is a service that connects registered taxis with would-be passengers via its app — thus working with the existing industry rather than against it — but it also offers an Uber-like private car service and is trialling . Uber is present in each of GrabTaxi’s markets, offering its standard Uber Black service in all and its cheaper UberX service in most. Hailo is present in Singapore, while Rocket Internet-backed Easy Taxi is a minority player in a handful of countries in Southeast Asia. Uber doesn’t break out user numbers, but GrabTaxi — which says it is leading the taxi app space in Southeast Asia — claims 500,000 monthly active users from 2.5 million app downloads. It says there are 60,000 drivers on its network, and that three bookings are made per second on average across its platform — which is an 800 percent increase over the past year. Back in May, GrabTaxi claimed 1.2 million downloads and 250,000 monthly users. This Series D round comes at a fascinating time. and is tipped to be again soon at a rumored $40 billion valuation. GrabTaxi, it seems, is building its own war chest, and bringing on a formidable ally in SoftBank, at just the right moment. GrabTaxi didn’t explicitly reveal how it will invest the money from SoftBank, but CEO and co-founder Anthony Tan told TechCrunch in an interview that it will go towards fortifying its efforts in existing markets and continuing its expansion across Southeast Asia. There are no plans to move outside of the region, which has a cumulative population of around 600 million, he said. “We’re going to be staying regional. [We want to] grow very fast and focus on expanding in this region, whilst staying very very focused,” Tan commented, speaking after the in Bangkok, Thailand. “We’ll also be hiring. We want the right kind of people, people who love people and believe in our mission,” he added. Related to that, Tan said GrabTaxi is open to potential acquisitions, but he stressed that in any possible deal, the focus would be on finding the right cultural blend. GrabTaxi has been focused on providing a pure-play transportation service to date. Uber, however, has experimented with a range of alternative services across the world. While he didn’t explicitly advocate that GrabTaxi will follow suit, Tan did admit that the company’s new funding intake gives it “the resources” to potentially explore new areas of business in the future. Harvard graduate Tan admitted that the price battles between rival services in Southeast Asia necessitate significant funding just to compete, although he said GrabTaxi still maintains the “heart of a startup” — such as working hard, traveling via economy class and low-cost carriers where possible — and generally being thrifty. While Uber has raised boat loads of money for its operations, the company is engaged in every continent on the planet. That’s something that could mean GrabTaxi is actually better capitalized, which Cheryl Goh, GrabTaxi’s VP of marketing, hinted. “Our strong focus in this region means that each of [the] six GrabTaxi markets stands to receive a significant portion of funding compared to larger players that have to stretch their funding much further,” Goh said in a statement without explicitly mentioning the ‘U’ word. While SoftBank provided the entire round for GrabTaxi, TechCrunch understands that the startup had multiple alternative offers on the table. That certainly bodes well for the future, since GrabTaxi’s track record and the ongoing battle will almost certainly require further rounds of funding in the not-too-distant future. Uber, GrabTaxi and others have of Vietnam and Thailand this past week, and numerous other regulators in the past. Tan didn’t provide specific comment on either of those incidents, but he did reveal that GrabTaxi has set up a dedicated government liaison team that works directly with authorities across Southeast Asia to help smooth out issues and communications. Southeast Asia’s startup scene continues to heat up. Just last week and . But this investment from SoftBank is sure to put the region on the map, particularly coming right after Rocket Internet’s Amazon rival led by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings. When I put it to Tan that many founders will want to know how he’s been so successful in Southeast Asia, he points to his faith in God and his company’s mission to make a difference. “There are a lot of well-run startups in Southeast Asia. We hope that the values we’ve been pushing for — helping drivers make more money, women feel safer and more — and changing the current ecosystem and how we treat each other makes a difference,” he explained. With SoftBank and its renowned founder Masayoshi Son on his side, Tan’s company is closing out the year in a very different position to how it began 2014. Then it was an outsider that was full of ambition and plans but lacking resources. Now it has gathered steam in multiple markets and pulled in the financial muscle to potentially battle Uber, one of the world’s most talked-about companies, blow for blow. Certainly, 2015 is gearing up to host a fascinating battle between these two, particularly now that SoftBank has stepped into the ring. |
London’s Mayor And Six Tech Investors Launch $133M Fund For City’s Startups | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | A new venture capital fund for startups has been launched by the mayor of London, aiming to boost . The new will be supported by £25 million from the mayor’s office and up to £60 million from six private-sector partners, so £85 million or $133 million in total. Applications for funding will open on 4th December, but you can . The money is coming in via the London Enterprise Panel’s ‘Growing Places Fund.’ The six private partners will be Wellington Partners (a major European VC), Playfair Capital (a Micro-VC), three business Angel syndicates (London Business Angels, Angel Lab and Firestartr) and the Crowdcube/ Braveheart Consortium (a consortium between an equity crowd funding platform and a fund manager). Originally, 38 venture capital funds, business angel Syndicates and investment platforms applied to be partners. LCIF predicts that it will invest in over 150 companies over the next three years, equating to roughly 2,600 new jobs in the U.K. capital. The new fund specifically targets small businesses in the areas of science, technology and “digital” looking to raise between £250,000 and £1m. According to the Fund’s own research that is the largest gap in the market for investment. For every £1 invested by the LCIF, the partners are obliged to directly invest (or secure from their investors) at least £1, and on average £2.9, in the selected businesses seed investment round. The London Co-Investment Fund will be managed by Funding London. The initiative was originated by, and developed in partnership with, (the membership body for universities, accelerators and incubators that support entrepreneurs in London). Capital Enterprise will promote the LCIF and manage the deal flow of businesses, which will be referred to the fund’s selected co-investment partners. And they are setting the bar quite high. As well as having to demonstrate they will create new jobs they will have to demonstrate how they will get to a decent return for investors, ideally 10x. They also plan to be pretty rapid. LCIF hopes to make its first investment in January 2015 and plans to co-invest alongside its partners at the rate of . According to the mayor’s office, London’s tech sector has become the biggest cluster of expertise in Europe over the last three years. There are over 34,400 digital technology businesses and 155,600 digital technology employees in the capital and 32 accelerators and incubators. |
Sound Might Be The Key To Touching Objects In Virtual Reality | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | The key to a sense of touch in VR might be sound, ironically – a team working out of the University of Bristol in the UK (via ) have worked out an improved version of haptic tech that can use high-frequency sound emitters to mimic the effect of touching a physical object, without any physical object present. Researcher Ben Long and his team at the university had already created a system by which sound could produce a sensation of physical touch, using speakers that produce waves that impact a user’s skin enough to exert a sense of pressure. To make that workable with VR, the team incorporated a Leap Motion controller, the gesture control device crowdfunded by a startup in 2010 and shipped in 2013. The controller can help determine the position of a user’s hands relative to a virtual image displayed in a VR environment, say one produced by an Oculus Rift headset, and provide an appropriate tactile response when they interact with said object. Just like with digital and printed images, there are issues around resolution when projecting a shape in this manner – virtual objects feel like they’re vibrating slightly in mid-air, for instance, and high detail isn’t yet possible. Plans are in place for use of speaker arrays that include smaller individual units, which working in concert should mean higher resolution, the same way more pixels packed into less space produces higher-resolution digital graphics. True immersion in any VR experience will require this kind of tactile interaction, so the tech is exciting to say the least. Oculus VR is on record as saying , and recently suggested that development of an appropriate input method might be the last hurdle towards pinning down a consumer ship date. |
Barry Diller Says Tinder Succeeded Because IAC Left Its Founders Alone | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | IAC Chairman Barry Diller talked about dating app Tinder while onstage today at Business Insider’s Ignition conference, but surprisingly, he didn’t directly address the company’s biggest piece of recent news — the fact that . Here’s how Diller tells the Tinder story: IAC created “this little incubation group” ( ) a few years ago, and one of the products to emerge from the incubator was Tinder. “And we were lucky enough — smart enough, I wouldn’t say so much — that we left it alone to the founders,” Diller said. As a result, those founders were able “to create this incredible virality. Since then it’s just skyrocketed.” That seems like an obvious setup to ask: If leaving leaving Tinder alone was key to its early success, why is Rad being demoted? (As last month, he’ll remain involved as president and board member.) I’m not trying to say that IAC is or is not making the wrong decision here, but it just seemed strange that it wasn’t addressed. , he ran out of time before he could ask the question. (Rad’s co-founder following a sexual harassment lawsuit from former vice president of marketing Whitney Wolfe. a few months ago.) What Blodget asked about instead was Tinder’s valuation and financial structure. IAC’s relationship with Tinder was the subject of considerable discussion earlier this year — partly because, from the outside, Tinder looked like a regular startup. And there were stories, , that it was raising outside funding. Ultimately, , and partner Matt Cohler joined the board, but reportedly, no money was invested. “It’s not a VC model because we’re not a VC,” Diller said, adding, “We’re not every three months creating a new faux value for it, because we don’t really need any money. We’re perfectly happy to finance it all.” |
Google Inbox Team Promises Support For Google Apps Accounts, Says User Demand Sped Up Efforts | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | Every single time I write about Google Inbox, I see the same two comments on repeat: a good chunk of readers saying “Meh. Tried Inbox, wasn’t into it,” and another good chunk saying “If only it worked with my custom Gmail domain!” If you’re in the latter camp: good news! The Google Inbox team promised today that support is on the way and has been made a high priority. (Custom Gmail domains have been called different things over the years. Whether you call it “Google for Work,” “Google for Business” or “Google for Domain,” we’re talking about the service that lets you host your address through Google’s Gmail servers and interface.) The bad news? There’s still not even a rough estimate as to when it might show up. However long it was going to take before, though, it’ll be a bit faster now. Thanks to post-launch demand specifically for Google Apps account support, the Inbox team says it decided to “speed up [its] efforts to bring Inbox to all of you.” To quote the Inbox product manager who did a : Supporting these accounts comes with other demands and we’re working hard on addressing them so we can get Inbox to Google Apps users.
We were pleasantly surprised to see how open-minded Inbox users are to making big changes to their work email workflow, and the high demand for Inbox on Google Apps accounts has already caused us to speed up our efforts to bring Inbox to all of you. Hang tight! Also promised: support for browsers that aren’t Chrome. |
Other Ways To Fund Your Business Dream | Kristopher B. Jones | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | For any startup, finding appropriate capital can be a matter of business survival. Nowadays, everyone is aflutter about the sexiest capital-raising tool on the block: crowdfunding. According to a recent crowdfunding raises a whopping $2 million per day, an equivalent of $87,000 per hour. Slap up a video, write a description of your project, share your dreams on social media and simply sit back and watch while funding rolls magically your way. The success stories boggle the mind. But despite all the media hype, the reality of crowdfunding for most small business is far different. The dirty little secret is that for every crowdfunding success story, there are thousands of flops; well-intentioned business owners who diligently set up their Kickstarter page but don’t receive a dime. But that isn’t reason to give up. The great news is that crowdfunding is definitely not the only kid in town. In fact, I think you might be surprised at all the capital-raising gems literally located in your own backyard. Here are some of my favorites: The government is an often ignored and misunderstood place to find capital. From low-interest (as low as 0 percent!) loans to outright grants, the government has programs at all levels to support startups and small businesses. Here are some tips to help you in your hunt: To learn more, set up a meeting with your town’s government division that specializes in community and economic development. Also check out the for available loans and grants. SBDCs are my capital-raising favorite. Often linked to a local college or university, SBDCs exist in most communities and are an excellent resource if you’re looking for hard-to-find grants. The’yre also an excellent place to receive high-quality and free business counseling. The Chamber of Commerce has always been at the center of any local business community. To profit from a chamber, you need to be an active member. The reason is that if you are active (attending all the events and contributing to the community) the chamber will prioritize your business when they allocate valuable resources like low-interest loans and grants. Most private foundations provide for nonprofit activities and some social causes. Some will also offer competitive grants to small business owners — particularly women and minorities. A great example is the , which gives money to women entrepreneurs trying to start a home-based or online business. Every year hundreds of business plan competitions are conducted throughout the United States to provide cash and/or in-kind services for startups. For example, in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., there is an annual that awards as much as $25,000 in cash and up to $100,000 in in-kind services. Raising capital can be both complex and intimidating. It can feel like a long and winding road but if you stick it out, you will succeed at getting money from the most unlikely of places. Try viewing it as a game. Have fun with it. Treat it like a treasure hunt and who knows what you will find. |
Anagog Raises $1M To Help Drivers Find Street Parking With Real-Time, Crowdsourced Data | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | One of the best decisions I ever made was to get rid of my car. The thing that really drove me over the edge? The constant search for parking, particularly in big cities, and the parking tickets that can pile up as a result. Israeli startup is trying to tackle that problem with real-time crowdsourced data. The company is announcing today that it’s going into beta testing and that it has raised $1 million in funding. “This is an area that’s ready to be disrupted,” says Chief Marketing Officer Jake Levant. He described street parking as a market where there’s no visibility into supply and demand. Anagog, he said, “can redirect demand to where there is supply — there is the free market at play here.” We’ve written about a number of parking startups, and their approaches include , , and flat-out selling your parking spot before you vacate it (that last one ). Anagog’s approach is probably closer to another service that began in Israel — Waze, which . (I was the one who brought up the Waze comparison to Levant, and he didn’t reject it.) The company that it has built up a network of “tens of millions of drivers [who] contribute millions of parking events daily.” The combination of historical and real-time data means that drivers can find areas where there’s more open parking, and even see specific spots that are being vacated. One difference between the Waze model and Anagog, however, is that Anagog is not building an app for consumers. Instead, it’s distributing its CrowdPark technology by integrating with partners. For example, it’s announcing today that it’s partnering with Milgam Cellular Parking to bring CrowdPark into Milgam’s parking payment service Pango. The funding, by the way, came from angel investors including Yos Shiran (CEO of Ceaserstone), Dan Vilensky (former chairman of Applied Materials Israel) and Avi Shechter, former vice president at AOL. |
SuperDuino Is A Tiny Arduino Board With A Built-in Touchscreen | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | Another day, another Arduino project. This time it’s something called , a tiny touchscreen powered by a coin cell battery and backed up by a tiny Arduino-Like processor. The kit can be used to build smartwatches and other mini devices and costs about $25 for the entire system. You can add microSD readers, Bluetooth, and wireless connectivity to the SuperDuino, as well. What can you do with it? As you can see above you can embed the device into a watch or use it as a mini-display for a sensor. It can also work as a mini oscilloscope and, most important, it runs Flappy Bird. Created by Mohsin Farooq the project has already surpassed its funding goal and has about 23 days left before the end of crowdfunding. It’s a clever, cool little product and could be useful for wearables experimenters and micro-Flappy Bird fans. |
Find Out What You Listened To Most On Spotify This Past Year | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | While the rest of the world is rocking to Ed Sheeran and his Top 40 friends, I’m mostly picking up dreamy indie pop the likes of Purity Ring and Bear Hands. Ignore the fact that you may have never heard of Bear Hands for a second (but trust me, they’re good). Spotify told me what I like most in its individualized . This nifty application grabs all your 2014 data and highlights just how, when, where and who you listened to throughout this past year. I spent a good 17,337 minutes on my favorite online jukebox this year, 51 percent of that on the go, so says the Year in Review. I listen to a lot of Pandora and some Rdio so it’s a toss up how much of my life has been spent streaming music in 2014. My top-most listened to playlist, “This is the sound. This!” includes a mix of new bands like Chvrches, Paperwhite, The 1975 and Great Good Fine Ok. My top five bands were BrotherTiger (it was actually just one song I played over and over. Good for running.), Haim, FleetFoxes, Stone Roses and No Joy. The great part here is I would have been relegated to the same (IMO) ho-hum soft rock everyone else gets on the airwaves had it not been for streaming services like Spotify steering me in the right direction. But I’m not the average listener. According to Spotify data, more folks were into Coldplay, Maroon 5 and Frozen in 2014; typical fodder for your average top 40 pop station. Pharrel’s Happy went viral with the most shares this last winter. It was also the No. 1 most played song. It’s fascinating to click and spin to see most. In the United States it’s Childish Gambino’s “3005,” Estonia tunes in on Karl-Erik Taukar’s “Vasupandamatu”, Finland favors TCT’s “Ranelle.” The UK united with Take That, Calvin Harris and some good old David Guetta. You can see . The Year in Review shows we were globally twerking it out to workout ballads from 5-7:30 pm in 2014 and enjoying Meghan Trainor’s Base this fall. Avicci’s “Wake Me Up” hit over 200 million plays this year and remains the most streamed in Spotify history. Note the individual shout-outs to certain songs that went big. Chances are you’re adding individual tunes to your playlists and not entire albums on Spotify. The streaming service readily offers up info to artists and users on how many times a song has been played. Bear Hands top song “Giants” has been played 5.6 million times while Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” has been streamed nearly 224 million times on Spotify. A much less popular (but still very popular, this is Katy Perry) song on the same album “Birthday” has only been streamed 48 million times. Favoring individual song streaming over entire albums changes things for both the record label industry and the Billboard top charts. It isn’t about sales of albums but streaming of songs. You may have skipped songs you didn’t like on CDs in the past, but the industry had no way of knowing you were doing that until streaming came along. Now, instead of just tallying up album sales, Billboard counts how many times a song from an album is played within on-demand subscription services like Spotify, Pandora and Google’s All Access. Fifteen hundred song streams are now the equivalent of one album sale. Daniel Glass, who handles indie record label Glassnote Records, told the New York Times, who first reported the story, that this also helps newer artists who are more likely to get streamed than sell an album, “It’s been very difficult over the last two or three years to communicate the charts to radio stations,” Mr. Glass said. “I’ve been Scotch taping and Band-Aiding Shazam and Spotify, bringing in all this data for them. Now with this all-in-one streaming chart, it’s a much truer reflection of how much is being consumed.” How do you listen? What are you listening to and do your tastes fall in line with the majority of Spotify listeners this past year or are you a little more like me? We’d love to know. and let us know about your listening habits in the comments below. |
London’s Containerville Is A Startup Office Built Out Of…. Shipping Containers | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | We’ve seen some pretty weird startup spaces in our time, but not often in shipping containers. , which has just launched in London, is an unusual take on startup offices. Some 30 shipping containers have been arranged over two floors, “up-cycled” into modern work spaces, just by the Regents Canal. Each container can accommodate up to eight desks, with each container fitted out to function as a modern work space, complete with a galley kitchen. Coming with 100MB broadband, these ‘plug and play’ offices are close to the key tech startup cluster of East London. They add to the multitude of co-working and fast office space London can now offer, from , , , and many, . |
Microsoft Makes Its Audience Polling Service Bing Pulse Available To Anyone | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | Microsoft is expanding its audience polling tool today — Josh Gottheimer, general manager of corporate strategy, told me that it’s moving from a model of one-off partnerships to self-service. So basically anyone can now use Bing Pulse at their events and meetings. While there are a number of polling and visualizing products out there, Gottheimer said this is really the modern version of where audience members are asked to turn a dial to show how they’re feeling. It’s not just about conducting a single poll, but rather tracking how people are feeling throughout an event. For example, to follow audience responses during the State of the Union, while used it to gauge how attendees felt during two sessions that were part of its conference over the summer. Gottheimer said people can now do something similar at individual meetings — you point attendees to a URL that they can access on their phone, tablet, or desktop/laptop computer, then they continually update you on how the meeting is going. Or you can send out specific questions, like, “How is Josh doing in his presentation?” You can track that information just for yourself, or display it on a giant screen, whichever you prefer. He also argued that Bing Pulse won’t distract people from the meeting or the show or whatever it is they’re being asked about — participants, he said, are “paying more attention to what’s in front of them,” because the polling urges them to be “reacting and listening to what people are saying.” Bing Pulse is still in beta testing and will be available for free until January 31, 2015. Gottheimer said the plan is to move to a freemium model, where a basic version is available for free, but customers have to pay for additional usage or features. |
Landbay Secures $2.35M From Omni For Its Buy-To-Let P2P Lending Platform | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | We covered the of in April and it’s since gone on to bring the peer-to-peer lending model to buy-to-rent mortgages, among a raft of other competitors piling into this space. The idea is that it offers lenders more attractive returns compared to banks. It’s now raised £1.5 million (USD$2.35 million) from an alternatives investment manager with direct experience of the UK property lending market. Earlier this year, Landbay raised £250,000 of seed capital via the crowd-equity platform. It’s also now joined the UK Peer to Peer Finance Association (P2PFA), alongside founding members Zopa, Ratesetter and Funding Circle. This requires its members to operate by a strict set of rules in order to promote high standards of conduct and consumer protection, beyond those required by the FCA. John Goodall, co-founder and CEO of Landbay says the round was “strategic.” P2P lenders have sprung up in recent years. Zopa in the U.K. pioneered the model, and has significant funding. And the P2P finance model has even to insurance. Competitors to Landbay’s model are Assetz and LendInvest. However, they focus mainly on lending for commercial property and developers, not the residential buy-to-rent mortgage market. Some £21 billion went though buy-to-rent mortgage lending in the UK in 2013. |
Former Justin.TV And Parse CEOs Join Y Combinator As Partners | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | Last month, former Pixar CFO Ali Rowghani joined Y Combinator . This month, YC is adding not one, not two, but new names to their partner/part-time partner rosters. (pictured above), former CEO of Justin.tv and Socialcam, is shifting from part-time partner to full time. According to an interview , Seibel will focus on helping minorities get a better footing in YC and in Silicon Valley as a whole. , previously a part-time lawyer/consultant for YC, is joining as a partner, as well. , previously the CEO of Parse (acquired by Facebook), is joining as a part-time partner. He will continue to work at Parse/Facebook. By a quick count, this brings YC up to 27 partners (counting both full and part-time): Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Dalton Caldwell, Paul Graham, Kevin Hale, Aaron Harris, Justin Kan, Carolynn Levy, Jessica Livingston, Kat Manalac, Robert Morris, Kirsty Nathoo, Alexis Ohanian, Geoff Ralston, Garry Tan, Qasar Younis, Michael Seibel, and Jon Levy. Adora Cheung, Patrick Collison, Elizabeth Iorns, Andrew Mason, Ali Rowghani, Yuri Sagalov, Emmett Shear, Harj Taggar, and Ilya Sukhar. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 6 | 25 | null |
Kidaptive’s Latest App Learner Mosaic Puts A Preschool Teacher In Parents’ Pockets | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | , the , has now released a new app designed just for parents. Called “ ,” the app offers parents personalized insights into how well their child is progressing based on their behavior and activity within Kidaptive’s applications, and soon, within other third-party applications that tie into the platform, as well. The idea is to create a platform where educational apps for kids can actually assess how well they teach children the skills they claim to, and then provide parents with a toolkit to understand where their child is in terms of that skill development. Learner Mosaic then offers tips and activities for parents so they can get involved to help their child progress further. Founded in 2012 and backed by $10 million in funding, Kidaptive’s apps combine high-quality animation to tell stories which include interactive puzzles and activities for young children to play in order to move the storyline forward. Prana Studios, an animation and visual effects studio co-founded by Kidaptive co-founder and CEO P.J. Gunsagar, is an investor in the startup which is how the company is able to craft animations that look a lot like what you would see on children’s TV. Kidaptive’s approach has always involved promoting a serious curriculum disguised as fun. My own in-house beta tester, who is turning 5 next week, has been playing the apps for some time now and is surprisingly not bored with them yet. Just yesterday, for example, she started Kidaptive’s “Leo’s Pad” over from the beginning and was busy coloring a picture within the app this morning at breakfast. The flagship application features a number of activities that take place in a series of “appisodes” which parents can buy as in-app purchases, or purchase in bulk for $25. There are now seven of these appisodes available, which tell the story of a young boy Leo, his friends, pet dragon and their adventures. The new Learner Mosaic app assesses where the child is in terms of the over 25 skills essential to early learning which are presented in Kidaptive’s Leo’s Pad app, and provides parents with insights and tips about their child’s strengths as well as where they’re struggling. Beyond just accumulating the data, Learner Mosaic is about getting parents engaged with the child to help them improve their skills through offline play and other real world activities. For instance, the app may tell a parent their child is working on “planning and sequencing” skills, and suggests a game parents can play with kids using colored blocks that can help to reinforce this skill set. It tells parents when kids hit a certain milestone, how they can foster her interests, and it shares other items pulled from Leo’s Pad, like the drawings the child made. “When we see a moment of learning for a child through Leo’s Pad that deserves special attention from parents so that they can further enhance their child’s learning or engage in a conversation, we’re giving parents an answer to the ‘what next’ question,” explains Gunsagar. “It’s like a personalized preschool teacher in the pockets of busy parents,” he says. Parents can also input data into Learner Mosaic to provide it with more information, and in turn, Leo’s Pad difficulty levels will adapt as children play and master their skills. Gunsagar says the company is now working with two other kids’ app developers to integrate with the program, one of which is in testing and the other which has proceeded to the integration phase. The company doesn’t disclose revenue but is at nearly 1 million users across its apps, and sees nearly half that in terms of monthly actives. Longer-term, Kidaptive wants to expand its program to be a bridge between parents and teachers, Gunsagar says, but for now the focus is on getting parents on board. Learner Mosaic is a free download on iTunes. |
SoftBank Invests $7M In MIT-based Clean-Tech Startup Altaeros Energies | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | Another day, another funding from SoftBank. This time the corporation, one of Japan’s leading telecoms, has , which is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and makes airborne wind turbines. SoftBank’s investment in Altaeros is tiny compared to its recent pouring of hundreds of millions of dollars into , , and , but it’s notable because it shows just how wide the company’s investment portfolio is. It also comes at a time when . SoftBank, however, has been keen to grow its clean energy business in Japan, where the Fukushima disaster in 2011 . For example, earlier this year that its clean energy business unit will start retail distribution of renewable energy sources including solar and wind power. In statement, Masayoshi Son, the chairman and CEO of SoftBank, said Altaeros’ tech can potentially help SoftBank gain a stake in new verticals. “Altaeros’ airborne wind turbine technology is a new and promising renewable energy solution for remote islands and locations in Japan and the Asia-Pacific region. We also believe in the BAT’s potential to create new businesses by combining it with communication and surveillance technologies,” Son said. Altaeros’ wind turbines, called Buoyant Airborne Turbine (BATs) technology can fly higher than traditional wind towers and go up to 2,000 meters above ground. Since they don’t need to be installed on the ground, BATs can be used in more locations than wind towers. Altaeros claims that BATs can “significantly [reduce] the cost of electricity for remote sites,” as well as deliver equipment and telecommunications services to remote locations. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kldA4nWANA8] |
After School Is Back On The App Store, But With Changes To Curb Cyberbullying | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | is back. The anonymous message board application returned to the App Store several hours after it . The app is still marketed to students and allows for the anonymous posting of messages. But an Apple spokesperson tells me that the developer made changes . The app now has a and users can flag content. Apple told the developer to clean up the content and I couldn’t find any content bullying another person after the app relaunched. Apple takes reports of cyberbullying and offensive content very seriously. An Apple spokesperson tells me that following , Apple’s developer team contacted the developer and asked him to take the app down and make changes. We noticed the app was no longer available around 7:00 am ET this morning, but the app returned around 6:00 pm ET this evening. Launched just a few weeks ago, After School’s is reminiscent of ‘s history. After just a couple of reports of offensive content, the anonymous posting app came under fire as a haven for cyberbullying and eventually, though some would say not quick enough, took steps to restrict access to the demographic posting such material. Despite the so-called safeguards in place, I was able to log into my local school’s site and browse and post content. There are 735 users on my local high school’s After School board and it’s exactly what I expected, too — high schoolers talking like high schoolers. It’s mostly messages about boyfriends, blowjobs and acne. There was a touch of nudity in some of the pictures, but I couldn’t find a comment targeting another user in an offensive manner. Today’s update relies on the After School user base to police itself. It allows users to flag content for removal. That alone will not stop cyberbullying, but it should let the company keep tabs on the offensive content. Apple doesn’t let app producers get away with violating its terms of service, especially with displaying offensive material. I would expect the app to quickly disappear forever if reports continue to surface after today’s update. After School’s developer still has not returned TechCrunch’s request for comment. |
Say Media Buys Out Investors As It Exits The Media Business And Focuses On Its Publishing Platform | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | After four years of operating a portfolio of digital magazines, is saying goodbye to its media business. The company is also saying goodbye to its investors, buying them out as it seeks to reinvent itself as a product-focused business focusing on what it believes is a next-generation publishing platform. The move is a big reversal for Say Media, which was formed through the back in 2010. The idea then was to create a , and over the next few years the company went about purchasing and building out a portfolio of various content properties. Rather than focus on a specific vertical or segment, however, those properties spanned the gamut from fashion to technology to pets, without having a real comprehensive thread tying them together. But as CEO Matt Sanchez admitted in an interview with TechCrunch, “Ultimately that didn’t work for us. We were not building singular brands, but had a bunch of mid-sized brands.” Well it turns out unless you create real size and scale of audience. After failing to accomplish that, Say Media has started the process of unraveling its media properties and selling them off. That began with the earlier this year, but will , including sites like ReadWrite and xoJane. Rather than continuing to create content of its own, the company will instead be focusing its energies on helping other publishers to create their own “digital magazines.” It’s doing that by doubling down on its publishing platform, which the company calls . “We wanted to go back to what we were focused on from the beginning,” which was being a product company, Sanchez says. But before Say Media was able to change direction and go all in on Tempest, it decided to buy out its investors. Say Media isn’t disclosing how much it’s buying the company back for, but it’s likely investors are getting back just a fraction of what they put in. In the more than ten years since the founding of Six Apart and VideoEgg, the combined company had raised a total of $113 million. To accomplish the buyout, Say Media found a small group of investors, mostly individual angels, to back the company and its new vision. Those investors include Justin Kan, Sean Glass, Michael Levit, and Ryan McCalley, among others. Sanchez said doing so will bring Say Media back to being more of a “Series A-type company,” but one that already benefits from a pretty large product and sales team. Say Media will continue to have about 170 employees working for it once the sale of its media properties are complete. And unlike most Series A companies, it already generates a fair amount of revenue. The company is on pace to bring in $60 million in sales this year, Sanchez said. Most of that comes from its content marketing and advertising business, which it’s hoping to grow by moving more digital publishers onto the Tempest platform. Say Media is hoping to position Tempest as an alternative to WordPress and Drupal, the two platforms many digital publishers use to manage their content sites. After developing it to power its own sites, the company believes it can help out others who want to build beautiful, responsive “digital magazines” of their own. Rather than having to do a bunch of custom development on a publishing platform like WordPress, Say thinks publishers will be attracted to the idea of a fully hosted but highly customizable platform for managing their sites. Tempest provides not just the publishing platform, but all the ad serving, content recommendation, and analytics that publishers frequently tack on through third-party tools. Say Media is essentially trying the “It Just Works” pitch to publishers. Move your site onto Tempest, and Say Media will take care of everything else. That said, most publishers face a fair amount of lock-in to whatever publishing platform they’re using, especially after years of custom development. Few are willing to look at that as a sunk cost, even if Tempest potentially provides a better alternative. But Sanchez notes most online publishers go through a refresh every 12-18 months. It’s hoping to capture new publishers while they are in the midst of such an upgrade cycle. According to Sanchez, Say Media will handle all data migration from a competing platform to its system (a process that he says can take up to six weeks), but once there they’ll be able to monetize the platform and sell their own ads. The other big selling point to publishers, other than just a better interface, is that the platform will be free for them to use. So how will Say Media make money? Essentially it hopes to profit by operating as the yield-management solution for publishers who use Tempest. In English, that means selling remnant ad inventory for its publishing partners. And just like all other ad players, the bigger the network, the better it can monetize. Say Media already hosts about a dozen sites on Tempest, including those it owns and some it has partnered with. But it’s onboarding more as we speak. Publishing brands that are in the process of being migrated over include Beauty Geeks, Ape to Gentleman, College Fashion, Sabotage Times, MomSpark, Pacific Standard, and Daytime Confidential. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sanchez says there are more than 12,000 digital magazines out there in the world today. If it captures just a small portion of those, it could have a big business ahead of it. |
Watch A Tech Blogger Play Against Charli XCX In Just Dance 2015 | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | The wonderful stopped by TechCrunch HQ this morning for a quick interview and a round of Just Dance 2015. We chatted about how her use of social media has evolved since she started promoting her music on MySpace as a teenager in the mid-2000s. Charli says she basically lives through her apps, balancing her time between Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook. When she’s not promoting her work or broadcasting her thoughts to her fans, she sends photos to her friends through WeChat (or as email attachments). We wrapped up her visit by playing on Just Dance 2015 for the Xbox One. She’s played the game a couple of times (much of her direct involvement in the game was designing the level and character for ” which will arrive as a paid download in January) while I haven’t played a dancing game since Dance Central came out on the Xbox 360. I’ll let you be the judge: who danced it better, the lanky tech blogger or the actual pop star behind the song? |
Platform Or Publisher? Whatever You Call It, It’s The Future Of Media | Tobi Bauckhage | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | There has been a sea change in the way content today is being created, distributed and consumed. The distinction between publishers and platforms online has never been more uncertain. This ambiguity has only been compounded by the emergence of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as new content distribution platforms along with hybrid players like Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and Bleacher Report. So is it better to be a publisher or a platform? Or is the old distinction becoming obsolete? In the simple content world we used to know, there were distinct differences between platform and publisher models. It seemed so clear and fundamental that it was easy to pick a side. Platform models were content- and content-creator-agnostic. They were all about facilitating the production and distribution of content. They were not about the content itself. Every user had the same access and means to create and publish content, while empowering audiences to decide what content was relevant and let the masses decide what would rise to the top. This was largely done through a mix of clever algorithms and user behavior and feedback. Platforms did not pay for content creation but for technology, and they usually did not feel responsible for bad content or copyright infringements. In contrast, pure publisher models were the complete opposite. Access and means to create and publish content were limited to staff editors or freelancers. Audiences had very little say, while all content decisions were made by publishers: They drew a clear line between content consumers and content creators; they paid for content creation, and less for technology; and they were responsible for bad content or copyright infringements. This approach was still pretty much in place up until five years ago. There were pure platform players like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr. And there were pure publisher players like the New York Times, Bloomberg and ESPN. But take a look today and it’s not so easy to make that distinction. YouTube recently announced that it would invest heavily (again) into content creation. Facebook has direct relationships with brand advertisers discussing premium ad formats and content creation. Twitter has an editorial team. Reddit’s staff organizes and moderates AMAs with celebrities. And traditional publishers like Forbes have moved towards the platform model by starting contributor programs. A much bigger group of hybrid players have evolved and become mainstream – like BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, Medium, Bustle, Mic and Elite Daily. All of them are more or less in the middle of this spectrum, embracing the democratization and technology and even opening up their means to content production and distribution to people outside their systems. And while the last 10 years have clearly been about technology and technology-driven platforms, they’ve had the biggest impact on the media industry because they tore down the barriers for entry. The costs of participating in the shiny world of content creation were going down and the digitization made it simple for almost anybody to create content (text, photo, audio and video) and make it accessible. In that period the distinction between publishers and platform made sense. But today everything is creatable, editable and publishable by almost anybody (with access to a smartphone). We now find ourselves overwhelmed by a massive abundance of content. And we have entered a period that is all about content relevancy. The big platform players are flooded with content and suddenly have to act like publishers to ensure their relevancy while facing new competitors like Snapchat or WhatsApp that are closed, personal networks that do not have the same relevance problem (and might therefore be as successful as they are). One could argue that the traditional publishers were well positioned in this new world order to provide direction and guidance. But most of them have neither embraced the democratization and technology for of content creation but continue to hold onto the past and the good old days when they basically owned a monopoly. And then there is the new generation of hybrid media companies that are trying to find their own path and build new businesses during these uncertain times. Some of them have built strong new brands that help audiences find and discover relevant content. Some have developed smart new business models around customized branded content, influence on e-commerce and very specific and relevant target audiences. Each of them is about finding the perfect spot on this new spectrum between platform and publisher. The predominant challenge of innovation in the content and media industry is not to enable everybody to create content. That problem has been solved. The innovation has reached the mainstream. The main challenge today is to help relevant content cut through all the clutter and rise to the top in a meaningful, pluralistic and diverse way. The answer to that innovation challenge doesn’t lie in just a publisher or platform model. Rather, the new hybrid models and the old pure platform and publisher players that have evolved seem to be in the best position to face these new exigencies. So will this be the time for a new breed of content providers in the form of “platform publishers,” “publisher platforms,” “platishers,” or “pubforms?” Call it whatever you want. But it’s the future of media. |
Gearing Up For The Future Of Connected Workout Clothes With Athos | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | According to my pants, I’m letting my left leg do most of the work. I already suspected this, but now, thanks to an app and some bluetooth-enabled fabric of the future from , I can prove it. Athos is a Silicon Valley startup with a new kind of “smart” workout clothing line that aims to improve your performance and prevent injury using data generated from the wireless fabric. It’s betting this technology will be the future of workout clothing. Trainer and marketing director for the startup, Jake Waxenberg gave TechCrunch a first look at the prototype for its “smart” workout clothes to see how they will function. I sweated for you people in this one. Check it out. The bluetooth enabled Core device is $199 and the pants or shirts are each $99. Each item is gender specific and can be worn underneath other workout clothes, if needed. They are machine washable and come with hidden pockets to store things like keys and cash. The clothes are slated for mass consumption sometime in early 2015. |
Here’s How Much Money Microsoft Lost Per Day On The Nook Deal | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | A deal from nowhere, which went nowhere, Microsoft’s partnership with Barnes & Noble’s Nook with the bookseller kicking the software firm a chunk of cash and shares. The indicates that Microsoft will sell “all of its $300 million convertible Series A preferred limited liability company interest” in exchange for “an aggregate purchase price equal to (i) $62,425,006.63 in cash and (ii) 2,737,290 shares of common stock.” How much does that sum to? Shares in Barnes & Noble were down sharply today, at current tip off just over 6 percent to $20.88. At that price, the total cash and stock that Microsoft will pick up adds to $119.6 million. That’s a nice piece of dollar, but far less than its original $300 million investment. $180.4 million less. But that doesn’t include potential further Microsoft expenditures as part of the agreement, or revenue that might have come its way as part of its partial ownership of the joint venture. Given that the Nook deal is returning cash, I would not expect that Microsoft had to further inject money into the project — if it can eject cash, it wasn’t out of the stuff, in other words. On the revenue side of things, it wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft did pick up some money in revenue share, but the relevant filing doesn’t supply that piece of information. Microsoft declined to comment on whether it did accrete revenue from the partnership that would, in theory, lower its total loss on the deal. That aside, the deal was announced 977 days ago, and an un-adjusted $180.4 million loss over that period works out to $188,331 per day. That is both a lot of money, and not much money at all. In real terms, burning nearly $200,000 per day is quite expensive. For Microsoft, however, the total loss amounts to a minute percentage of its ready cash, not to mention its quarterly net income, making the figure inconsequential. Given the scale of the loss, even if we accounted for, say, $50 million in revenue for Microsoft, the firm still lost more than $100,000 per day on the deal. That’s , for reference. And the Nook loss pales in comparison to the . Place that event next to the , and the Nook deal and it almost seems like making hardware is hard. |
Viewbix Raises $3M To Wrap Video Ads Inside Interactive Players | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | Video ad startup is announcing that it has raised $3 million in additional funding. The company basically wraps videos in a custom player, so if you’re an advertiser, the player can include your branding, as well as the ability to collect contact information and more. You can see , including a Cuisinart YouTube video that’s been wrapped in a Cuisinart-branded player. The player includes buttons for following Cuisinart on Facebook, for signing up for the company’s email list and for buying the product in question. That means consumers can take direct action on an ad right while the message is fresh. Plus, there’s detailed analytics data about who’s watching the video and interacting with the player. Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Stefansky told me that this approach has been particularly effective on Facebook (Viewbix players work on both Facebook and Twitter), because “the combination of targeting, plus engagement and analytics, provides results that are literally 20x what we see on generic preroll distribution.” We’ve written about a number of other startups trying to offer or video ads — indeed, it’s something that AOL (which owns TechCrunch) . In some ways, building a player around a video seems less exciting than adding interactivity to the video itself. But Stefansky noted that his approach makes things easier for the advertiser, since you just take an existing video and create the player in a few steps (as he demonstrated for me). “The ecosystem of video marketing is going to be large,” he added. He even said that you could use another service to create a custom video “and still use our interactions — they’re not mutually exclusive.” The new funding came from 2M Companies, as well as previous investors Canaan Partners and Longfellow Venture Partners. Viewbix has now raised a total of $6 million in funding, and the Israel-based company plans to open a New York sales office soon. |
Facebook Relaunches Slingshot As A Snapchat Stories-Style Lifecasting App | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | Reply to unlock didn’t work. Neither did dropping the requirement and just letting people freely send photos and videos to each other. So today Facebook took yet another swipe at Snapchat with the for and . Now you follow people like on Twitter, but you can still privately message. If you pull down the camera, you’ll see a grid of shots from the last 24 hours by people you follow — a lot like Snapchat Stories. The difference is you can immediately see big visual previews of friends’ Slings rather than having to open them to reveal what they’ve been up to like on Snapchat. And spying the success of Snapchat Stories stars, Slingshot has a discovery center for finding cool people to follow. The app is sure to get plenty of groans from critics who’d prefer to see Facebook actually innovate rather than ape its competitors. But if Snapchat’s not willing to sell and its Stories feature is obviously popular, Facebook is happy to commission a few employees to take their best Slingshot at usurping it. Facebook first back in June with an innovative, if a bit friction-full, feature where you had to reply with a photo or video to see one a friend had sent you. It was one of the early releases from Facebook’s Creative Labs project for experimenting with mobile app design. While I found it fun at first, the annoyance of having to create to consume eventually whittled down the small initial user base, and I haven’t received a Sling in months. The update in September that did nothing to reinvigorate the community. It’s unlikely the new filters or option to share Slings out to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter will get anyone excited either. The relaunched Slingshot’s only hope is its focus on creators and discovery. If it can convince some savvy creators from apps like Snapchat and Vine to come over by dangling the opportunity to be the most popular person on the new medium, their fans might come too. And with the discovery center, it could help people accustomed to only following their friends on social apps to find creators they love. Unfortunately, judging by the very limited set of no-names found on the Explore tab, Facebook didn’t go the extra mile to recruit any social media stars. That means Slingshot will most likely fall short again. |
Google Gets Thousands Of Girls To Program The White House Christmas Tree Lights | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | The is getting a tech twist this year. Over 300,000 people, mostly young girls, participated in Google’s campaign to program the way the lights will dance on the 56 official White House Christmas trees during this evening’s lighting ceremony. We don’t know what exactly 300,000 different lighting programs will look like until the actual event tonight. You can on the official White House YouTube channel at 5 pm EST. , 20, is one of 10 chosen to go and participate in the ceremony tonight. Those in the program range in age from 4 to 20, but most are in their teens or tweens. Wenger says each girls’ code has a very specific time, down to the “exact second.” She tried to describe how her code will look when it’s time to shine. “Mine kind of starts out blue and turns into a greenish thing and goes like a funnel,” she explained. Wenger is a student at Duke University and an ambassador for Made with Code. Her skills were first recognized by Google after creating an app to detect breast cancer. She mentioned the White House Christmas tree lights could be programmed by anyone who has access to a computer, but that the program is geared towards and mostly made up of young women. “Made with Code is more of an introductory learning platform to get girls interested in coding so it makes it super easy,” she said. Wenger and the other chosen girls are at the White House waiting to see their programmed lights tonight. She seemed pretty excited to be in the same area as the president and his wife. She mentioned that she was also going to get to sit down with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson to discuss the Made with Code program and encourage young women to go into computer science. When asked if the president’s teen daughters Natasha and Malia participated in the program, she said, “I’m not sure, but I hope they do after this. I want to see a lot more women coding in the future.” Any girl who wants to program something for one of the trees is encouraged to participate through Made with Code. The White House trees will continue to add more programs from anyone who submits something throughout the holiday season. |
The Problem With The Internet Of Things | Dan Conlon | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | Lightbulbs, washing machines, thermostats, fridges and locks. If you believe the Internet Of Things salespeople, over the next 10 years, everything in your home is set to become connected. Imagine a world where you could turn on your porch light from the office or unlock your door for a visitor, all from a smartphone app. Well, like a growing number of early smart-home adopters, I have seen this future today — and let me tell you, it’s a mess. Blame the interface. Connected slow cookers and smart plugs may be turning on geeks today but, if user experiences are not improved quickly, the smart home dream is at risk of going belly-up. As a case in point, take one of the connected home’s leading lights — literally. lightbulbs impress aficionados for being controllable via a mobile app from any location. That’s fine for truly remote control — for instance, illuminating a room from hundreds of miles away — but, at home, smartphone control is positively retrograde. Want to turn on the bedroom light? Sure, just pick up your smartphone, enter the unlock code, hit your home screen, find the Hue app, and flick the virtual switch. Suddenly, the smart home has turned a one-push task into a five-click endeavor, leaving Philips in the amusing position of launching a new product, , to effectively replicate the wall switches we always had. Smart home technology should work the existing interfaces of households objects, not try to change how we use them. Turning on a coffee machine via mobile using a smartphone may be cool, but the moment someone in the family turns off the pot using its own switch rather than the plug modules, the device ceases to be smart — and someone in the family is going to miss his morning cup of Joe. No wonder Belkin, having released smart plugs, is now moving to solve this last mile by making actual integrated consumer devices like Crockpots and coffee machines. If you think the smartphone as a universal remote control is where the problem gets solved, you should recalibrate. Once you have loaded up with your dedicated WeMo, Hue, Nest, Withings, August and other apps, simply living your life becomes a Groundhog Day of repetitive, siloed status changes. Just locking the door and turning off the lights to leave the house becomes more of a chore than it ever was. That’s not smart, it’s dumb. What the smart home needs is not increased, smarter control but less, ambient control — the apps need to stay in the background and let their gadgets respond to the natural rhythms of human home life. Mobile apps should be the output panels, not the input interfaces, of the connected home. Certainly, initiatives now exist that aim to provide a single, inter-connected user experience for the smart home future. Samsung-acquired SmartThings does more than most to knit together the array of distinct radio standards that make home automation products as individual as they ever were in the heyday of protocols like X10 – but its user forums host many disgruntled customers. Apple’s HomeKit aims to smooth pain points by grouping distinct gadgets into rooms. But much will be unclear until the system is fully released next year, and whether voice control via Siri is the right interface for a home remains to be seen. What I mean by “ambient” interaction is making technology invisible — responding instead to occupants’ normal patterns, like their presence in a property or room. Many technology makers agree, but their implementations belie their lack of empathy for how the mass-market consumers they crave really behave. Take geolocation control, a mechanism that many devices now employ. While it may be efficient to have heating or lighting at home turn off when I leave my four walls with my GPS-enabled phone in my pocket, what good is that if walking out the door leaves my wife in the cold and dark? Failing to account for multi-person households is one of the biggest ways in which technology makers will quickly let down enthusiastic consumers. This is easily solved by beginning to recognize more than a sole account holder using more than one phone. Overloading with half-implemented technology for technology’s sake is the reality of Internet Of Things in 2014, the year the concept was due to woo mainstream consumers. If this year was not the year when the smart home finally went mainstream, technology makers will hope that 2015 will take that honor. However, if the latest efforts to harmonize the experience do not succeed in simplifying implementation, the ambition may as well be put on ice for another 10 years. |
Pip! | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | to brand itself as such, Aol isn’t known for innovation. Part of the co-editor job here at TechCrunch is fending off some of the clunky things that our parent company does, like holding an internal Aol Disrupt, or playing a Taylor Swift parody during all hands or making us log into our TechCrunch emails with our Aol accounts. This is why what and are doing at Aol is a big deal. They and their 20-person team have managed, much like we’ve tried to at TechCrunch, to gain as much independence as possible within our corporate borg. And they’re using it to make cool, mobile-first apps. This injection of independence benefits Aol in the long-term, as it fosters an environment that can produce surprises, the newness Aol desperately craves. , a structured messaging app, is the first launch in the Alpha series, and , it allows you to send a specific message to your friends on the app. Unlike Yo, however, the Pip messages actually have utility, like telling someone you’re running late or that it’s raining. The specific messages you can send through Pip are “Call me,” “I’m running late” (with specific time intervals), “Did you do that thing?,” “Where are you?” and your weather and location. Users can respond with another set of structured messages. Because the person you send a Pip to, and the time you send it, function as context, the specific messages become vehicles for multiple meanings. I’ve sent a couple of very pointed “Did you do that thing?” Pips, for example. Because it’s the No. 1 feature request from beta users, Block and Rojas are considering offering custom Pip packages in the future, like sets of stickers. Messages like “I love you” or “I miss you” in a Relationship set would be well-received, as would a Pip for Enterprise: “Meeting?” “Sure” or “Hell no.” Sure it’s a simple idea, but when you consider that Pipping an “I’m running late” from your Apple Watch (once it launches in 2015) will be the fastest way you can get the information across, it starts to make sense. “We’re adding additional utility to the push notification. Getting a Pip is better for the recipient than just getting a similar text message. We are also turning stuff you might not normally send as a message — like your location or the weather — into something you can much more easily share with your friend,” Rojas said. “We don’t want to take over all your messaging,” Block added. “We just want to make some of the most common or useful messages even easier to send and even more useful.” Pip makes even more sense when you consider Aol’s rich messaging past, and the missed opportunity it had with Aol Instant Messenger– which many of us at some time used religiously but now have replaced with iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Snapchat or one of the other thousand avenues presently available for messaging. Evan Williams has even cited the status part of AIM as a primary inspiration for Twitter, a constant stream of statuses. essaging is an area where Aol has a long history and we thought it made sense to try and build something in that space, especially if we could make it mobile-first,” Rojas said. Engadget founders Rojas and Block came to Aol for the second time through and will have spent two years here as of February 2015. When asked if they will continue to work on Alpha after their two-year lockup expires, Block said, “I’m not paying a ton of attention to time. We’re all having a lot of fun, and I’m glad we can finally start to talk about this thing publicly. It’s an incredibly rare opportunity to get to run a product lab at a big Internet company. Plus sometimes they even let me talk to Shingy.” As a testament to Alpha’s independence, Block and Rojas did not use Aol MapQuest to build out the locations on the app, preferring to use the Foursquare points of interest graph instead (they did end up using Aol Weather). Their next app, which you can see on the Alpha homepage, is called and it uses your Twitter faves for news reading. And they’re managing expectations. “It’s hard to make successful apps,” Block told me. “If there were some kind of predictable formula to what works and what doesn’t, then everyone would have a hit app. And even if you have tens or hundreds of millions of existing users to direct at a new product, you can still flop. There are just too many different factors that go into what makes one app work and another fail, and we’re all realistic about how hard it is. So the game for us is experimenting, not win-at-all-costs.” Now if only Aol would let us use Pip for our work email. |
After Multiple Reports Of Cyberbullying, After School Disappears From The App Store | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | Another haven for cyberbullying is gone. The app After School is no longer available in the Apple App Store. It’s unclear at this time if it was pulled by Apple or taken down by the publisher. Apple is investigating the removal of the app and the app publisher has not responded to multiple requests for comment from TechCrunch. We noticed that the app was no longer available around 7:00 EDT today. After an unceremonious launch in October, the anonymous posting app After School quickly gained notoriety for cyberbullying among high school students. For some reason, the app took off in Michigan where it led to metro Detroit school districts warning parents about the app along with countless reports of issues reminiscent of when Yik Yak was used in high schools. Just yesterday resulted in a heightened level of security and an FBI investigation in one Michigan school. The app was designed to be a Whisper-type app for schools but unlike Yik Yak After School did not have a 17+ user rating, making it much harder for parents to prevent their child from downloading it. It allowed users to post anonymous messages viewable by just those who attend the same school. Like Yik Yak and ask.fm before it, high school students were reportedly using After School to anonymously bully, aggravate and threaten others. One Michigan community took to Twitter with the hashtag #clarkstontakesastand to encourage other people to delete the app. Sadly, the app is still functional at the time of writing. The app’s publisher has not responded to multiple requests for comment from TechCrunch. The app utilizes a server-side element so in theory it can stop working, but the publisher will need to shut it down. More as we get it. |
Nexus 9 Keyboard Folio Review | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | 9 is Google’s latest tablet running pure, unadulterated Android, and it’s a very capable piece of hardware, made better because it’s running Lollipop, which is a big step up for Android overall. Google has just begun shipping accessories, too, which give the tablet a magnetic cover with a built-in keyboard, complete with mechanical keys that actually offer decent travel, sort of like the Microsoft Surface Type Cover. It’s an accessory that inevitably leaves you thinking Google’s longterm Android tablet plans could be much more about competing with low-cost notebooks in the enterprise, rather than against other tablets like the iPad. The Keyboard Folio uses a segmented magnetic back component, just like the iPad cases, but it also has a full hardware keyboard on the other side, complete with keys that actually depress when you hit them, for a satisfying tactile clicking experience. The keys themselves feel like they have just a shade less travel than you’d get from an Apple Wireless Keyboard, for example, but with the same chiclet-style individual key design, and of course narrower gutters between individual keys. While the keyboard layout feels a little cramped, Google (and whoever is building their keyboard for them) has done everything possible to give the actual QWERTY letter keys as much of the available real estate as possible, while leaving less room along the sides for things like shift, enter, ,arrows, apostrophes and assorted brackets. Typing isn’t exactly a joy on the keyboard built into the portfolio, especially when you don’t exactly have the daintiest digits, but the Nexus accessory makes the most of a situation that’s never going to be perfect, given the overall dimensions of the Nexus 9, and by extension, the portfolio case itself. Some handy dedicated keys do help out, including a search key where you might expect to find Caps Lock, which launches the Google Search function built into Android regardless of where you happen to be, both inside and outside of apps. You can also navigate the OS with the keyboard, using the direction keys to make your way around home screen icons, folders and even the new Android multitasking app switcher interface. Key combos can activate the browser, contacts app, Gmail, Calendar, Google Music, Hangouts and YouTube, too. Missing are some of the dedicated media keys you might be used to from iOS Bluetooth keyboards, like volume up/down and track playback controls. There are however key combinations that let you trigger Android’s software home, back and app switcher buttons without touching the screen, but you’ll have to learn and remember these, as they aren’t clearly indicated anywhere on the keyboard itself, and I had to figure them out by poring over the included information card (which is all visual and not anywhere near as arduous as having to dig into a manual). The Nexus Keyboard Folio’s magnetic connectors provide two different angles for typing, and despite the fact that the whole thing feels like it could potentially slide apart, it hasn’t actually done so in practice. It’s also surprisingly light, and it also doesn’t add that much bulk to the Nexus 9’s overall profile. Connecting the accessory to your Nexus 9 is easy, thanks to built-in NFC for the initial handshake and Bluetooth for the subsequent pairing, and the Folio has a standard micro USB port for charging tucked away at the end of its spine. At the other end is the switch for turning it on and off, but once it’s on, Google says it should get around 5 months of battery life on a single charge with occasional usage, so you probably don’t need to use the switch that often. The Nexus 9 Keyboard Folio is $129 on its own, which is roughly in the same ballpark as most other keyboard cases out there. The way it works with the Nexus 9 in particular is seamless, though, and the magnetic attachment methods means it’s easy to either leave on or take off at a moment’s notice. The amount of travel the keys offer is terrific compared to the general field of similar devices, and the Android-specific keys and key combos work well, once you get used to them. In all, it’s a handy addition to your gear pack if you’re a Nexus 9 fan already, and one that makes it easy to see how people might be using these in lieu of standard notebooks in work settings where only light computing like email is required. Rarely is an accessory as well-matched to its companion device as the Nexus 9 Keyboard Folio is to the Nexus 9. |
Why LiveRail Ditched An IPO To Sell Its Video AdTech To Facebook For ~$500M | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | profitable. We probably would have pursued an IPO. The business was accelerating”, CEO Mark Trefgarne tells me in his first interview about how his company was . Still, rather than go public, Trefgarne said his team realized that “If we work hard at Facebook, we have a real opportunity to take over the world…actually that’s not the best phrase [laughs]. Maybe not take over the world, but do some really industry changing stuff.” With TV viewing down 4% and online video streaming up 60% in the last year , FaceRail could soak up the flood of vido ad dollars headed to the Internet. The smiley British entrepreneur was in good spirits when I met him and Facebook’s VP of ads product marketing at the social network’s palatial headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. That’s understandable. considering he secured a stunning exit while dodging one of the world’s most stressful experiences: shepherding a small company through an IPO. Founded in 2007, LiveRail works with publishers to let them easily monetize their videos and websites by hosting video ads bought through 170 different ad networks. LiveRail had raised just $12 million and was helping target 7 billion video ad impressions a month before Facebook bought it out. The 41X return delivered through the acquisition may have been better than LiveRail could hope for on the public market. Competing video adtech companies got destroyed when they went public. YuMe’s share price sank from its $9 debut to $4.97, while Tremor Media IPO’d at $10 and has fallen all the way down to $2.68. Navigating the regulatory circus to get to that opening stock market bell also would have been a huge distraction. “The pressure that a small company faces when they IPO is that the CEO becomes absolutely entrenched with talking to analysts every quarter. There’s a significant pressure to hit each quarter’s number in a short-term way” Trefgarne laments, looking like he dodged a bullet. “As part of Facebook, we’re able to think a little more long-term and are able to really invest into what the future of adtech will look like without having the fight-for-your-life stresses of being a very small public company.” LiveRail had already learned a valuable lesson that as the Internet shifts to mobile, the public market doesn’t take very kindly to desktop-centric tech companies. Facebook’s own IPO made that clear. It went public with essentially zero revenue on mobile despite the fact that its usage was moving there, and was promptly hammered until it got mobile advertising sorted out. Now Facebook is earning billions on the small screen per year. “We were already seeing a lot of our publishers say that 40 percent or 50 percent of their visitor time was on mobile devices,” Trefgarne recounts. “Mobile was not an area that LiveRail by itself had great experience with. Facebook brings the world’s greatest experts at monetizing mobile to the table.” Unlike some of Facebook’s other big buyouts like Instagram, LiveRail’s acquisition didn’t happen overnight. There weren’t any of Mark Zuckerberg’s no-nonsense dinner meetings or convincing walks through the Silicon Valley foothills to quickly seal the deal. The courtship was a slow burn dating back to 2013. “We first spoke to the team at Facebook about a year ago to see what we could do together. It was very much initially a business development conversation.” LiveRail didn’t know at the time, but Facebook was plotting how it could expand its ad targeting prowess built on its trove of personal data to the rest of the Internet — a quest in which LiveRail could play a big part. It wasn’t until April 2014 that Facebook would to do just that. “Then, the conversation just accelerated over the period of a year. There were periods where we didn’t speak,” Trefgarne recalls. “Then it all came together around June, when we said, ‘You know what? There’s an opportunity here to build something amazing together.'” That was when Trefgarne got a call from Facebook’s Director of Product Mike Hudack saying, “Do you want to spend a week on campus?” The startup CEO remembers: “We brought the entire management team to Menlo Park and locked them in a room together [with Facebook’s ad execs] to talk about what it would look like if we were going to do something like an acquisition.” They figured out that combining Facebook’s targeting powers and advertiser relationships with LiveRail’s video-serving technology and publisher relationships would be “much bigger than either of us could do separately”, says Brian Boland, VP of product marketing for Facebook Ads. LiveRail offered Facebook a leg up, too. The social network saw a stunning 50 percent increase in on-site video views between May and July this year. LiveRail’s skills could squeeze more money out of the auto-play video ads Facebook now shows. The startup’s sales teams could also serve as a vector to place ads bought through on LiveRail’s publishers’ properties. Boland explains that “we generally love to build when we can build” but in this case, it was better for Facebook to buy LiveRail for three reasons: Though Trefgarne met Zuck a couple of times, it was the ad execs like Boland who drove the deal to completion. The LiveRail team at Facebook orientation Acquisitions can slow down speedy companies, but LiveRail has just kept growing since it jumped in bed with Facebook. It’s now serving 10 billion video ad impressions per month, up from 7 billion when the deal was announced. Together, they’re trying to make ad views, or impressions, matter after years of focus on clicks. That’s especially important for LiveRail because its video ads are often pre-rolls or interstitials. They’re vivid, but people don’t want to click away from the actual content they were watching. Since the dawn of search ads and banners, “it was a click-based economy,” Boland tells me. The ads were little and ugly, just a few lines of text or a cramped image stuffed around search results or site content. They weren’t very striking or memorable, so all that counted was if someone immediately clicked through. Clicks were also one of the only ways to measure ads. No one knew if seeing a banner on the web for a new car actually made you more likely to buy it. “‘What’s the click-through rate of my banner look like?’ That was the end-all be-all. The value created in the impression was being lost.” Things just got more fuzzy with the rise of mobile. Without a unified tracking cookie system, advertisers couldn’t tell if a view on mobile led to a click or purchase on web or vice versa. LiveRail’s CEO Mark Trefgarne (left) with Facebook’s VP of Ads Product Marketing Brian Boland (right) While Facebook gets a lot of credit for its ad targeting, its secret weapon is its ad measurement solution to the impression problem. Facebook has invested a ton into conversion tracking so it knows if you bought something after seeing one of its ads. It all works because people stay logged in to Facebook, which . Online, Facebook uses installed on advertisers’ checkout pages to measure conversions even weeks after an initial view. Offline, it partners with to connect your supermarket buys using a loyalty discount card to your Facebook profile. Businesses can also at their stores, which Facebook then matches to who saw what ads. All this lets Facebook tell advertisers when they earned more money from sales inspired by their ads than the ads themselves cost. When it can demonstrate this return on investment, advertisers pour more cash into Facebook’s coffers. LiveRail didn’t know how to do any of this. But now as part of Facebook, it does. If you see one of its vibrant video ads on the web showing just how cool you’ll look in a fashion brand’s clothing, it doesn’t matter if you buy a shirt from them three weeks later on mobile or in their physical store. LiveRail connects the impression to the sale with no need for a click. The combined company will need all the targeting and measurement it can get to beat out fellow video adtech companies like Tremor, YuMe and BrightRoll, which . It seems to have an edge, though. Just today, TV network Fox announced its local stations would use to monetize their content on their websites. More and more customers are coming out of the woodwork. The FaceRail team-up comes at the perfect time, though. Nielsen is finally measuring online video views so advertisers can make apples-to-apples comparisons between television and digital. TV commercials don’t end with “clicks.” They’ve always just been impressions. But now Facebook can prove how views lead to purchases in a way TV never could. Boland concludes, “We’re moving from this click economy to understanding people’s attention.” |
Apple Stores Will Host Free Coding Workshops For Second Annual ‘Hour of Code’ | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | Apple is participating in this year’s Hour of Code, the second annual worldwide event designed to help spark interest in and provide access to coding education among youth and students. Apple’s participation will involve offering free one-hour workshops at its Apple Store retail locations, during which they’ll provide attendees with an introduction to basic computer science concepts. is the non-profit behind the Hour of Code movement, and is working with a number of corporations to organize this year’s movement. The group has funding from Microsoft and others, and has a goal of reaching 100 million students through its program by year-end. Apple’s workshops will run on December 11th, and will occur in international retail stores as well as domestic, whereas last year they were only available in U.S. locations. Apple is also going to be rolling out a full week’s worth of accompanying speakers and other events, to support Computer Science Education Week, and pointing would-be coders to resources on both the and its via a created to mark the occasion. |
null | Jonathan Friedman | 2,014 | 12 | 3 | null |
Microsoft’s Plan To Become More Diverse | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | At its annual shareholder’s meeting this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Chairman John Thompson fielded a series of questions from the Reverend Jesse Jackson concerning diversity inside the technology company. The set of queries gave Microsoft a chance to address how it approaches the issue. The first of Jackson’s questions concerned whether Microsoft would “commit” to releasing diversity data in the future and consider expanding its board with an eye toward hiring “women and people of color for all future board openings.” He also asked if Microsoft would “set goals, targets and timetables to measure its diversity and inclusion progress related to workforce, supplier diversity and inclusion of people of color within your financial and professional services work.” He continued, asking if the company would repatriate its huge sums of foreign cash, kept abroad to lower its tax burden. In the words of Jackson, “that money must be somehow sequenced back into the American economy.” Jackson also asked “what partnerships locally and nationally can be designed and expanded to build the pipeline needed to create a 21st-century multiracial inclusive workforce?” Nadella noted in his initial response that diversity was “core to everything” at his firm, and is “not something that [Microsoft does] on the side.” He followed that remark by directly committing to Jackson’s diversity data release requests, saying that they would be “done by the end of [the] month.” Nadella by indicating at a conference that women in technology should not ask for raises, but should instead lean on karma. The executive, following the interview that contained the remark, retracted, and then apologized for the comments. Addressing the board-related questions, Thompson stated that in the future, “there will be additional opportunities for us to supplement the skill base of our board.” Microsoft’s board has seen turnover in recent months, which isn’t surprising given the recent CEO shakeup at the firm. Nadella kicked back in, telling Jackson that Microsoft’s work on “equal pay for equal work” which, according to its own numbers, has salaries that are “within a very tight band of .5 percent.” The CEO went on to detail how Microsoft tracks its diversity makeup internally, and hopes to improve its numbers: We’ll be able to track how well the efforts Nadella listed work. Microsoft has very public diversity information on its website. Here’s the current card for the full company: And its technology team: Other technology companies have released their own diversity data, showing similar large number of white male workers. The entire industry has work to do. As Jackson argued in his remarks at the meeting, the “leadership and the workforce of the technology industry does not look like America.” |
WedPics, A Photo-Sharing App For Weddings, Raises $4.25 Million Series B | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | Can a mobile, social application bloom outside the Valley or other traditional tech hotspots? Raleigh, North Carolina-based WedPics has proven it can. The company, which makes a photo and video-sharing app for wedding couples and their guests, has now closed on $4.25 million in Series B funding led by Bullpen Capital, and is working on a second close that will see TV’s “Shark Tank” investor Barbara Corcoran participating via her new AngelList syndicate. Participating in the round so far were , , , , and angels including , , , and others. Corcoran’s AngelList syndicate, launching on Monday, has asked for a $250,000 hold. Along with other investors, the startup is expecting to raise a total of $5 million for its Series B when fully closed. WedPics is not the only company to offer a weddings-focused, photo-sharing app. Others in the same space include Eversnap, Capsule, and Wedding Party, to name just a few. But the startup has figured out something when it comes to user acquisition, and isn’t shy about sharing its figures. Today, the company is acquiring 25,000-30,000 new brides per month, and is acquiring weddings at a cost of under $2 per wedding. (David’s Bridal, a big retailer in the space, acquires weddings for around $60/each, to give you an idea). According to co-founder and CEO , WedPics was hosting over 6,000 weddings per weekend during this summer, with 175,000 guests joining and users uploading a photo every second. To date, 400,000 couples have signed up for the service, and the company has reached 2.5 million users – brides, grooms and guests combined. Across all its metrics, growth has been up by over 200%, Miller says. Because WedPics has an audience whose time spent using its service is ultimately finite, those that do end up downloading the app and participating are highly engaged. Over half of WedPics’ users upload at least one photo, and of that 55%, 76% upload at least three photos. The app’s popularity has a lot to do with its simplicity, and these days, its name-recognition and trust factor. Couples, and brides in particular, tend to sign up a good half a year or more before their big day and begin documenting other wedding-related events, like fittings, shopping trips, showers, and other pre-wedding parties. More recently, WedPics has expanded to include options for couples to share their accommodations and registries, too. And it’s now generating revenue through print services that let couples order tabletop cards promoting the app, as well as an option to order photo prints. On that latter front, WedPics is selling around 20,000 prints per week at present. The company also has an international footprint, despite not having localized its app. Today, it has 15% of the U.S. market, one-third of the U.K., a quarter of Australia, and a presence in 188 countries. Going forward, WedPics will be using the funding to ramp up its user acquisition efforts which are largely done through social media, and today, mainly Facebook. It’s about to start using Pinterest’s Promoted Pins ad product soon, and is looking into Tumblr as well. The 16-person team is growing, too, with plans to hire mobile and web developers along with marketing. Next year, the company may also begin exploring the question about what comes next after weddings. “We built WedPics with that understanding that there was a possible huge opportunity with a generic events app, but we decided to tackle it with weddings first,” says Miller. But he says they’re seriously looking into this secondary app in 2015. “We’re hashing out what that looks like.” What it probably looks like, though? Baby showers and birthday parties, we expect. |
Wonderloop Attracts Investment From One Of Africa’s Wealthiest Magnates | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | Tony O. Elumelu, one of Africa’s wealthiest magnates (who recently a $100 million program to support entrepreneurship in Africa) is understood to have put an undisclosed sum into Silicon Valley-based mobile startup . Prior to this, Wonderloop had raised $500,000 in seed funding and received $100,000 from Innovation Norway. Heirs Holdings, a Lagos based proprietary investment company, has committed the seed investment into Wonderloop, which has a sort of ‘LinkedIn for video’ platform, . Founded by Norwegian entrepreneur Hanna Aase, the Wonderloop iPhone app allows people connect through short 10 to 15 second video profiles, replacing the static images and bios of traditional social networks. |
Disney Will Launch Its First Imagicademy Learning Apps On Dec. 11 | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | Disney just unveiled its digital learning initiative , which will launch on December 11. The company first mentioned Imagicademy last month, but . As outlined at a press event today in New York, it’s a suite of mobile learning apps for kids, along with an app where parents can follow along, give their kids a virtual high five, and see recommended physical activities that complement that in-app lessons. Eventually, Disney plans to release printed material and smart toys, too. “As you can see, it’s so much more than a set of digital apps — it’s about a brand,” said Andrew Sugarman, executive vice president of Disney Publishing Worldwide,. “It’s a comprehensive suite of connected experiences, all of which have been created with quality, attention to detail, and, yes, magic.” More specifically, Bob Chapek, president of Disney Consumer Products, said that when the company interviewed parents about existing learning apps, they said that the landscape is cluttered, with inconsistent quality. And even if they find something that they and their kids like, it tends to be a one-off experience. With Imagicademy, on the other hand, there are plans for a suite of 30 similarly branded apps covering math, creative arts, science, language arts, and social skills. The first app to launch will be Mickey’s Magical Math World on iPad, as well as the companion app for parents. Jeff Sellinger, senior vice president of Disney Learning, gave quick demos of the math app, as well as Mickey’s Magical World of Arts. Both of them actually include five different games — for example, there’s a game focused on helping kids learn about three-dimensional shapes by assembling rockets. These games were built in consultation with a number of education experts. Doug Clemenets, an education professor at the University of Denver, took the stage and talked about the importance of early math learning, and about how much kids can learn if they’re offered “a playful approach.” For that reason, Sellinger told me in a follow-up interview that Disney could only draw in a limited way on its previous experience in mobile games. “Curriculum is not an easy thing to do it really well, particularly when you’re driving towards imagination and creativity,” he said. “So we were able to draw on some of it, but at some point you have to dive into the fire.” As for the smart toy, it might look like a regular Mickey Mouse plush, but it will supposedly be able to hold basic conversations with kids and even respond to their activity within the apps. There was no live demo for the toy, and it’s not supposed to launch until the back-to-school season in 2015, but Sellinger said that it’s “much further along than you would think, given the timeframe.” (The physical products will be created in partnership with companies including KIDdesigns, Wonder Forge, and Mercury Active.) He also gave me more specifics about the business model. The apps will be free at first and offer a “pretty deep” experience before you’re asked to pay — $4.99 for each game inside the app, or $19.99 for all five. If fragmentation is a problem, why not have a single mega-app that bundles all these experiences together? Sellinger said it would just be “too big.” The target age group for these initial apps is three to five. Over time, there will be apps for six- to eight-year-olds, and they might start incorporating other Disney characters and brands, like Star Wars and Marvel. Finally, Sellinger noted that Imagicademy could circumvent the all-too-common situation of parents asking their kids, “What did you learn in school today?” and getting a shrug in response — because those parents can now open their companion app and see for themselves. Here’s a demo video of Mickey’s Magical Math World. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo0viSvyS0s?list=UUNbwV0c3cIx8tc69ZDvmFfg&w=560&h=315] |
Ektron President Fesses Up To Selling The Company To Accel-KKR | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | After denying to TechCrunch that Ektron had been sold, company president Tim McKinnon admitted in a later phone conversation that a sale had in fact happened, after a document confirming the . Earlier this week we published a story about the to an unnamed private equity firm. The firm was presumably Accel-KKR, which had invested in the company earlier this year. Today Ektron issued a stating it had received additional funding from Accel-KKR. After receiving the updated press release, we got in touch with McKinnon, who told TechCrunch that it was an equity investment and that no sale had happened. That was before a document sent to shareholders had been uploaded to the Internet. According to the document, “In April 2014, funds affiliated with Accel-KKR, (“The AKKR Stockholders”), invested $7,900,000 in Ektron. The AKKR stockholders currently hold thirty percent (30%) of the issued and outstanding capital stock of Ektron. The merger will result in AKKR stockholders and other funds affiliated with Accel-KKR owning one hundred (100%) percent of Ektron through the buyer.” That sure sounds like a full-blown sale to me. When I asked him about it in the second conversation, McKinnon had no choice but to admit there had been a sale, telling me, “The deal closed, Ron on Tuesday at 2 pm. The deal has been closed for days.” When I pressed him that he had denied it earlier, he said, “No it happened.” McKinnon went onto say he couldn’t say what percentage the Accel-KKR owned, but he said it wasn’t going to be 100 percent when all was said and done. According to him, the company would be reborn under a new entity and some existing stockholders would be issued new stock. Others, as he stated in our first conversation would be bought out giving Accel-KKR and the remaining stockholders more control of the company. In addition to acknowledging the sale, McKinnon pointed out that whoever posted the document, which he said was the cover page to a much bigger packet of legal documents given to all shareholders, was violating a non-disclosure agreement by doing so. |
CrunchWeek: Uber’s Massive Raise, The IPO Market And What The Hell We Listened To This Year | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Another Friday, another turn ’round the CrunchWeek table. This week, , and chewed on , the and, yes, . Spotify may lose money, but it and Uber help set the larger tone for the technology market, both private and public. Their trajectory is portent for all tech companies. Just keep your IPO price conservative, and it should be smooth sailing. We’ll be back next week with more. Tune in, feet up and have a great weekend. |
Zillabyte’s Funding Maps Show Startups Taking Over Your Favorite Cities | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 5 |
Everyone talks about how San Francisco has been overrun with startups, but now has taken a stab at visualizing it for you. Zillabyte’s actually a San Francisco-based startup itself. It , offering tools for developers who want to build data analysis apps. In , software engineer Nikhil Karnik talked about how he used the CrunchBase API, with some help from Zillabyte’s tech, to obtain the city, street address, and total funding raised for venture-backed companies. Then he used to turn that data into time-lapsed maps.
I’ve embedded his maps of San Francisco and New York City above. His post includes maps of Austin and Palo Alto, too, and it goes into a more detail about the process — . I was also curious about what this would look like on an Bay Area-level, so Karnik was nice enough to create that map for me, too. I’m not sure they show you anything revelatory (turns out that funding for San Francisco and New York really picked up in the last few years — I never saw it coming!) but it’s still fun to see that play out visually, rather rather than just look at a list of fundings. (And yeah, even though the CrunchBase the team is awesome, the data isn’t 100 percent accurate. I also suspect it may be spottier for the first few years that the maps cover.)
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Here’s What Cortana Looks Like Running In Windows 10 | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Hey, Windows users! Ever wish you could talk to Cortana (Microsoft’s Siri/Google Now-style digital assistant) on your desktop the way you can on Windows Phone? It’s coming. Long-established Windows fan site has managed to get their hands on a leaked build of Windows 10, and have coaxed a early build of Cortana into working on the desktop OS. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but it’s a pretty damned solid indication that Microsoft hopes to finally integrate Cortana into Windows — a move that many expected to happen in Windows 9. As the video demonstrates, a fair amount of functionality is already in place. Things like setting reminders, making Skype calls, checking the weather, or controlling music all work. The goofy stuff like “Who are you?” or “Tell me a joke”, however, don’t seem to work just yet — the more playful responses apparently go through a separate server, and those connections haven’t been made yet. |
Twitter’s Former Head Of Product, Daniel Graf, Has Left The Company | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Daniel Graf, who was just recently bumped from his role as the head of Twitter’s product team, has parted ways with the company altogether. News of his departure comes by way of a tweet from Graf: Danke team, danke ! May you succeed in your mission, society needs you! — Daniel Graf (@danielgraf) Graf previously led the Maps team at Google, switching ships to Twitter just seven months ago. In October (just six months after Graf joined), CEO Dick Costolo opted to shift Graf’s role as product head to Kevin Weil. |
Instacart Is Raising North Of $100 Million At A $2 Billion Valuation | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | , the home grocery delivery service that launched back in 2012, is close to raising a massive Series C round of funding north of $100 million, according to sources. The raise will value the startup at $2 billion, or more than quadruple the $400 million valuation of its Series B financing from June. Including this round, has raised a total of with other investors that include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Khosla Ventures, Canaan Partners, Y Combinator boss Sam Altman and Box founder Aaron Levie. We’re still working on verifying the lead investor, but at this time, sources indicate that Kleiner Perkins is in the driver’s seat. We heard rumors that KPCB took a look at Instacart during its last fund raise, which was led by . Instacart launched two years ago to become the Uber of grocery delivery. Users choose a grocery store, shop for items, and get on-demand delivery of those items within an hour, either from their phones or the company’s website. It’s an idea that has caught on with consumers, and Instacart has been growing rapidly over the last year. As of June 2014, Instacart was operational in 10 cities across the United States, showing 15x revenue growth. Given two huge cash infusions and the spiked valuation, it’s fair to imagine it will continue to grow aggressively. But so does the competitive landscape. A number of services offer an alternative to Instacart, though the SF-based startup does seem to have the lead with regards to newer companies. FreshDirect has been around for quite some time, though doesn’t offer the same immediacy as Instacart. Meanwhile, everything-on-demand services like function rather well as an instant grocery delivery service. Plus, Amazon is throwing its hat into the ring with , which has already launched in a few big markets. That said, investors have been pouring a huge amount of funding into startups showing high growth. The biggest is Uber, which just announced it closed an additional at a $40 billion valuation. Stripe also raised in a recent deal that values it at $3.5 billion. We reached out to Instacart and Kleiner Perkins, but haven’t heard anything back at the time of publishing. We’ll update you if we do. |
Zazzle Buys Boundless Network As It Battles Teespring For Democratized E-Commerce | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Want to sell T-shirts with your face on them, or get your employees shirts with your company name? is newcomer for your business, and it just got some more ammunition. Yesterday, personalized product maker and marketplace , a startup that lets companies save money on big branded product orders. Launched way back in 2005, from investors including Kleiner Perkins, while the Austin-based since its start in 2005. They’re both likely feeling threatened by Teespring, a Y Combinator company founded in 2011 that’s racked up a massive led by Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, and has considerable buzz. While Teespring only sells t-shirts today, the company has told and create their own brand. That could push it even closer to Zazzle’s model. Teespring has also gotten deeper into the discovery and marketplace angle to help shoppers find products from its sellers, much like Zazzle’s browsing-optimized site. With Teespring’s momentum and ambition, it could also barge into the corporate merch business Boundless is built upon. Companies often end up with way too many logo’d t-shirts or the wrong sizes, but Teespring’s more on-demand model can make sure they only buy what they need. Zazzle could bring product breadth and manufacturing experience to Boundless, which in turn could provide corporate sales and distribution expertise to Zazzle. It all may sound a bit silly. T-shirts? Really? But these companies could turn everyone into product designers by equipping us with creation, manufacturing, and distribution tools big brands have. Tech has democratized publishing, art and more. E-commerce could be next. |
Separating The Opportunities From The Obstacles In Open-Source Networking | Mike Cohen | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Open standards have driven the networking market since the earliest days of the Internet. While the use of open source for networking is a more recent phenomenon, it is no less important. A major industry transition to open source for software-defined networking (SDN) is under way, and users and vendors stand to benefit. Some expectations, however, may need to change. While the original idea behind SDN — separating the control from the data plane in network switches — has turned out to be just one of many architectural approaches that have emerged, it did catalyze massive interest in software and open source within the networking world. Things like APIs and DevOps tools became relevant to network engineers, and open source movements emerged to fulfill the need for increased automation and flexibility as organizations moved deeper into the cloud. Most recently the conversation has shifted to how open-source policy frameworks can hide the complexity of networking and make interacting with networks easier and faster for application developers. Suddenly, networking is not just about the next generation of ASIC technology. It’s now about innovating at the speed of software. While some of these open-source technologies are still maturing, they already show promise as a way to simplify network operations and reduce both operating and capital expenses. Networking vendors have moved aggressively to support open-source orchestration, network controllers and even software-based appliances to drive higher levels of interoperability. While these projects require operators and developers to get their hands dirty, they offer a critically important venue for collaboration between vendors, as well as a way to drive standardization ahead of slower-moving standards bodies. Many different open-source projects have evolved over the last few years that affect networking. Some of the more notable initiatives include: Open source projects have also performed significant work on open protocols, including: These are just a few of the most noteworthy open-source networking projects, but others bear watching. For example, the was formed to help drive low-level innovation in open hardware and software. Other cloud-based, open-source initiatives — such as Docker, which offers a portable container platform, and Puppet and Chef, which offer flexible and automated configuration tools — are also being connected with network infrastructure to push open-source networking forward. Meanwhile, within the OpenStack community, efforts like are emerging: using open source to define an intent-driven policy language that can help application developers easily describe networking requirements. As users look to make a broad range of cloud technologies interoperate, open-source networking is benefiting from being a natural extension of existing community efforts. Vendors haven’t always been quite so supportive of open source networking. Some networking vendors initially viewed the rising tide of open-source projects as a threat. But the open-source networking movements and associated user demands for openness became too strong to resist. Most vendors have since come to embrace the trend. They have joined open-source communities and are building products for and around open source projects even as they look for synergies with their own product lines. The industry is now going through the process of deciding on which dimensions products should compete and where everyone must cooperate on standards and open APIs. That model is working. Some useful, though still maturing, code bases have been packaged and distributed with network products, the de facto standards established by open-source projects have increased interoperability, and in some cases the open-source community has come up with new approaches to solve problems. The work, however, is far from complete. Open-source communities don’t always build finished, enterprise-ready products and likely will not obey any vendor roadmap. For example, operational elements such as installation, security and reliability may not be fully developed. These are major issues for people who manage enterprise networks. They need assurances that their organizations’ networks will be safe and reliable when using products based on an open-source platform, so it’s up to vendors to meet those customer requirements by filling in any gaps in their own distributions of the open-source software. Testing and quality control in open source also may not be up to the network vendor’s standards for enterprise-ready products. Indeed, many open source projects have been “a year away” from being operationally ready for a long time. However, the consensus-driven process behind open-source projects moves much faster than that of traditional standards bodies like the IETF. The mantra that “working code wins” can help open-source communities agree on de facto standards and start using them well before they become officially sanctioned. OpenStack’s community, for example, aims for a new release every six months. Many people don’t understand that open source takes a long time to mature. By accepting open source into the product development cycle, vendors give up some control over product delivery schedules. If the community can’t agree, timelines will slip, and vendors who rely on open source for their own products will be forced to extend release schedules. Customers may expect vendors to build and release products at the same pace as they did before, but that’s just not possible. But these initiatives are establishing new standards for software components at a much faster pace than the traditional standards process ever did. Open source networking stakes out the middle ground between the traditional, slow-moving standards process and the rapid pace of product development and innovation possible with more proprietary designs. The vendor’s role in open-source networking projects should be a symbiotic one with other members of the community. This includes contributing to open-source efforts for the good of the community while continuing to innovate and build differentiated products that better meet user needs. Vendors should also contribute some of those innovations back to the community to help promote new standards that will help the market continue to grow. It’s still very early in the evolution of open-source networking, but it’s here to stay. Over the next few years, users can expect to see the continued evolution of all of these projects, as well as continued growth of the communities supporting them. Vendors will invest more in packaging and interoperability to ensure that customers can take full advantage of these tools, and users will see increased collaboration between web scale companies, cloud operators and vendors to ensure that open-source tools meet the needs of the user community. The result will be a win-win scenario for both network vendors and users. |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 12.05.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | – Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Doc Searls, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session . |
Early Uber Investors Shervin Pishevar And Scott Stanford Raising $250M For SherpaEverest Fund | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Early Uber investors Scott Stanford and Shervin Pishevar are looking to raise another big fund, presumably to do follow-on investments in growth companies they had previously invested in. According to an , they are seeking $250 million for the new SherpaEverest Fund. Stanford and Pishevar are probably best known for their investment in Uber during the company’s Series B round, a deal that Pishevar invested in through Menlo Ventures and Stanford participated in while at Goldman Sachs. They left their day jobs last year to team up and , along with a strategic advisory firm and startup incubator called Sherpa Foundry. Since then, they’ve made a series of investments in companies that are part of the on-demand economy, including startups like Munchery, Shyp, Washio, and Pro.com. Sherpa Ventures focuses mainly on seed and Series A investments, though it hasn’t completely ruled out participating in later-stage investments. Representatives from Sherpa declined to comment on the filing due to regulatory concerns, but based on the information in the filing we can deduce a few things. For one, the new raise is not related to the firm’s , which they sought to raise for its first fund. It’s also not connected to SherpaFoundry, which is being run by serial entrepreneur and corporate exec Tina Sharkey. What’s most likely is that SherpaEverest will emerge as the firm’s growth investment vehicle. That will allow the SherpaVentures guys to continue to follow-on in the case of companies that get huge — like, for instance Uber, which has raised about $2.4 billion in the last year alone. It would also allow Stanford and Pishevar to make opportunistic investments in companies that aren’t currently a part of their portfolio when it makes sense. Growth funds are becoming all the rage these days, particularly as early-stage investors realize their current fund structures might not be equipped to follow-on in the case of Uber-like investment rounds. In recent months we’ve seen established firms like and raise funds to keep putting money into their biggest winners. But it’s interesting to see a firm like Sherpa, which is less than two years old, become ambitious enough to seek an additional $250 million, especially after just raising $150 million. Then again, once you’ve hit it big with a bet on Uber, it probably gives LPs confidence that you’ve got another big win in you. |
Bitsbox Debuts Monthly Coding Projects That Teach Kids To Build Simple Apps | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | When co-founder Scott Lininger learned to code, it was on a his mom and dad bought him when he was a kid. He says he taught himself coding by copying from the book that came with the computer. Now a dad himself, Lininger wanted to offer his daughter the opportunity to experience learning to code much in the same way he did, but couldn’t find a service that he felt focused on the part of learning that’s really necessary: the part where you practice actually typing code. “Most of the [learn-to-code products for kids] are fantastic,” says Lininger, who left his job at Google around six months ago, where he previously worked as a senior software engineer within its SketchUp division after selling his startup to the company back in 2007. “All the drag-and-drop tools, they teach you the grammar, the syntax, and the structure of language,” Lininger explains. “If you’re going to be able to write something in German, you’re going to have to understand the rules of German. But then there’s just the fluency part of it…the second part is just practicing the actual coding.” When he began looking around for recommendations and ideas for teaching coding to his daughter, his Google colleagues all told him they learned much in the same way he did – they typed out code. “None of us over the age of 30 or so learned to code by dragging blocks around,” notes Lininger. “Having kids type code works.” The challenge, however, is making kids think that typing code is . That’s where Bitsbox comes in. “The enemy is not hard, it’s boring. Kids will do hard stuff, but if it’s boring, you’ve lost them,” says Lininger. The site, which has been live for just three weeks has already seen 70,000 users sign up and code via the web, spending 280,000 minutes doing so, which equates to 194 days of coding. Much of that traffic has come from Code.org, where Bitsbox has been listed as a featured activity. Online, kids get a virtual tablet and are able to build simple apps and games in JavaScript. Lininger says the lightweight programming API Bitsbox uses is like the “Dick and Jane” version of coding, referencing the classic books for young readers which used very short, easy-to-spell words that repeated often. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyTM7LFebwc] After the kids build a game, they’re able to zap it to their tablet or smartphone (iOS or Android) by scanning a QR code. Technically speaking, these are HTML5 apps that can run in the browser on any device and include things like a simple bubble popper game, one where you drive cards around, or shoot aliens out of the sky. Next week, Bitsbox is going to launch a Kickstarter campaign to take its service to the next level. While the website is free to use, the business that Lininger and fellow ex-Googler Aidan Chopra, also previously of SketchUp, are building is a subscription-based “box of the month” club. The boxes will include an activity book with over a dozen apps to build. The boxes come with collectible trading cards of apps with lines of code on the back. Kids pick the project they want to do, then go online to type out the code and run the app on the screen on the virtual tablet. They can then send the app to their device or share it on social media. The team has tested the first box with around 150 kids so far, and are now preparing to raise $45,000 on Kickstarter to help them truly launch. That funding, as well as a bit from their participation in a Boulder accelerator called will help them ship their first three boxes, beginning in April. The boxes cost $30/month – or about the same (or less than) many other kid activities like swimming or dance classes, for example. Kickstarter backers can also opt to receive just one box for $40 if they don’t want to subscribe. The idea with the boxes, aimed at kids ages 7 to 11, is to give kids a reason to return to the web to continue to practice coding by offering them something new and exciting to build on a regular basis. The team believes that coding is something that’s best introduced when children are younger, because coding is a language – and one that’s increasingly important to learn in the modern world. “Not all kids love to read, but we make sure we teach our kids to read and write,” says Lininger. “My philosophy is that it’s the parents’ job to at least introduce [coding] and give them an opportunity to learn if they’re into it.” Interested users can sign up to use Bitsbox now, and will be alerted next week when the Kickstarter project goes live. Update: the Kickstarter has now gone . |
Hands On With Sony’s PlayStation 4 20th Anniversary Edition Console | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Sony has a new version of its PlayStation 4 console going on sale soon, which is limited to only 12,300 units globally, and which comes in the original gray color of the first PlayStation hardware. The anniversary edition will retail for $500, which seems steep, but it also includes a stand for vertical mounting and a PlayStation 4 Camera in the box, neither of which are included in any of the console’s standard packages. The stand is $36 and the camera is $60 when purchased separately, so you’re actually not paying much more for the unique color scheme and case design. [gallery ids="1091190,1091185,1091182,1091186,1091187,1091189,1091188,1091191,1091192,1091193,1091196,1091195,1091194,1091197"] There’s more than just a different paint job here, too – the surface of the PS4, as well as the surface of the included original gray-colored DualShock 4 controller both include finely textured patterns that use the PS button shapes, along with the number 2 to commemorate the anniversary. In person, both of these subtle touches help contribute to the overall magic of the package on the whole, as does the swank black and white limited edition packaging. Sony’s putting these up for sale via pre-order on Saturday, December 6, and interested potential purchasers can tune into their at 10 AM PT on that day to find out exactly when. Sony’s PS Experience is a debut event it’s holding in Vegas this weekend, and which it’s using as a platform for new game announcements from a number of its developer and publishing partners, including the leaked Super Street Fighter V. The Capcom fighter will be a PC and PS4 exclusive, it was revealed by a trailer that went live ahead of schedule briefly earlier today. |
Microsoft Releases Cortana In 4 New Countries | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | If you live in Germany, Italy, France or Spain, you can now get your Cortana on. Microsoft today that it has rolled out its virtual, digital assistant to those four new European countries for users that are part of its Windows Phone Developer Preview Program. In short, if you’re an early adopter sort in one of those locales, you can finally bust out Cortana like the Windows Phone kids in the States have been doing for some time. Cortana initially shipped with , an update to the Windows Phone platform that is now understood as a bridge between versions 8 and 10 of the Windows ecosystem. Microsoft previously rolled Cortana out to the UK and Chinese markets, with the latter seeing a host of localized additions. It will be interesting to see if the addition of Cortana to new markets on the continent assists the mobile platform in its quest for new market share. Microsoft has big plans for Cortana. The tool is expected to roll out in Windows 10, making the service not merely a mobile play, but something that embodies the company’s larger push to expand what it thinks of as “productivity.” It’s an ongoing process. The company intends Cortana to be a differentiator for Windows, but it needs more data fed into its algorithms to learn enough to meet that goal. So, new countries, expect more of the same coming soon. Microsoft declined to comment on what countries would come next in the broader Cortana rollout, merely indicating that “additional market availability will come in 2015.” Alert the media. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: CarPlay, Google Glass + Intel, And Star Wars | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Friday is a beautiful thing, and this morning’s podcast celebrates that. Pioneer released a new version of its , and the WSJ reported that of the next version of Google Glass. Meanwhile, the tech world is . 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 . |
Microsoft Rolls Out Support For Video Calling Between Skype And Lync Users | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Last year, that its consumer-facing Skype communications service and its enterprise-focused counterpart would begin to interoperate, first with IM and audio, and later expanding to support video. Today, the company says, the video integration is complete. Skype users can now video call contacts on Lync, and vice versa, Microsoft announced this morning. The change follows a series of deeper integrations between the two products, the latter of which will be . To use the now cross-platform video calling feature, you don’t have to do anything differently from before – you just kick off the call the same way you do today. However, video calling is supported only on an up-to-date Lync 2013 client on Android, iOS or Windows and on Skype for Windows desktop. Skype is now working to expand this integration to more platforms, starting with iOS and Android. Under the hood of this integration, the teams have worked on the underlying media stack, upping Skype’s feature set along the way. The products now offer built-in security with enterprise class encryption of media and signaling using TLS and SRTP, enabled by default. Additionally, the stream can cross personal and corporate firewalls using STUN, TURN and ICE. Meanwhile, the video support involves “high quality, scalable video using the industry standard H.264 SVC codec.” Calls will default to use the SILK audio codec, which Microsoft chose because it offers “a phenomenal balance between audio quality, bandwidth utilization and power consumption,” the company explains on . With the technical integrations both behind and ahead of it, Lync’s branding change is clearly more than just a renaming of the product. However, it plays into a larger strategy at Microsoft to create ties between its consumer products and those it sells into the enterprise. For instance, there’s also a OneDrive (Microsoft’s cloud storage service) and a OneDrive for Business. Next year, as the integrations continue, Microsoft will add support for SkypeIDs and make it easier for users to find contacts in the Skype directory when Lync rebrands to Skype for Business in the first half of 2015. |
null | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 12 | 4 | null |
Recruitment Platform Intern Avenue To Roll Out Across Europe With Vodafone | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | is a startup which matches college undergraduates/graduates searching for paid internships with employers by using a data-based scoring system. To date, around 2,000 employers and 40,000 intern applicants have registered with the service in the UK. But it’s now secured a major distribution deal with Vodafone Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the telecoms giant, to expand the service across Europe. Founder , a former lawyer and Oxford graduate, has created a data-driven way for young people to get a foot on the jobs ladder and solved the headache of corporates having to scour through though thousands of applications. Abiola told me that with Vodafone as a distribution platform, they are “planning to develop a unique and disruptive mobile solution”. She said Vodafone Foundation will “support us in a few ways. Initially the focus will be helping us to advance our technology, particularly optimizing in the mobile space and then helping us expand our reach.” The partnership was announced at the Vodafone Institute’s Digitising Europe event in Berlin today, which featured a keynote speech from the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel (pictured). With Intern Avenue, the key point of differentiation from other market players (which are mainly advertising or agency based talent solutions) is that they are focused on automation and building a predictive profiling mechanism that helps match the most suitable candidates with the right employers. This is big data applied to recruitment. In addition, the startup is raising , which is on course to hit its target. It’s also secured a £250,000 UK government grant from the Technology Strategy Board. The company won Best Recruitment startup last year at . It’s high time more of this sort of thing happened, given the perilous state of youth unemployment in Europe. |
SwiftGate And The Future Of Music | Philip Inghelbrecht | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | At last the dust is settling around SwiftGate. For those of you who missed (or avoided) the saga, it all began in early November when Spotify conceded, but battle lines were drawn in the press as music experts stunned by her move began questioning the company’s future. Swift quickly explained her position in an exclusive with ; Spotify was an “experiment.” In turn, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek weighed in with a constructive . Taylor Swift’s label, Big Machine, felt the need to (no pun intended). Somewhere in the crossfire Grooveshark ended up as collateral damage. So, they too threw in . And let’s not forget about the musicians themselves. The Foo Fighters said they f*cking didn’t care ( ) and her Tennessee bestie, Jason Aldean, found courage and followed in Swift’s footsteps by pulling his chart topper from Spotify, too. Ms. Swift had already underlined the importance of getting paid for her work (or any musician’s work for that matter) in an op-ed . And according to her, Spotify didn’t bring home the bacon. It seems that her beef was mostly with Spotify’s requirement to be part of the free (or ad-supported part) of the service, and not just Spotify Premium. Competitors like Rdio or Rhapsody that are paid-only (for the on-demand component of their service) were quietly allowed to continue offering her (older) albums. Throughout the debate, very little was said about YouTube. For all intents and purposes, it’s the largest on-demand music service; and it’s entirely free. To get an idea of YouTube’s scale, just look at the table below: YouTube is at least twice the size of Spotify, and the real difference is likely even an order of magnitude bigger. Why? A lot of songs are available as UGC videos uploaded by fans and claimed by the rights’ owners (i.e. outside the VEVO relationship). , in particular, are popular. Interestingly enough, YouTube’s monetization isn’t much better than Spotify Free. Here’s some back-of-the-envelope math: In the U.S., music videos enjoy advertising CPMs around $15. Assuming a sell-through rate of 50 percent (you don’t get ads all the time) and 70 percent goes to the rights owners, each play yields roughly half a penny (or 0.5 cents per play). That’s roughly the same as Spotify claims to pay, 0.6 cents per play. That’s a generous estimate. The monetization on the claimed UGC videos is likely a fraction of that enjoyed by official VEVO music videos. Furthermore, if we were to do the same math outside the U.S. (with lower CPMs), the picture isn’t getting any prettier. Surely YouTube has underwritten its wheeling and dealing in the music industry with both a and towards the major record labels. Neither is likely so big that it stands head and shoulders above Spotify Free’s monetization. So why did Ms. Swift and Big Machine ignore the elephant in the room? If there’s one plausible answer, it’s the music industry’s misunderstanding of YouTube. Music executives still seem to believe that watching music videos on YouTube is mostly coincidental in nature (as opposed to on-demand) and therefore promotional, just like traditional and online radio. They compare YouTube to MTV and fail to see that, for teens, YouTube is in-fact a global on-demand music service (with the added bonus of a cool video). Don’t take my word for it; just go hang out with a few younger (cash-strapped) kids and ask how they listen to their favorite songs. Google has long realized this and record labels have started to wake up to it. As such, and in order not to lose this privileged status, Google smartly added a new subscription component to YouTube — Music Key. It’s YouTube as we know it today, but without the ads, with higher sound quality, and the ability to play music on your mobile device in the background. For $7.99 a month, these hardly feel like killer features that will convert the (young) free audience to paying subscribers. It’s evident that Google has no serious ambition to turn YouTube Music Key into a full-blown Spotify competitor. As a matter of fact, for that, they already have Google Play All Access. Or they could have simply added a feature to YouTube that bundles Music Key with your All Access subscription. * Instead, Music Key is about safeguarding YouTube’s status as the world’s largest free on-demand service. For all we know (and this may be a stretch), as part of the deal, YouTube may have obtained a guarantee from the music industry that their (free) videos will not be taken down. That was the very issue over which Taylor Swift and Spotify broke up. Ironically, the recording industry is dancing to Google’s tune. For Google, solidifying YouTube as the No. 1 video destination is worth every penny in VEVO investment and/or minimum guarantees. Now back to SwiftGate. Amid all the press, I tried to get a temperature check from her fans by perusing Twitter. None seemed outraged. People have long accepted paying a premium for what’s new. Taylor Swift knows this, too. To buy a 2015 model car, you will pay over sticker price. For a little extra money, you can get the latest iPhone before most others on eBay. eBay in general is a great place to understand the value of new or early access (e.g. at one point a Google Wave early invite sold for a whopping $5,100). So things worked out: Those who couldn’t do without Taylor Swift (happily) bought the album and became the first platinum selling album in years. It won’t always work out this easily and consumers will eventually get tired of not getting “all you can eat” through their music subscription. So where do we go from here? The answer lies in windowing, or creating “exclusivities,” a concept that I advocated in a few months ago. In this particular case, it’s about exploiting time-based price discrimination for music access. By charging a flat $10/mo for on-demand music, record labels fail to capture money from both those would are willing to pay more (the “consumer surplus”) and those who are only willing to pay less (the “producer surplus”) I expect there to be soon a Premium “Plus Tier” for on-demand music e.g. $20/month. It will give the subscriber full catalogue access, as soon as the CD or iTunes release hits (“day and date” release). It’s a no-brainer. Record labels can further exploit this by cutting exclusivities between the various on-demand services. So music nuts like myself will take out Spotify “Plus,” Beats “Plus” and Rdio “Plus” ($60 a month?) at the time. Look no further than the movie and TV industry to see how this works: I currently pay for HBO, Starz, and a handful of VODs each month. More gutsy is a lower-price tier (e.g. $3 a month) that still gives catalogue access, but this time only for “older” music; and perhaps a few other “shortcomings” around quality, geography, etc. The casual music fan may find this price point sufficiently appealing and take out his/her first music subscription. The lower price point is scary for musicians and rights holders. Devaluing music is the last thing they want right now. Furthermore, there’s compelling data that a good chunk of Spotify users are “dormant” – they only stream a few tracks each month, nothing close to the value of the $10 a month they spend. The uncertainty on the upside (i.e. huge price elasticity unlocking millions of new streaming subscribers) doesn’t weigh up against potentially cannibalizing millions of existing paid subscribers. For Spotify in particular, it may mean that the difference between free and premium is more than just ads, but a different music offering altogether. This would bring artists like Taylor Swift back. I believe Daniel Ek when he says that free ultimately drives paid premium subscriptions. I doubt, however, that a (slightly) different music offering would kill this dynamic. If anything, it may just be the opposite. Meanwhile, Spotify will smartly point to YouTube as to why it shouldn’t go there just yet. Putting everything together, I don’t think Taylor Swift (and her record label Big Machine) meant to snub Spotify. They sent a message to the on-demand streaming industry. They want to get paid more. They want to party like it’s 1999 (the year the music industry peaked at $38 billion from CD sales). It’s about accelerating windowing in music, and Taylor Swift just happens to have the clout and visibility to make it happen. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for music fans. If anything, it may be better to pay a little more for guaranteed access to the latest music. For Spotify, this would be a hard (if not unfair) thing to swallow if YouTube continues to stream the latest and greatest without having to pay the big bucks. The ball is now in the court of the record labels and streaming services to make it happen. All they may need is a bit of “ ” It’s the remedy to a special kind of vertigo, in this case a fear of the music industry falling even further. If you’re impatient like me for the record labels and streaming services to work it out, you can always . Or better, click and listen for free. * |
Torque, Microsoft’s Alternative To “OK Google,” Now Works On Android Smartphones | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Microsoft this morning has released an app for Android smartphone users called that allows you to shake your phone in order to perform a voice search, similar to Google’s “OK Google.” The difference is that instead of waking up the app with a standard keyword command, it’s the shaking motion that instead does the trick. Also like Google, Torque will provide a number of “instant answers,” including things like details on local flights, stock prices, sports scores, weather, nearby restaurants and more. Torque itself was actually released , but at the time was only supported on select Android smartwatches. The app then was activated with a wrist flick. However, smartwatches are still a niche market, so it makes sense for Microsoft to expand its support to smartphones as well. (The original app has been download under 10,000 times, to give you an idea.) The 2.0 release, , also includes a few more instant answers, including flight status reports and info on local events. These answers and other results are powered by Bing search. Early testers reported some bugs with the first version of the app properly responding to their wrist movements, or detecting their voice, but overall the app has a decent 3.9 (out of 5) star rating on the Android app marketplace after some 240+ reviews. That Microsoft is actively developing Android applications outside of its company’s flagship software products like Microsoft Office, Xbox, OneDrive or Outlook, for example, may be news to some. But Torque is representative of Microsoft’s newer thinking which sees the company attempting to engage with the broader mobile ecosystem. The Torque app was developed by Microsoft Garage, a group exploring, experimenting with and releasing cross-platform consumer applications. The organization, which grew out of Office Labs in 2009, is about connecting Microsoft engineers and its engineering projects with customers to see how its technologies are received. “From a customer’s point of view, it’s a really great way to get first access to emerging technologies. And from Microsoft’s point of view, it’s really a great way to get real feedback from real customers on how people are using things,” said Jeff Ramos, Manager of The Garage in from October. The original Torque app was built in three months’ time as a side project created by Xuedong Huang, Jiaping Wang, Lingfeng Wu and Wayne Xiong from Microsoft Garage who worked with other Microsoft researchers on the twist-to-activate motion. Huang has worked with voice technologies for some time, having founded Microsoft’s speech recognition research and development efforts in the early 1990s. In addition to Torque, the team has rolled out a number of other applications, including (lets you control 4 computers with a single mouse and keyboard); (alerts that tell you when your bus is arriving); (a social trip log app for Android); (an Android lock screen offering quick app launches and other notifications); (a voice-controlled Xbox game), . If apps don’t work out, the Garage team moves on, building on top what they’ve learned as they move forward. With something as critical as mobile/voice search, however, one would imagine Torque is the kind of project Microsoft wants to get right. |
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker Review | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | season continues with an unlikely hero: Captain Toad, the toadstool-esque stock supporting character from Super Mario games, who takes the helm for a full-fledged puzzler based on mini games from Super Mario 3D World. takes unique advantage of the Wii U’s capabilities, in addition to being just generally super fun, and while it won’t have the console-selling mojo of a Super Smash Bros. or Mario Kart, it’s definitely another good reason to consider Wii U ownership. We can all sympathize with the Toads of the world; never seeking the spotlight, they’re content to populate Mario’s worlds and stand stolidly by as sympathetic helpers along his path to adventure. Sometimes they’re booby prizes when all you need is a princess, and sometimes they’re running guesthouses along the path to greatness, offering up comforting powerups to keep plumbers on their feet. Rarely, though, are they heroes. In Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Toads are heroes, including Captain Toad, and, in a refreshing twist, Toadette. These adventurers tackle puzzles in the form of contained, rotatable 3D levels, which feature a variety of different mechanics for player interaction. If you haven’t played Super Mario 3D World, another close title in terms of how gameplay works is the excellent Monument Valley for mobile, but Toad’s lands are a little less Escher-esque, and a little more accessible for players at any skill level. Toad and Toadette are sympathetic heroes in this game, kind of like a light-hearted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the Tom Stoppard play. Ancillary characters brought to the fore, which is terrific as a bit of fan-service, and which also helps Nintendo flesh out its roster of first-party content without venturing into the risky territory of the unfamiliar. Captain Toad’s battle cry of “Ready for adventure!” prior to each outing is incredibly endearing, too, and overall this is a game that just oozes charm thanks in large part to its plucky protagonists. The Wii U ships with the Wii U Gamepad, a touchscreen tablet-like device that offers lots of potential for interesting gameplay mechanics, and yet I seldom take mine off the charger. Instead, I generally use Wii remotes or classic controllers. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker makes use of the Wii U Gamepad, however, and in a refreshing twist, it doesn’t feel like a chore that you have to pick up the hulking tablet. The way the game works with the Gamepad includes letting you rotate the view, as well as touch-based interaction to reveal hidden secrets and temporarily stun enemies. Even Nintendo’s “blow” interaction, which is really just about using sound input in the mic to trigger virtual mechanics, doesn’t feel as bizarre, embarrassing and out of place here as it does in other titles where it’s been used before. In some situations, like when you’re riding along in a mine cart, you switch to first-perosn view on the Gamepad’s screen to target enemies. This has a distinctly Pokémon Snap vibe, which means it triggered all kinds of nostalgia emotions. Even if you don’t have those attachments, it’s a great mechanic and one of the most compelling uses of the Wii U’s special abilities ever built for the console. Captain Toad favors an episodic format, and without giving too much away, I’ll just say that if you’re initially thinking there might not be enough content here to justify the price tag, just hang in there and all will be resolved. And while the individual levels aren’t especially challenging overall, they’re nonetheless clever, and should feel rewarding for gamers of all proficiencies. Nintendo has included mechanics that make it easier for novice players, including a special power-up that will render you invincible if you seem stuck at a particular juncture, but they’ve delivered them so innocuously that they don’t feel too much like cheats. The game is also great for multiplayer, despite not actually supporting any concurrent multiplayer. By this I mean that it’s a terrific title for passing the controller back and forth, since each mission is quick, and if one player dies the other can attempt to help out and take a turn as well. Controller passing is a time-honoured tradition, but few modern titles support it as well as does Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, because of its ability to work with a wide variety of skill levels, and the brevity but surprising depth of its individual levels. Basically what Captain Toad manages more than anything is to just be plain old fun, and it’s helped by the fact that each mission has a set of potential secret discoveries that make replay value a blast, as well as the initial play-through. The plot is paper-thin, but not at all important, and even though there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about the graphics, it’s a visually gorgeous game, with each carefully designed level offer up lots to enjoy for the admirer of lovely things. In short, Nintendo has provided another compelling reason to become a Wii U owner this holiday season, or to remain one if you were considering selling off your console. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is Nintendo doing what Nintendo does right, and doing it very well. |
Facebook 202X: How It Becomes The Multitool For The Modern Totalitarian, Part 1 | Dan Kaplan | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | Maybe it’s naive, but I’d always hoped that Facebook would evolve into the Internet’s humanizing, unifying force — the one that would stretch across geographical, national, religious and racial boundaries to show us that, even when we disagree about the tactics, we all want the same things for ourselves and our children: to be safe, to be at peace, to have food and shelter, respect and opportunity and hope. Indeed, with the combined social force of Facebook and the immersive power of Oculus Rift, I still think this vision remains possible. But let’s face some realities: As a marketer who believes that content marketing will become the dominant form of advertising, this is a boon. When you understand your target market and know how to produce content that engages it, there is simply no better way than Facebook to get this content in front of exactly the right people. But as someone who cares about the future of democracy and human autonomy and wants these things to persist and not collapse into some form of corporatist totalitarianism, my feelings are a bit more mixed. In the next couple of posts I write, I’m going to explore some potential trajectories for Facebook’s future. While it’s possible that Facebook’s walls won’t hold up against the multi-front assault from social mobile apps, I think it’s more likely than not that Facebook will be around in some form in 10 years. Some of these forms are beneficent. Others, not so much. Today, let’s take a look at one of the less ideal paths, where Facebook evolves into the multitool for the modern totalitarian. Like most projections into the future, this is just speculative fiction. In East Germany under communism, the secret police (the Stasi) gathered data by hand, relying on stakeouts and a massive network of civilian informants to build detailed files on its targets, whose ranks included pretty much everyone. Under the watchful eyes of the Stasi, whose file cabinets stretched for miles, case agents were responsible for keeping tabs on individuals and groups. Though these agents had large and ever-growing dossiers at their disposal, they were essentially confined to what they could capture on paper and keep in their minds. The 21st century totalitarian has no patience for this antiquated approach. And nor should he: compared to Internet-scale data collection, the Stasi’s methods are slow, inefficient, and prone to lapses in human judgment. No, the 21st century totalitarian needs a modern way to capture and catalog the activities, psychologies, and political sentiments of the population in real time. Ideally, this would be a place online where people share freely and regularly about themselves. Of course, collecting massive amounts of data is the (relatively) easy part. Once you have access to a large, rich and ever-growing online identity database, you need algorithms that can mine its activities and uncover threats to the status quo. Along with potential terrorists, these threats include: Wouldn’t it be nice if you, the 21st century totalitarian, could build a detailed psychological profile of these types and use your massive identity database and a bit of sophisticated machine learning to find others? Sure, you’d surface a substantial number of false positives, but it’s nothing some light investigation and/or interrogation couldn’t suss out. With such a tool at your disposal, it’d be like having the pre-cogs from Minority Report, but instead of weirdly-psychic humans drugged up and living in a bath, you’d have an All-Seeing Machine. The 20th century totalitarian relied on absolute control of the flow of information. Writing official textbooks, burning subversive materials, censoring the media, and publishing a non-stop flow of propaganda was simply the way of things. But for the 21st century totalitarian, the fragmentation of TV and the free-form frontiers of the Internet complicates this strategy. Sure, you could just co-opt cable news, but there are so many channels! Radio? That’s so 1933. No, while these blunt forms of manipulation work for Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, they are too obvious to work on everyone else. Today’s totalitarian demands a more subtle way to influence cultural and political sentiment. But if you got your hands on an algorithmically filtered newsfeed? One that could control the stories people see every day and influence their emotions across geographic, political and economic lines? You’d be in business. I don’t know Mark Zuckerberg personally, but I believe he has a vision that involves eliminating artificial barriers between people and building a better world. While Facebook has made a few boneheaded privacy blunders in the past, I have been willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt. I have trusted that Zuckerberg and his senior staff have benevolent intentions for the power they are amassing. But then there was the that scandalized us for a couple of weeks this year. Facebook changed the tone of content showing up in people’s feeds to test the impact it could have on their moods. The results, not too surprisingly, suggested that Facebook has the power to manipulate sentiment at scale. I’d always sort of worried that Facebook, despite the good intentions of the people building it, could eventually evolve into the Totalitarian Multitool. The disclosure of this study brought the whole thing home. Even though I’m hopeful that the ideals of democracy and human freedom will persevere against the paranoia of our modern age, there’s a strong case to be made that some of these ideals face a risk of death in the not-too-distant future. Given how easy it is to scare people about the scary-seeming-but-actually-low-risk Ebola, and how dumb we all get when we are afraid, it is not crazy to think that under the wrong circumstances — like one or two more mass-scale terrorist attacks on major cities — modern democracy gives way to something akin to 1984. If Big Brother were to seize the reins of power, sure, he’d use the cable news the way it’s being used today. But Facebook’s data maw, targeting power and sentiment-manipulation capabilities would be far more insidious. Whether this is what we become or not comes down to the future we choose to build. |
Skype Co-Founder Backs Wire, A New Communications App Launching Today On iOS, Android And Mac | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Skype co-founder Janus Friis is backing a new communications app called , out now for iOS, Android and Mac OS X. The app itself is the reimagining of how a communications tool like Skype should operate had it been built today. Much of that, in Wire’s case, means under-the-hood improvements that users don’t necessarily see, such as advancements in media processing, audio technology, file compression and delivery, and more. Wire pairs this more solid infrastructure with an uncluttered, simple design that will likely be the initial attraction for mainstream users. Skype, of course, is one of the top communication apps in the world, but it’s also running on dated technology. Users still experience issues with call quality, connection problems, synchronization and more. “Skype was launched more than a decade ago. A lot has changed since then – we are all used to free calls and texting, and we have taken to carrying our computers in our pockets,” said Friis in a statement about Wire’s launch. “It is time to create the best possible communication tools, as beautiful as they are useful,” he says. “Wire is just that.” Wire of course is not the first attempt at reimagining communications for the mobile age. Even Skype’s team inside Microsoft . Based in Zug, Switzerland, Berlin and elsewhere, Wire has a strong team with deep backgrounds in communications, including those who worked in product and technology at Apple, Skype, Nokia and Microsoft. Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Christensen has been in Internet communications for 15 years, having previously worked on MSN Messenger and Lync at Microsoft, and then later co-founded audio-processing software company Camino Networks, . Co-founder Alan Duric (CTO) also co-founded Camino, as well as , a VoIP company similar to Vonage. Wire’s head of product design Priidu Zilmer previously led design teams at Vdio and Skype. And Wire’s Chief Scientist Koen Vos created the audio compression format and co-created the audio coding format . Wire today is not a Skype replacement, however. Well, at least not yet. The service, which works as both a mobile and desktop app, allows users to share text, pictures, GIFs, HD audio and other rich media, including content from SoundCloud and YouTube. But it currently lacks video support for either real-time video chat or asynchronous recordings, though it plans to add this and other features later on, including HTML5 web support (soon, also WebRTC compatible) and later premium features users may pay for. What’s most impressive about the app for a non-technical user is Wire’s elegant design, which will appeal more to younger users who grew up with smartphones in their pockets. They’re likely used to gestures like swiping and pulling down on screens to access menus – movements that the mobile app utilizes for things like moving back and forth between chats at the contacts list, for example, or accessing a search box at the top of the screen. Older users may initially struggle with the lack of obvious navigational aids, like “hamburger” menus (the mobile menus with three stacked lines) or buttons, but Wire gives little tips the first time you use it to help you get started. The design is one where most of the app’s features and the chats’ metadata are hidden away from view. For instance, when you want to share a photo, call or “ping” another user, you have to swipe the flashing cursor to the right to reveal the options. If you want to see a message’s date and timestamp, you have to tap on it. The end result is a messaging client where the focus is more on the content being shared, rather than the app itself which almost disappears into the background. The app is smart in subtle ways, too. For instance, as you use the app to chat, it reorganizes your contact list putting those you’re most likely trying to reach up at the top. “When I left Skype in 2012, I really didn’t have this out of my system,” says Christensen of co-founding Wire. After getting Duric on board with the idea, he then got back in touch with Skype co-founder Friis, who was already sketching out ideas for something similar with Zilmer. “It was super obvious we were thinking the same thoughts, so we shook hands and decided let’s get going,” Christensen says. The company has an undisclosed amount of funding from Friis and , a collection of engineers, executives and designers which serves as a new, non-VC model for investments including Aether ( ), , , and others. “We looked at every single aspect of the landscape,” Christensen adds. “We had the context and the history having been in this for quite a long time and having seen the pain points,” he says. “We took all of them apart, and rebuilt them the way they should be built…we hope.” Wire is a free download . : Some have asked about Wire’s stance on user privacy and encryption. The company offers end-to-end encryption (SRTP) for calls, and TLS for messages and media from clients to servers. As for user privacy, Christensen says, “privacy was a primary concern for us – it’s one reason why the data storage is in Europe and we are located in [Switzerland].” Plus, he adds, “we also hire outside security experts to review architecture, code, policies, penetration testing, etc. We take it very seriously.” Data is retained on company servers however, and is not immediately deleted when users de-activate their account. He says the analogy here is something like Gmail – messages are still in others’ “inboxes” so to speak. The company is still figuring out for how long those messages need to be archived on servers following an account de-activation. “It’s an area we are actively working on, along with other ‘features’ in this domain,” Christensen says. |
Yik Yak’s New Funding Round Confirmed As Sequoia Leads $61M Investment | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | There’s been speculation that Anonymous messaging app Yik Yak is raising again, and today that the one-year-old app, which is popular among U.S. colleges, has closed a $61 million Series B round. Yik Yak representatives confirmed that Sequoia Capital led the round, which included participation from previous investors including DCM and .The deal sees Sequoia’s Jim Goetz join the Atlanta-based startup’s board. Last month $75 million in new capital from investors, and ten days later that the startup had raised $62 million. The Journal reported that the round values the company, which was started by Furman University graduates Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, at between $300 million and $400 million, though we haven’t been able to confirm that at this point. The filing indicates that Yik Yak closed $60.9 million of $62 million, which means that there is still just over $1 million ($1,086,637 to be precise) available in the round. Unlike other anonymous messaging apps like Whisper and Secret, Yik Yak is focused on serving college campuses as their go-to for news and views. The service currently covers around 1,300 colleges in the U.S., and typical messages from users include thoughts on teachers, other students, college life in general and — of course, the core of campus life — hookups. It’s been a busy year of fundraising for the young company. in April and it quickly followed that up with in June. last month that Droll and Buffington want the company to be more than just the campus town crier despite its initial success. One of their ambitions is to turn it into a hyper-local news source. To that point, Yik Yak recently allowing you to view conversations worldwide, while it continues to court the college demographic, having recently promoting the app on the West Coast. |
Update: Sonos Sells Off $130M In Secondary Equity To Stave Off IPO For Its Smart Speakers | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Suddenly, music is a business again. After years of wallowing in the post-Napster/iTunes era, streaming is beginning to take hold and everyone’s phone is now an iPod. So while Sonos has been in the smart home audio business since 2002, now’s the time to push for mainstream adoption. So to stay focused on its business and push back the need to IPO or get acquired, Sonos just did a secondary sale to let employees and early investors sell off equity in exchange for cash, according to . [Update: Sonos initially declined to comment on the news when we inquired. We originally printed that it raised $130 million, but the company now says “The funding is just a secondary round strictly raised as a part of our ongoing liquidity program for employees, not a new round of capital.” So rather than adding to its $325 million in existing funding, it’s giving equity holders a chance to cash out.] Sonos is still a very, very well-capitalized startup. It’s so big that probably no one but Google or Apple could afford to acquire it. Considering Apple’s personal audio buyout of Beats’ headphones business, and Google’s invasion of the smart home, either could be a smart alternative to an IPO for Sonos. Thanks to the secondary sale, Sonos doesn’t need to jump into going public soon, as its created a release valve for liquidity pressure from employees and investors. The company hasn’t been too flashy lately, even as Spotify’s big fundraising and Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats made news last year. Instead, Sonos has been steadily improving its core product — home stereo systems where each room can be separately controlled to wirelessly play music from online and local sources. It ditched its proprietary controller to let you use iOS and Android devices as remotes, and that you had to plug into your wireless router. Alongside Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Deezer, Sirius XM and your own music library, Sonos recently added support for and Google Music. What’s left is to become a household name. And since the Sonos experience is so fun, it just needs to infiltrate different groups of friends. That way when they all rock out at someone’s Sonos-equipped house, they go home wanting to buy their own. Sonos has already begun buying expensive commercials on primetime music TV shows like The X Factor. It’s also running huge outdoor ad campaigns on the sides of buildings in Europe. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCx0tfodMZI] Beyond marketing, Sonos could look to deepen its R&D, building out new home speaker systems and boomboxes. Now that everyone has music players in their pockets, could win big as people look for ways to turn streams into sound that follows them around the house. This critical moment is better spent doubling down on its product and marketing than dealing with the circus of going public. |
Sen. Al Franken Questions Lyft On Its Privacy Practices | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Senator Al Franken today asking it to detail its privacy practices. Sen. Franken’s questions come in 10 parts, and hit on predictable points: which employees can access customer data; how training is structured for employees that can access that information; what “mechanisms” exist to provide oversight of worker activity; and how third-party corporations interact with user data. The Senator expects a response by the end of the year. The Senator 10 related, but different questions regarding how it handles user data. Uber, arguably the most popular ridesharing service, managed to mangle its public relations position recently, when one of its executives go after journalists it didn’t care for. The ensuing flap was followed by revelations that it had played loose with user privacy, including . Uber and Lyft are two leading parties to the ridesharing wave, which has been quick to dismantle taxi monopolies in cities. The new market niche has been so successful that . However, as Lyft and Uber have grown by leaps and bounds, questions regarding how they manage user information has risen to the fore — car services of any stripe are privy to private moments and information about your movements that others might find incredibly interesting. Keeping users’ privacy secure is paramount. You recall that last Uber or Lyft you took early on a Saturday morning wearing last night’s pants, don’t you? The senator’s queries also underscore growing interest in Washington about Silicon Valley’s startup culture, where companies are quick to pursue technological solutions to frictions in often regulated environments end up irking entrenched parties. As when Sen. Franken sent Uber a missive: We users trust services like Uber because they are at once familiar and also terribly high tech. When a company abuses that trust, everyone loses. While a draconian (and EU-like) policy isn’t imperative, common sense and a dedication to the humanity and privacy of customers certainly is. That’s correct. Bringing Lyft into the fold only makes sense. Welcome to the new normal. |
Tumblr Now Has ‘Buy,’ ‘Pledge,’ And ‘Get Involved’ Buttons From Etsy, Kickstarter, Artsy + Do Something | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | — the site that has — has today a test of a new feature that will give it more interactivity, and more of a social commerce spin. Users that post links from a selection of sites — , , and — will now automatically see action buttons appear in the top right corner of the posts for people to “buy”, “browse”, “pledge”, or “do something”. For now, the actions are limited to these four sites. Down the road, if Tumblr decides to integrate the buttons into links from a wider range of properties — taking in e-commerce behemoths like Amazon and eBay, for example — it could feasibly become much more of a competitor against the likes of Pinterest, Facebook and others, positioning Tumblr not just as a place to consume content but to transact, too. The buttons give viewers the option of buying or pledging or getting involved on the spot, currently with a link back to the original page for the item in question. You can also set reminders to take an action later, by sending the address you have registered with Tumblr back to get contacted in the future. (The reminder option currently seems to only be working for items that you buy.) When Tumblr was last year for $1.1 billion, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer made it clear that the intention was to turn on more monetization for the service. Many assumed that would be primarily through advertising. To be sure, this is an area where Tumblr been rolling out more features, including that were turned on last week with their own action buttons. Today’s announcement shows that there may be more up Yahoo’s sleeve. At the very least, they show that Tumblr is also going down the same route as the likes of Twitter in weighing up ways of monetising their platforms alongside more direct advertising. Indeed, the buttons on Tumblr are somewhat reminiscent of the buttons that Twitter has been adding to Tweets, initially giving people a way to sign up for services, to follow new accounts, and more recently as a route into purchasing items advertised in Tweets. But there are some differences. Currently, Tumblr’s buttons are much more simple for anyone (not just businesses or power users) to create — they come up literally when you a copy/paste of a link. Or, as Tumblr notes on its , a “clever new button” that comes up simply when you post “something you love” to Tumblr. And while Twitter has integrated with payments companies to underpin its own buy button, Tumblr’s implementation is, well, a bit more rough and tumble. It’s unclear, for example, if Tumblr is getting an affiliate cut on any traffic that it sends to these sites as a result of the button. If anything, it feels more like Tumblr has added these buttons to test the waters, looking at how such a feature might potentially get monetised in the future, perhaps as an ad unit for businesses using the button. We are reaching out to Tumblr to ask for more details about when other sites might get added to the mix, whether it plans to add more actions, and whether it plans to manage some of the transaction process itself. : A Tumblr spokesperson describes that the buttons are “yet another step to support creative communities on and beyond Tumblr.” She adds that initially it’s limited to the four pilot partners and confirms that the offering is desktop only — not mobile. |
TC Cribs: Pact Coffee’s London Office Is As Fresh As Its Coffee | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | is to become a daily habit for Brits, with a tech-driven startup that can deliver the freshest coffee available, shipping within seven days of roasting. Pact has also gone for super-awesome customer service, going above and beyond the call of duty, Zappos-style. Pact has raised almost $4 million in venture capital to date. They now have 30,000 cups of coffee being drunk in the UK daily and plan to launch internationally. Co-founder and CEO Stephen Rapoport showed us around his cool South London office in this week’s episode of TC Cribs. |
Nominations For The 8th Annual Crunchies End Soon — Get Yours In Today! | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | It’s that time of year again. The will soon be upon us, but if we’re going to give out any awards, we’re going to need your help. Each year, the Crunchies brings together the best and brightest from the startup ecosystem for a night of awards and schmoozing with their peers. As last year’s host John Oliver noted so astutely, the Crunchies are “like the Nobel Prizes being given out, if Nobel Prizes were given out in an atmosphere of high-school bitchiness.” Next February we hope to carry on that tradition with a new host — — who will be there to help us highlight all the best startups, founders, apps, and technologies over the past year, and probably make fun of those who don’t end up winning. But to do that, we’re from our readers to help narrow down the overwhelming list of candidates. Great news, right? But! end in just under 36 hours — at 11:59 p.m. PST on December 3, to be exact — so be sure to cast your vote for nominees and let us know who you think should be up for the awards. So anyway, . And . It’ll be February before you know it. Our list of categories and most recent winners is below: Best Technology Achievement (2013: bitcoin)
Best On-Demand Service (2013: Airbnb)
Best E-Commerce Application (2013: Wanelo)
Best Mobile Application (2013: Snapchat)
Fastest Rising Startup (2013: Upworthy)
Best Health Startup (2013: One Medical)
Best Design (2013: Pencil by FiftyThree)
Best Bootstrapped Startup (2013: Imgur)
Best Enterprise Startup (2013: Zendesk)
Best International Startup (2013: Waze)
Best Education Startup (2013: Duolingo)
Best Hardware Startup (2013: Oculus VR)
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop (2013: Candy Crush Saga)
Biggest Social Impact (2013: Edward Snowden’s NSA Revelations)
Angel of the Year (2013: Chris Sacca)
VC of the Year (2013: Peter Fenton, Benchmark)
Founder of the Year (2013: Arash Ferdowsi & Drew Houston, Dropbox)
CEO of the Year (2013: Dick Costolo, Twitter)
Best New Startup of 2014 (2013: Tinder)
Best Overall Startup of 2014 (2013: Kickstarter) |
Firefox Could Soon Come To iOS | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | For more than a year now, Mozilla has that it wouldn’t release a version of Firefox for iOS because Apple won’t let it use its own web engine on its platform. With a , however, it looks like Mozilla’s position may be changing. At an in Portland today, the organization talked about the need to get its browser onto iOS. “We need to be where our users are,” Firefox release manager Lukas Blakk (quoting Mozilla’s VP for Firefox Jonathan Nightingale, we think). “So we’re going to get Firefox on iOS.” : Mozilla has now that it is experimenting with the iOS platform: At Mozilla, we put our users first and want to provide an independent choice for them on any platform. We are in the early stages of experimenting with something that allows iOS users to be able to choose a Firefox-like experience. We work in the open at Mozilla and are just starting to experiment, so we’ll update you when we have more to share. We need to be where our users are so we're going to get Firefox on iOS — Lukas Blakk (@lsblakk) Apple has been very restrictive with regard to third-party browser engines on its platform. Current third-party iOS browsers like Chrome or Opera can only operate on iOS because they use Apple’s own JavaScript and rendering engines, for example — or, as in the case of Opera, by rendering sites on a server and then sending them to the device. It’s unclear how Mozilla plans to bring Firefox to iOS, but given that Apple isn’t likely to open up its platform for third-party browser engines, it’ll likely have to work with Apple’s technology. With that, it can still support Firefox accounts, its bookmark-syncing tools and all the other features that Firefox for Android currently offers. Next year is going to be an important one for Firefox — and one that will hopefully bring a bit of a resurgence for the browser. Users today want to use the same browser on all of their devices. That makes keeping bookmarks and passwords in sync quite a bit easier, after all. For a while, Mozilla offered for exactly this reason, but then it that project two years ago. We have reached out to Mozilla for comment and will update this post once we hear more. https://twitter.com/matt_ruttley/status/539844872522301440/photo/1 |
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