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TC Droidcast Episode 29: Lollipop’s Adoption Lag, Google Glass’s Second Act | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | This week, Darrell Etherington, Greg Kumparak and Kyle Russell opine about , and whether Google can ever solve that particular problem. are also on the agenda, as well as the , how modular phones might scare away buyers on the casual end of the spectrum, and what modularity really means for consumer choice. Next week, we’ll have deeper impressions of some devices we’re currently testing, including the LG G Watch R. We’ll also break down some of the best software to pick up heading into the holiday, based on our preparation for year-end best lists.
and check out past episodes . Download it directly here: |
Twitter Copies Instagram With New Adjustable Photo Filters | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Over-filtering can obliterate the beauty of your photos or make them look cliché. So to give you more nuanced control, Twitter for and today replaced its clumsy photo filter grid with a much simpler Instagram-style row of . Each filter can be double-tapped to reveal an intensity slider so you can lay that sepia effect on heavy or light to get the perfect hipster sheen. Twitter first back in 2012 after Instagram made them a fad. But the design for choosing between filters was squint-inducing. Twitter divided the screen into nine tiny thumbnails showing how your photo would look with the different filters. You had to know to tap to enlarge one and then swipe sideways to easily compare the full-screen versions. Twitter’s new filtering system will roll out to all iOS and Android users today. Twitter offers a row of filters that you can easily tap through to pick the best one. It should be familiar, considering it’s basically a clone of Instagram’s filter selector. You can choose from Radiant, Positive, Warm, Breeze, Glow, Golden, Fame and Stark. With the adjustable power slider revealed by a double tap, you can increase or decrease the intensity of the filter. Good design is good design. Great artists steal. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Still, the similarity between Twitter’s new design and Instagram’s is uncanny. Really, it’s just the latest in a continuing social singularity as Facebook and Twitter copy each other ad nauseam. Facebook launches hashtags and trending topics while Twitter experiments with a News Feed-style filtered feed. Copying isn’t inherently bad, it’s just not very inspiring. Instagram’s classic photo filters on the left, Twitter’s new filters on the right. The similarity is unmistakable. Photo sharing has become a hotly contested space since they’re so irresistible that they generate out-sized engagement compared to text on services like Facebook and Twitter. If Twitter’s new filter interface can attract more photographers, it will also have a better chance of turning their audiences into loyal users. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 5 | null |
Valve Takes On Twitch With Steam Broadcasting | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | There’s a new entrant in the already-competitive online game-streaming space. Game developer, publisher and retailer just announced the beta version of , a tool for watching your friends play from within the company’s popular game store and community hub. Steam has long offered the ability to see when your friends are playing a game on their PC. With today’s release, you’ll be able to click on those status updates and go straight to watching a live stream of your friends as they hunt orcs in or ruin a stranger’s day in . If you don’t want everyone watching you play, there are privacy settings ranging from letting all friends watch at all times to only allowing friends you request (say, if you need pointers for beating a level). In addition, there’s a new tab in the Community hub for watching people play popular games. The feature’s still very new, but there are already hundreds of active streams. While and YouTube are the dominant players in the game streaming space, Valve’s prospects in the market are bolstered by the fact that it is the de facto games marketplace on the PC. Steam Broadcasting is simply a new option within the Steam experience, with no new accounts to sign up for or third-party apps to download. Back in August I wrote about the ways that . Many of those points apply to Valve and Steam as well — though unlike Amazon, Valve’s games are actual killer apps for hardcore gamers. |
Stripe Raises Another $70 Million, Doubling Its Valuation To $3.5 Billion | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Ultra-hot payments startup has brought on $70 million in new funding that will double its valuation less than a year after its last raise. The round, which was , brings the total amount Stripe has raised to . With the new financing, Thrive Capital joins Stripe’s list of investors, which also includes Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, and Khosla Ventures. The company’s valuation has increased to $3.5 billion, which is up for $1.75 billion during its last round. After its last raise, Stripe said it was . Since the company couldn’t be reached for comment, we’re assuming that’s still the case. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ |
FCC Commish Alleges That Netflix Is Working To “Effectively Secure” An Internet Fast Lane For Its Content | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | FCC Commissioner sent to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings today, alleging that the online video provider was working to “effectively secure” Internet “fast lanes” for its content. Netflix has been a . As such, Pai’s comments are somewhat embarrassing. If Netflix is in fact building ways to advantage its content over that of others, it could be said that it was working to warp, or otherwise distort the fabric of the Internet in its favor. That would make it a monied incumbent hoping to use a cash advantage to bolster its market position, precisely what net neutrality seeks to avoid and prevent. The company declined to comment. Here’s Pai’s argument on why Netflix is going against its own stance on net neutrality [Bolding: TechCrunch]: Recent press articles report that Netflix, our nation’s largest streaming video provider, has chosen not to participate in efforts to develop open standards for streaming video. Moreover, I understand that Netflix has taken — or at least tested — measures that undermine aspects of open standards for streaming video. . In other words, if standards collectively agreed upon by much of the industry cannot identify and correctly route Netflix traffic, those standards ultimately are unlikely to be of much benefit to digital video consumers. Some have suggested that Netflix has taken these actions because the company is currently installing its own propietary caching appliances throughout ISPs’ networks as part of its Open Connect program. If ISPs were to install open caching appliances throughout their networks, all video content providers — including Netflix — could compete on a level playing field. To Pai, that doesn’t sound fair. The allegations “raise an apparent conflict with Netflix’s advocacy for strong net neutrality regulations,” according to the commissioner. There is a lot for Netflix to respond to in the above, including the commissioner’s apparent idea that if Netflix installed its own caching equipment, other caching equipment is excluded. More broadly, it’s worth : Netflix believes strong net neutrality is critical, but in the near term we will in cases pay the toll to the powerful ISPs to protect our consumer experience. When we do so, we don’t pay for priority access against competitors, just for interconnection. Netflix may argue that what Pai is unhappy with is merely some form of interconnection. What we need here is a technical explanation from Netflix. Merely opting out of the open protocol isn’t a sin. But if Netflix’s decision to do so, and work with ISPs in a certain context, will force non-Netflix content to be delivered even comparatively more slowly — which is to say, granting Netflix a speed boost of any sort — then we have something larger to chew on. |
How To Hire When Everyone Wants To Found Their Own Startup | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Back before founding a company was cool, it was a lot easier to get a lot of smart people in a room. Rock stars were hireable because they weren’t forging their own paths. That led to powerhouse teams like the seen below. Alongside the future founders of LinkedIn, YouTube and Yelp at PayPal was , now of Khosla Ventures. Today at the in SF, Rabois explained how PayPal was lucky to start at the right stage of the talent dilution cycle. According to Rabois, during down times when there’s not a lot of funding or fever to start companies, it’s easy to hire great talent. With enough intelligence centralized on a few startups, they grow. With time and success, hype builds around the idea of entrepreneurship and being a founder becomes a full-blown fetish. Eager to coin on the success of the ecosystem, funding becomes plentiful and smart people found their own companies rather than join others. It becomes tougher to get a critical mass of talent on the same team. These companies raise money but don’t have the skills to win big and deliver returns. The bubble deflates, hype around startups cools off, and it becomes easier to hire strong people again. Keith Rabois speaks at Postseed Conference in San Francisco But what should startups do if they’re unlucky enough to be getting off the ground when there’s a ton of recruiting competition and everyone wants to start their own company? You know, like now? Rabois laid out four strategies for founders facing a tough hiring climate: The tactics might seem time-consuming, but early hires set the tone for the company, and mediocre recruits can be toxic. It’s worth the effort for founders to enlist lieutenants they can trust to inspire the rest of the troops. |
Android 5.0 Currently Runs On Fewer Than 0.1% Of Handsets | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Google’s is currently running on fewer than 0.1 percent of handsets, according to . The new software, code-named ‘Lollipop,’ was made generally available November 12. Carriers are currently rolling Lollipop out to consumers, according to their own schedule. The limited uptake of Android’s fifth version so far underscores a wider problem in the mobile world: Fragmentation. It took Windows Phone 8.1, for example, . And , Apple is seeing slower adoption of its new iOS 8 than some expected. Current reports indicate that , which could quickly push its market share numbers higher. Google was not immediately available to comment on the current Lollipop figures. However, even if Lollipop manages to grow its share of the Android install base through the end of the year, it will likely face an adoption ceiling. Currently, the most popular version of Android is KitKat, or Android 4.4. It commands 33.9 percent market share. There are six versions of Android at current tip that have more than 7 percent market share, for reference. Given that, it seems doubtful that Lollipop itself will do much better than the 30 percent mark, unless something in its ecosystem changes. Looking backwards, we can compare the current rollout of Lollipop to the KitKat release. The , it had 0.01 percent market share. The next month, that tally inched up to 1.11 percent. The next month, 2.94 percent. So the initial incline can be shallow for new Android builds. Operating system fragmentation makes the work of developers more difficult. If the install base of phones that you’re building for not only have a wide array of screen sizes, but also firmware, building an app that will work for the majority of users can be difficult. This applies to all three platforms, of course. |
AWS Simplifies EC2 Reserved Instance Pricing | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Amazon Web Services is making some major changes to how it charges for — a move that seems to be at least partially motivated by the changes Google earlier this year. As Amazon , developers can still pay upfront for the full term of the instance (either one or three years), but in addition to this, they can also pay only a portion of the reserved instance up-front cost and then pay the rest later for a slightly higher price. They can also opt to pay nothing up front, but commit to pay for the instance over the course of the contract. The last option, however, is only available for one-year commitments. All of these options offer major savings over Amazon’s on-demand pricing, but both of the new options offers fewer savings than paying everything up front. What’s gone now is the between light, medium and heavy utilization — all of which used to come with their own prices. Instead, there is only a single type of reserved instance now. As Amazon notes, this greatly simplifies the pricing model for these instances. Here is what this new pricing model looks like for a standard m3.medium instance running Linux: Earlier this year, Google announced that it was doing away with reserved instance pricing for its Cloud Platform service altogether. Instead, the company now offers an automatic discount to users who utilize an instance for a longer period. AWS isn’t going quite as far with today’s announcement, but it does now offer developers a bit more flexibility in how they pay for reserved instances. |
Status Automatically Tells Your Friends What You’re Up To And If Your Phone Is Dead | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Your phone is dead. Or you’re driving. Or you’re in a meeting. Your girlfriend/boyfriend/lover-person is trying to call you. You didn’t pick up, so now they’re assuming you’re either ignoring them or dead. Your phone knows better — hell, with all of the sensors and data crammed in that thing, it probably knows what you’re up to. Wouldn’t it be nice if your phone could lend a hand here? Meet Status, an iOS/Android app built to do just that. Status is sort of like the AIM away messages of yesteryear — but automatic. Or like an automated version of Twitter, back when Twitter was more about telling people what you were up to than it was about yelling at each other and making jokes about popular things. Status uses a big ol’ array of data to figure out what you’re up to, and automatically shares that information with a finely-honed list of friends. At home, or work, or one of your favorite regular haunts? Status will pick that up by way of geofencing (and the Wi-Fi network you’re connected to) and automatically set your status to “At [wherever].” If you’re somewhere you haven’t taught the app to recognize, it’ll just say “Out and about.” Driving? Status can be set to look for your car’s Bluetooth connection. Once it finds it (that is, once your car is on), it figures you’re driving and sets your status accordingly. In a meeting? Give Status access to your calendar, and it’ll automatically give people a heads up whenever they might be calling during a scheduled event. Battery about to die? Status knows. This isn’t the sort of information you want broadcasted to the world, of course — that’s why Status focuses on carefully curated friends lists. It’s not a Twitter-style follow model; you approve each and every friend to make sure you’re only sharing your status with the right people. And even among friends, you can go “incognito” whenever you want. While the app is cross-platform across iOS/Android, each platform has its own strengths. The iOS build is a bit better at detecting when you’re driving/biking/etc, thanks to iOS 8’s core motion API. Android, meanwhile, can do things like integrate status updates into the dialer — so if a friend with Status tries to call when your phone is about to die, that little factoid will pop up right within the phone app itself. Oh! And while it’s not a very heavily played-up feature, Status also makes for a pretty decent cross-platform alternative to Find My Friends. Tapping on someone’s status brings up a map, at which point you can ping them for a location update. If you’re familiar , the logic at play here might seem a bit familiar. Agent uses your smartphone’s data to do things like extend battery life and remember where you parked; Status uses that data to help your social life. And hey, wouldn’t you know it: Status and Agent are actually built by the very same people. While Agent will be sticking around in the Google Play store, it sounds like Status is more of the focus now. I’ve been using Status for about a week now. Since the app hadn’t actually launched yet, I mainly used it with the app’s developers — but I still loved it. It’s well polished, the interface is clean and accessible, and it does exactly what it promises. Check it out for and . |
The Father Of The Powersquid Launches A Bluetooth-Enabled Carbon Fiber Drone | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Chris Hawker, the creator of the , and some of his buddies at Trident Design have created a new flying drone, the The Flyer is an ultralight airplane that flies under its own power and controlled via Bluetooth. A tiny camera streams the flight to your phone. “We built this because after years of focusing on practical items like the PowerSquid, we wanted to make something FUN! A toy to please our inner children, using all of the coolest technology we could cram into it. We also wanted to create a lead product for a new company focusing on remotely operated aircraft where we see a huge opportunity for future growth,” said Hawker. The team already raised $68,575 on Indiegogo and they have 39 days left in crowdfunding. Early-bird units cost $89.
The body of the bird is made of carbon fiber, and Toby Rich, creator of the first phone-controlled RC plane, built the Bluetooth controller. The most important part of the design is that the drones won’t break when they crash land. Carbon fiber and nantotube epoxy will hold them together and the propellers are well out of the way so they won’t snap. Like the Ohio-based Wright Brothers, the Ohio-based Hawker was inspired while playing with a flying toy. “I had the original idea to do a carbon fiber free flight plane while walking in a park one day, and then Abraham and I brainstormed about it on a drive, which led to the idea of making it powered. Bret then added in the Bluetooth control-idea, as well as the expertise to pull it off. We decided to crowdfund it after getting our first images together and realizing how cool it looks and that it would really appeal to the crowdfunding community,” said Hawker. |
Twitter Releases New Suite Of Anti-Harassment Tools, Promises Faster Response Times For Dealing With Abuse | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Twitter this morning has a new set of anti-harassment tools that make it easier for users to flag abuse on the network, as well as describe more specifically why they’re blocking or reporting a Twitter account. Twitter had made it fairly simple to report spam, but the new tools allow users to report a variety of troubles, including impersonations, harassment, and even self-harm or suicide. In addition, users can report the harassment on behalf of other users, even if they’re not the target themselves, which is a big change. When “harassment” is chosen as the option in the new abuse reporting workflow, users are asked to choose “who is being affected?” and can answer “I am” or “Someone else is.” They can then choose from a menu where they’re asked to describe what the abuser is doing, with options like “being disrespectful or offensive,” “harassing me” or “threatening violence or physical harm.” The changes have been implemented in a way that makes them more mobile friendly, and require less initial information, says Twitter. The company also says that behind the scenes, it has made several improvements as well in order to respond more quickly to these abuse reports. (Likely it will move the “violence” and “physical threats” reports to the front of the queue in order to act faster.) Starting today we’re rolling out an improved way to flag abusive Tweets. See how it works. — Twitter Support (@Support) Another new feature is the Blocked Accounts page now available from Twitter.com’s Settings menu. This shows you which accounts you’ve blocked in the past, and will feature even more controls and options in the months ahead, says Twitter. Notably, the company has also revamped the way the blocking system operates…yes, again. Before, blocked accounts could continue to tweet and respond to you but you would no longer see this activity. Now, blocked accounts will no longer be able to view your profile at all. Before, these abusers’ accounts could see your profile, but couldn’t follow you – a following request would be met with a message that they’ve been blocked. That change doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll have way to view the abuse victim’s content, as other users could still quote or retweet it, or the abusers could simply log out. However, it makes things a bit more difficult for a harasser to respond in real-time to what someone is saying and continue to fuel the fire of hate on Twitter. Twitter has changed its policies around how blocking behaves several times now, and this appears to be something of a reversion to an older policy. So far, no policy have effectively culled Twitter’s often darker side where anonymous accounts have been allowed to threaten users with violence, including rape and murder, and tweet hate speech to anyone listening. The problem comes from Twitter’s policy to support anonymous accounts, identified only by an @handle and authenticated via an email. But that also means that Twitter can be used more safely by those with authoritarian governments in power, so it’s something of a trade-off. The social network has often been viewed as being something of reactive instead of proactive when it comes to its policies around abuse and user protections, though. This most recent move comes after a number or reports of “Twitter harassment,” especially those involving women. These have ranged from celebs like Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda and, of course, the nightmare that has been which has led to vicious harassment of women like feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, indie game developer Brianna Wu, and indie developer Zoe Quinn. Twitter says the updates are available now for a small group of users, and in the coming weeks, it will roll them out to everyone. It also says that users will soon see additional user controls, further improvements to reporting and new enforcement procedures for abusive accounts, but doesn’t go into detail. |
Misfit Raises $40M From Xiaomi And Others As It Eyes More Growth In China | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | Wearable device maker and health and fitness platform provider Misfit has raised an additional $40 million in a Series C funding round led by GGV Capital and including Xiaomi, JD.com (online retailer with massive reach), Shunwei and existing investors, including Horizons Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and Northwest Venture Partners. The new funding brings Xiaomi and JD.com on board as strategic partners, which reflects a deepening of Misfit’s commitment to the wearables market in China, which currently drives about a third of its total business, according to Misfit CEO and founder Sonny Vu. “To us, [China] is probably our favorite market,” he said in an interview. “It’s a vastly larger market, even when you take into consideration income differences and what not. They have 1.7 or 1.8 billion people, and it’s a super important market for us. China’s always been a very strategic market for us, because we got there early.” Xiaomi’s investment in Misfit is its first in a U.S.-based company, and the four-year-old smartphone industry titan seems to recognize the value of having Misfit on board as a partner, despite the fact that it already markets its own wearable devices, including the $13 Mi Band. Vu says that there’s plenty of room on the market for both types of devices, and that discount offerings like those actually spur sales of more premium hardware like the Misfit Shine. “The person who buys the $13 band is very different from the person who buys the $100 Shine,” he explained. “The day that they announced the $13 band, was the largest single sales day for us at Misfit. If it were lightbulbs or tablets, then price probably is incredibly important. I’m not saying price isn’t important, but when it comes to wearables, fashion, design, brand and experience are more significant factors.” As for this round, Vu says that Misfit actually didn’t need the money. The $15 million from their previous raise is still in the bank, he told me, and Misfit is actually break-even thanks to its hardware sales. The whole company is designed to be more self-sustaining and less dependent on outside funding than most, Vu says, because of his experience running previous startups that ran out of cash, which led him to take steps Misfit could build its long-term vision (which goes way beyond wearable hardware, he says) without worrying about running out of runway. This round, then, was less about capital and more about securing key partnerships. “This whole thing with Xiaomi and JD.com was basically done so that we can really amplify our presence in China, and also to accelerate product development,” Vu said. “We only have 40 people in San Francisco, so there’s only so much we can do every year, and having a partner like Xiaomi who really knows how to scale and get to production quickly, and not just them but the company’s they’re invested in, that’s kind of a big deal for us.” The deal will also see GGV managing partner and Xiaomi investor Hans Tung join the Misfit board of directors, and Shunwei founding partner Tuk Koh will also join as board observer. Capitalizing on market potential internationally could help Misfit continue to work on long-term strategy, while others flounder in the still nascent (and largely unproven) wearables market back in North America. |
UPDATE: Why Retailers Must (But Won’t) Succeed In Introducing Mobile Payment Systems | Catherine Tucker | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | In the digital age, it’s critical for retailers to collect and manage customer data. This information is the key to providing personalization for any kind of shopping experience, as it allows retailers to understand customer preferences and analyze shopping histories. Smartphone payment systems like Apple Pay do not collect this information, but retailers would love to find a system that does. * Just imagine that you use a mobile payment service and you’re heading out to a department store to buy holiday presents. The service could have such a complete history of your purchasing habits that your mere proximity to that store could trigger an advertisement or notice from a competing retailer to appear on your mobile phone, enticing you to visit the competing store instead. As the holder of the data, the payment service could retain all of the power in the relationship and can charge hefty referral fees to retailers who seek to use that data. To avoid this future where retailers know less and less about their own customers’ preferences, retailers need to succeed in establishing their own online payment networks that would allow them to keep their data in house. Yet there are several reasons why retailers are likely to be doomed to fail in this effort. First, data security is a key issue in users’ minds. Recent news reports stated that CurrentC — a competing smartphone payment system to be used by retailers like Target, Best Buy and Sears — was hacked before it even got off the ground. Second, there is the question of whether customers will use multiple payment networks. This is a concept called multihoming. You can see this issue with Uber, which is facing difficulties because customers can use Uber or its competitor, Lyft, by simply pressing a different button on a mobile phone. It’s easy to be on both platforms at the same time. In the world of mobile payments, the opposite may well be true. Customers may find it more convenient to keep all of their payments on a single platform, especially if that platform provides services, like letting users search, sort and visualize their shopping expenditures. Customers would lose that functionality – and the ability to see the whole picture of their spending — if they use multiple platforms. This is all bad news for retailers, who are losing control of their data. This article has been corrected to reflect that Apple Pay does not collect or store consumer information. |
The Internet Of Things Is Not A Shiny New Toy | Marc Canter | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | The Internet of Things is the latest, greatest new buzzword du jour and every major technology company, industrial manufacturer, big retailer and health industry player has declared the IoT to be the next big thing. Each of these industries sees a way of taking advantage of tiny low-power intelligent devices or sensors and they’ve baked the IoT into their future product strategies. These industries are so excited about the IoT that they’ve created a collective frothing-at-the-mouth level of hysteria – to the point where Cisco is even trying to rename it to the “Internet of Everything.” Whenever Cisco tries to rename something (as it did with “the Human Network”) you know we’re in trouble. Qualcomm has several different IoT platforms, Intel has created a breakout standard of their own and Apple and Google are replaying their walled garden battles — just as we all expect them to do. Like every major technological trend before it, IoT has given birth to trade shows and conferences, accelerators and venture funds, and local meetups and DIY co-working spaces. And every consulting company from McKinsey, Accenture, KPMG on down now have their own IoT divisions and practices. What most amazes me is the universal lack of a clear definition of what the IoT’s benefits are to mere mortals — and really, what it is at all. We’re already seeing a backlash formed towards IoT — whether it be in the rejection of Google Glass and the glassholes associated with it to the over 50 percent set-aside rate of fitness devices — which are still selling and still being set aside. Consumers don’t understand machines communicating with each other (sometimes referred to as M2M) or the cloud per se, as they see that as some weird form of Skynet. Based on public reaction to NSA spying, hackers hacking and Google and Facebook monetizing our data, I’d say IoT has a basic challenge in front of it to build basic trust in the minds of average consumers. But the real problem with the IoT is that people see it as some sort of shiny new toy and not the all-encompassing, change the world, prepare us for the future thing it really is. It’s almost a belittling effect to the possibilities ahead – by seeing IoT as simply “yet another new trend.” It’s far more than that — and quite frankly I’m getting tired of watching this incredible opportunity be misunderstood and exploited as “merely a new trend or fad.” Whenever you hear about “genie-in-the-bottle” intelligence coupled with real-world data ( based on user activities and behavior patterns) this should give us an inkling as to the new era of “smart” solutions ahead. Technological platforms interoperating in a synchronized, orchestrated manner in a distributed networked environment are a turn-on for software guys like me — but I’m also wary of what’s missing in this buzzword-based, collective frothing behavior. I see the IoT as the culmination of all modern technology that is finally uniting the online technological world and the real world. By understanding context, both in terms of the end user and the world around them, we can now truly create “mediated conversations,“ real-time intervention and help, online augmentation of everyday experiences and ultimately “contextually aware” apps. What’s most exciting about this burgeoning “Age of Context” (as Robert Scoble and Shel Israel refer to it in their book) is what we don’t know. Yes the future is murky and nebulous, but it’s definitely going to be based on a chain of technology, which starts with your smartwatch, or wristband (or smart home), which sends contextually up-to-date data back to “intelligence” (in the cloud), which then analyzes this data and reacts to it in real time with contextually aware experiences. Or something like that. These experiences are going to happen with mobile devices and your social graph of friends, colleagues and family members and are going to include streaming digital media content. That’s a lot more than just a shiny new trend. My head explodes with new kinds of solutions and creative expression, but I know that the IoT must also include mobile apps and social engagement, and we sure as hell better not leave out digital media and streaming content. So from now on, whenever you hear the term IoT, think about what it should be referring to, and not some shiny new trend and category that just happens to be worth several trillion dollars. Please. |
How NASA Opens Planetary Mission Data | Thomas Stein | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | As the tests , planetary scientists are already working with reams of data to determine what the next generation of astronauts may encounter. For the past 25 years, NASA has been working to make the data it collects from all of its planetary missions open to the public and the research community. Known as the , the site is an archive of data from all NASA planetary missions, sponsored by its . It’s responsible for archiving all NASA scientific planetary data. All PDS products are peer-reviewed, documented and easily accessible via online catalogs organized by planetary disciplines in the form of the Analyst’s Notebook, a front-end application to help researchers review data on a planetary mission. The scientific community accesses the data for use in planetary research, analysis and more. In fact, the data is made open to anyone – scientists, astronautics agencies from around the world and the general public – on a regular basis, and the level of detail is staggering, including imagery of all kinds, analysis, charting, even the science team’s own notes. NASA’s planetary data are archived into data volumes typically segregated by mission and instrument. This approach works well for long-term data conservation. However, the Mars Rovers , and, more recently, provided a new challenge. Because of the nondeterministic nature of these missions, it wasn’t possible to assess the data without understanding the context in which it was collected. Therefore, it was vital to capture any and all data types, to give clarity on the “why” and “how” the data was collected. So NASA scientists created the Analyst’s Notebook concept. During early Rover mission simulations in the late 1990s, science teams discovered the need to present all of the data and documents as a logical unit, thus allowing scientists to better understand the bigger picture of landed operations. Better data organization is only a small part of the Notebook though. In building the Notebook, NASA is able to capture information that is not part of the data archives: daily reports, engineering data, maps, activity plans, and context mosaics. Additional value-added tools in the Notebook provide insight and access to the data archives that are otherwise unavailable, such as specialized data searches, interactive traverse maps, data product reviews, large-volume data orders and the ability to view large images (up to 200 megapixels) on demand. Today, the Analyst’s Notebooks for MER Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the MSL Rover Curiosity, operate on Telerik development toolset. The Analyst’s Notebook for the Phoenix Mars lander will follow. A number of software tools are used in creating and supporting the Notebook. It’s a web-based application running on the Microsoft ASP.NET platform. The application is written in c#, with a majority of the code running on the server side. NASA uses Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX for framework controls and ESRI ArcGIS for map support. The agency also uses Microsoft Image Composite Editor to create context mosaics. The database is built primarily on Microsoft SQL Server, with a small solr instance also used. The data ingestion and transformation tools are written in-house. Some scientists use the Notebook to get to data for their research on characterizing the planet’s surface, chemical makeup, or history. Others use it to find data in support of cross-instrument studies. has imbedded links to the Notebook. The is working on adapting the Notebook to support their mission launching in 2016. There are myriad uses of the data for science research. In fact, in one week alone I’ve worked directly with four researchers who have used the Notebook to get data for their research. Without the Notebook, the archives consist of a structured collection of files with little mechanism for finding or previewing the data, much less having any descriptions about the processes active during data acquisition. Imagine a library with books on shelves organized by subject, but with no titles, no card catalogue, no book reviews, no descriptions on the dust jackets. The only way to find an interesting book is to pull down every book and start reading it. By making the research available on a regular basis, NASA not only keeps the public informed of activities and strides made in the scientific community (not to mention demonstrating where taxpayer money goes), but also enables researchers not necessarily connected to the missions to continue to make their own strides. Most importantly, the Analyst Notebook enables meticulous record-keeping so that decades down the road, scientists can review the data and know exactly what mission scientists were thinking, seeing and deducing. This ultimately maintains the integrity of the data and research. This openness is what can continue to help ensure advancements in the scientific community and future Rover missions. |
Hands On With The Blackberry Classic | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | It’s been a long time coming: Blackberry’s return to its roots. Rather than chasing the pack, Blackberry has brought back exactly what its fans have been wanting in a package that is usable, fun, and solid. But can it save the company? I’m a fan of the $450 Classic and will post a full review on Monday but until then I’ve prepared a brief hands on. I’ve found myself reaching for the Classic more and more this weekend and I’m excited to see what it can do. |
11 Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Travis Bernard | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | From the Sony hack coverage to Instagram being valued at $35 billion, here are the top stories from 12/13-12/19. 1. Sony was hacked. . The . Obama says (and calls James Franco, James Flacco). Sony’s CEO responds by saying that . Now . 2. . 3. . 4. Sarah Perez responds to the NYT op-ed penned by screenwriter and playwright Aaron Sorkin. . 5. . See if you can guess what they were before taking a look at the list. 6. . The definitions he provides help demystify startup lingo. 7. Guest columnist . With the pending debut of the Apple Watch, wearables in the workplace are about to become ubiquitous, particularly at large tech companies that are known for innovation and change. 8. , the Classic. 9. . 10. After Google decided to shut down Google News in Spain, the . 11. Facebook originally bought Instagram for $1 billion. . It looks like Facebook bought Instagram at a steal. |
How Mobile And Social Feeds Government’s Appetite For Innovation | Anne Altman | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | Applications that simply deliver information can be useful, but government agencies are now pushing user engagement to new heights. With in the U.S. owning smartphones, citizens are continuously equipped with an Internet connection, GPS functionality and a digital camera. In fact, the mobile phone has evolved from a simple voice device to a multimedia communications tool capable of uploading and downloading data, text, audio and video while also functioning as a global positioning system, wallet, FM radio, television, alarm clock, thermometer, address book, newspaper, camera and more. Enterprise government apps have the opportunity to take advantage of these basic smartphone attributes. To help balance workforce productivity with security and compliance risks, just about every agency is looking to set up their own internal app stores to provide access to mobile devices that are issued and managed by the government. Access to the information on these devices is closely monitored and regulated to protect against unauthorized access and apps that could pose a security risk. As the federal government warms to the idea of bring your own device (BYOD) policies, agency administrators must ensure security and address stringent procurement and policy guidelines. Whether collecting phone or text logs or location data, one of the initial challenges for federal IT managers will be to ensure the security of their agency’s infrastructure for the increasing number of diverse devices entering the network and accessing this data. They must also focus ways to separate the management and monitoring of job-specific information versus personal content. Agencies must also focus on app-development strategies to create job- or role-specific apps that not only make it simpler to support compliance requirements, but also encourage use that translates into greater productivity — a key goal of any enterprise mobile initiative. But, agencies don’t have to start from scratch. Sometimes, reinventing the wheel with your own app might be the wrong way to go, especially if there are familiar and preferable apps already available to your audience that accomplish a similar goal. With any app-development strategy, the user experience must be a focal point. Being open to ideas and engaging with other departments in the design and functionality of the app will be key. Hackathons or other events can also bring developers and designers together to work on creative solutions to civic challenges. These events often encourage developers to create applications, either for use by the public, or to help government employees solve specific challenges. Open data and mobile apps are changing the government-citizen relationship. Creative ideas like 311 apps and mobile public transportation payment systems, along with a movement toward open and transparent data, have spawned a new era of government-citizen interaction. Putting open data and mobile technology to use, IBM recently announced a humanitarian with the government of Sierra Leone to use SMS and voice calls with a citizen and engagement and analytics system to enable citizens to report Ebola issues. In the U.S., agencies are making use of new mobile innovations, as well. Some examples include a MyTSA app that tracks security wait times at airports, as well as an app that makes it easier for small businesses to apply for licenses and registrations at the Small Business Administration. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) mobile app includes disaster safety tips, an interactive emergency kit list, storable emergency meeting locations, and a map with open shelters and open FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers (DRCs).
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With the right app, Department of Agriculture food inspectors can replace clipboards and laptops with tablets capable of recording and processing complex safety data. And a cache of yet-to-be-developed medical apps are expected to transform the healthcare landscape at government hospitals across the country. One untapped resource is the 500 million public tweets sent every day. It’s a virtual town hall of people sharing their opinions and preferences. That tsunami of 140-character messages spans the range of human interests and activities — from raves about recent purchases to exhortations to rally behind social causes. Think about that from a federal agency perspective. You’re the U.S. Forest Service and you start seeing indicators for wildfires. Or you’re the National Park Service and you get early indicators of crowded campgrounds based on tweets. The potential here is endless. Navigating this land of mobile and social app development can be a challenge, even for government agencies with sizeable budgets and plenty of talented resources. After overcoming the hurdles of planning, development and testing an app, agencies still have to decide how to launch, maintain and drive adoption. To help spur innovation in this area, we are encouraging and working with the ecosystem that supports the federal government — business partners, academia and entrepreneurs. The goal is to drive rapid development of mobile and web apps that can be built and delivered on the cloud using open data and innovation to solve real-world problems and enhance forms of citizen engagement. Increased app development collaboration among agencies will accelerate government-wide expertise in mobile, increase focus on the user experience, and prompt agencies to rethink the way data and digital content is created and shared in a wide variety of citizen-centric services. |
North Korea On Sony Hack: It Wasn’t Us | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | Here is the latest twist in the ongoing : after the that North Korea was indeed behind the attack on Sony, North Korea today categorically denied having anything to do with it. According to , North Korea’s foreign ministry went as far threatening “grave consequences” and demanding a joint investigation into the allegations. the country’s cyberwarfare troops could indeed have been behind the Sony attack and subsequent leaks. As security expert Brian Krebs reported , the investigators now believe that most of the attackers, which call themselves the “Guardians of Peace,” are indeed from North Korea, though some of them apparently now live in Japan. At first, the Sony hack (which apparently wasn’t ) mostly looked like a major embarrassment for the movie studio, but now that it’s turning into an international kerfuffle, North Korea isn’t likely to admit it was behind it. For now, the fog of war surrounding this whole situation is still pretty dense and it’ll likely be a while before anybody gets to the bottom of who was behind the attack (assuming we ever find out). Given the state of the U.S.’s relationship with North Korea, we aren’t likely to see a joint investigation anytime soon, though — unless plans on running that task force. |
India’s E-Commerce Giant Flipkart Replenishes Its War Chest With New $700M Round | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | at the end of July, and less than six months later the Indian e-commerce giant is rounding off the year with a new $700 million round. The round includes money from existing investors DST Global, GIC, ICONIQ Capital and Tiger Global, and new backers Baillie Gifford, Greenoaks Capital, Steadview Capital, T. Rowe PriceAssociates and Qatar Investment Authority. Added to , this round takes seven-year-old Flipkart past $2 billion in investor money in 2014, and to around $2.7 billion in total. Interestingly, the company has disclosed that it has applied to become a public company in Singapore, where it is registered. It stressed that this filing is in line with the law since it now has over 50 shareholders and that it “is in no way indicative of any upcoming IPO,” but it does raise the question of what (and when) its exit will be. Flipkart has over 14,000 staff and sees more than 8 million daily visits from 26 million-plus registered users. It said the new funding will be spent on “long-term strategic investments in India” and on developing its technology and customer service. This year it , and it looks like it open to snapping up other complementary services to guild its competitive edge against fierce rivals Amazon India and Snapdeal. Amazon finally launched its service in India in 2013, but this year it really put its foot on the gas. In addition to (just a day after Flipkart announced its $1 billion raise), the company snapped up a number of exclusive sales deals including Chinese phone company OnePlus. ( .) Snapdeal, which counts eBay as a shareholder, raised its own mega round this year when that closed in October. Retail in emerging markets is a capital intensive business, just ask Rocket Internet which has billions into a range of businesses worldwide. The bet is that this money will reap dividends as smartphone adoption increases and consumers in countries like India begin as we’ve seen in China — which has . With a clutch of well-funded rivals and the price competition that comes with it, Flipkart and others are taking in money to keep afloat and stay ahead of the competition. As is the case with , 2015 is shaping up to a pivotal year for e-commerce in India, particularly now that Flipkart has replenished its war chest. |
Gillmor Gang: Hackathon | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Alexia Tsotsis, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, December 19, 2014. Our end-of-year show, produced as RogenGate broke and the President held a press conference. It may have occurred to some employees at Sony that they would be better off with some form of corporate SnapChat. It may have occurred to the President that there’s more to lame duck then previously assumed. I’m with Alexia — can’t wait for the iWatch and whatever notifications appear in the New Year. Be safe. @stevegillmor, @Scobleizer, @alexia, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor Follow GILLMORGANG on YO or click (mobile only) |
Transforming The Conversation On Women In Computer Science | Alison Derbenwick Miller | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | Barbie and Mattel made news recently in the world of computer science. While initial reaction to Mattel’sBarbie “ ” book focused on all-too-common and inaccurate stereotypes, conversation that has developed around the book is actually helping to shine the spotlight on two very important issues. Why are women misrepresented and underrepresented in computer science, and how can we change perceptions and increase the number of women pursuing careers in this important and vibrant industry? While the book admirably focuses on the fact that women “can be” computer engineers, the reality is that women are computer engineers and women do code. That said, while women are present in computer science, there is no denying that they are underrepresented, – with women making up only . Interestingly, it wasn’t always this way. Looking back to the 1970s and early 1980s, the number of women studying computer science . Around 1984, however, the number of women earning computer science degrees leveled and then plunged. While there is no single reason for this drop, many researchers and academics propose that it is linked at least in part to the rapid entrenchment of gender stereotypes as home computers began to emerge. Computer programs, ads and promotions were increasingly focused on and directed at males. For example, as mentioned in NPR’s segment “ ,” a popular commercial from the 80s almost entirely focuses on marketing color computers to boys, barely showing a female character throughout the clip. We can and must turn the tide on these stereotypes and boost the number of women entering this growing industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, computer science employment is projected to grow 15 percent by 2022. Transformation of perceptions of women in computer science must happen at the individual and community level. At the individual level, Casey Fielser, a Ph.D. in computer science at Georgia Tech, inspires us by taking it upon herself to rewrite At the community level, organizations focused on encouraging girls to code are popping up around the nation. For example, (BGC), a and Oracle Giving grantee, provides computer science training for African-American girls. BGC reaches out to surrounding communities to inspire girls to code through workshops and after school programs. , also an Oracle Giving grantee, is dedicated to ending gender inequality in computer science by providing girls with skills to pursue computer science and engineering jobs. Similarly, , a mentoring organization that focuses on leadership, development, and STEM education among others, empowers girls to develop their strengths and talents. These programs are important foundations for inspiring and empowering girls and young women. In addition to supporting programs like these, there are a number of things that we can do to help increase interest in computer science among girls. It can take 25 years or more to create a computer scientist — male or female — from developing core analysis and problem-solving skills to achieving fluency in programming languages. As such, it is essential that computer science education become integrated in the K-12 curriculum so that females, along with their male counterparts, are exposed early and often to this discipline. Teachers, parents and administrators can help expand interest in computer science by making the subject more appealing to a wide range of students, including females. Help students understand the connection between computer science and their lives – how it helps them to register for classes at school, enables cell phones to function, fosters improved health and fitness, and determines the ads they see online. It is important to show the diversity – in both people and career paths – that exists in the computer science careers to help drive student interest. This is particularly true for supporting female students. Both industry and academia must highlight existing female role models and actively encourage mentorships at the community level. Schools can bring in female professionals from the community who leverage computer science in their jobs to share with students how the skill can translate to a career. Research and extracurricular programs help students understand the importance of their computer science skill set and how it can be applied beyond the classroom. in Claremont, Calif., used this important concept to quadruple its female computer science majors in four years. It rethought its approach to introductory courses and offered female students a summer research opportunity between their freshman and sophomore years to demonstrate how to apply their computer science skills and encourage them to take additional courses. We applaud Mattel and Barbie for shining the spotlight on women in computer science. It brings to the forefront the importance of changing the narrative of women in computer science. We must rewrite the story to accurately reflect the role of women in the industry historically and today, and more importantly, encourage a new generation of females to pursue careers in this critical, diverse and burgeoning economic sector. |
Stichy Makes It Easier For Groups To Curate And Share Mobile Media | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | Inc, a mobile messaging focused startup which last year raised an $800,000 seed, led by ‘ Ben Ling, to fund a series of projects, has now launched its third app — called — this one focused on sharing multimedia content within groups. Rumr’s founder is James Jerlecki, who brings a background in messaging to the business, having previously worked for Jerlecki kicked off Rumr Inc with an eponymous, anonymish group messaging app , launched in March this year. The team followed that with the Slingshot-esque , launched in August, which turned photo sharing into a popularity contest via gamified ephemeral antics. Their third effort, Stichy, feels as if it has a little less zeitgeisty buzz and a little more substance to it than either of its predecessors, given it’s addressing what is — at least relatively speaking — a bit of a pain-point: sharing photos of the same event, such as a Birthday party, taken by different people at the event. Albeit it’s competing with Facebook on the group social photo sharing front, but with a tighter frame — allowing for easier sharing within smaller groups. “Collaborating on mobile sucks,” writes Jerlecki in a announcing the launch of Stichy. “I was at a friend’s birthday a few weeks ago and at the end of the night, the fifteen of us spent 20 minutes seeing who had halfway decent photos and figuring out how to send the photos to each other just so we could look at them. What’s your phone number? Email them to me. Airdrop works better — it was a mess!” Stichy’s fix for this social sharing “mess” is an app that lets multiple people contribute multimedia content (i.e. photos and/or videos) to the same in-app interactive slideshow for easier group sharing. Everyone who has been added to a particular Stichy can add stuff to the Stichy, and also comment, like, share and so on. Content within a Stichy is ‘played’ (i.e. displayed) in the order it was added, much like a slideshow. Or users can swipe through manually at a faster speed. A Stichy can be left open-ended for more content to keep being added, or closed off by its creator — which means no more new content can be added, but any existing content remains viewable and downloadable. To ease media sharing outside the app, collaborators can save all of the media within a Stichy, regardless of whether they took it themselves, so the pooled content does not remain locked up within the Stichy app’s Amazon Web Services’ based cloud storage locker. But presumably Stichy’s willing participants are waiving any copyright claims on their own content, given it’s shared by default with any others that are added to that same Stichy. Even though the primary use-case for Stichy is simplifying group sharing of media between friends and family, Jerlecki points out the app could also be used by individuals wanting to create a visual record of a particular activity or thing, such as tracking their gym progress, week by week. Or recording a seasonal view of their garden. Asked how Rumr’s other apps are going, Jerlecki says more than 100,000 photos have been sent via Shotclock since the app launched in August, with total views exceeding one million so far. So it’s evident that Rumr’s earlier apps have not been viral smash-hits yet. The team will be hoping it’s onto something a bit more immediately sticky with Stichy. As well as Khosla’s Ling, ‘ MG Siegler, who — — has been a for TechCrunch (but had no input into this article), also participated in Rumr’s October 2013 funding round, along with , LA-based angel investor , and , textPlus founder and CEO. Stichy is available as a free download on and . It remains to be seen how Rumr could monetize usage, but perhaps — if it can build a solid Stichy community — there could be scope to monetize around paid cloud storage for higher resolution content. “While we do plan to keep the service free, being able to store and share things at even higher resolutions when it comes to pictures and videos is top of mind,” Jerlecki tells TechCrunch, when I ask about future revenue streams. “I definitely would not rule out charging or partnering with a cloud storage service for something like that if we see users starting to have large amounts of data saved on Stichy, but again important to see how the community evolves and uses Stichy,” he adds. “Right now our focus is on making it easy for people to collaborate on mobile. There’s not a whole lot out there that is really simple or fun to use. We’ve seen the tool used both ways by creating threads like silly selfies and memes or like how I used it with my family on Thanksgiving to capture and create a story of a meaningful time in my life.” |
Why Is Yahoo Still So Bad At The Basics? | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 12 | 20 | I’m reluctant to cite what I’m about to cite. It’s scathing. It’s scurrilous. It’s caustic criticism that seems often overblown and, in some cases, deliberately devoid of context. It’s the ‘s , and it’s clearly an attempt to do to her what . But — and I’m linking to it because I feel like I have a dog in this fight. You see, unusually for a tech columnist / software engineer, I am, to my increasing regret, a frequent and longtime Yahoo! user. Flickr is still my . My is still hosted on Yahoo!, and the email address it points visitors towards leads to a Yahoo! Mail account. It says something that I actually feel I need to quickly follow the above paragraph with a lengthy disclaimer lest I immediately lose all tech credibility. Yahoo! is not well-respected among the tech cognoscenti. A cutting-edge close friend once looked over my shoulder at the Y! Mail client and said, with undisguised horror, “That’s not where the email I send you goes, is it?” She was visibly relieved when I assured her otherwise. But back when I started using it, during the first dot-boom, Yahoo! had the best webmail service there was. Back then they were a tech company. I can easily move my vanity email address to GMail–I own the domain–but I feel like the many-eyed hydra of Mountain View knows enough about my life already. I’m holding out for some fully decentralized email service. Until that arrives, Yahoo! is… …probably not good enough. Alas. Every few months I find myself confronting this: and/or this: and/or the banner image atop this article. Sometimes for hours, intermittently, over a period of some days. Then, eventually, presumably in a dark windowless dungeon somewhere in Sunnyvale, Yahoo!’s engineers get their act back together, and my email starts working again … for another couple of months, until the cycle begins again. And I think to myself, yet again: “I know webscale email is hard, but I also know that other companies of a similar size seem to manage it a lot more competently. What’s wrong with Yahoo!?” It’s not just mail. I also used to follow NFL/NHL/NBA scores/games on Yahoo! Sports — until, earlier this year, some crazed ad embedded in their mobile site started popping up a on . For . And I thought to myself: “You know, quite aside from that maddening ad, for a company allegedly focused on mobile, their mobile sports news site is , clumsy and so ugly that it hurts the eyes. How could this be? What’s wrong with Yahoo!?” Well. Thanks to Nicholas Carlson, I now have some idea. I don’t care about Marissa Mayer’s alleged color-scheme micromanagement, or lateness for dinner with ad execs, or whim purchase of the “Saturday Night Live” archives. I am, however, flabbergasted that: Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; strategic goals were sacrificed, as employees did not want to change projects and leave themselves open to a lower score. Stack ranking! They adopted stack ranking! The system (at least for software companies) that helped to drive Microsoft into irrelevance, and was in Redmond last year! What were they You don’t pay back technical debt by introducing stack ranking. (Note: Yahoo seems not to have learned what Microsoft did, which is that "forced ranking" is 100% counterproductive.) — suldrew 🏳️🌈🇺🇸 (@suldrew) I’m not saying this is the cause of all their problems; those long predated Ms. Mayer. I can see the case for stack ranking as a temporary measure to remove deadwood (although that still only makes it slightly less terrible.) And I admit that every now and then she makes a really smart move, like hiring Alex Stamos as CISO and Yan Zhu as a security engineer. But it sure seems that no matter how sleek and newly painted the Good Ship Yahoo! may seem from a distance, it’s still taking on a lot of water, while its sailors keep fighting each other to stay above its slowly rising waterline. A boat that big is hard to sink, but also hard to steer. I remember when Yahoo! was a technology company. Then, famously, it . It seems that once that kind of rot gets into your business, it’s almost ineradicable. I can’t help but think that not even Marissa Mayer can turn Yahoo! back into a technology company now — especially not with stack ranking. There’s a larger lesson here. Technology is increasingly at the core of every major company. Eventually they’ll face the choice Yahoo! did a decade ago: explicitly embrace being a technology company, and ride the tsunami … or try to reject it, and, eventually, capsize. Whether Mayer manages a turnaround or not, Yahoo! will make for an interesting object lesson. My prediction: they continue to slowly flail their way into irrelevance. |
Flickr Removes Creative Commons Images From Its Wall Art Program Following Backlash | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Last month, Flickr to include images from the photo-sharing site’s professional artists as well as images licensed for commercial use through . The project was originally intended to allow photographers profit from the sale of images made into prints, but it generated controversy when users realized that Yahoo (Flickr’s owner) would keep all of the revenue from Creative Commons images. Though that didn’t violate Creative Commons’ licenses, it . In response, Flickr from the service. In a blog post, it said: We hear and understand your concerns, and we always want to ensure that we’re acting within the spirit with which the community has contributed. Given the varied reactions, as a first step, we’ve decided to remove the pool of Creative Commons-licensed images from Flickr Wall Art, effective immediately. We’ll also be refunding all sales of Creative Commons-licensed images made to date through this service. Subsequently, we’ll work closely with Creative Commons to come back with programs that align better with our community values. Users will still be able to order prints from their photostreams, as well as licensed artists in the Flickr Marketplace. The Wall Art program and Flickr Marketplace are part of the site’s initiatives to better compete with rivals like 500px by attracting professional photographers who want to make money off their images. Others new features include photo books and . It’s important for Flickr, which was launched in 2004, to figure out how to stand out against the crop of rival photo-sharing sites and apps that have sprung up and surpassed it in terms of growth and popularity in the last decade. The controversy over the Wall Art program, however, shows that Flickr needs to figure out a way to move forward without alienating its long-term users, many of whom originally joined the site to participate in different communities and not with an eye to selling their photos. |
Mobile Commerce Consolidation As Mozido Takes Majority Stake In CorFire | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Just days after Dutch digital commerce provider , another heavily capitalised player in the space has made an acquisition to up its game. Mozido, a mobile commerce specialist that after raising $103 million in May, has taken a majority stake in , another mobile commerce startup that focuses on point-of-sale payments. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Mozido’s financial services such as international and domestic remittances, P2P payments, mobile bill pay, and international and domestic airtime top up, delivered as white-label services. Updated with reference to name of the company (it’s still just “Mozido”), and clarification of what Mozido and Corfire each bring to the deal. |
Are SaaS Companies Just Misunderstood? | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Depending on whom you ask, companies that sell their products on a subscription basis are either companies that are veritable giants of growth, or firms that hide their business models’ inherent weakness in the form of short-term losses that are dismissed under the guise of investment. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, companies based on the subscription model aren’t going away, if for no other reason than customers can’t wait three years between upgrades anymore. They need to move much more quickly than that and the subscription model accommodates that need for agility. Customers also don’t want to deal with the complexities of installing, managing and maintaining software anymore and the subscription model removes all of that. In this post, we hash out the pros and cons of the subscription approach and argue whether its viability is just a matter of accounting semantics or a fundamental problem with the way these companies operate and the high cost of doing business in this fashion. Wall Street has tended to look at companies with subscriptions models showing red ink on the balance sheet with a fair bit of disdain this year. But perhaps traditional accounting methods aren’t the best measure of a subscription company. As Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora told me, our accounting systems aren’t set up to accommodate a subscription model. “Our accounting systems, don’t know whether a dollar is going to recur,” he explained. So if you’re Dollar Shave Club and you have 10 customers paying $5 a month for a year, you don’t have the revenue on the books yet for the life of the customer, even though you know you’re going to be earning that money (10 x 5 x 12) over the length of the subscription. The traditional accounting system can’t take this into, ahem, account. When you start looking at enterprise companies, the numbers are much bigger, but the same problems apply. The idea that we haven’t known in the past when a dollar of revenue will recur is only partially true. If a company signs a large support contract that will be serviced on a recurring basis, and tells its investors, they model under that presumption. Certainly, there can be minor GAAP-to-non-GAAP dissonance at play, but even the most rudimentary acolyte of corporate finance can parse the difference. The strong version of this, of course, is when your entire revenue stack recurs. This is when you may begin to discount short-term losses more heavily in favor of longer-term recurring revenue. But the concept is merely the amplification of a problem that we had previously. Companies have long had recurring and non-recurring revenue streams. AOL has lots of the former in the form of dial-up customers. (AOL owns TechCrunch.) It isn’t that hard to model. And yes, SaaS revenue has a few other quirks to it, but it’s still recurring revenue on a contract, making its DNA quite similar. I’ll allow the following: When you are a high-growth organization, the effects of recurring revenue can become overshadowed, in the short-term, in the following circumstances: When you have long-term clients that are hard to land, have high, positive dollar-churn over the life of the account, and very high gross margins. This is when you have the highest up-front costs, compared to lifetime-value of a customer, which most distorts growing recurring revenue that must be accounted for in its own fashion. What I want to know is why SaaS revenue can be so expensive. In the above, my colleague Ron Miller makes what I will call the common argument about SaaS revenue: Losses up front, party in the back. Some large SaaS companies have spent more than three times their top line over the course of their life to build nine-figure annual recurring revenue. You can imply the cost of that. Not all companies have to burn so heavily to generate that amount of top-line, recurring or otherwise. The corollary to that point is that the idea that SaaS incomes are future profit cannons is slightly doubtful — if that past revenue is now such pure profit, why doesn’t it support, and constrain future customer acquisition expenses, which contribute to gaping GAAP losses down the road, say, eight years, keeping revenue roughly equal to just the sales and marketing line item? Even when the lines start to move toward crossing, the idea that SaaS revenue becomes a quick profit goldmine appears to be belied by the results of companies that we have the figures on; why is Salesforce still unprofitable, using normal accounting tools? Does its growth rate make its continued, and expected-to-continue, losses reasonable? There are so many companies out there working with this revenue model, and the subscription model has so much potential because it isn’t a matter of getting you to buy something again and again. You have a service and so long as you are reasonably responsive to your customer’s needs, chances are you’re going to keep them. Contrast this with the old model of selling boxed software (as one subscription model example) where the vendor spent a couple of years updating the software and the customer had to spend tons of money to upgrade. With the subscription model, the product is constantly being updated so customers are getting the benefits right away without waiting. Since this model is more attractive to customers, it bodes well for the subscription companies who can count on continued revenue from happy users. You don’t have to sell them a new car. You sell them the service and your sales cycle is almost over. Of course, you want to add more licenses and schmooze for renewals, but the hard part is done once you’re in the door. That should drive down the sales and marketing costs and over time, the cost to attain customers should level out. It may take a small leap of faith, but we are seeing it play out already as Zendesk bucked the trend and went public earlier this year and it’s doing just fine. Perhaps Wall Street needs just a few more examples like this before it finally comes around that subscription revenue is far more lucrative than selling one widget at a time. This fits neatly under the idea that a SaaS account, once sold, becomes a quick profit source. The presumption I take is that once it has paid off its customer acquisition cost, which should take no more than one-third the life of the customer, gross margins give you wings and up go your margins. Again, I think that if this were the case, we would see different financial performance from firms that we have the figures on. Let’s use an older firm to make our point: Microsoft now wants to sell Office on a subscription basis. The dollar amount is probably — measuring on an amortized basis for the Office In Box version — larger than what it previously took in. But the company now has greater server, bandwidth, and other costs. So does the margin situation really change? And then there is the idea of continuous development; is it cheaper to build a product once in three years, ship it, and then restart? Or is it cheaper to ship every week? It probably varies for every company, but when every subscriber is now a continued research and development cost, taking part in other line-items as well, the idea of gross margin can, perhaps, become gross. — To summarize, SaaS companies can be great revenue engines, but we should be careful to dismiss all losses as reasonable investment. That, and there is nuance to long-term support and sales costs to selling software in this fashion that, for companies coming into the space from the Old World, might prove more costly than promised. |
A Holiday Gift Guide For Your Tech-Savvy Girlfriends | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Whether you are looking for your girlfriend, your gal pal or that special lady in your life, or a gift for yourself, these items promise to charge, inform and add some chic style for the new year. Whether you go with the pendant or bracelet, this Tory Burch styled Fitbit is a great gift for close girlfriends such as your mom, sister or bestie. Both come in gold, silver or the seasonally popular rose gold version. It’s $175 for the pendant or $195 for the bracelet. It’s perfect if you’ve already got a Fitbit. Add this to their stocking and challenge each other in the new year. “My phone’s about to die. It’s at 2 percent! Don’t know if you’ll be able to find me here,” your friend texts. We all know this person. A tech savvy gift like this can add some juice right when your friend (or you, if this is you, ahem) needs it most. The Michael Kors phone charger was specifically designed to look just like a lipstick case, making it a great item for travel or to just throw in your purse on your way out the door. Holiday gifts are not always about practical things like socks and ear muffs. Sometimes a gal needs her tunes in style. This Stelle clutch adds both bling and stereo-worthy boom in a speaker you can jam out with on-the-go. According to the site, it pairs with any Bluetooth-enabled device, can take hands-free calls and even holds a mirror inside. It also doubles as a phone charger in case you are about to run out of battery. The newly released Voyage is here just in time for Christmas. This is Amazon’s top of the line e-reader with the promise to read even more like a book page. A caveat here: it’s a full $80 more than Paperwhite. What you get for that is 300 pixels-per-inch resolution vs Paperwhite’s 212 pixels or the standard Kindle’s 167 pixels. It also promises a slightly whiter late night reading light and an easier turn of the page. There are a myriad of tech accessories out there with which to decorate your gadgets, but not many are as stunning as these artistically designed Dannijo cases from sisters Jodie and Danielle Snyder. Choose from 21 different designs for iPhone 5, 6 or 6 Plus, many of which are currently on sale at Dannijo.com. The 5 cases are the lowest price. Keep in mind that many of the designs advertise that they come in all 3 sizes, but some have actually discontinued the 5. The fashion ring that doubles as an alert for incoming phone messages is both a beautiful conversation piece and a useful wearable device. The ring buzzes when you’ve got an in-coming phone call, email or text message. It saves women from the need to keep their phone in their hands at all times. The customizable ring comes in several different colors and sizes and allows the user to program exactly which alerts they’d like to get. You can even program it to give you a different kind of buzz for different contacts in your phone. Earbuds can hurt your ears when smashed up against your pillow at night. These soft foam-covered headphones are designed to be comfortable to wear as you drift off to sleep. These are good for traveling, music lovers with sensitive ears, or the friend that listens to podcasts at night before bedtime. |
Ending The Invisibility Of Homelessness | Kevin F. Adler | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Francisco, 6436 of our neighbors slept on the streets or in shelters. The lack of affordable, safe, and supportive housing is a scourge on society. It costs $90K to maintain a human being on the streets for a year, compared to $18K to provide supportive housing to a previously homeless person. Over the last 10 years, an influx of 75,000 people have moved to San Francisco, while only 17,000 new housing units have been built. We can end chronic homelessness by 2020 by providing affordable, safe, and supportive housing options to the homeless and by electing representatives who will fight for housing as a basic human need. But providing support means understanding that the needs of the homeless extend beyond housing. “They” are individuals and . Stories like Ronnie Goodman’s, a 54-year old artist and half marathon runner in San Francisco. The studio where he works at 440 Haight Street showcases his paintings, adorned with colorful motifs of Frida Kahlo and jazz legends and social justice and San Francisco streets. He gives back generously to his community, raising $15K by running half marathons and donating original artwork for worthy causes like , , and the . Ronnie is also homeless. While he has been offered housing before, it was located in an area where he says, “I would feel tempted to relapse on my addictions.” Ronnie Goodman, artist and marathoner Neuroscience research has shown that the medial prefrontal cortex — the part of our brain that activates when we see a fellow human being as compared to an object — does not activate when we see a homeless person. As a result, if they appear homeless. Without knowing their stories, we risk perceiving people like Ronnie as less than human. It’s ridiculous that we know every detail of our acquaintances on Facebook, and yet know so little of the 3.5 million Americans who have experienced homelessness this year. This issue is personal to me. Mark was my uncle. He was the most family-oriented member of my extended family. He remembered every birthday. Mark was also homeless. He suffered from schizophrenia, and spent 30 years on and off the streets and in and out of halfway houses before he died 10 years ago at the age of 50. The author’s uncle, Mark Adler, center, homeless for 30 years At the beginning of this year, I started to help people like Ronnie and Mark capture their stories using wearable cameras, smart phones, and the help of their neighbors. After collaborating with 15 homeless autobiographers and receiving over 300 messages from people across the country wanting to get involved, I left my job in edtech a few months ago to build , a new type of media and interaction company that uses to connect people with life as it’s rarely seen but often felt. The word “entertainment” has a negative connotation in our society, conjuring mindless Reality TV shows of sassy pre-pubescent beauty queens and rich people in mansions. We are restoring the idea of to its empathetic Latin root: “to hold inside,” as in, to entertain an idea or experience. We are in the final hours of the . Along with the filming sessions, we coordinate with local businesses and service providers to offer opportunities for homeless and non-homeless neighbors to . The causes of homelessness are vast and varied among the 15 autobiographers we selected. They include a lack of affordable housing, poverty, unemployment, trauma, addiction, medical expenses, domestic violence, mental illness, physical disabilities, evictions, divorce, relational brokenness, grief, despair, and other unexpected, life-altering events. Throughout, there is one comment that emerges in each conversation: “I realized I was homeless not when I lacked housing, but when I lost the family and friends that provided me with support.” A new brand of homeless services understands this, leveraging a bit of technology to build relationships, deliver much-needed services, and humanize homeless people. helps homeless artists sell and showcase their artwork. enables anyone to donate directly to a homeless neighbor in need. retrofits MUNI buses to deliver mobile showers to homeless people. And San Francisco community mainstays like just opened a new dining room in October, designed to foster human connectivity for another 64 years of daily meal services. We are proud to partner with these organizations, and celebrate the work of others that build social capital. There’s ; use of video and social media to share stories from the streets; hackathons for the homeless in and , and Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation’s transformative services that provide tenants with “the sense of connectedness and community that we often take for granted.” These organizations recognize that home is “more than just four walls and a roof.” In community, we can stand up for self-expression and social capital, for the importance of understanding each others’ stories and building relationships. Let’s stop and start engaging again as fellow human beings. Technology alone is not the answer. But it can help us tell our stories — |
Neurence’s Cloud Platform Gives Wearables Eyes That Can See And Ears That Can Hear | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | U.K. startup , which has previously released two proof-of-concept apps showcasing its augmented reality tech, called and , has now launched its long term platform play: a machine learning cloud platform for object recognition which it’s hoping will underpin the next wave of search queries as computing becomes increasingly immersed in the physical world — thanks to the rise of wearables and the Internet of Things. It’s calling this platform , and is offering free access to interested developers via an SDK as it seeks to drive adoption and usage. It needs users because there’s a crowdsourcing element to the platform play, with individuals encouraged to add objects to the Sense database themselves to help build it out and make it more useful and contextual. At launch there are “hundreds of thousands” of recognized objects but the Sense system is capable of identifying up to five million, according to Neurence investor — investing via his technology investment fund. Some types of objects, such as books, have been able to be added in bulk, by crawling online datasets. But to scale up to the level of adoption the startup is hoping to achieve, the platform is clearly going to need lots of humans feeding it data. As Wikipedia has crowdsourced an online encyclopedia, Neurence’s hope is enough users will help it label and augment millions of real-world objects — so it can become a contextual layer for the Internet of Things over the next five+ years. “The important point here is that the devices, the wearables that are out in the real world have full context, because they can see and hear [via Sense],” says Lynch, in an interview with TechCrunch. “Anyone can tell the system about a new thing. It’s not something we need to program. All you need to do is look at something and rather like Wikipedia you can contribute that object and its properties to the cloud and it’s then available to everyone.” “You can author and you can use, and it’s available to anyone on the system,” he adds. Given that objects can mean very different things to different people, groups, communities and cultures, Neurence building a platform that affords users the ability to author an object’s context is the sensible decision. Users can upload images, audio files and algorithms to the platform via the to give a real-world thing their own digital spin. The Sense platform works by analyzing what can be seen and heard around a connected device — using its camera and microphone (if it has both; the platform can also work with just one or the other input) — and turning the sensory data into “probabilistic vectors”, as Lynch puts it, sending those to its cloud engine for processing. So it’s not streaming or uploading any feeds of actual visual or audio data into the cloud (because that would be really slow, as well as really creepy). The platform then identifies real world objects if it finds a pattern match in its database, and can do so in near real-time (depending on the hardware being used). Objects it can recognize include signs, books and paintings. But that’s just the initial utility for Sense. The act of recognition opens up follow on actions for the user, much like a returned search on the desktop invites a user to engage with a spider’s web of additional information. With Sense the device wearer can also quickly access additional information and content about an object in their vicinity. This can be content that the system or developer has associated with a particular object, or which a user has custom-tagged for their own eyes or for others. “One of the things that anyone that writes an app or a piece of code that goes into an object can do is say ‘I want this recognized and if you have definitions from these sources they take priority’,” says Lynch, discussing how different services and users could implement and customize Sense to fit their world view. “What you might expect is various sub-cultures would have their own definitions of things,” he adds. If all that sounds a bit layered and nuanced for mainstream utility, the core problem Sense is aiming to fix is a simple one, according to co-founder Charlotte Golunski. “We see this as the next generation of search,” she says. “It’s exactly the same reason we use a search engine. “We want to find out more about things. We want to learn about similar things we might like. We want to know the background about something. Often I’ll be walking along and I’ll think ‘oh, what’s that building? What’s the history of it?’ Or I’m in a foreign country and I want to understand what the foreign text is I’m seeing. And all these things could certainly be solved by the advent of smart wearable devices. “I’m often wondering more about the things I’m looking at and this is a way to just access that information very, very quickly and discover more about something without having to get my phone out, search for it, go down a list of links. I can just instantly access information in a much more human friendly way, as if I would ask a friend when I was walking along… That’s the problem that we’re trying to solve here.” The Sense technology can support facial recognition but Neurence is targeting objects rather than people at this point, given the massive privacy can of worms that automatic, real-time facial recognition technology inevitably opens up. (More on the privacy implications of Sense below.) After successfully identifying an object with Sense, a user is able to follow up with a series of configurable actions — such as purchasing the same item via an ecommerce store, or playing a video associated with it and turning a movie poster into a trailer they can watch immediately, for instance. This is where Neurence sees the likely future monetization of the Sense platform — such as via affiliate or promoted links. (Albeit generating revenue is very far from its mind at this early point.) As mentioned above, these actions can be customized by the user to fit their own needs and tastes. One example might be to have a wearable device pull up real-time transport data when it perceives its wearer has arrived at their local bus stop or train station to save them having to fire up an app and check this manually. It’s up to developers how they apply Sense in their apps and devices, so applications are going to vary. Golunski says early developer interest has focused on shopping use-cases and real-estate scenarios, such as turning pictures of houses into dynamic tours. Neurence is already working with Google on a Glass application of the Sense technology, and also with Samsung for its Galaxy Gear 2 smartwatch (which has a camera). Neither application is out in the wild yet but both were shown in action to TechCrunch. It’s working with around six device developers in total at this early point, and says it’s keen to get more on board. The Galaxy Gear 2 application of Sense allows the user to point the device’s camera at an object — such as a book — and once/if the system recognizes it a red dot appears at the top corner of the screen. Tapping on that brings up information about the item and a series of actions that let the user drill down further or purchase the item. The Glass application, which can be seen demoed in the below video, allows the wearer to get related information about what they are looking at pushed to the display. They can then use additional voice commands to interface with Sense via Glass and access other digital content associated with the recognized item.
Neurence was founded last year but its algorithms and underlying machine learning tech predate that by some time. Its co-founder, Dr James Loxam, studied at Cambridge University, and set up the company to commercialize his machine learning PhD research. The startup has been backed by $4 million in investment from Lynch’s Invoke Capital (who also has his own PhD pedigree in computer vision technology). Neurence’s other co-founder, Golunski, is a former Autonomy employee. Lynch says developments in computer vision and machine learning mean the ability of computers to recognize objects in real world environments has made leaps and bounds in recent years. Using a camera that can be directed by the user on the particular object of interest — as in the Sense scenario — also helps make the recognition task easier. Plus the technology has been given uplift by improvements in mobile hardware, so more processing power and higher quality cameras with auto focus and image stabilizing tech. On the demand side, there’s evidently a way to go to get users engaged with an object recognition search platform, given how nascent wearables still are — and with text and typing remaining the major focus for mobile digital activity. But Neurence’s pitch is that the proliferation of connectivity, wearables and connected objects will create more demand for an alternative interface for search querying the world around you — one that does away with the friction of manual inputs. And that’s where Sense aims to insert its smarts. (Other startups are also clearly investigating the intersection of computing and the physical world; springs to mind.) “This is a long term thing,” says Lynch. “You can imagine objects are all going to have this intelligence. They’re going to have to be able to use this and exchange it with each other. This is a fundamental part of the next generation of the Internet. So we’re having to take some bets. We’re betting that always on connectivity will arrive. We need that, there’s no doubt about that — but I think that’s a fairly safe bet on the timescales that we’re looking at.” “What you’ve seen [in the Sense demo] is rather like seeing the first television pictures in the 1940s but I think things like cameras, resolutions, all that sort of stuff, one can be fairly sure are going to get better on these devices,” he adds. Lynch envisages an early wave of applications will use Sense in specifically targeted ways, such as the smartwatch application with its focus on shopping. Followed by next-gen smart glasses that are a lot more polished and useable than the “clunky” current crop of devices — and therefore more likely to be more widely adopted. Beyond that, over the next five years, he sees potential for demand to blossom as the universe of connected objects populating the Internet of Things inflates and having more intelligent interfaces becomes an imperative. “You’re going to have a lot of intelligent objects and they’ve all going to have to deal with this problem and exchange their understanding with each other, and that’s really where this idea starts to really come into its own,” he says, describing Sense as “an incredible enabler” for the next generation of smart systems. “If you want a system that knows whether your grannie has fallen over in her house it’s got to be intelligent to work. If you want a system that is going to reduce accident breaks because autonomous cars work in reality then you have got to these kinds of intelligences,” he adds. But there is one other big bet to consider: that people will be comfortable with the privacy implications posed by widespread application and adoption of adaptive, real-time recognition technology. Early reactions to Google Glass suggest with visible surveillance wearables. Whether that discomfort wears off as wearables proliferate remains to be seen. Put such a technology in the hands of lots of people and it’s not Big Brother watching you; it’s Little Brother, says Lynch — and Little Brother really is everywhere. “In a world where you’ve got the ability as a user to instantaneously look up things, in effect, with no effort, and your ability to, for example, know what’s going on around you, among other people who are around you, does go up a lot…and that does raise some interesting questions,” he says when I pose the privacy question. “It’s not dissimilar to the problem where we can all get very excited about having CCTV cameras in town centers but as long as no one’s watching them and no one can analyze and follow them and all that sort of stuff it’s much less of a problem. “But when you start to see these machine learning technologies that can understand what’s going on in one camera and as the person walks to the next camera understand that, and then yes there are some questions that society is going to have to look at — at how it wants to handle that sort of thing.” Lynch concedes there is a big societal debate looming here. But he also argues that the networked technology is already inexorably being slotted into place — so it’s just a question of how we use it now. Sensing technologies are coming regardless, even if Sense is not the platform that prevails. “The thing people haven’t really understood about the privacy debate is… we are now going to enter a world where the ability to understand becomes industrial. So that will raise questions and there will have to be thinking about that, and how that’s done,” he says. “We’re going to have to work how we want powerful technologies to work in this area. “The genie is out of the bottle on this. It is happening. Everyday there are apps coming out that are more intelligent and understand more what’s going about them… the thing that people have missed is it’s not just the power of an individual app on an individual phone but when you network that through social media and you have 3,000 of them in a city, then you get a data fusion effect, which is very powerful.” “My position is not to make a value judgement here. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, you can argue both cases, but it is inevitable,” he adds. |
null | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 2 | null |
Google Claims 2015 Will Be A “Moment” For Surveillance Reform | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Google thinks that next year will be a big moment for surveillance reform. So much so that the company set up a on its hub asking individuals to sign something akin to a petition of sorts to “help make the Internet more secure for everyone.” Why does Google think that 2015 will be big? The company notes that “[i]n June of 2015, we have a huge chance to protect Americans from mass surveillance when a key part of the USA PATRIOT Act is set to expire.” That’s correct. Google goes on to state that “we need to be ready to take action this coming year.” The potential sunsetting of some portions of the USA PATRIOT Act, a key piece of law that supports parts of current American government surveillance, will be a political scrap. Google and other large technology companies will have some sway through both community organizing and purchased political clout. Google’s political expenditures have to become among the highest in the country on a per-corporation basis. That spending growth, of course, fits under the larger rubric of tech going politics and politics going tech. Google did not respond to a request for comment on how many sign-ups it has received on the page. Google claims that its Take Action collection has more than 3 million members. If 2015 manages to be the year that brings real surveillance reform, it will top a 2014 that brought little but disappointment. The USA Freedom Act, which was seen as a partial step to reforming the NSA at best, failed to advance to a vote in the Senate after losing a procedural vote, thus ending any hope for reform this year. |
Google Rips MPAA For Allegedly Leveraging Local Government To Revive SOPA | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Corruption in the American Hollywood style is something to behold. Today, Google published a alleging that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), alongside a number of film studios, funded what was essentially opposition research about the company. The resulting material was later fed to state attorneys general. At issue is the MPAA’s wish, according to the search company, to “revive” SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was seen by most as a shamble of legislation that would have potentially led to widespread censorship of the Internet. Since the MPAA failed to get the bill that it wanted when SOPA failed, it turned to other means. The evidence for Google’s post, stemming from the recent hack of Sony and the ensuing email dump, is explicit. After the MPAA and its studio associates spent their pooled capital to hire a law firm — Jenner and Block — they “pitched,” in Google’s words, Jim Hood, the attorney general of Mississippi. Hood later sent to the company, again according to Google, a “letter making numerous accusations about [it].” The original author of that letter was not the good attorney general, but instead, as you likely guessed, the previously hired law firm Jenner and Block. Hood sent to Google, with minimal changes, the work of the MPAA and several studios, accusing the company of various misdeeds. What followed from Hood was what Google calls “a sweeping 79-page subpoena, covering a variety of topics over which he lacks jurisdiction.” As far as corporate notes discussing government officials go, that’s as salty as language comes. At play here is the fact that the MPAA was more than willing to raise capital, and, through , attempt to buy support for its cause, using it to go after private companies. The MPAA’s nickname for Google is telling: “Goliath.” Google ends with a stomp: While we of course have serious legal concerns about all of this, one disappointing part of this story is what this all means for the MPAA itself, an organization founded in part “to promote and defend the First Amendment and artists’ right to free expression.” Why, then, is it trying to secretly censor the Internet? Why indeed? |
Restaurant Discovery Service Zomato Acquires Italy’s Cibando | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | , the restaurant search and discovery service backed by Vy Capital, Info Edge, and Sequoia Capital, continues to be on an acquisition spree as a means to accelerate its international expansion. After recently adding a presence in Central and Eastern Europe by means of , the New Delhi-headquartered company, which now boasts a presence in 20 countries, has gobbled up Italy’s . Terms of the acquisition remain , though Zomato says all of Cibando’s team will be joining the company and will now lead its efforts to build out the service in Italy. This will include integrating Cibando into Zomato, thus transitioning its user base and traffic. It also plans to scale up its teams in Rome and Milan to 30-40 full-time employees over the next three months, up from Cibando’s current headcount of 10. Even longer term, Zomato says it will invest $6 million in its newly-acquired Italian operations over the next 2 years, growing the team to 150-200 people across the country’s top six cities. That planned increase in headcount is probably a reflection of Zomato’s relatively labor-intensive business model, at least compared to other pure Internet plays. To power part of its restaurant search and discovery engine, the company collects menus from restaurants and scans them using OCR. Its menu data is then re-checked in person by Zomato’s team every three months to ensure it stays relatively fresh, and it’s this “feet on the street” approach that attempts to differentiate the company from competitors, such as Yelp, IAC-owned , Priceline-acquired , and . Discussing today’s acquisition, Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah tells me that Cibando is one of the largest restaurant search services in Italy and lists 82,000 restaurants across various cities. “Their existing rich content base, traffic and user base will give us a great start as we launch Zomato in the country,” he says, noting that Yelp is the only other significant player in Italy. “We don’t see that as a threat – there are many other markets where we have entered after Yelp and are now bigger than them.” Furthermore, Zomato’s appetite for buying up local players doesn’t show any signs of lessening. “We are currently in talks with 4 other players. There are always a lot of moving parts so can’t put a timeline for the next one,” adds Chaddah. In November, the company , giving it a post-money valuation of $660 million, and taking total funding to over $113 million. |
ZZ Photo Is A Photo App That Can Organize Your Snapshots By Pet | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Does your photo management solution recognize your cat? Your mom? Your dog? No, it does not. That’s why there’s . The app, built by a Ukrainian team, is essentially a shoebox for all of your photos but with a few smarts built in. It is Windows-only right now but the team is working on mobile and Mac versions of the app. The app won our weekly thanks to their brand manager Tatiana Vezhis’ vibrant description of the tool. The founders, Alexander Lisovskiy and Artem Chernodub have experience in computer vision and desktop programming. Chernodub is actually head of the computer vision department at the MMSP of National Academy of Science of Ukraine. They’ve seen a few hundred users so far – they just launched – but they haven’t spent much on coding and the app is ready to download. It essentially allows you to organize your photos by subject and it can automatically recognize people (and the aforementioned pets) and store your photos for easy viewing. “The market we are entering is not crowded with competitors. In fact, most of them solve only one problem – photo viewing, while ZZ Photo is full-scale solution for collecting and organizing images at home photo libraries,” said Vezhis. “ZZ Photo is unique because it handles duplicate detection, similar pictures detection, recognizing faces, and detecting pets.” The app will soon have cloud access as well.
“The idea of launching this product came to our CEO when he was nervously looking for his newborn son’s photo at his computer and he almost had a heart attack when he thought he’d lost them forever,” said Vezhis. “ZZ Photo can detect pets. We can detect your cat, its fluffy girlfriend next door or your mother’s favorite kitty as well as all dogs in your family during their lifetime.” The app costs $29 and is available now. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/181942276″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /] |
New Secret Is A Shameless Clone Of Yik Yak | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | . |
Still Not On Inbox By Gmail? They Just Gave All Users 10 Invites Each | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Have you somehow not gotten a chance to try Inbox, despite Google opening up the service to anyone who asked It’s okay. I understand. You can’t be sitting on Twitter looking for these sorts of things to pop up the time. You have stuff to do. Important things, like “Work”, or “Feeding the dog”, or “literally anything that isn’t staring at a computer monitor all day.” Whatever the case: Google is loosening reins a bit again today. Alas, it’s not the free-for-all chaos that they’ve unleashed a few times with their “You get an invite! You get an invite! You get an invite!” style happy hours, but it’s still pretty easy: just ask anyone who has Inbox for an invite. While Google has given users a slow trickle of friend-to-friend invites since launch, they just dumped a 10-pack of invites onto the laps of anyone and everyone who has already made their way past the front door. If you’ve got a friend on Inbox who has told you they were out of invites, get to pestering — they’ve got more now. |
RebelMouse Expands Its Publisher Tools With The River, A Personalized Newsfeed | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | first launched as a way for people to aggregate their social network updates into a “social front page,” but more recently, it’s been working to give publishers social tools for their own websites and apps, through a platform called . Now it’s rolling out the latest piece of Rebel Roar — The River. If you’re on Facebook or pretty much any other site with a newsfeed, the look of The River should be pretty familiar. Except it’s probably less random, since it’s tied to a specific site or community. Basically, The River creates a place where people can track community activity based on the people and the topics that they follow. And yes, it works in mobile apps, too. It can be a challenge to build an online community, but RebelMouse founder and CEO Paul Berry (formerly CTO at the Huffington Post) pointed to a few features that help ensure that people aren’t just staring at an empty feed and wondering, “Where is everybody?” For one thing, he said it “ingests social graphs from all the networks, so that you’re not starting from zero.” Or, if you have a favorite writer or editor (ahem), you could follow them and see whenever they publish a new article on the main site. Plus, you’re not just seeing comments, but other activities like follows and likes, which should give you get a good sense of what other people are reading and who they’re following. For example, animal news site just this week, and when I signed up, I was presented with a feed of recently published stories, no following required. The River is interesting in and of itself, but I also wanted to talk to Berry about the broader strategy behind Rebel Roar, a platform that also includes the ability to A/B test headlines and feature social widgets like quizzes and polls. He said Rebel Roar is supposed to help companies fight back against online readers’ tendency to read one page or article and then go away. Berry said this doesn’t reflect a change in direction for RebelMouse, but rather “iterating on the same thing.” He added, “More and more, at RebelMouse we’ve become obsessed with super charging content, growing audience, and turning that growth into lasting and loyal community.” For some users, it’s enough to create the aforementioned social front page on the RebelMouse site, but there are publishers and brands who, understandably, want to build their own communities on their own sites. “Really, the transition is we’ve evolved into a B2B SaaS company [i.e., a business that sells subscription software to other businesses],” he said. Asked how many users RebelMouse has, Berry said there are 4.2 million overall, including 1,650 paying clients. He also noted that Rebel Roar is accelerating, since the time needed to create a Roar site has gone from months to weeks to days. [vimeo 111429301 w=500 h=281] from on . |
Few Winners In Anonymous Social Networking, And Secret’s Not One Of Them | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Is anonymous social networking a flash-in-the-pan trend? A winner-take-all category? Which of the anonymous social networking apps around today are still thriving, and which are practically dead? These questions come to mind today as one of the leading companies in the “anonymous social” category, Secret, , borrowing ideas from popular and Snapchat and others in order to introduce new features like location-based posts and disappearing private messages. Secret’s pivot is representative of the app’s inability to maintain growth amid an overall decline in anonymous social networking applications, with the exceptions of Yik Yak, Whisper and, more recently, newcomer After School. For a bit of background before diving in: One of the bigger trends among consumer applications in 2014 was the rise of “anonymous social networking” – or apps that allowed users to post publicly to networks without using their real names. Users on these apps share secrets, gossip and other random thoughts. They are from private messaging apps because their content is visible to anyone who logs in, or anyone in a given geographical region. That is, they’re “one-to-many” sharing apps, not “one-to-one” mobile messengers. and the debated about the ethics of these sorts of apps, as they often allow for cyberbullying and shaming of public figures – and in some cases, . Nevertheless, “anonymous social” seemed to be carving out a new category for itself this year. It almost made sense that this sort of activity would emerge in a post-Snowden society where users realized that social networking on more public, “real-name” networks like Facebook had been tracked by their own government. Perhaps “anonymous social” would encourage the same sort of human connection that Facebook once offered, without the drawback of disclosing your true identity along the way? Actually, what anonymous social networking for the most part offered was yet another reminder that when people no longer have to stand behind their words, they can say some pretty terrible things. Ever since the days of Myspace, which had the dubious honor of being the first to bring about a , social networking users have had to contend with online bullying issues. Anonymous features in Ask.fm, for example, were referenced as being directly contributing to , and following its revamp toward more “safe” networking policies, newcomer Yik Yak appeared to be ready to pick up the slack as one of the top mobile-first anonymous networks. On Yik Yak, which combines anonymity with location-based networking, around the U.S. School officials warned parents about the dangers of the app, which had become home to threats, including bomb threats and shootings, and vicious bullying. A girl on Yik Yak was even reportedly bullied for , a news report once said. Twitter, though not entirely anonymous as many users identify themselves by name, . Sadly, in private, people want to read about shameful secrets, gossip, and other things that people think, but are too polite to say publicly. When any network caters to this sort of activity, it soars. Secret’s ascension in the App Store earlier this year is attributable to the fact that it became a go-to destination for tech industry gossip and leaks. When Secret, funded , finally had to clamp down on that activity – and stopping users from posting photos from their camera roll, among other things – it began to decline. In short: when the trash talk dropped, so did the app’s popularity. And thus demonstrates the vicious cycle for anonymous apps. Let people misbehave, and the app buzzes with activity. Sanitize the experience to protect people’s feelings (and potentially users’ lives), and the app fails. Ask.fm is a great example of what “cleaning up” looks like (via App Annie). It declined from the top of the App Store down to #444 after : While Secret, Yik Yak, Whisper and others reigned this year, entered the “anonymous social” space this year as well. Few of these still matter. For instance, a representative sample from the long-tail (data via App Annie): And among those who could still be contenders? They include: Yik Yak, Secret, Whisper, Facebook’s Rooms (if not by traction, but by its parent company’s power to promote it if it chose to), and entrant After School. To be fair, After School is likely only popular because it had virtually no content protections in place against, and . On the chart above, current as of Tuesday, only Yik Yak and Whisper have any significant traction at this time. (After School has been again pulled from the App Store at the time of publication.) Historical rankings: Yik Yak flits in and out of the top 10 and 20, Whisper the top 50. After School briefly soared, but also has to deal with . For cyberbullying!, go figure. Today’s U.S. rankings for these apps in the Social Networking category on iTunes are as follows: One could argue that FireChat (#161 Social Networking) also deserves to be in this category, but its purpose is a bit different – it’s more about connecting people when an internet connection or phone coverage is not available, rather than being solely focused on anonymity. It has proven popular at outdoor festivals and protests. When apps like Secret drop in the rankings after cleaning up their experience, they tend to lose their active users as well. For some insight into this: using data from SimilarWeb’s (beta) service which currently tracks actives on Google Play apps only, you can see Secret’s monthly actives falling over time. Vs Yik Yak and Whisper: The question for Yik Yak and Whisper, as the only real contenders left given After School’s inability to keep its app in the App Store, is how long they can last. Whisper is arguably maintaining its popularity today because it has veered into “adult” territory thanks to its “NSFW” category and other sexual content. Yik Yak, meanwhile, may have geo-fenced its app, but kids, teens and other young adults are for as recent stories . If either of these apps clean up their content or cut down on the gossip and sex, their heydays could be over as well – just like Secret, Ask.fm, MySpace, and all the others where cyberbullying once thrived, then died. |
Jawbone UP3 Likely Won’t Ship In Time For Christmas After All | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | If you had plans to tuck a Jawbone UP3 under the tree for someone this year, it’s probably time to start thinking about something else. When Jawbone first to release a new fitness tracker, the company wouldn’t give us an exact date — only that it was coming “later this year.” Turns out even might be a stretch. According to some sleuthing by , the shipping estimate for pre-ordered units has only slipped further and further away over the past few weeks. In November, it read “6-7 weeks”; a month later, it’s slipped to “8-9 weeks.” According to comments from Jawbone, the first batches of UP3 bands are now set to arrive in early 2015 for those who ordered earliest. Those people are also being offered $40 in credit or a free (usually $50) to help take some of the sting off. As for everyone else who isn’t already in the queue, you’re probably looking at closer to February/March. |
Duet Makes Your iPad A No-Compromise Display For Your Mac | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | iPad-as-secondary-display apps have been around almost as long as the iPad, but most who used them once have seldom used them since. These things mostly work over Wi-Fi, and work poorly over Wi-Fi at that, with unwatchable video performance, choppy animation and tons of lag, even in the best of circumstances. from a team that includes ex-Apple display engineering talent, changes all of that with a secondary display experience on an iPad (or even an iPhone) that feels like magic. I was initially highly sceptical of Duet founder Rahul Dewan’s claims regarding his app’s performance – lag free performance, even for games (on recent Macs) with 60fps refresh rates? Sounds like a “go home, you’re drunk” situation. But Duet manages it, and with minimal installation headaches, too. The key to the magic is using a wired connection (via Lightning or 30-pin dock connector) and the mandatory installation of a new display driver on your Mac that will recognize the connected iPad as a monitor. This does require a restart, which if you’re like me and almost never do that, plus have thousands of things open, can be a bit annoying. But once you boot back up, Duet is installed as a menu bar application, and provides a helpful tooltip window at first launch to get you started. On the iPad side, you simply purchase and install Duet from the App Store and then open it to get things going, then so long as you’re connected via cable to your Mac and the OS X application is already running, it should find your iPad and automatically add it as another display, just like those you’d connect via Thunderbolt, DisplayPort or HDMI. You can adjust frame rate and resolution according to your machine’s performance capabilities, and your battery conservation needs. The issues that I found were minor – some strange artifacting appeared on one of my other external monitors, a remnant of a moved Finder window that disappeared when I brought my mouse cursor to the area; and high CPU usage, which didn’t otherwise appear to affect performance of apps including Final Cut on my office iMac, but which might affect battery life considerably when used with a notebook. Neither issue will prevent it from becoming a daily use utility, however. Dewan told me he created the app based on a wish expressed by his father that he able to use his iPad in this manner, after which he battened the hatches and created Duet in an intense development cycle covering just 30 days – aided by his experience as a display engineer working at Apple on both the Mac and iPad side. Duet works with only one iDevice at a time for now, but support for additional devices, as well as improved CPU usage and even Windows support are planned for the future. The app is $10 on the App Store for a limited time, and the companion app is free. If you’ve ever bought a secondary display app in the past, or wanted to but were scared off by questionable performance, you must get this one. |
This Little USB Necklace Hacks Your Computer In No Time Flat | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Quick! The bad guy/super villain has left the room! Plug in a mysterious device that’ll hack up their computer while an on-screen progress bar ticks forward to convey to the audience that things are working! It’s a classic scene from basically every spy movie in history. In this case, however, that mystery device is real. Samy Kamkar — developer of projects like that that conquered MySpace back in 2006, or , the drone that hijacks other drones — has released a video demonstrating the abilities of a particularly ridiculous “necklace” he sometimes wears around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLEq7-hlmo?start=49 Called USBdriveby, it’s a USB-powered microcontroller-on-a-chain, rigged to exploit the inherently awful security flaws lurking in your computer’s USB ports. In about 60 seconds, it can pull off a laundry list of nasty tricks: So in 30-60 seconds, this device hijacks your machine, disables many layers of security, cleans up the mess it makes, and opens a connection for remote manipulation even after the device has been removed. That’s… kind of terrifying. While the video above focuses on OS X, the methods tapped here aren’t exclusive to Apple’s platform. Kamkar says everything shown so far is “easily extendable to Windows or *nix.” So what can you do to protect yourself from things like this? Not a whole lot, really — that’s why attacks like this and are so freaky. A lot of these flaws are inherent to the way the USB protocol was designed and implemented across so many hundreds of millions of computers; short of filling your USB ports with cement or never, leaving your computer’s ports unattended while out and about, there’s no magic fix. [via ] |
Sony SmartWatch 3 Review | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Sony’s new Android Wear-powered SmartWatch 3 bucks a trend of the company releasing devices that use their own wearable platform, opting instead to jump on the bandwagon that includes a host of other Android wearable OEMs. It ends up being a big benefit, when you compare this device against previous SmartWatch models, which have proven overwhelmingly uninspiring. Sony’s design on the SmartWatch 3 might be described as “minimal” or “classic” by some, but to me it’s just boring. The look of the device reminds me of what you might find in a reference document made available to Android Wear OEMs – the generic and prototypical Android Wear hardware that is intended as a placeholder, rather than an actual shipping gadget. [gallery ids="1096602,1096603,1096604,1096605,1096606,1096607"] This is even more disappointing because the SmartWatch 3 arrives at a time when it seems like other OEMs were just getting it, so to speak, in terms of realizing that the key to distinguishing oneself in a market where the software is essentially cookie cutter is by providing a unique angle on design. Sony’s watch feels like it has much more in common with the rushed offerings available at Android Wear’s launch than with more mature watches like the G Watch R or Asus ZenWatch. While uninspired, the SmartWatch 3’s design does provide some benefits; the silicon band is durable and comfortable, plus it can be worn during all kinds of activity. Sony’s decision to make the watch unit itself swappable, rather than using a standard band, has advantages if it comes up with a line of different types of cases to house it, but feels limiting at launch with only color options to choose from. One other thing that Sony has done right with this – they’ve made it so that it charges via standard micro USB, via a port on the back. It’s so much better than the proprietary chargers every single other device maker seems to be opting for that it almost makes up for the overall ‘meh’ look of the watch. Almost. I’ve said this so many times now I feel like a broken record, but Android Wear devices are mostly of a piece when it comes to feature sets. They all offer notifications from your connected Android smartphone, they all allow for voice commands, and dictated response to messages in apps that support those features. They all track your steps, too. Other things they don’t all do include tracking your heart rate, and the Sony SmartWatch lacks the sensors necessary for those features. This is not, in fact, a major strike against it: heart rate tracking on these devices is of limited value at best, since they can only take your pulse after you stay very still for a few minutes, and then you only get a snapshot of a moment in time. If you’re an athlete doing heart rate-based zone training, this is worthless, and if you’re just an average person, it’s mildly interesting for the more curious, but mostly useless for just about everyone else. As for what Sony does include, the SmartWatch 3 is the first Android Wear device with onboard GPS. That GPS comes in handy now that Google has added support to Android Wear as a platform for its powers, and this makes it much better for using when you’re out for a run without your phone attached. The app works with Googles’ own MyTracks, and combined with offline Bluetooth and song storage, it can replace a lot of basic fitness trackers and works as a competent smartwatch when connected back up at home. The SmartWatch 3 also has a hidden payload: It supports Wi-Fi connections directly on the watch, but that’s not a feature supported by Android Wear yet, so for now it remains a tantalizing, albeit toothless aspect of the device’s overall design. Sony’s SmartWatch 3 performs well as a dedicated fitness device, but in that capacity it competes with gadgets like the TomTom Cardio and Garmin’s devices. Many of those have continuous heart rate monitoring, which is even more appealing for hardcore fitness enthusiasts, in addition to GPS and fitness coaching support. That said, the SmartWatch, in keeping with its rudimentary but effective design, offers a steadfast Android Wear experience overall, ticking the boxes without really excelling in any particular area. Its battery life is around a day with always-on screen, under the life leader LG G Watch R but on par with most other Android smartwatches out there. The display is weaker than most on the SmartWatch 3, however, perhaps owing to the transflective tech used to make the LCD easier to read both in bright light and darker situations. It succeeds when the screen is in its passive mode, but it does not look good when the LCD is actually active, and as a result the benefits that come with using transflective tech are mostly missed. Sony’s SmartWatch 3 is one of the latest in Android Wear devices, but it has some failings I’d expect from much earlier entrants. The painfully neutral design feels as though it won’t be able to win over anyone with looks alone, and the lacklustre display really pales when measured against others on the market. The device’s saving grace is its use of onboard GPS, as well as that future gift of local Wi-Fi, both of which make the SmartWatch 3 the best Android Wear device for those looking to take advantages of updates to the platform and third-party apps as they come in. That means making some bets on the future, however, and it’s impossible to say that better hardware won’t be available from others by the time that happens. |
Xbox One To Get Pandora, Vevo, Popcornflix And More Apps This Week | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | Microsoft might have said that they’re done — but that doesn’t mean they can’t release a few new toys in the form of apps. The company has just announced five new apps that should be available to Xbox One owners just in time for Christmas. 2014 was already a pretty solid year for Xbox One apps, with the addition of things like Plex, HBO GO, MLB.TV and Twitch. With the new entries, it’s getting harder to think of a popular service that hasn’t found its way onto Microsoft’s box. Rdio/Spotify seem like big gaps, but Rdio employees have that services that compete with the Xbox Music service probably aren’t welcome on the platform. While there’s no specific launch date for the new apps, Microsoft says they should all hit sometime “this week.” |
VHX Introduces An iPhone App And Library So You Can View Your Whole Video Collection In One Place | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | has been working hard to make it easier for independent content owners to sell their videos online. And now it’s working to make it easier for consumers to find and enjoy the content that they’ve bought off the platform, with the introduction of a video library that stores all their purchases in one place, along with the launch of an . Over the past few years, VHX has powered direct-to-consumer sales of video content online at a time when selling your content direct to fans has become a pretty popular idea, especially among comedians and independent filmmakers. The breakthrough example for this type of success came with of a comedy special a few years ago; since then, a number of other people with an independent fan base have begun marketing their own content online. Rather than go through the usual distribution channels, content owners and producers are finding they can more profitably sell their videos and attract audiences on their own. And, for the most part, consumers seem to be on board with the idea, as well. VHX now has more than 3,000 titles on the service, according to co-founder Jamie Wilkinson, and more than a million customers have purchased something sold through its service. To date, most of those sales have happened through the content owners’ sites. They’re able to do this because VHX provides a turnkey solution for selling and distributing videos, enabling content owners to just upload files into its backend and host videos wherever they want. But as its library of content for sale expands, and as new users show up to purchase it, inevitably users will end up owning more than one title distributed through VHX. That’s already happening, Wilkinson said, with more than 60,000 customers owning two or more pieces of content sold on the platform. To make it easier for VHX customers to keep track of their content, the company is introducing a library where all their purchased videos will be stored. Users can now view their libraries on the , or they can access it through a new VHX iPhone app. With the app, they’ll also be able to do a lot of cool other things. Like, for instance, download a piece of content for offline viewing or Airplaying the video through Apple TV directly onto their televisions. In addition to iOS, VHX is working on an Android app, which is coming soon. And over time the company will also work toward making its service available on Roku and other connected TV devices. While having libraries and an app will give customers new ways to access their content, it also opens up new opportunities for VHX to make sales. That is, by providing a destination for owners of its content, over time it will be able to suggest new releases and other titles that consumers might want to purchase. By doing so, it’ll be able to make more sales, which means more money for content owners on its platform, as well as itself. |
Aereo To Be Pieced Out And Auctioned Off To The Highest Bidder | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | Lest you held any lingering hope in your heart of hearts that Aereo would somehow rise from the grave, let them be gone. The courts have just given the greenlight for the company to be pieced apart and its parts sold to the highest bidder. Aereo was a startup that captured over-the-air cable TV and allowed users to watch it (live or DVR’d) on their tablets, phones and PCs for a subscription fee. Aereo wasn’t paying licensing fees to the content owners, but because they were leasing each user their own unique OTA antenna for content that was broadcast over the air for free, they figured what they were doing was technically legal. Alas, the . They dropped the hammer on Aereo’s business model, effectively killing it instantly. The company had raised nearly $100 million, which the has since been burned down to around $3.6 million. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2014. Now a bankruptcy court in New York has granted Aereo permission to sell off its assets, with one big caveat: those angry broadcasters who shut them down in the first place? They get to approve any sales that go down. Blyeck. The auction will take place on February 24, at which point the broadcasters have two weeks to decide if they’re okay with the highest bidder. |
The Top 10 Pricing Mistakes Companies Are Making | Per Sjofors | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | Price strategy is emerging as a critical path for companies to increase their competitive advantage and bottom line. Many companies have spent years achieving gains through cost cutting, outsourcing, process re-engineering and adoption of innovative technologies. However, the incremental benefits from these important activities are diminishing, and companies need to look at other areas to improve their business results. Today, companies are looking to serve well-defined market segments with specialized products, messages, product variants and services, and to earn superior profit margins while doing so. All too many companies, however, use simplistic pricing processes and cannot even identify their most profitable customers or customer segments. The following is a list of 10 of the most common mistakes companies make when pricing their products and services. Prices based on costs invariably lead to one of the following two scenarios: 1) if the price is higher than the customers’ perceived value the cost of sales goes up, discounting increases, sales cycles are prolonged and profits suffer; 2) if the price is lower than the customers’ perceived value, sales are brisk, but companies are leaving money on the table, and therefore are not maximizing their profit. By resorting to “marketplace pricing,” companies accept the commoditization of their product or service. Marketplace pricing is a resting place for companies that have given up, and where profits end up being razor thin. Instead of giving up, these management teams must find ways to differentiate their products or services so as to create additional value for specific market segments Some financial strategies support a drive for uniformity, and companies try to achieve identical profit margins for disparate product lines. The iron law of pricing is that different customers will assign different values to identical products. For any single product, profit is optimized when the price reflects each customer’s willingness to pay. This willingness to pay is a reflection of his or her perception of value of that product, and the profit margin in another product line is completely irrelevant. Customer segments are differentiated by the customers’ different requirements for your product. The value proposition for any product or service is different in different market segments, and the price strategy must reflect that difference. Your price realization strategy should include options that tailor your product, packaging, delivery options, marketing message and your pricing structure to specific customer segments, in order to capture the additional value created for these segments. Most companies fear the uproar of a price change and put it off as long as possible. Savvy companies accustom their customers and their sales forces to frequent price changes. Marketplaces change radically in a short period of time. It’s important to recognize that the value proposition of your products changes along with changes in the marketplace, and you must adjust your pricing to reflect these changes. Volume-based sales incentives create a drain on profits when salespeople are compensated to push volume, even at the lowest possible price. This mistake is especially costly when salespeople have the authority to negotiate discounts. They will almost always leave money on the table by: selling lower priced products and dropping prices to “clinch the deal.” Pricing strategy cannot exist in a vacuum and must take into account anticipated competitive moves. When making price changes, it’s important to take into account not only likely competitive pricing changes but to also make an objective assessment of competitive product or service quality. There are three basic variables in a company’s profit calculation: cost, sales volume and average price. Most management teams are comfortable working on cost-reduction initiatives, and they have some level of confidence in growing their sales volume. But a good price-setting practice is seen as a “black art.” Consequently, many companies resort to simplistic price procedures, while the same companies use highly sophisticated procedures and technologies to track and control their costs in minute detail and in real time. The hastily called “price meeting” has become a regular occurrence — a last-minute meeting to set the final price for a new product or service. The attendees are often unprepared, and research is limited to a few salespeople’s anecdotes, perhaps a competitor’s last year’s price list, and a financial officer’s careful calculation of the product’s cost structure across a variety of assumptions. Such people are an uncertain source, because their information-gathering methodology is often haphazard, and the information obtained thereby can be purely anecdotal. A customer will rarely tell the “complete truth” to a salesperson. Savvy companies employ trained professionals to collect and analyze the data to identify and evaluate the value perceptions of their marketplace. Pricing offers many companies the most direct route to higher profits, yet particularly in North America, the pricing function often fails to get sufficient attention. We believe a combination of greater management commitment to the art of pricing along with powerful analytical software tools like the Stratinis Pricing Suite, can make a significant difference. |
What 2015 Has In Store For Native Ads, TV And Email | Jonathan Sills | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | Succeeding as a modern, high-tech marketer means adapting to accelerating changes in technology — whether that’s leveraging Facebook’s newest features, segmenting customers with even more granularity or finding a new platform for viral distribution before the rest of the business world takes notice. While some marketing principles and approaches stay the same, every year brings new opportunities and threats. And marketers who recognize these disruptions earlier than others have the best chance to leapfrog competitors and crack open new markets. The coming year is no exception. In that spirit, I’ve had several CEOs and marketing executives ask me about trends ahead, so I decided to package some of these conversations for others to see. To further inform these opinions, I canvassed some of the smartest marketers out there at fast-growing tech companies to solicit their input and reactions. Below are some predictions for what marketers should anticipate in 2015. The targeting of individuals through digital ads has continued to evolve toward rather than behavior. So the focus is increasingly on “who are you” versus “what are you doing” right at this moment. One of Facebook’s most successful ad-product developments has been the ability to upload “custom audiences” that marry advertisers’ customer lists with those individuals’ social profiles (subject to various privacy policies, of course), enabling advertisers to reach these targeted groups (and those who look like them) specifically. So a company selling widgets online could upload a data file of their most loyal customers and communicate directly with them about the latest product releases and developments. Google has continued to inch toward this approach, building “similar audiences” off remarketing lists. But with the massive success Facebook is seeing here, it’s hard to imagine they won’t follow suit in a more specific and compelling way. Television advertising, despite the growth of online video, continues to play a role in marketing budgets for traditional and emerging businesses. For those wishing to target households more finely at the subscriber level, online, or through people’s tablets and smartphones as they’re watching video, there’s certainly a long line of partners waiting to take that money. A variety of interesting opportunities continue to surface from the cable/satellite/fiber providers here as well. But despite these efforts, we still seem a few years away from a fundamental disruption in the way television advertising is purchased — namely, in a non-interactive, linear way, with ads being paired with specific broadcasts at set times — be it a football game at night or the History Channel during the day. May the line between editorial and advertising rest in peace. Native advertising, or ads that match the form and function of a particular website, e.g. they look and act a lot like the regular story placements on a site like CNN or Business Insider, has become a rule rather than the exception on a wide variety of independent content sites. So it seems likely that some of the largest publishers may choose to take a crack at keeping 100 percent of the margins in-house rather than outsourcing the work to a third party – despite the requirement for more work on their end. AOL buying web-personalization engine Gravity provides one example. This is a tricky one to call, but it does seem that traditional email marketing as a way of effectively reaching customers and prospects is falling subject to more and more pressure every day (migration to mobile; intelligent inboxes; Google’s “promotions” tab; improving spam filters). and are two of several companies doing interesting work around new and alternative engagement paradigms. Here is an example: A widget company releases a new product, and Kahuna sends personalized push notifications to phones rather than a traditional email blast. And retargeting technology continues to evolve and become more intelligent. Ideally the new stand-ins for email campaigns will be more tailored and personalized and seem like less of an intrusion as a result. While I haven’t had an opportunity to demo the Apple Watch, I’m intrigued by the new interaction models Apple has laid out: sending “touch” and “tap” messages, quick doodles, and further abbreviation of messages and intention. Siri seemed to have this potential but fell short. Anything on-demand and easy that facilitates communication and commerce has the potential to reshape how we reach new customers and more intelligently play a value-added role in their daily lives. It seems like a better platform for marketers with more likelihood for quick consumer adoption than Google Glass. |
Crowdfunding Startups Are Looking To Refashion The Business Of Fashion | Dennis Mitzner | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | Crowdfunding is enabling new fashion startups to fight against the industry norm of manufacturing in Asia, bringing production closer to home thanks to lower minimum orders, willing local manufacturers and the trend of unique, customized clothing. Fashion startups such as , and use the crowd to provide an alternative to mass manufacturing for the masses. Small startups online are not looking to produce quantities comparable to big retailers, but instead respond to a growing demand of personalized and unique clothing. The concept of these new fashion crowdfunding startups is simple and similar to Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Each item has its own campaign with a minimum threshold to make the final cut. After the item gets the minimum amount of backers, the piece of clothing or accessory goes into production. The power is solely in the hands of the crowd that decides whether a dress gets made. Tel Aviv-based OutOfX wants to break the manufacturing norm by incorporating two funnels: one between the business (individual designer) and the buyer of the end-product, and one between the designer and local manufacturers. “Designers who submit the designs decide where to manufacture, but prefer to do it locally for obvious logistical reasons. After submitting and pricing the design, we put them in contact with a local manufacturer,” Shany Elkin, the creative director of OutOfX said. Even though Elkin doesn’t rule out that in the future some designers might opt to produce in Asia, most do not. “Manufacturing in Asia is only meaningful if you make huge amounts. We are currently collecting a database of manufacturers in the countries where our designers are based.” As part of the website, the company plans to launch a service that rates local manufacturers to give designers more choice and create competition between local players to push down the prices. OutOf X’s business model is based on revenue share with a flat fee of 12 percent from the purchasing price. It’s optimistic about the future as it expects its turnover to reach $10 million by 2016 and see the number of designers on the site rise to 5,000. The main differences between the crowdsourced and retail models lie in the accuracy of determining the real cost of an item. Instead of first designing the summer collection, then estimating demand and finally manufacturing thousands of different styles in China or Indonesia, fashion startups use crowdfunding to turn the whole cycle upside down to let desginers and the crowd have a conversation about the demand. Moreover, retailers suffer from a weak bargaining power which allows the manufacturers to demand large minimum quantities, along with the uncertainty regarding demand. This easily causes a massive surplus, which then leads to overloaded inventories. Such factors inflate the price tag, since the retailer is forced to compensate on the high risk and the anticipated losses. The many fashion crowdfunding startups give the designers an ability to set up shop on a number of competing websites and choose between local manufacturers. “Independent fashion designers know that they operate in a highly competitive industry and need to come up with their own fresh and unique advantages to stay relevant. Manufacturing methods such as 3D printing provide real tools to help indie designers make low quantities at low cost,” Nir Laznik, the co-founder of OutOfX, said. Fashion through crowdsourcing seems to be a concept for the times due to a global trend that prefers customization and uniqueness to the grayness of the masses. However, whether Made by My Cousin Lisa replaces Nike and Armani is entirely up to the crowd. |
Who’s Behind The Internet Outages In North Korea, Anyway? | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | North Korea blamed the U.S. and called President Obama a “monkey” today when the country’s Internet and mobile network went down for the third time this week. However, it’s still not clear who’s behind the Internet outages. “Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” said the National Defence Commission, North Korea’s ruling body, as reported in . Whether North Korea’s Internet was just down or the result of a cyber attack isn’t apparent at the moment. What is clear is that the U.S. government doesn’t want to talk about it. The White House hasn’t commented on the matter and a spokesperson from the State Department in a conference on Tuesday that it would also not be commenting on those reports “in any way.” The North Korean government has dismissed what it sees as denials of U.S. involvement in the outagaes. Meanwhile a hacker group associated with Anonymous claimed responsibility for North Korea’s Internet outages on Twitter. https://twitter.com/TheAnonMessage2/status/547197756482551809 According to CEO Matthew Prince, North Korea’s Internet is fairly fragile and would be easy for anyone to hack. He told CNN, “If it’s an attack, it’s highly unlikely it’s the United States. More like it’s a 15-year-old in a Guy Fawkes mask.” North Korea only has one Internet service provider, connected via China. Some put the country at barely 1,000 Internet addresses. The NDC also criticized Obama for Sony’s last-minute decision to release “The Interview,” a movie depicting the plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. “The United States, with its large physical size and oblivious to the shame of playing hide and seek as children with runny noses would, has begun disrupting the Internet operations of the main media outlets of our republic.” The Obama administration accused North Korea last week of being behind the cyber attacks at Sony Pictures in response to “The Interview.” posted a tweet late last Monday showing that North Korea’s Internet was back online after an outage that lasted for over nine hours. Internet of North Korea down again at 15:41 UTC. Second blackout since last night's restoration of service — InternetIntelligence (@InternetIntel) Dyn posted seven hours later that the country’s Internet was . The Internet and 3G mobile service went down again Saturday. In a separate statement, the NDC also denied having anything to do with the on a South Korean nuclear power plant. |
13 Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Travis Bernard | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | From Xbox Live being down on Christmas to the worst tech stocks of the year, here are the top stories from 12/20-12/26. Gamers who received new consoles for Christmas found themselves unable to connect and play with friends. On what might be the biggest gaming day of the year, . as a rental or purchase on Christmas Eve, but not everyone paid for it. Within the first 20 hours, . . . The Phantom is a petite, spherical, all-in-one amplifier and speaker that delivers what audiophiles think may be the best sound in the world for around $2,000. . If you go back and read the original S-1 documents that current tech giants filed decades ago, you run into some pretty funny stuff. . on your brand page. This could challenge YouTube and turn brand pages into more of a TV channel. . . . . Jon Evans examined Yahoo. Did you invest in Sprint or Twitter? . |
Tech’s Year Of Missed Political Gains | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | The technology sector had a rough year in Washington. In the face of growing political spending, increasing economic might and , tech got nearly nothing it wanted in 2014. NSA , as did copyright reform, and patent reform. Immigration reform? . And the recent election who were allied with the tech industry on certain issues. It was a dismal calendar cycle. Technology is ascendant in many ways. Its leading firms have cash reserves in the tens of billions. Three of the four most valuable companies in the United States are tech firms. Growing tech companies are , and venture capital money is flowing into the sector . TechCrunch has noted in the past that just as politics is going tech, tech is going political. That has never been more true than today. Before we jump into a new year, a new Congress, and a new Senate majority, let’s spin our wheels backwards and take a look at just what tech didn’t get this year. The recurring news that technology companies are spending increasing sums of dollars on their political operations is now something of a dull trope; o f course they are. But it is worth noting the scale at play here. Campaign spending was near record highs for tech firms in the 2014 election cycle. Google spent and Other forms of money were at play, of course, with two technology-financed groups causing as much ruckus as they could. The Mark Zuckerberg-funded managed to flame out , just on outside lobbying firms. In total, the group in support of a comprehensive immigration bill.* Its leader, . The project was an embarrassing, and very public failure. , another tech-money-backed effort to have some sway in the capitol managed to rival the implosion of FWD.us for profligacy. After a very public campaign to raise money, including from leading technology-focused venture capitalists, it managed to lose burn through $10.6 million. And it it backed. Winning. To highlight the excellent, progressive, and legislatively competent 2014, let’s dig through the key issues that technology companies worry about, and often actively work on. And on which they got nothing done. When the Senate passed an immigration bill with the support of tech , hopes were high that change could come to the policies that companies say inhibit their ability to hire and retain top talent. Despite fourteen Republicans crossing the aisle to pass the bill in the Senate, it was . President Obama responded after the recent midterms by taking extensive executive actions on immigration, but the tech lobby said these reforms . In a meager appeasement to those calling for high skilled immigration reform, the White House laid out plans that would . People with these temporary high-skilled visas can now change jobs more easily, and their spouses have more access to employment authorization. A nice addition, certainly, but hardly enough in the eyes of tech, and there is little on the horizon. At the start of 2014, NSA surveillance reform seemed inevitable. Presidential review boards investigated the efficacy of the agency’s spying programs, and Congressional committees grilled top officials on the most controversial program, the collection of Americans’ bulk telephone metadata under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. President Barack Obama called for an effective end to the program by June 2015 in a speech, calling on Congress to pass legislation that would reform the agency’s practices. The tech sector for comprehensive reform in the summer when . In the lame duck Congressional session following the midterms, a was introduced in the Senate but was . Due to sunset provisions on parts of the Patriot Act — law on which much surveillance is based — reform is sure to be an issue that reappears early in the next Congress. But given the new political lay of the land in 2015, any measure would likely be toothless in comparison to the failed bill. In a tight race against Republican challenger Cory Gardner, Democratic senator from Colorado and privacy advocate Mark Udall . Udall’s loss was lumped together with a wave of Democratic incumbents who lost their seats amidst low public opinion of the Obama administration. In Udall’s loss, Democrats did not lose just yet another blue seat, but a leader and important voice on NSA surveillance reform — one who said Edward Snowden should be allowed to return to the U.S. and supported measures that would curtail the oversteps of the PATRIOT Act. Given that other members of our Congress have variously said that Snowden arrested, , and the like, his positions were pleasant outliers. Also, Udall told Obama to “let the experiment unfold” when Colorado became the first state to legalize weed. Given that technology executives are noted for their , it was again a tech-friendly comment. (For further evidence on that point, TechCrunch recommends the reader spends a day around a large technology office in San Francisco.) Udall wasn’t the only candidate that tech wanted to win, who didn’t. Years before John Oliver , coined the term “net neutrality” to explain that the Internet should be a fair and free space where all content is equal. But even after the wave of publicity stemming late night comedy shows caused more people , Wu for the New York lieutenant governor’s race. Despite bipartisan support, Congress . Sen. Patrick Leahy, who led Congress in its attempt at NSA surveillance reform, abruptly dropped a bill that would have curbed patent trolls shortly before it went to a committee vote. Patent reform advanced slightly in the courts, with one ruling prohibiting patent trolls from “fee shifting.” What was odd about the loss was how small the final distance seemed between the warring parties. In April, it appeared that a bill would be introduced after just one more delay, and that there was “broad bipartisan agreement in principle,” according to Leahy. But by May, the law was dead. After six tries to bring the legislation up for a vote, . Here’s the key quote: ” Regrettably, competing companies on both sides of this issue refused to come to agreement on how to achieve that goal,” said the Senator. Well, then. Microsoft decided to , served by the United States government, demanding the company turn over client data stored in an Irish data center. It isn’t clear if the person in question is a United States citizen or not, but the struggle has highlighted the growing complexity of domestic and international law in the cloud era. The United States government has a simple position: Microsoft is a United States-based company, and therefore its warrant is legal, regardless of where the data might be housed. Microsoft, which operates in a number of countries through subsidiaries, and is spending billions to build out a global network of data centers, disagrees. There is law in place like the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), to facilitate sticky legal situations like this that cross borders. The United States government finds that law, in this case, unnecessary. At risk is the following: If the United States government can command access to user data stored anywhere, in any data center around the world that a company based in the US owns, then no international user data is safe from quick access by the US government. Or, put another way, any US company that offers cloud based services to a global client base would not be able to protect its global client base from simple snooping by its own government. Customers might go elsewhere. The — — has lined up behind Microsoft. But the company managed to lose in court a number of times this year. It isn’t clear if Microsoft can win at all. If it can’t, as it failed to do in 2014, the cloud industry will be knocked back a few pegs. And since this cloud thing is quite the big deal, that would be a material headwind for all large tech companies that are making cloud plays, which is to say all of them. Net neutrality, the regulatory structure that supported an open Internet in which all content was equal, suffered a , when the FCC lost to Verizon in court. That loss ended the net neutrality regulations that had previously been in place. The FCC put together a , hoping to at once re-institute open Internet rules, and also better ground them in the law, ensuring that they would not fall down yet again. Enter the struggle. In its first proposal, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler recommended that net neutrality rules allow for, in some capacity, “paid prioritization,” a concept that became known as Internet “fast lanes.” It was a controversial proposal. Instead of having the FCC create, and vote into place stern net neutrality proposals that would ban paid prioritization this year, the FCC has been forced to punt into 2015, and fast lanes themselves remain a potential plank. Many in tech and support rules that would ensure that the Internet is classified as a utility. ISPs are vehemently opposed to the idea. Who will get more of that they want in 2015 is an open question. 2014 began with the public reeling from the high profile hack of credit card information from various retailers, . It ended with another . But it seems these threats to the private sector are doing little to prompt Congress to act. They seem to be DGAFing just as much as the people who . Extensive media coverage of these hacks should have set the scene for legislative action, but instead the Senate did not even vote on a cybersecurity measure introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein. If there is any bright spot in this dismal year for tech policy, it’s the public’s response to net neutrality. Although we’re still in the thick of the debate, the outpouring of public concern about the openness of the Internet showed the very best of the influence tech can have on the Hill. It’s significant to note the power of lobbying the American people to get involved, not just throwing dollars at the politicians and their campaigns. We also almost had enough support for meaningful surveillance reform. More than half of U.S. senators voted to bring the Senate measure to the floor, but still . This loss can without a doubt be chalked up to Washington’s gridlock. Earlier in the year with the threat of ISIS less defined and public outcry over the Snowden revelations still strong, the measure likely would have passed, but by December it lost its steam. The question before the technology industry will be whether the combination of a new Congress, a new Senate majority, and a non-election year can unite for real progress. There is some obvious tension in play. Tech companies are broadly in favor of net neutrality, for example. The majority in the next Congress in both chambers, for example, is not. Immigration reform could be a sticking point as well. Tech firms want more H-1B visas. Lots more. The incoming Senate gods, however, are slightly more nativist than your average techie. The list goes on, especially when it comes to mass surveillance — an increasingly fractious global security climate may not help tech’s case. Despite the uncertainty of an election year, tech had a chance to make real inroads on surveillance and immigration that it missed in 2014. These issues won’t go away in 2015, but some of the Democratic majority that would have been more favorable to tech on these policies will. With their own bully pulpits, and all the money you could dream of, you would think that tech would be better at politics. * |
On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | posted on his website, Paul Graham, the co-founder and former head of YCombinator, . Writing with an intensity that is unusual in his writing, Graham argued that “The US has less than 5% of the world’s population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US.” His concern is that “anti-immigration” forces have thwarted reforms to our immigration system, risking America’s competitiveness in attracting the most brilliant engineers to Silicon Valley. The problem is particularly acute today, he notes, since startups face a severe talent crunch that could be ameliorated with a more open immigration policy. If we refuse to adapt, “the US could be seriously fucked,” Graham writes colorfully. But Graham largely avoids what many tech workers think when hearing about immigration reform: “ could be seriously fucked.” Indeed, Graham’s essay never once uses the words “wage” or “income.” Even worse, his focus on “exceptional” programmers belies the real issue at the heart of immigration reform: it isn’t about the top performing 1% of workers, which of course every country and policymaker in the world wants to attract. It is the broader effect that immigration has on wages for the other 99% that causes such controversy around these policies. What is missing from the immigration debate in Silicon Valley is trust, and it certainly isn’t the engineers that have abused it. We know that tech companies have worked to keep wages from rising the past decade. Google, Apple, and a multitude of other large tech companies by restricting recruitment practices and preventing workers from enjoying free movement of their labor. Such tactics have made engineers far more cynical about the motives of tech companies, which is intensified by the incessant talk of talent shortages in the industry. Graham, like hundreds of other immigration advocates before him in the tech industry, argues that there is a broad talent crunch in Silicon Valley, and immigration policy is one of the critical friction points stopping the expansion of high-flying startups. This widely-reported hiring challenge turned immigration into the marquee political issue for Silicon Valley and led to , FWD.us. Yet, we know that many of America’s best engineers are never even given the chance to work in our industry, left behind by the meritocracy. in engineering jobs in the region, . Graham might argue that America only represents 5% of the engineers worldwide, but it seems we have already thrown away more than 75% of them at home. That hasn’t stopped fear of a labor squeeze from having a strong effect on Capitol Hill, where there remains broad support for easing immigration rules for knowledge workers. Changes demanded by Silicon Valley companies are generally supported on Capitol Hill, particularly in light of the other immigration challenges faced by legislators such as procedures on handling undocumented workers. , “…it is likely Congress will again want to use high skilled immigration as a ‘sweetener’ in comprehensive immigration reform efforts to bolster the support of business minded moderates in both parties.” But for all of that popularity, funding, and support, high-tech immigration policy has completely stagnated, as it has for years. During a round of negotiations for immigration reform in 2007, high-tech issues got almost no final traction in Congress, despite that broad support. , “E. John Krumholtz, director of federal affairs at Microsoft, said the bill was ‘worse than the status quo, and the status quo is a disaster.’” More recently, FWD.us has also had tremendous difficulty in affecting change in Washington. Several of its strategies have backfired, . Joe Green, who founded the organization, following discontent over the performance of the group’s lobbying efforts. It’s a strange dichotomy. How is it that a policy generally received well by legislators and policymakers seems to always be thwarted in Washington horse trading? The answer is jobs, of course, but even more than that, it is about the quality of the professions available to high-tech workers. , and many groups want to protect that bright spot in an economy which has otherwise seen . Labor unions like the AFL-CIO, , are among the most aggressive in blocking changes to high-tech immigration. These unions simply don’t believe arguments about “worker shortages,” since such arguments have been used for more than a century to foster an environment for employers to lower wages, weaken job security, and cut benefits. Such tactics are not just used by stereotypical factory owners, but have been adapted by managers of tech companies as well. , Eric Weinstein, currently a managing director at Thiel Capital and a long-time researcher on the market for elite labor, showed that labor “shortages” in high-tech fields described during the immigration reform efforts in the early 1990s were largely a fiction, and that the reality was anything but. Any shortage that might exist would have tremendous benefits for workers, but was “… an economic crisis as seen from the point of view of the large government, university and industry employers.” It was the active policy of the government to encourage immigration, because one of the primary benefits was lower wages for industry, and thus, greater competitiveness for the United States. Shortages allow workers to drive their salaries higher, since they have increased leverage to negotiate with. That’s one of the reasons why we are suddenly reading in the New Yorker about . It’s also the reason why tech company wages have increased, to the point that even . It is ridiculous to think that the talent crunch affecting Silicon Valley has no effect on these rising wages. We all know these issues. And yet, tech companies and venture capitalists continue to avoid addressing them head on, instead advocating for more immigration as the simplest solution to the problems plaguing Silicon Valley. Trust starts with honesty, and so far in this debate, we have had very little of it. Companies should admit that a shortage means they have to pay higher wages, and that they simply don’t want to do that. I am a global knowledge worker, and like most people, I am a strong believer in the power of immigration to improve our world for the better. But we can’t start this discussion – one that goes to the core of the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people – without the proper respect for workers who have built up the largest tech companies. Solving our problems on the homefront may be just the way to build the coalition needed to see comprehensive high-tech immigration reform come to fruition. |
After Alleged Rape In New Delhi, Uber Lays Out Additional Safety Measures In India | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | Following an incident in which one of its drivers in New Delhi, ride-hailing company has announced . Those precautions were announced ahead of a hearing that the local Transport Department will be having on Monday to determine whether Uber and other mobile transportation services should be allowed to operate there. Last month, Uber came under scrutiny in New Delhi after a driver for the service was . While the company said it was cooperating with local authorities following the incident, its service was quickly , along with . As a result, Uber while reviewing its operations in the market. Uber has long touted its trust and safety features, which typically include background and driver checks, as well as transparency into driver and passenger accounts and a two-sided rating system. But as , it’s not enough for Uber to rely simply on government records to ensure the driving and criminal records of its drivers are clean in some international markets. For instance, as wrote after the incident in New Delhi, “Anyone who has spent any amount of time in India would know that background checks just don’t work and a certificate from the cops is just paperwork.” In response, Uber has laid out additional measures it is taking to ensure passenger safety in the India market. That includes having all of its drivers reviewed again to ensure they have “authentic and valid police verification,” as well as hiring local “safety exerts” to detect fraud and to develop more effective screening methods for its drivers. In addition to more advanced driver screening, Uber also says it is rolling out a local incident response team to resolve critical issues there. It is also adding a ShareMyETA button to the app, rolling it out first in India to allow passengers to send trip details to loved ones. The measures were announced ahead of a hearing that the Delhi Transportation Department is holding on Monday to determine whether the service can resume in that market, according to the blog post. Of course, Delhi is just one market where Uber is facing challenges from the local government. It recently come under fire in Portland, where it while the legality of ride-sharing services are reviewed there. Regulators in Taiwan and Chinese city Chongqing are also , and in South Korea Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was indicted on charges of in that market. Meanwhile, the company has faced trust and safety concerns following a series of incidents in other markets. A driver for Uber in Boston was earlier this month. That incident follows the beating of an in San Francisco, and an off-duty Uber driver being after striking and killing a six-year old child last year. Those incidents, combined with Uber’s fast rate of hiring — CEO Kalanick said the company was in September — have led some regulators to look more closely into the company’s screening and on-boarding processes. Earlier this month, the district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles for claims it made about the quality of its background checks. As a result, Uber has committed to around the world. But some of those investments — most prominently its ShareMyETA button — will roll out in India first. |
Walmart’s New Site Allows Consumers To Exchange Unwanted Gift Cards For Walmart e-Cards | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | Walmart has teamed up with the gift card exchange website CardCash to launch a new where consumers can exchange their unwanted gift cards – many of which were likely received over the holidays – for a Walmart card instead. The site went live on Christmas day and is offering up to 97 percent of the value of the original gift card from over 200 different retailers. The site in particular seems to target Amazon, as those cards fetch 95 percent in trade-in value, while others, like Gap for example, are currently seeing just 84 percent of their original value. These rates will fluctuate with market conditions, including things like how many cards from similar retailers are being traded in and other factors. The new website is set up on Walmart.com’s domain at , and the retailer is now heavily promoting the option in a large, rotating banner at the top of its home page. To use the new service, consumers enter the merchant name on their card, the amount, and then instantly receive an offer they can choose to accept or reject. If they opt to take the offer, they would enter the full card number, PIN and other basic customer information. After completion, Walmart emails a Walmart e-Card that can be used online or printed out and used at a local store. The physical card being exchanged never has to be mailed in, and there’s no minimum balance requirement. In other words, consumers don’t have to wait until they’ve been given a new gift card they don’t want – they can also get rid of gift cards that have been previously used but still have funds remaining. The cards Walmart collects will be re-sold on CardCash.com, a large online gift card exchange. The site is one of several of a similar nature that see a ton of business after the holidays as consumers dump their unwanted cards for cash or swaps. It competes with sites like Cardhub, Cardpool, Coinstar and more. But scoring a partnership with Walmart is a big win for CardCash, clearly. There are other ways to sell unwanted gift cards where consumers have more control over the rates, however. Raise.com, for instance, where consumers get to set the selling price for their cards, as well as where you can buy gift cards for less than face value while shopping in the store. Gift cards have become a popular go-to gift, with the NRF that total gift card spending is expected to reach $31.74 billion in 2014. However, according to a study from CEB TowerGroup, about $1 billion in gift cards go unused each year because people forget about them or don’t find anything they want to buy. In earlier years, retailers didn’t mind that unused gift cards were floating around, but now they’re not able to until the cards are redeemed. Walmart says the gift card exchange is still considered a test, but it may continue the program after the holidays if it sees large enough demand. |
When Will Your Phone Replace Your Keys And Wallet? | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | When I leave my home, I check that I have three things: keys, wallet, phone. How long will it be until the first two are obsolete? My wallet has only three things I actually need: credit cards, cash, ID. Any American with an iPhone 6 has already obsoleted credit cards, courtesy of Apple Pay. Any Kenyan, , etc. with a phone has long obsoleted cash, courtesy of M-Pesa, Orange Money, etc. As for ID, well, if you’re in Iowa, : “Iowans will soon be able to use a mobile app on their smartphones as their official driver’s license … sometime in 2015.” Can the other 49 states be far behind? Well, yes. But they be? I doubt it. Expect a profusion of government ID apps sometime over the next few years. In America, cash is still the real sticking point for wallet replacement. Maybe, if we’re lucky, , , and other Bitcoin startups will eventually drag America up to near-equivalence with African e-cash. I certainly wouldn’t go expecting American banks and carriers to do it. What about keys? Already set. KwikSet’s Kevo locks (I would link to their site, but there’s an incredibly annoying autoplaying video with audio , so forget it) let you use Bluetooth LE to open your home. (which has a much nicer home page, go click on them instead) does much the same. Both also let you send temporary e-keys to guests, a very cool feature not available for physical locks. So in principle, if you live in Iowa, and don’t much use cash, then as soon as next year, you can buy one of those electronic locks and get rid of your keys and wallet forever… …but you probably won’t. Because if you ask me, the obstacle barring key/wallet replacement isn’t apps; it’s redundancy. Lose your phone today, and you can still pay for a ride home and let yourself in. But if your phone doubles as your key and your wallet, then if/when it’s lost or stolen, you are suddenly screwed beyond belief. Especially since most online services are moving to two-factor authorization, in which the second factor is … a code sent to your phone. Which in turn is much more vulnerable than your keys or wallet. You don’t spend half your waking time waving the latter two around. So: I predict that within the next 2-3 years, many of you will be to replace your keys and wallet with your phone — but few if you will actually do so, until and unless the redundancy problem is solved. Various solutions do immediately occur, but all are imperfect. The ability to temporary download your phone’s authorizations/settings onto a new/borrowed phone? Maybe, but that sounds like a key-management security nightmare to me. (Private encryption key, not physical door-opening key.) Temporary authorization for a friend or trusted service who can take you home and open your door? Again, not without its own flaws. Oh yes. And remember: unless you own a , you don’t control your phone. Its manufacturer does, its carrier does, and whoever wrote its OS does, but you probably don’t have root on its main microprocessor, and you don’t have root on its baseband processor or its SIM card. Do you really want your every financial transaction, your entire legal identity, and your access to your own home to be dictated by a device controlled not by you, but by multiple separate mega-conglomerates? With absolutely no fallback to dumb incorruptible brute-force real-world entities such as steel keys and $50 bills? I too would like to leave my home with only my phone and leave my keys and wallet in the past where they belong. But it seems like before we do that , we need to solve the same problems that seem to be erupting everywhere else around our world, both online and offline: redundancy, security, and trust. |
Healthcare Predictions For 2015 | Julie Papanek | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | Next year will be big for healthcare. We felt small tremors in 2014 of the seismic changes underway. In 2015, I predict five changes to the core of the U.S. healthcare system: insurance, pharmaceuticals, supplies, medical services and payments. Let’s take a look at each of these trends, what they mean for the healthcare sector, and what they mean for you. This October, tipped its hand by a healthcare insurance exchange online. However, the insurance products currently sold on its exchange do not have Walmart as the carrier, which will change in 2015. Walmart’s public announcements thus far provide a clear preview of the insurance plan’s future design. Primary care through retail clinics and $4 generic drugs at the pharmacy will drive traffic into stores. For specialty care, the plan will leverage the Centers of Excellence program that Walmart already offers to its 1.2 million insured employees. In this program, consumers pay little to nothing out-of-pocket for knee, hip surgery, and cancer treatment if they go to a short list of high-quality medical centers like Mayo, the Cleveland Clinic, Mercy and Geisinger. With a store within five miles of 95 percent of all Americans and retail transactional data from its consumers, Walmart can provided tailored population health services and incentivize healthier shopping decisions to prevent diabetes and heart disease. Despite a 5x increase in venture investments, most digital health companies are not profitable. Digital health CEOs should look at pharma as its paying customer. Despite their vast differences, pharmaceutical manufacturers are starting to pay tech startups to solve their complicated problems. One major issue pharma wants your help with is accessing and selling to physicians. In person detailing by trained sales representatives has been the core of pharma’s sale strategy for decades. Yet, one-fourth of all MD’s offices and two-fifths of all offices with 10 or more MDs refuse to see pharmaceutical sales reps in their offices. The Sunshine Act, which compelled every pharma company to disclose what it spends on each MD, accelerated the problem. The problem of customer awareness and engagement is ripe for tech companies, particularly those focused on social media, mobile advertising and video, to capitalize on. Next year is going to be a tipping point, because spending and hiring within pharma’s commercial organizations are changing fast. Plus, the FDA published draft guidance on social media in July 2014. Suddenly, these corporations have large eMarketing teams and VPs of digital health. We are seeing CIOs from companies like Dell working at Merck. These indicators tell me that 2015 will be the year when pharma is willing to shop for best-in-breed companies that address their business problems. Amazon sells a dizzying array of products. Catheters and surgical gloves are not on the market yet, but they will be soon. Doctors and practice managers are just like the rest of us — they love Amazon Prime for their homes, so why not for their practices? Amazon will first target small practices and cutout group-purchasing organizations that take an undeserved cut of savings that could be passed on to physicians. If Amazon can ship you toilet paper in two hours, it can supply a small practice with gloves and gowns. The volume from these accounts will justify free shipping, especially when Amazon moves upstream into higher-margin products such as sutures, syringes and other commoditized supplies. While medical professionals and business managers will be driven by price and convenience, Amazon’s motivations will be financial. General surgical supply company Owens & Minor generated $9 billion in annual revenue last year. Amazon isn’t known for letting glaring business opportunities go untouched, especially those that can move its stock price. If you understand the flow of payments in healthcare, you can predict the trends. Consumers and employers are purchasing insurance plans with high deductibles. As a result, the first dollar that hospitals earn is now coming from consumers. Actually, the first $17,000 is coming from consumers. With an average income of $55,000, most American consumers simply can’t pay their medical bills. When they don’t pay, it hurts providers financially. What consumers don’t pay shows up as accounts receivable on hospital balance sheets and eventually turns into bad debt. Since many hospitals are financed by debt and their credit worthiness is partially determined by the health of their balance sheet, the problem of getting patients to pay is urgent. This raises the question — how can we find the money to help consumers finance their health care payments? Many consumers are able and willing to pay their medical bills, they just can’t do it all at once. Peer-to-peer lending companies have paved the way for unsecured structure notes, where an individual’s loan can be financed by others. These have shown impressive growth. Peer-to-peer lending is already being used to finance plastic surgery and other cash-pay procedures. Now it could be used for the majority of medical expenses in the U.S. There are 54 million Latinos living in the United States, . Politicians have taken notice and are paying attention to Latinos as an important voting demographic. Healthcare providers are beginning to do so, too. Latinos have been disenfranchised by the U.S. healthcare system because of legal status, English language skills and financial constraints. Fewer than 4 percent of healthcare providers speak Spanish and most do not know how to approach the cultural and economic diversity within the Latino population. Even native English speakers can’t make sense of PPOs vs. HMOs. As a result, Latinos are 1 out of every 5 uninsured and leverage healthcare services differently than other demographic cohorts As hospitals compete for volume, they cannot ignore 1 out of 5 Americans. In order to win the loyalty of this untapped customer segment, we will see Latino-branded services with evening and weekend hours to serve dual-income families. Since these services will be built from scratch to provide high-quality care at low prices, they might leap frog the care that the rest of the population currently receives. Change has historically come slowly and reluctantly to the healthcare industry, but thanks to widespread demand from the government, payers, and consumers for improvement in coverage and care, it seems to be speeding up. These five predictions represent a power shift in the world of healthcare, where new players emerge as forces to be reckoned with, and consumers gain greater control over their care. I predict, and hope, that 2015 will be the year when leaders across the healthcare spectrum will welcome innovation and embrace much-needed change. |
Google Translate Adds 10 More Languages, Including Burmese | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | Google’s translation tool is constantly adding new languages, but its , the official language of Myanmar, as well as Malayalam, one of India’s six classical languages with 38 million speakers. The latter is especially significant because it ties into Google’s efforts to get more Indian users onto its services. Earlier this month, for example, Google launched the Indian Language Internet Alliance, which seeks to increase offerings for Hindi speakers, as well as Hindi voice search. At that time, Google India MD Rajan Anandan that “to reach our goal of 500 million Internet users by 2017 [in India] we need to make the Internet accessible to those who don’t speak English.” The Internet giant plans to add other Indian languages to its services, and the addition of Malayalam to Google Translate is a small but noteworthy step toward that goal. India’s official languages are Hindi and English, and the government also recognizes about 20 other languages. According to the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, however, people in India , with 122 spoken by more than 10,000 people. , India currently has about 200 million Internet users, with five million new users added every month, which means that India will have more Internet users than the U.S. within the next year. But only 198 million Indian people are estimated to be proficient in English, so it’s important for Google to increase its roster of offerings in different Indian languages if it wants to tap into that market. Meanwhile, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has stressed the importance of free speech in Myanmar. Last year , he called for the Myanmar government to stay away from regulating the Internet, saying “The answer to bad speech is more speech. More communication. More voices. If you are a political leader you get a much better idea of what your citizens are thinking about.” Schmidt also added that Google’s first priority in Myanmar is to improve access to information with its search engine and tools such as Google Translate and Maps. According to Google, its latest additions brings Google Translate’s total number of supported languages to 90, and mean that 200 million more people will be able to use it to translate texts to and from their native languages. In its blog post, the company reiterated that the accuracy of Google Translate depends on members of its , who supplement the tool’s algorithms by correcting translations and translating phrases. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 12 | 18 | null |
YouTube Gets A Built-In GIF Creator | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | Remember back in November of last year when I for making GIFs from videos? Some called me crazy. Many, however, agreed completely. It seems YouTube agreed, too. YouTube is now quietly rolling out its own GIF maker. It doesn’t seem to be enabled on all videos just yet, but it’s definitely there for some. Take, for example, pretty much any video from (as spotted ). Click to , hit the share button, and GIF away. GIF creation through the tool is quite simple: tap the share button, set your start/end points, set any captions you might want, and create away. The tool is super fast, and YouTube hosts the GIFs themselves. The final look of the tool isn’t too unlike , which means I’m totally going to take 100 percent credit for this idea despite the fact it had probably been in the works for months/years. Need to make a GIF , but YouTube’s new tool isn’t enabled on your oh-so-GIFable video yet? , which turns pretty much any YouTube video into a GIF with just a quick URL tweak. |
Anonymous Leaked A Massive List Of Passwords And Credit Card Numbers | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 12 | 27 | Following through on , a Twitter account claiming affiliation with Anonymous released a list of what it says are usernames and passwords for 13,000 accounts on Amazon, PlayStation, XBox Live, Hulu Plus, Walmart and other retail and entertainment services. The hack additionally included credit card numbers, security codes and expiration dates.The trove . : VPNCyberGhost, UbiSoft, VCC, Brazzers, UFC TV, PSN, XBL Gamers, Twitch TV, Amazon, Hulu Plus, Dell, Walmart, (EA) Games, LEAKED.. — Anonymous (@AnonymousGlobo) In addition to providing account information for online retailer, gaming and video services, the cache also includes information for a variety of pornography sites. The Daily Dot has compiled a full . And just to top it off, the group included a stolen download of “The Interview.” When Sony pulled the release of “The Interview,” Anonymous . It seems the company’s decision to distribute the film in certain theaters and online in the U.S. did not deter the hackers. (As TechCrunch noted earlier, “The Interview” in its first 20 hours) Well, to finish with . Film "The Interview" available for download. Kernel.mp4 2.05 GB — Anonymous (@AnonymousGlobo) The allegedly stolen account information for PlayStation and Xbox Live was posted just a day after another hacker group called Lizard Squad for taking the two networks out on what is likely the biggest gaming day of the year. |
Oculus Acquires A Hand-Tracking Company And An Augmented Reality Company | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | Will the Oculus Rift someday bring your hands into virtual reality? That seems to be a direction they’re moving in, based on some acquisitions they just made. This morning, Oculus quietly disclosed a pair of acquisitions: Nimble VR, and 13th Lab. Nimble VR is a hand-tracking, skeletal detection camera built almost entirely with the Rift in mind. You’d strap their camera to your Rift, and boom: your in-game hands and your real-life hands are moving in sync. If that company sounds familiar, you might’ve seen their Kickstarter campaign. They set out to raise $62,500 back at the end of October, and had more than doubled that by the time they canceled the campaign this morning (in light of this acquisition) . Given that Oculus itself all began with a Kickstarter campaign, there’s something particularly sweet about that detail. 13th Lab, meanwhile, is a computer vision/augmented reality company. While their main project focuses on creating 3D maps from image data, they’ve also done work in image detection and augmented reality. One of their coolest tricks: detecting a room, then replacing it with a 1:1 3d environment they’ve turned into a video game. Sounds like a good fit for VR, right? Financial details weren’t disclosed for either deal. Check out the examples of what each company did down below. |
Netflix Fires Back At FCC Commish Pai’s Allegation That It Is Building Internet Fast Lanes For Its Own Content | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | After initially declining to comment, Netflix has responded to FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai’s letter alleging that the company was working to “effectively secure” online fast lanes for its content through deployment of its own caching technology. Netflix, unsurprisingly, doesn’t buy the argument. The company claims that its “Open Connect” caching tools do not advantage its content, is based on open source technology, and works to protect the privacy of its users. Caching is a separate issue from interconnection. In the case of interconnection, Netflix to directly put its content onto their private networks. Netflix has that it should not have to pay these fees, that interconnections should be regulated under net neutrality rules, but also that it will pay in the short-term to protect its users’ video performance. The company also spends money to install Open Connect hardware at ISPs. That effort, however, is distinct from what the commissioner described as “open standards for streaming video,” placing Netflix’s method of caching its content apart from that of other companies. Commissioner Pai argued in his letter that Netflix’s support for net neutrality was in opposition to its work to use Open Connect. Since Netflix is paying to install Open Connect hardware, it is financing a non-industry-standard technology that its own content works with well, leaving other content companies to use a less-Netflix-based set of tooling. Netflix’s counter argument is that it’s the last-mile component of networks that matters, and as long as any ISP in question isn’t speeding up the video company’s content once it climbs aboard its network, then all’s fair. Caching exists on ISP networks, however, making it a last-mile issue, and therefore party to the potential regulatory authority of net neutrality. If Netflix’s support of its own technology does lead to the company having quicker speeds on top of ISP networks, it could be argued that the firm is in moral abrogation of the spirit of net neutrality — that a company cannot use a financially-based effort to improve the delivery of its own content to its customers in a way that is not freely available to its competitors. In its missive, the company reiterated its support of net neutrality and the banning of fast lanes for content that can afford it. Netflix also made an important historical point, indicating that it had “supported the FCC’s use of section 706 to promulgate its 2010 Open Internet Order,” noting that the legal setback that net neutrality suffered in January of this year, when it lost a key court case “has left [Commissioner Pai] and [his] colleagues at the FCC with little alternative but to consider other enforcement tools.” That is a roundabout way of advocating for the use of Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 to reclassify broadband service as a utility, which would bring a greater regulatory burden onto Internet service. The President is a . If you are annoyed about the gray area that exists as a miasma between paid prioritization — fast lanes — caching, interconnection and a market-friendly, open-source technology that Netflix doesn’t use, you’re not alone. Netflix wants to have it both ways, it seems, at once financing technology that isn’t widely in use that helps its own content, while also claiming that given that Open Connect is open source, isn’t just for its own use. But given, in the case of the latter issue, that only a single ISP supports it, how precisely open it is isn’t clear. The larger political context here matters. Commissioner Pai, a Republican, is opposed to net neutrality regulations. If he can find a way to embarrass one of the key advocates for net neutrality — by essentially painting them as hypocrites — it could go some distance to making net neutrality more , and less of a key point for the protection of the Internet. The FCC will rule on new net neutrality regulations in 2015. It had been expected that the agency would do so this year, but that deadline slipped in the face of massive public comment, the sheer complexity of the issue at hand, and certainly the shifting political climate following the decisive midterm elections. |
Snapdeal, One Of India’s Leading E-commerce Sites, Acquires Wishpicker To Deliver Better Product Recommendations | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | , one of India’s largest e-commerce businesses, has acquired , a tech platform that uses machine learning to deliver recommendations for gift purchases. The deal’s financial terms were undisclosed. The company says this is the fifth acquisition it has made so far. Back in April, the company, whose competitors include Amazon India and Flipkart, . Since folded into Snapdeal’s main site, Dootzon, a fashion products discovery site, was also geared toward matching shoppers with products they are likely to purchase. Other companies Snapdeal has acquired include group buying site Grabbon in 2010; sports retailer esportsbuy.com in 2012; and Shopo.in, a marketplace for handmade items, in 2013. Snapdeal, Flipkart, and Amazon India are competing with each other for shoppers as India’s e-commerce market grows rapidly. , e-commerce is expected to grow from $10 billion to $43 billion in the next five years. Snapdeal, Flipkart, and Amazon India are expected to acount for $4 billion in sales this fiscal year. As they size of their inventory grows, it’s important for India’s main e-commerce businesses to focus on finetuning their product categories and recommendation engines. Founded by Apurv Bansal and Prateek Rathore, Wishpicker’s technology helps users find gift options using information about their relationship with the recipient, the occasion, and his or her age and personality, or looking at the recipient’s likes on Facebook. In a prepared statement, Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal said, “We are investing in strengthening our technology platform and Wishpicker.com is an excellent platform with entreprenurial, engineering talent and fits in perfectly with our vision. We believe that with consumer buying trends evolving, intelligent recommendations will be one of the key drivers for business volume for our sellers. This is an important acquisition for us in terms of adding technology capabilities and helping sellers connect with buyers in newer ways.” |
With $2.2M In Funding, VideoAmp Helps TV Advertisers Reach More Eyeballs Online | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | is the latest startup trying to move TV ad dollars online. The startup is officially launching today, and it’s also announcing that it has $2.2 million in funding from Anthem Venture Partners, Simon Equity Partners, Third Wave Capital, Wavemaker Partners, and ZenShin Capital. Co-founder and CEO Ross McCray is disgustingly young (23), but he already has experience in the video ad world, having served as head of product and technology at the Channel Factory. He told me that TV advertisers are getting more sophisticated about how they spend online — they started out by just treating it as an afterthought to their TV campaigns, but now Nielsen is starting to measure cross-platform campaigns. What’s still missing, McCray argued, is “cross optimization” — in other words, using data from one platform to influence buying on another. In VideoAmp’s case, that means taking data about an advertiser’s TV campaign and finding the point “of diminishing returns,” where they’re just paying to reach the same people over and over. VideoAmp suggests how the advertiser can move that spending into online video to reach a de-duplicated/non-overlapping set of viewers. “We’re here to be the guys who don’t say, ‘Here’s a report,'” McCray said. “We’re optimizing, moving the media, doing the math, pushing that forward.” VideoAmp also says it can help advertisers buy from both public and private inventory on desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets, and deliver real-time data on how their campaigns on doing. While McCray focused on online ads during our conversation, McCray also said the company will reach “the next level” as more TV adopts a programmatic ad-buying model. Eventually, he wants to tell advertisers, “Come to us optimize your TV and your digital campaign in unison.” And even though VideoAmp will work directly with advertisers, it’s also looking to integrate with existing ad-buying tools through its API. (“Everyone wants their own custom flair, whether it’s a network or reseller,” McCray said.) In fact, he claimed that the API was built first, with the current VideoAmp product built on top of it. “We want to be a technology company and have others build their ifnrastructure on top of ours,” he said. |
In Public Q&A, Zuckerberg Says Facebook Wants Diverse Expression But Won’t Launch A Dislike Button | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | In currently being , Zuckerberg discussed how Facebook won’t add a dislike button but wants to give more nuance to how people share emotions and reactions other than approval, and explained how he doesn’t think connecting with friends is a waste of time. The 30-year old CEO, clad in his gray t-shirt uniform, said Facebook changes its privacy policy as infrequently as possible while keeping up with its new technologies. The company is working on oversight of experimentation and user testing around emotion and sensitive communities. And while Facebook gets flack for making us less connected in real-life, Zuckerberg said the product’s goal it to let us blow past Dunbar’s Number and maintain relationships with more people. last month saw him tackle some of Facebook’s toughest questions and criticisms head on. The CEO explained that Facebook split off Messenger from its main app and forced people to download it for mobile chat to get people quicker replies from friends and a better experience. He addressed the decrease in organic Page reach, saying that since people Like more Pages and add more friends all the time, and everyone is sharing more content, but people spend a limited time browsing News Feed, competition naturally reduces reach over time. Here’s today’s questions: “You know we’re thinking about it, on the Dislike button. It’s an interesting question, right, because there are two things that it can mean. And we’re considering and talking about doing one and not the other. So the one that we don’t want to do: The Like button is really valuable because it’s a way for you to very quickly express a positive emotion or sentiment when someone puts themselves out there and shares something. And, you know, some people have asked for a Dislike button because they want to be able to say ‘That thing isn’t good’. And that’s not something that we think is good for the world. So we’re not going to build that. I don’t think there needs to be a voting mechanism about whether posts are good or bad. I don’t think that’s socially very valuable or good for the community to help people share the important moments in their lives. But the thing that I think is very valuable is there are more sentiments that people want to express than positivity or that they Like something. You know a lot of times people share things on Facebook that are sad moments in their lives, or are tough cultural or social things and often people tell us that they don’t feel comfortable press Like because Like isn’t the appropriate sentiment when someone lost a loved one or is talking about a very difficult issue. So one of the things that we’ve had some dialogue about internally and that we’ve thought about for quite a while is what’s the right way to make it so people can easily express a broader range of emotions to empathize or to express surprise or laughter or any of these things. And you know you can always just comment, right, so it’s not like there isn’t a way to do that today, and a lot of people are commenting on posts all the time. But there’s something that’s just so simple about the Like button. You know if you’re commenting, a lot of the time you feel like you have to have something witty to say or add to the conversation. But everyone feels like they can just press the Like button and that’s an important way to sympathize or empathize with someone in an important moment that put themselves out there to share. And giving people the power to do that in more ways with more emotions would be powerful, but we need to figure out the right way to do it so it ends up being a force for good, not a force for bad and demeaning the posts that people are putting out there. So that’s an important thing. We don’t have anything that’s coming out soon but it’s an important area of discussion.” Don’t worry about making mistakes too much. People ask what mistakes I wish I could have avoided. But mistakes are how you learn. The real question is how you learn from them. I started out when I was so young I didn’t know anything about running a company. You gotta keep on powering ahead and not stress too much about it. We grow up and go to school and then are told to socialize after your homework. That’s so pervasive in society, that people think I have to get all my work done before I focus on my friends or family, and I think that’s wrong. My friends and family, that’s what matters. I don’t think connecting with them is a waste of time at all. It’s easier to find someone on the service if they use the real name instead of some fake screen name. Some people want to defraud people or trick them, and do bad things, if you’re connected to your real world identity you’re more accountable, rather than if you’re connected to some fake handle. It’s about creating a safe community. Facebook’s role in civic debate is bringing you more opinions. If something big happened, you might have read about it in just a few newspapers, but we want everyone in the world to have a voice. That’s a pretty new thing in the world. People turn to Facebook when there’s unrest. I think is important to have diversity of opinion. On Facebook, even if you’re republican or democrat you probably have some friends in the other camp. If you‘re christian, or jewish, or muslim, you probably have friends from another religion. So on Facebook you hear opinions from people who are different from you. We update the privacy policy about once a year to reflect the product and policy changes from the last year. It use to be that Facebook was one website. Now Facebook as a company offers a bunch of different services. Facebook and News Feed, Messenger, Instagram. But as technology evolves, Facebook might want to build things on location for example, so that’s something we’ll put into our privacy policy. We don’t want to change it too often. It’s a lot to read through and digest. Sometimes we do the changes well, sometimes we don’t and get criticized. But we need to follow the technical progress of new things we can do. We want to be good citizens in the community. Whether that’s having programs at local middle schools and high schools to come here and get trained, or summer internship programs. I taught a class on entrepreneurship. I think I learned more than I taught. There are always going to be more things like that that we want to do. We support the local police. I’ve personally donated to the local Ravenswood health center. If there are things we can do to be better citizens to the community and Bay Area, we’d love to hear suggestions. I try to use my time proactively. I try to spend the majority of my time on things I want to be working on. ost important thing is to be putting your time into things you want to see happen, not what other people want. You have to be responsive to the community, but I think any entrepreneur or anyone would say it’s easy to see your time eaten up. Fried chicken. It’s one of the few disciplines where you can sit down, write code for a few hours, and come away with something concrete that’s valuable for the world. I think it’s an important way for young people to express themselves. If you can code, you have the power to sit down and create something, and no one can stop you. Around half of the people at Facebook are technical. Even for people who don’t write code, understanding engineering is valuable no matter what you want to do, so we’re supportive of efforts in the community to help people learn to code. There was this press about a report that a Facebook data scientist released this summer, and we took it as an opportunity to tighten things up. We think the only way we can make our product better is to try out things and get feedback from the community. We’ll try new features, and different ways of showing things in the News Feed. We try things to make Facebook faster. We try to have a positive impact with everything we roll out to the community. Testing is an important part of Facebook. My wife is a doctor, and there’s an assumption that there’s a consequence of any test you run, and there’s a belief that every test’s potential benefit needs to outweigh the risks. There are some things we shouldn’t test. Anything with young people, or sensitive communities is something we need to be especially careful about, or anything around emotions or psychological well-being. Ee need to make sure people internally don’t have the ability to test on things that could hurt people. The study we did was because there was press that seeing posts about happy moments in people’s lives on Facebook made people sad because they feel like they’re missing out. We don’t want to make people sad. We have a responsibility to understand the impact of Facebook. We ran a relatively small study, showed people more or fewer happy posts and measured if they were posting happy or sad things afterwards. If something’s happening on Facebook that’s going to have a negative effect on society, I think it’s our responsibility to change it to have a more positive effect. We need to make a change so if an engineer wants to run a test, people at Facebook check to make sure it’s something acceptable to test. A lot of what Facebook tries to do is help you stay connected to the people you already know, rather than trying to help you meet new people. I think that’s an important role in society. What defines a tool is it takes a human ability and augments it. I wear glasses and that enhances my vision. Bicycles and cars extend our ability to move around. Steve Jobs described computers as a bicycle for the mind. What we’re trying to do with Facebook and social networks overall is enhance the ability to maintain relationships. Research says people can only maintain relationships with 150 people at a time, and we want to expand that. There are people I see on Facebook and I see the important events in their life. Or if my family is traveling somewhere else, I can’t be there to experience it in person. We want to extend the human capacity to have empathy and relate to more people. If I have an option to see my wife or mom in person, I’ll take that over a phone call or talking to them on Facebook. In person is a high bandwidth, richer way of communicating. But Facebook helps us communicate with more people. I try to think about it because I don’t have any children. On one hand, I remember being really young and using technology and I thought it was pretty positive. Sometimes I think society has an overbearing attitude that children don’t know how use do things right. We want to take care of our family. Bullying is a real issue and something we take really seriously. We work with local law enforcement and school administrators to make sure there’s no bullying on the platform, and things like real names help with that. I would follow our rules. We don’t allow people under 13 to use Facebook. After that, I’d probably talk to them about it. I‘d want my children to use technology to gain an understanding of the modern world and banning it isn’t a way to help them learn what’s out there. But you want to be in constant dialogue and make sure to report anything that’s harmful. We need to continue doing our best to make sure that goes away. — Overall, Zuckerberg seemed confident and affable during the Q&A, though he frequently relied on saying “That’s a really good question” and “That’s something Facebook takes really seriously” to buy himself time to formulate answers. Still, it’s impressive that he would be willing to so directly and publicly respond to some of the company’s harshest criticisms. |
YouTube Is Testing An Autoplay Feature That Streams Suggested Videos Automatically | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | , always on the lookout for ways to keep people watching more videos and staying on its site longer, is testing out a new feature that could prove to be a honeypot (or major annoyance!) for casual visitors: video autoplays, where once the video you came to watch ends, instead of defaulting to the usual grid of suggested videos, another video starts up. The feature was flagged to us by Deepanker Verma, whose Indian blog wrote up the appearance of the Autoplay function. We reached out to YouTube to find out more. A spokesperson confirms to us that autoplay been rolled out globally with a “small percent” of users to the site while it collects feedback on the feature. (In fact, the illustration here comes from an avid YouTube user who lives in Fresno who is also in the test group.) “With more videos coming to YouTube every minute we’re always experimenting with ways to help people more easily find, watch and share the videos that matter most to them,” said the spokesperson. “We’ll consider rolling features out more broadly based on feedback on these experiments.” As you can see in the screenshot above, Google/YouTube currently presents autoplay as an optional feature. It’s set to “on” by default every time you open a new video, at which point you get an “up next” dialogue on the screen before the next video plays. Those who prefer not to see the suggested stream can disable it — . Clarification: YouTube tells me that the autoplay toggle on the top right of the page is permanent: once you turn it off, it will stay off. You’ll only see the countdown screen when autoplay is ‘on’, and the ‘cancel’ button on that screen turns off the autonav just for that video. There are a few good reasons why it makes sense for YouTube to push a feature like auotplay more widely. As we have seen with other streaming sites, one of the biggest problems with a large selection of content is being spoiled for choice: you can watch anything you want, but you don’t know what you actually want to watch. YouTube — like Spotify and Netflix — have been trying to come up with different ways of tackling that problem, including integrating social features so that you can see what your friends are watching; creating playlists; and using playlists made by others. You can think of autoplay as a complement to those for casual users who are less social or less organised, or looking for an even more lean-back experience. In that sense, it is a format that feels a lot like the site’s namesake: the tube, or broadcast television, where you are dealt a stream of video content on channels without much interaction. Currently users spend on average 24.4 minutes on YouTube per visit, according to comScore — a number very close to the classic half hour of a TV program. Right now it looks like the other videos that appear in the autoplay stream are just others from the YouTube catalog, but you can see how the format would lend itself to another piece of video content that YouTube already automatically inserts elsewhere: advertisements. With video ads being a hot commodity these days, having a place where YouTube could insert an ad a video as well as before the video effectively could double its inventory. Interestingly, after Susan Wojcicki was appointed head of YouTube earlier this year, it came with a new focus on revenue generation and advertising, specifically looking for ways to inject more advertising and advertiser-friendly formats into YouTube. “Advertisers have said they want YouTube to resemble a TV network,” . Autoplay would help with that. It could also potentially be a boost in competition with Facebook for eyeballs and ad dollars. Facebook is , in part because of its own version of the autoplay feature — where videos begin to play when you scroll past them in your timeline (albeit on mute). But as with so many changes on YouTube, despite the positives for the bottom line, it could also become really annoying. We could find tests of the feature once before, back in August 2014, when the autoplay feature was ID’d by , who figured a way to call it up by modifying YouTube’s cookies. But one to it as something that Google has toyed with even earlier. While autoplay was effective in getting people to stay on the site for longer, a “meaningful percentage” of users hated it. Indeed, many others responding to this story on social media and in the comments below have pointed out how this would be irritating, with one YouTube power users specifically. Along, with autoplay, YouTube has been working on other features in limited rollouts, such as a and . |
Lending Club’s IPO Pops 56% In Its First Day, Sets Stage For Hortonworks And New Relic Offerings | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | Lending Club had a strong debut in the public markets today, popping 56 percent from its $15 IPO price to more than $23 per share. As , the company’s offering was “the largest IPO for a U.S.-based tech company” thus far this calendar year. The company’s IPO sets the stage for tomorrow’s flotations of and . New Relic recently . Given the strong performance of Lending Club, both firms could enjoy positive momentum heading into their debuts — if Lending Club had stumbled, it could have changed market sentiment towards technology shares, potentially harming the two succeeding IPOs. Box, a company noted for quick revenue growth and expanding losses, , including its more recent financial results. If Hortonworks and New Relic make it out the door in strong fashion, their quick succession following the Lending Club flotation could clear the path for Box to go public itself. The delayed IPO of Box has long been viewed as a bellwether for technology IPOs. The company has invested aggressively in growing its revenues, spending heavily on sales and marketing costs. Concerns about its margins and future profitability have clouded its path forwarded to date. Taking the above together, the technology market itself is seeing a strong spurt of IPO behavior, which could be viewed under the rubric of either an overheated set of sector conditions, or a symbol of the industry’s current robustness. Whatever the case, investors are being offered a number of options to place bets on the newly mature tech firms. Whether they find them to be appealing as a group is about to be tested. |
Amazon’s Connected Speaker Echo Now Has An iOS App | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | When last month, which plays music, news, radio and more as well as respond to commands and queries via its included virtual assistant technology, it also came with a dedicated mobile app for configurations and other settings. The app was initially available only for Amazon’s Fire OS and Android, but not iOS. Instead, iPhone and iPad users had to use Safari or a desktop browser instead. Today, that changes as Amazon has now released for iOS. Like its Android counterpart, the new iOS app allows you to use your iOS device as a remote control of sorts for interacting with Echo. To get started, the app guides you through a simple set up process, after which you can use the app to control the output to Echo as an alternative to using voice commands. The app lets you manage a variety of settings supported by the connected speaker, including your alarms, music, shopping lists and more. It offers a basic music player as well that lets you see what’s playing, what you’ve played recently and what’s in your queue, while also offering player controls that let you play, pause, rewind, fast forward, shuffle and repeat. The included shopping list interface is also fairly simplistic, allowing you to add or remove items, or check them off. Additionally, the main screen of the application shows you weather and other recent queries, including those Echo has looked up on Wikipedia on your behalf, which is one of the hardware device’s more interesting functions. Amazon Echo, as a reminder, is not yet broadly available. Instead, interested users can visit the Echo website an to purchase the device. The issue here is not likely whether or not Amazon can manage to produce enough hardware to fulfill demand – but rather whether there will actually demand. After all, Amazon’s entry into the smartphone market with Fire Phone flopped, and Echo is at best not, you know, a . (Or Alexa, as Amazon has named its virtual helper.) As with its other hardware-based shopping assistant , the company is basically running its hardware consumer trials in the open to see how people respond. Amazon Echo for iOS is a . |
Adobe Acquires Stock Content Marketplace Fotolia For $800M In Cash | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | Adobe today that it has acquired , a popular marketplace for stock photography and video, for approximately $800 million in cash. The idea is to integrate the service into and make it easier for Creative Cloud members to use (and purchase) the over 34 million images and videos in the company’s portfolio. “The acquisition of Fotolia will reinforce Creative Cloud’s role as the preeminent destination for creatives,” said David Wadhwani, the senior vice president for Digital Media at Adobe in a canned statement today. “Creative Cloud is becoming the go-to marketplace for the creative community to access images, videos, fonts and creative talent, through critical creative services like Fotolia and our new Creative Talent Search capabilities.” Adobe’s Creative Cloud now has over 3.4 million members, as the company also today announced. It’s unclear how exactly Adobe’s subscribers will be able to access Fotolia’s content, but in a phone interview after today’s new broke, the company told me that it’s thinking about this and may offer specific subscription levels to Creative Cloud that could include access to Fotolia’s content. The company is also thinking about ways to connect Fotolia with Behance, its portfolio site, to give its subscribers new ways to monetize their work. Adobe says that Fotolia will definitely continue as a standalone service that will remain open to anyone — Creative Cloud subscription or not. Fotolia was founded in 2004 and has offices in New York, Paris and Berlin. The company is owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., TA Associates and management. Adobe expects the acquisition to close in Q1 2015 and says it’ll start integrating Fotolia’s content into its products soon after that. |
Xiaomi Confirms It Has Suspended Sales In India Due To A Court Ruling | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | Chinese phone maker Xiaomi has confirmed that it has stopped selling devices in India after the New Delhi high court placed an injunction on its business this week. Xiaomi VP of International Hugo Barra revealed the temporary pause in India, which is triggered by , via . Initially, Xiaomi told media it had not received a notice from the high court, but that situation has changed now. “We have been forced to suspend sales in India until further notice due to an order passed by the Delhi High Court. As a law abiding company, we are investigating the matter carefully and assessing our legal options… Please rest assured that we’re doing all we can to revert the situation,” Barra wrote. Ericsson is protesting against Xiaomi’s “unfair” usage of a range of its wireless technology patents. The Stockholm-based company said its legal challenge was a “last resort” that it claimed has followed three years of attempts to communicate with Xiaomi about the issue. Xiaomi told TechCrunch yesterday that it is “open to working with Ericsson to resolve this matter amicably” so this situation may yet be remedied quickly and without too much disruption to its sales in India. Indeed, with a number of India-based phone makers, and it may be holding out for a similar arrangement with Xiaomi. The Chinese firm entered India in July, and it has since sold its Mi3, Redmi and Redmi Note devices in a series of flash-sale-like batches via online retailer . Xiaomi is , and is expected to introduce in the first quarter of next year. Xiaomi has scaled back its aggressive international expansion plans of late in order to devote more time to realizing its potential in some of its newest territories, including India and Indonesia, so it will look to avoid a lengthy sales suspension. The company — which is now — is tipped to sell 60 million smartphones this calendar year. Its executives are optimistic that the number will . |
Microsoft To Unveil The Consumer Side Of Windows 10 On January 21 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | Following the release of an earlier this winter, Microsoft will further takes the wraps off of its next operating system on January 21 of next year. The company has repeatedly claimed that what is has released of Windows 10 far has been a small fraction of its larger size. This event, which won’t release the final preview, as I understand the company’s release schedule, will contain a consumer-friendly set of features. Microsoft is making something akin to a three-part pitch to the computing market: enterprise, then consumer, and finally, a release for developers. The event will be livestreamed. Windows 10 has seen warmer initial reviews that Windows 8 accrued in its early life, but remains a nascent product that has managed to with changes to how it handles OneDrive, the company’s cloud storage solution. TechCrunch will cover the event live. Provided that Microsoft can make a compelling case as to why Windows 10 is different, and therefore more palatable to the mass market than its predecessor, the company could continue its rehabilitation of the Windows brand itself. For now, Microsoft has promised to not release a new build of Windows 10 before the New Year, so it’s a decent guess that until the 21st, we won’t get new code through official channels. |
Perks Don’t Work | Sophie Kitson | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | In Silicon Valley and across the technology industry, there is a real risk of commoditizing engineers. What does that mean? Literally treating engineers like a commodity to be “bought” instead of thinking about the reasons they love to go to work. As the war for talent continues to heat up, hot startups and businesses need to think beyond throwing just money at the problem and gravitate more toward quality and longevity when it comes to making these strategic hiring moves. Throwing ridiculous amounts of money at an engineer is a possible signal that you don’t understand your audience, or your own value proposition – and it is a temporary fix, you’re allowing the market conditions to drive how you treat a very value-based part of the talent community. Money alone isn’t the end all be all of solving problems or building a technology team when you need to differentiate yourself for the long term and retain the amazing engineers you work so hard to hire. It’s no secret that it’s really hard to find and hire great engineering talent and I’m not here to talk about all the many potential root causes for this for this problem. I’m more interested in addressing how we can better connect with the engineers we have, both in the talent market and in our existing teams, to better understand what they want and stop treating them like they are “buyable” and start doing the things that matter. We need to get back to basics, and ask ourselves why engineers choose to work at a given company and what makes them, outside of money, choose one place over another. My company pays well and offers many of the typical perks of a startup. But we wanted to better understand what makes an engineer tick and have come to the following conclusions: We all know engineers have a passion for building and solving problems. For example, a real-time highly available trading algorithm might not have a noble cause, but it’s an incredibly fun problem to solve for an engineer. Historically, Apple teams designing circuit boards used collaboration and friendly competition to build better outcomes — two other ingredients to delight your engineering talent. Facebook has also been known to host all-night hackathons to drive internal innovations for building the applications of tomorrow. Great engineers like to work with other great engineers. If you’re a company that has an amazing engineering team with a focus on a collaborative culture, you can still attract the best talent without having to promise outlandish prizes for joining the team. Finally, I think companies need to ask themselves the following questions: Does your organization understand engineering? Can it balance pace with quality and give the engineers on its team the chance to do good work and satisfy customers or revenue goals without compromising either? Do you have a culture that’s appreciative of engineering and sees it as a vital core, versus a cost center or a team to produce against detailed technical specifications that leave little room for innovation or ownership? Finally, forget the perks and funny money. Do you treat your engineers like grown-ups? Benefits and the working environment matter to an engineer. Do you give them the opportunity to work flexible hours or work from home and trust them and your team to deliver and collaborate regardless of whether they’re at a desk or on a couch? I sigh every time I hear about another Bay Area company offering crazy compensation and perks. I sigh when I hear the questions we “talent” folk ask ourselves – focusing on how we can “out-perk” each other versus understanding how to build compelling places to work. I want to know that we in the people and talent industry, we the engineering leaders in the powerhouse companies of the Valley, value the reasons engineers love their work, and more importantly, that we understand and care about these reasons ourselves. Understanding who you’re hiring matters. Understanding how to engage them in a great career choice that resonates with who they are as people, matters. It sounds basic and simple, but it’s not often practiced in this current crazy recruiting market. The tech boom won’t be here forever. We will regret inflating perks and salaries as the way to engage our engineers or any employee. We owe the engineers we are trying to hire a little more respect and an educated dialogue about who they are, what they care about – and why they should make our cause their own. |
Convoy! The Fueloyal Is A Smart Fuel Cap For Truckers | John Biggs | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | Breaker breaker 10-4 good buddy. We got on your tail coming up off the exit. This robotic fuel cap essentially keeps track of the fuel poured into your vehicle independently of the truck itself and lets fleet owners ensure they no one is stealing the fuel poured into their 18-wheelers. Called the iCap 1000, the system fits into your Class-A truck gashole and tracks the gallons poured. The system is tamper-proof and sends the data back to your home office via Wi-Fi. It is self-powered and can be removed in minutes. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKvfxY8CPs4] Founded by Igor Hristov and Jurica Magoci, the company is based in Chicago. The team also found Roadmiral, a fleet management system. “In challenging economic times like we are having in the last few years it is important to reduce cost of business and to be more efficient. That is the reason we started this company. With load prices going down and fuel prices going up it’s important to control costs,” said Hristov. The product is being built now and will be assembled in the EU. The team plans on shipping in four months. “We have preorders worth $320K and distributor agreement signed with one large US truck leasing company. Based on the increasing preorders and feedback we are estimating that in first year upon launching we will have signed contracts in total value of $3 million,” said Hristov. Fueloyal is unique in that you don’t have to modify the tank in order to gather the data. Because it fits right into the gas inlet and measures the gas poured into the vehicle and prevents siphoning. “Company owners can install it on the fuel tank in less than a minute. It cannot be removed without the security key, and if unauthorized removal occurs the system will ‘alert’ headquarters,” he said. Now if they can just keep truckers from getting road hypnosis or getting picked up by Smokey then we might have something special. |
Google Removes Amazon’s App Listing From Google Play Search Following Addition Of Appstore, Instant Video Integrations | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | In October, we spotted that which was available for download on Google Play. Now, according to new reports from , Amazon’s flagship application’s listing is no longer available via search from within Google Play, though its is still live. Additionally, there’s now a newly launched application called which looks much like the original application, but no longer includes the Appstore section. The change was first spotted by German site who also received a statement from Amazon which claims that this is related to . That update involved having users update to or install the newest version of the main Amazon app, then download the Amazon Instant Video Player app afterwards, in order to watch Prime Instant Video on their Android devices. Amazon has sent us the same statement as well, confirming that after Amazon released its updated app in September, Google changed its policies. This required Amazon to submit a new app as a replacement. Says Amazon: We launched a new Amazon App for Android Phones on September 9 that provides an award-winning mobile shopping experience, enables customers to discover and purchase all of Amazon’s digital catalog, and provides customers access to the Prime Instant Video player and unlimited streaming of over 40,000 movies and TV episodes. Google subsequently changed their Developer Distribution Agreement on September 25. As a result, we removed the app from Google Play and published the Amazon Shopping app. Customers who want the best Amazon experience on their Android phone, including access to Prime Instant Video and Amazon’s entire digital catalog, can still get the Amazon App for Android Phones at amazon.com/androidapp. In case you , Amazon’s app was changed in September to include a new category called “Apps & Games.” Amazon didn’t exactly publicly announce this change, however – its only mentioned that the app “now enables customers to discover and purchase all of Amazon’s digital catalog” but mainly touted the Prime Instant Video integration. When we reached out to Amazon in October after finding the functional app store tucked away inside the main app, a rep confirmed that: “we now offer the ability for customers to purchase videos, songs, audiobooks, apps and games from within the Amazon app.” The new “Apps & Games” category wasn’t just a list of apps that Amazon has for sale elsewhere in its standalone Appstore app (an alternative to Google Play) – it was actually a complete app store in and of itself, right within the main Amazon application. Users could browse, search, install and buy apps directly from Amazon’s main application without having to jump through as many hoops as they would have had to otherwise, by installing the standalone Amazon Appstore app. Instead, the first time a user tried to download an app, they were prompted to “enable downloads” if they haven’t already adjusted their Android phone’s security settings to enable downloads from outside of Google Play. Amazon’s app also walked users through these steps making the entire process very simple. We wondered if Google would be okay with Amazon – a competitor to Google on devices, app discovery and more – would be allowed to continue to operate a hidden app store in its shopping application. After all, it doesn’t permit Amazon’s Appstore app to be directly downloaded from Google Play either. Apparently, it seems that Google was with this at all. The older, flagship application from Amazon is now no longer discoverable through Google Play search, and we’re having trouble pulling up the new application “Amazon Shopping” as well, though your mileage may vary. (App store direct links often go live ahead of search results listings.) Going forward, as Amazon’s statement indicates, the functionality Amazon released this fall in its main Amazon app – including Prime Instant Video Streaming and the ability to download movies, apps and games – has now been relegated to yet another standalone application. Users who visit are asked to take a series of steps similar to what’s required with downloading the Amazon Appstore standalone app. That is, they have to request a link to the app download, then change their device’s security settings to allow for its installation. Google has not responded yet to a request for comment. |
[Update] Lending Club IPO Shows The Profit Potential For Financial Technology Investments | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | on the New York Stock Exchange is more than just the largest IPO for a U.S.-based tech company this year, it’s also planting the flag for an entire ecosystem of startup companies engaged in overturning the ways in which the world deals with money. “This is not some narrow addressable market, it’s trillions of dollars and represent billions of dollars of opportunity,” says Matt Harris, a managing director with Bain Capital Ventures who specializes in backing financial services technology companies. The most immediate winners are Lending Club’s investors, among them , , , , , , and . Norwest Venture Partners is the largest holder with 50.8 million shares, and a roughly 14% stake in the company. EquityZen has a breakdown of how much investors from each round stand to gain on their participation in each of the rounds . Numbers like that typically cause other firms that may not have been paying attention to the once-sleepy financial technology sector to stand up and take notice. “This is just a a catalyzing event to a very large wealth-creating phenomenon,” says Foundation Capital’s Charles Moldow, an investor in several financial technology companies including Lending Club, the soon-to-list , , and . Moldow, whose mapped the potential of marketplace lending, says that these companies are the vanguard of a larger host of companies that will remake finance. “There are equity fundraising and investment banking underwriting services that eventually will be transformed, but are still the old boy club,” says Moldow. Beyond OnDeck a slew of online credit businesses are waiting in the wings with aspirations to take their own bow on the IPO stage and their own twist on the lending business that was pioneered in the U.S. by Lending Club and its earliest direct competitor, . Companies like are pitching student lending services; , , , , and others are appealing to small business borrowers; and , , all want to lend to different types of consumers. Some startups are pursuing even more specialized types of loans, with and targeting home buyers with mortgage loans, and looking to lend to would-be restaurant franchisors. “We see the lending club IPO as a bellwether for a major structural shift in the way that consumers and small businesses get access to credit,” says Funding Circle co-founder Sam Hodges. “It’s one step in what will be a multiple step shift in companies like ours coming to scale and changing the ways that parts of the market work.” The success of the lending business wasn’t always so certain. As the financial crisis loomed, in 2008 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission took a hard look at both Lending Club and Prosper and both businesses were forced to shut down while regulators assessed how they’d be overseen and by which watchdog. Some investors point to the different approaches Prosper and Lending Club took to addressing regulators’ concerns as one reason why Lending Club was able to take the pole position against its rival, which had actually been the first peer-to-peer lender to launch in the U.S. market. The two companies have always approached peer-to-peer lending somewhat differently. Lending Club curated its borrowers and lenders from the outset, while Prosper had a much more free-wheeling, pure marketplace approach to its business, investors said. And both companies stumbled in the face of regulatory scrutiny. Lending Club was nearly out of money when investors like Salil Deshpande from Bay Partners (and now with Bain Capital) came in to revive the business in 2008. Here’s how chief executive officer Renaud Laplanche described the situation on his own LinkedIn page, “Salil invested in Lending Club as a Series A in 2008. We were in the middle of the financial crisis and were awaiting for the clearance from the SEC to launch our program to investors.” In the following years, attention and capital turned to payments companies like BrainTree (acquired by PayPal), Stripe or Square as the hope for fintech’s biggest home runs. But those businesses all have potential (and actual) acquirers, while lending businesses almost as a rule, can only look to public markets for exits. “There are no M&A acquirers of these lending companies. Regulators will not let banks use equity to buy growth,” says one investor familiar with the market. Also, the economics of lending make it a more profitable business then any of the other, advisory services that could come to market. With loans, there’s risk and a multiple that lenders make based on the risks they take, whereas advisory services or transaction services are taking a percentage on the service they provide or returns they generate for customers. So which businesses could be the next wave of financial technology companies to go public? The financial advisory services companies like WealthFront, which manages over $1 billion in assets, and Betterment, which now has over 50,000 customers using its service and has a partnership with Fidelity, are still too early. Bain Capital’s Harris has his money — both literally and figuratively — on business payments and transaction management companies. “These are companies that have very good enterprise facing products. There’s again this wave of innovation in B2B payments and although there are a lot of M&A buyers, there are a lot of CEOs in that category that are eager to go public.” Bain Capital has backed BillTrust, but there are other companies like Payoneer, and Chrome River Technologies that are gaining traction. “We’re at the front lip of something big that’s happening,” says Harris. “Public markets are going to show us that financial services companies led by lending are going to be hugely valuable.” *An earlier version of this post misrepresented the EquityZen infographic reporting returns for each round as returns from specific investors. |
DCM Is Raising Another $100 Million Fund To Make Investments In Android-Based Startups | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | It looks like global venture firm plans to make more bets on Android apps, with another fund that seems to be devoted to investing in startups that develop for the mobile OS. According to an , it’s seeking to raise $100 million for A-Fund II, the aiming to take advantage of innovation in the Android ecosystem. The first A-Fund was when the battle between iOS and Android apps was just getting started. The A-Fund was developed in partnership with Asia’s Tencent, KDDI, and GREE to make investments in startups founded in the U.S., China, and Japan that were building apps for Google’s mobile OS. The belief at the time was that there was a huge opportunity for Android adoption in China and other developing markets, and those firms wanted to make early bets to ride that wave. It was also a time when other venture firms were a little more bullish on iOS development. Kleiner Perkins, for instance, had to invest in iPhone apps back in 2008, but with a $200 million commitment in 2010 with the release of the iPad. That said, early returns from DCM’s bet on Android seem pretty positive. The biggest winner out of the fund so far was an investment in , which later and is now with a $7 billion market cap. (DCM followed on its A-Fund investment by putting money into Kakao’s Series A round through its main fund.) In addition, the A-Fund seeded , which DCM also . Earlier this month, that company led by Sequoia. Life360 is another company to graduate from the A-Fund to a full investment by DCM — in its case a led out of the main fund. It has since gone on to as part of a strategic partnership with ADT. Other notable investments include Freee, which is a cloud services startup providing back-office tools for Japanese SMBs, and PlayStudios, which develops gaming solutions for casinos and has partnered with MGM. Exits from the first fund include mobile game startup Loki Studios, which was , and , which was . DCM declined to comment on the public filing, but it’s probably worth noting there are some differences between A-Fund I and A-Fund II’s SEC records. The latter fund lists only DCM co-founder and general partner David Chao and general partner Jason Krikorian as directors, while DCM general partners Peter Moran, Dixon Doll, Tom Blaisdell, and Carl Amdahl were all on the filing for Fund I. It’s also worth noting that many of the more successful startups to come out of that fund may have started on Android, but are now mostly multi-platform. You can include KakaoTalk, Yik Yak, Life360 and Coffee Meets Bagel as companies that are now on iOS as well as Android — and some of its investments are available on other platforms as well. It’s a fair question to ask if this fund is betting on Android in particular or mobile in general, especially as more developers realize the need to be on multiple devices. But since DCM’s website still , we’ll take their word for it. While not commenting on any successor fund, DCM general partner Jason Krikorian had this to say about the rationale for betting on Android and A-Fund portfolio companies’ commitment to it so far: From the beginning, there was a realization that most potential portfolio companies would be cross platform. However, there are many companies in that fund (e.g., Life360, Kakao, Augmedix (Google glass related health care play), Wandoujia (an app store in China)) that have taken unique advantage of the opportunities afforded by the openness and market momentum of the Android platform. As you know, the growth of Android since we first conceived of the A-Fund with our strategic partners in 2010 has been phenomenal. |
Moov Fitness Tracker Lands On Android | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | , the fitness tracker that raised this October, now supports . The idea behind Moov is pretty simple: Rather than counting your steps and giving some illusion of progress in physical fitness, Moov uses a combination of hardware and software to improve your form based on the training you’re doing. If you cycle, swim, box or simply jog, Moov will pay attention to the way your body moves and help you execute that skill properly, so you are getting the most out of it. With today’s launch, Moov is bringing its Run & Walk app, which offers four different run/walk modes. When paired with the wrist-worn Moov fitness tracker, Moov will send instructions to your headphones as you run to improve cadence, keep your joints safe, and ensure you’re getting the most efficient work out of your body. Moov originally this app for iOS back in August, and has since delivered an app a month, each tailored to a different type of exercise. This, however, is the first Android launch, opening up the product to millions of new users. Moov debuted on Kickstarter in February and blew past its . If you want to check out the Moov fitness tracker, hit up the website . |
Built In Brooklyn: Tattly Works With Artists And Designers To Create Sweet-Looking Temporary Tattoos | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 12 | 29 | Thanks to , the Dumbo-based startup featured in our latest episode of , you can adorn your skin with temporary tattoos created by professional artists and designers. Founder and CEO Tina Roth Eisenberg told me that she was inspired to create the company when her daughter returned home with temporary tattoos that Eisenberg described as “hideous” and “a complete insult to my Swiss aesthetic.” Given her background as a graphic designer (she still ), Eisenberg decided to do something about it, launching a new website with work from her artist and designer friends. Three years later, the company not only licenses tattoo designs from , it also works with businesses and marketers to create custom designs. For example, Head of Partnerships Yng-Ru Chen talked about working with Warner Bros. to create a temporary tattoo to promote the film . “We’re more than just temporary tattoos — we’re really kind of a lifestyle brand,” she said. The Tattly website describes its product as “designy temporary tattoos,” which might sound a little, uh, Brooklyn-y, but cover a broad range of styles and depict everything from dinosaurs to subway lines to inspirational mottos. (In the video, I’m wearing a ship tattoo created by — who, incidentally, .) As competitors follow Tattly’s lead, Chen said the startup will stay ahead by continuing to focus on “really great design.” And according to Eisenberg, that means relying on a highly curated model rather than just throwing the doors open to anyone who wants to sell a design. “I think there’s something to be said for having the team at Tattly, or a few people, just really defining the tone of a brand and sort of the easthetic of a brand,” she said. “While a lot of people have been suggesting we should take on the Threadless model, I personally want to stay away from that.” And even though I said Tattly is a Dumbo-based company, it’s actually about to move to Boerum Hill; Eisenberg said their current building is being converted into condos. “It’s all good, because I have slowly but surely realized that it’s time to move on,” she added. “Dumbo is becoming very … luxury residential, which is kind of not the vibe I want to be surrounded with. Which breaks my heart a bit, because Dumbo started out all creative and all artsy.” |
Flurry Finds That Apple Devices And Phablets Scored Big On Christmas | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 29 | Flurry has released its . Each year, the holiday sees the highest number of device activations and app installations as people open presents, and last week was no exception. What is interesting is that 51.3 percent of new devices activated were made by Apple, compared to 17.7 percent for Samsung, and 5.8 percent for Nokia. Other smartphone makers, including Xiaomi, Huawei, and HTC, each held a less than one percent share on Christmas Day, despite . As Flurry notes, that is because their key markets are in Asia, where the holiday is not a gift-giving bonanza. Apple’s success was driven by the iPhone 6, the number one device activated, and iPhone 6 Plus. Flurry, which compiled the report using data from the 600,000 apps it tracks, the iPhone 6 Plus was one of the top five devices activated this Christmas. In general, phablets became increasingly popular among consumers. In the week before Christmas, 13 percent of new device activations were phablets, a significant increase from 4 percent in 2013. Flurry says that the availability of an iOS model is helping to drive phablet sales. Larger smartphones, however, started becoming commonplace instead of being seen as novelties even before the iPhone 6 Plus was released. Back in January, were expected to hit 120 million units shipped by 2018, up from the estimated 20 million phablets shipped in 2013. Many analysts would eat into tablet sales as users start depending on one mobile device instead of juggling two, and Flurry’s holiday research underscores that. Sales of tablets, as well as smaller smartphones, decreased as phablets became more popular, which means developer used to designing for palm-sized screens may have to start rethinking their work. “App developers should take into account the fact that larger screens are becoming the primary device; it’s not just the secondary primetime tablet anymore,” Flurry noted. Owners of new mobile devices were eager to start downloading apps. As usual, Christmas was a big day for app installs, with Flurry tracking 2.5 times the number of downloads, compared to an average day in the earlier part of December. Despite the bump, Christmas Day app installs because more people own smartphones and tablets now, so the novelty of playing with apps is beginning to wear off. Still, this year’s spike was “a remarkable number considering the maturity of the U.S. market and the difficulty of getting recognized in app stores,” Flurry said. As usual, games and messaging apps were the most popular downloads on Christmas Day. |
Designers Are Ditching The Mouse For The “Flow” 3D Motion Touch Controller | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 29 | Sliders suck. “Little too far to the left. Ugh. Little too far to the right. ARRHGH!!!” The mouse can be a frustrating controller for Photoshop, Final Cut, AutoCAD or even Spotify. But a new input device called lets you play your computer like an instrument, with infinite dexterity through feeling rather than sight. The Y Combinator startup Senic’s offers four types of control: motion by waving over its infrared sensor, a programmable touch-sensitive pad on top, haptic response for pushing Flow like a button, and a physical cylinder around the sides that you can twist for ultimate precision. It already works with 30 apps like some of the Adobe Creative Suite, and cunning developers can build custom Flow interfaces for anything they want. Co-founder Tobias Eichenwald thinks there are better ways to work than squinting at a screen. He wants Flow to let you control your computer “blindly, unconsciously, naturally” — like a guitar. Normally, designers have to dig through Photoshop menus, then use a clumsy mouse or hit the bracket button, which changes things in increments that are too big. “You can never do pixel-perfect graphics” says Eichenwald. With Flow, you can bump up or down the hue or brush size in Photoshop, alter model angles in AutoCAD, switch layers in Illustrator, select frames in a video editing app, and more. Beyond work, the startup wants you to stay in Flow while spending quality time with your friends. “We’ve had 40 years of screens. They’re not always the best designed interface,” Eichenwald explains. “They’re not good in social settings because they require your full attention.” That’s why Flow is built to work with Spotify, YouTube and SoundCloud. You could hover your hand above Flow to adjust volume, or wave over it to skip to the next song without disconnecting from your friends or the task at hand to stare into a screen. Phillips Hue smart lightbulbs can also be controlled much quicker with Flow than digging up the remote app on your phone. I’ve played with Flow and the device is well-constructed. The tension on the spinning cylinder gives just the right resistance so you can feel the slightest movement. It combines motion with less tiring gestures rather than just tiringly keeping your hands in the air, which is why Leap Motion never took off. Integrating Flow into your habits will take time, and not everyone has a professional need for it. But at the very least, Flow looks downright beautiful sitting on a desk. , and Eichenwald says its added efficiency as an input means that designers could quickly recoup the cost. The crowdfunding money will go to hammering out manufacturing and hiring an embedded software engineer to deal with firmware updates. It seems inevitable that laptops will offer motion control. I can imagine my MacBook’s trackpad or webcam working like Leap Motion eventually. But it’s fine if some of Flow’s features get integrated elsewhere, as the startup has big ambitions. “We want to create a new generation of natural user interfaces,” says Eichenwald. With hardware costs, connectivity, and Wi-Fi chips all getting cheaper, anything could be turned into an input. Eichenwald asks “Why not the table? Why not the wall? Why not the objects around you?” It’s that philosophy that makes me wonder if Flow-maker Senic will get acquired by Apple or Nest one day. Most gadgets we invent distract us or add to our cognitive load. Yet researchers keep saying we’re terrible at multi-tasking, and everyone works better when they can focus. Finally there’s a device that helps us maintain . |
Stormy For iOS Makes Posting Tweetstorms Easier (Sorry!) | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 12 | 11 | Love ’em or hate ’em, but tweetstorms are still a thing. So there may as well be an app for that! A newly launched, exceedingly simple iOS application called lets you compose your thoughts as a series of tweets in advance of your Twitter tweetstorming efforts, allowing you the time to craft just the right phrases and figure out any issues with character count ahead of posting. The app also lets you choose a numbering style for your posts, and lets you schedule how many seconds should pass in between each tweet. Tweetstorms, in case you’ve been offline most of 2014, are a popular and among the tech and media crowd where longform thoughts are posted as a series of numbered tweets instead of to, say, a blog post, where they might make more sense. (And where they’d certainly be easier to read!) Netscape co-founder and investor Marc Andreessen really kicked off the whole tweetstorming thing, and has now posted some according to online tweetstorm creator and tracker Tweetstorm.io. Others soon followed in his footsteps, and, among this niche crowd, tweetstorms really started to take off. The format appeals to the way Twitter and mobile users tend to consume information today – in small, bite-sized chunks as opposed to longer articles. However, many feel that tweetstorms unnecessarily clutter up Twitter timelines and the information is hard to follow, especially as replies stream in. Today, there are other tweetstorm creation tools out there, including Tweetstorm.io and , a tweetstorm composer built by RSS developer Dave Winer. There’s even another mobile app for tweetstorming called Thunderstorm, but Stormy’s creator Daniel McCarthy says he didn’t care for the interface and ran into some glitches, which is why he decided to just build his own app instead. Stormy is really just a side project for him, not a startup, he also clarifies. McCarthy is currently busy with and a soon-to-launch suite of iOS games where the games’ ad revenue is donated to charity. (More on that later). However, he’s continuing to develop the app’s feature set to include things like support for logging and categorizing past “storms,” support for adding photos, loading others’ replies, replying in the app, saving and scheduling posts for later, and more. McCarthy adds that he’s also trying to explore more of the Twitter API to see if he can monitor the service to detect tweetstorms to allow the app to include a discovery aspect as well. In the meantime, the Stormy app, for better or for worse, is s. |
Microsoft Is Rumored To Be Building A New Browser That Is Not Internet Explorer | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 12 | 29 | Remember when ? Microsoft might, if ZDNet’s recent report that the software company is bears out. According to Foley, Spartan is “new” and “isn’t [Internet Explorer].” Her post notes that it could be set free inside of the Windows 10 release schedule. In short, Microsoft may be building a speedy, simpler browser that maintains use of Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. Internet Explorer has had a ribald history, growing from zero market share, to market-dominating heights, to slow decline in the face of Firefox, to faster decline in the face of Chrome, to a recent re-acceleration under a new, standards-based approach. Its life has been bitcoin’s late 2013 to date, but stretched out over several decades. Whether the company’s recent moves have been enough to salvage Internet Explorer’s tarnished brand, however, is open to interpretation. Microsoft certainly wants its browser to gain market share, especially on the that it hopes to deploy from smartphones all the way to televisions. If Microsoft wants Windows 10 to function across all platforms and wants developers to be able to develop once and deploy everywhere, then creating a new browsing experience that is built to handle all sorts of inputs — without the baggage of a traditional desktop browsing experience — would be a decent idea. Microsoft did not return a request for comment by the time of publication. The second half of January is going to be a bit Microsoft-heavy. The company, expected to release the consumer-facing preview of Windows 10 in that window, is under some pressure here. If it fails to impress, it will directly undercut the that it has built for its new operating system. A new browsing tool could help boost human interest in its new platform. Perhaps it is better to ask ourselves what would happen to Microsoft’s browsing market share long term, if it fails to reimagine Internet Explorer. |
Google X’s Astro Teller Says Wearables Still Need A Killer App | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 29 | Back in November, I had a chance to visit Google’s Mountain View headquarters to chat with Astro Teller, the head of Google X’s so-called “moonshot” projects, about the past, present, and future of wearables. I opened the interview with a blunt question: “Which do you want to talk about first, the wrist or glasses?” He immediately called me out: “That presupposes that the only interesting things we’re working on are watches and glasses.” Teller made it clear that just because Android Wear and Google Glass are prominent in Google’s public efforts, they’re not the only thing the search giant is looking at when it thinks of putting gadgets on our bodies. “[Humans] have spent that last several thousand years working on wearbles. We’ve got rings, glasses, we wear things for armor, for protection from the elements, to signal our status to other people. And we’re going to co-opt a lot of those things, where wearables are going to end up being the interface between us in the world,” he told me during our 30 minute chat. One interesting line of research Google has looked at includes using rings to “train” our brains for things like navigation using slight vibrations whenever you face a certain direction. I see the current wearables ecosystem as a spectrum. At one end, there’s single-purpose gadgets that are essentially pedometers, heart rate trackers, and blood-oxygen sensors that have existed for decades — only now, they’re sending all that data to the cloud via Bluetooth connections to our smartphones. At the other end, there’s Google Glass, Android Wear, the Apple Watch, and their ilk: general-purpose devices that Google has said could one day replace the metal and glass slabs we keep in our pockets. When I asked Teller where he thinks the successful wearables of the future will fall on that spectrum, he said that there’s likely going to be an evolution in the space from one use case that initially takes off to more general-purpose devices in the years to come. He compared the process to the decades-long adoption of desktop computing. “VisiCalc and WordPerfect were the killer apps of their day, but Google and Facebook make them look small in comparison.” The way Teller sees it, those applications were what made computers a reasonable purchase for the first tens of millions of customers — but you couldn’t look at them and predict the applications valuable to billions today. So what are the Visicalc and Wordperfect of wearables? Teller says that there’s a few uses that seem like they could bring in the mass of users necessary for wearables to become a meaningful platform. In the very near term, there’s fitness and health: from fitness trackers to the fashion-focuses bands, every major player in wearables has at the very least included things like step-tracking or heart-rate measurement (with varying degrees of accuracy). Fitness has the advantage of being something that becomes habitual: if exercise is a big portion of your life, you’ll keep using that smart band with some regularity. The biggest hurdle for this category is the tendency for people to try out gadgets like the Nike FuelBand or a Fitbit and one day decide to just leave it on the desk or in a drawer — it’s a category that’s in a constant struggle against human laziness. Another option is information security and environmental personalization — in terms of both our physical and digital spaces. “I think wearables in general have as their best calling, to better understand our current state and needs and to express those back to the world. It’s crazy that you have to tell your phone or your computer or your house or your car “It’s me!” hundreds of times a day. Wearables will solve that problem. They haven’t yet, but they will.” Regarding the current appreciation (or, more accurately, lack thereof) of Google Glass in popular culture, Teller isn’t phased by the haters. “There’s about a 0% chance that in 10-20 years we don’t access our digital world through our glasses, but I would be shocked if we don’t also have watches,” he says, though he acknowledges that the consumer market might not be where Google finds the killer app for its eye wear. |
Latest Snowden Revelations Expose Scope Of NSA Interceptions | Cat Zakrzewski | 2,014 | 12 | 29 | Over the weekend, about the NSA’s ability to crack encrypted forms of communication, exposing the agency’s routine interception of SSL/TLS, which are used by web servers to transmit sensitive information. The report also exposed the fact that the agency has the ability to decrypt a virtual private network. But perhaps more significantly, the revelations culled from the trove of documents leaked by Edward Snowden show the forms of encryption the NSA struggled to break (at least at the time of the documents in 2012). That list includes PGP, Tor, CSpace, OTR and ZRTP. The combination of good news and bad news garnered contradictory coverage, with highlighting the networks the NSA can’t break, and leading with “Snowden Documents Show How Well NSA Codebreakers Can Pry.” Overall the report was reassuring. Many of the forms of added encryption measures those concerned about security have taken in the 18 months since the Snowden documents became public are effective. For example, the documents show that communications protected by ZRTP (the type of encryption uses) block the NSA. “It’s satisfying to know that the NSA considers encrypted communication from our apps to be truly opaque,” RedPhone developer Moxie Marlinspike told Spiegel. Although the scope of the interceptions on SSL and VPN connections are concerning, many assumed the agency possessed this capability previously. The trove released by Spiegel shows the specific tools the agency used to go about this. The Spiegel report has prompted backlash in the information security community, with some saying it sensationalizes the NSA’s ability to access information on VPN connections. According to Spiegel, the NSA operates “a large-scale VPN exploitation project to crack large numbers of connections, allowing it to intercept data inside the VPN — including, for example, the Greek government’s use of VPNs.” This is a very concerning revelation, considering the high number of companies and governments that utilize VPNs to allow users to access their networks anywhere in the world. But No Hats, a security specialists blog, says if you properly configure your VPN, According to the blog’s comprehensive breakdown of the NSA slides that Spiegel based its reporting on, properly configured IPsec based VPNs are okay. Another alarming statistic from the article is the number of https connections, the type of secure connections used by sites like Facebook, that the agency intercepts. One document showed that by late 2012, the NSA was cracking 10 million such connections a day. Much of the Spiegel article discusses a conflict of interest that the NSA faces: It is charged with recommending security standards, yet it is constantly attempting to break the very security standards it recommends. At first glance these claims seem to point to the very hypocrisy we are reminded of time and again as more is exposed about the American surveillance state. Privacy advocates widely agree that communications vulnerable to law enforcement agencies are also at risk for all kinds of cyber threats, from criminals attempting to steal identities to hacks of foreign governments. It seems counterintuitive that the NSA would be responsible for creating standards it only wants to break, especially when of wanting communications to be less secure to make accessing information easier. But in a , calling it “activist nonsense,” cybersecurity expert Robert Graham says the NSA trying to break the standards it sets is a good thing. “You secure things by trying to break them,” he writes. The Spiegel story leaked a large number of documents containing very specific information about the NSA’s techniques. A year-and-a-half after The Guardian and Washington Post first published the documents, the report reignited calls on social media for the full release of the Snowden documents. If anything, the report served as a reminder that we likely have years of new exposures to come about American surveillance practices. Right, that shits 18 months stale already, there's no point keeping it secret except to increase page views. Dump all the Snowden docs. — the grugq (@thegrugq) |
From Internet To Internets | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 12 | 29 | Over the past few days, through its Great Firewall. Earlier this month, for every single snippet of a news article the company uses with Google News. , and also convinced Facebook to . Earlier this year, France passed a law, , that would ban free shipping from online retailers to allow independent booksellers to compete more effectively with the online giant. After much push for reform, South Korea still requires the use of a citizen’s national ID number to login to websites, which . And of course here in the United States, there is continuing fallout from the Snowden revelations about . It used to be that internet activists were mostly concerned with declining levels of freedom of speech on the internet. While statistics continue to show that censorship is increasing, that is no longer the entire story. Across the world, it is becoming abundantly clear that the internet is no longer the independent and self-reliant sphere it once was, immune to the peculiarities of individual countries and their laws. Rather, the internet is firmly under the control of every government, simultaneously. In short, 2014 was the year that the internet clearly became the internets. As governments learn of their power, they are increasingly regulating, controlling, and fiddling with the internet’s levers. They block websites they don’t like, pass ecommerce provisions that make it hard for international companies to standardize their services, and violate the privacy of citizens for their own ends. That has implications not just for engineers building products for the web, but also for every person who believes that the internet can be a tool for progress throughout the world. In some respects, that progress is continuing – to ensure that the next billion people will one day have access to the internet. But while expanding access is crucial to the long-term health of the medium, so is ensuring that those who already have it are not seeing it taken away from them. The internet is a special medium. It’s basic governance structures are remarkably libertarian, , as well as . There are no bodies that determine what products can exist. The internet was crafted with complete freedom in mind, and that has survived mostly up to the present moment. But as more of our everyday activities take place in cyberspace, governments are increasingly threatened by the medium they can’t control. In the United States, postal inspectors have the right to open every single piece of mail traveling in the country. Email afforded no such guarantees in its protocols, that is, until new tools were developed to intercept online message traffic. Likewise, as commerce is conducted increasingly online, the threat to sales tax revenues and general commercial regulation grows. As the examples in the introduction demonstrate, the push to regulate is not just coming from one definable group of countries. Every country is debating laws that affect the internet’s core principles and operations. The internet clearly needs greater protection, but unfortunately, protecting it as an open reserve is extraordinarily difficult. While the lack of regulating bodies controlling the internet has been a boon for creativity and freedom, that absence also ensures that there is no one group that can forcefully advocate on these issues. Furthermore, in spite of the strength of social media tools, mobilizing the internet remains extraordinarily difficult. , which were widely seen as successful in stopping a bill that would require internet service providers to block websites that were accused of copyright infringement, most other protest movements have rapidly fizzled. The internet may be shared by people across the world, but they speak different languages and live in different cultures. That diversity is a strength of the online world, but it makes developing common ground exceptionally challenging. Finally, while the changes happening to the internet have been continuous, they have also been slow in coming, making it difficult to rally the kind of support needed to debate them. Usually, the changes don’t even come up in a designated internet regulation bill like SOPA, which attracts significant attention, but are rather added as an amendment to a law already on the books. It’s hard to protest a subsection of a paragraph. While these challenges may be insurmountable, the internet does have one group of advocates who can help to shape the debate – companies offering internet services like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. , these companies both have the most to lose with increasing regulation and fragmentation of the web and also the most users (i.e. voters where that matters) by which to affect change. We need to launch a much broader education effort on the open principles of the internet. The internet is still a confusing term for many, including both its operation and its philosophy. Codifying what the internet stands for and bringing that vision to as many people as possible is key if we want to see more advocates for internet freedom. We don’t want to return to the world that existed just a little more than three decades ago. The internet helped to usher in a more globalized world that has allowed all of us to explore more cultures and engage with our fellow humans in ways we could never have dreamed of before. We need to protect a singular internet to continue to see those dreams realized. |
Biz2Credit Gets $250 Million Commitment | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 12 | 29 | Lending startups are en vogue this year, with and planting the flag for the industry in public markets (and offering healthy returns to investors). But there’s a crop of other lenders and service providers waiting in the wings, like , which just received a $250 million commitment from investment firm Direct Lending Investments. Unlike OnDeck, which lends directly to small businesses, Biz2Credit acts as a service provider, vetting the viability of potential borrowers and then connecting them with lenders, like Direct Lending Investments, who provide the capital for the loans. Once the loans are made, Biz2Credit handles all of the follow-up. Founded by brothers Rohit and Ramit Arora, who immigrated to New York from India in 2003 and 2001, respectively, Biz2Credit proves that there are still opportunities for first-generation entrepreneurs. According to Ramit, the brothers launched their business because of the things they saw first-hand among entrepreneurs trying to get started in the U.S. — men and women with little or no credit history or access to traditional sources of capital. “We started a marketplace peer-to-peer lending platform where we originate everything through our platform. Institutional funds come in and buy the loans and we underwrite them and service them on an end-to-end basis,” Ramit explains. The company has a proprietary scorecard for issuing loans and collects reams of data on lenders across the country. That technology and analytics platform has led to some of the lowest default rates in the industry. Only 0.7 percent of the borrowers on the company’s platform have defaulted on loans. Loans range between $25,000 and $500,000, which Arora calls the sweet spot in which most banks won’t lend. Despite their reticence, these borrowers represent a solid investment, Ramit says. Roughly 70 percent of the businesses receiving mony on the platform have been in business for over three years and have more than $1 million in revenue. Buyers of loans on the Biz2Credit marketplace include Direct Lending Investments (the largest investor on the marketplace, with $65 million in capital commitments already). Banks, which typically won’t address these customers directly, will provide cash to loan through the platform under their SBA portfolios. Union Bank, TD Bank, and other mid-tier regional banks have made loans through Biz2Credit, Arora says. Borrowers range from warehouse operators to small retailers like restaurants and service businesses like hotels and motels. The company expects to have roughly $80 million in revenue in 2015 and is looking to have an initial public offering by 2016. Biz2Credit has 150 employees across offices in Delhi, New York, San Francisco and St. Louis and is backed by Nexus Venture Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif., and Mumbai-based investment firm. “Over the last 15 years, banks have all but abandoned the small and midsize companies across the country in need of financing. Even when these loans are made by banks, it can take months for the funding to come through, but business owners often need more immediate solutions,” said Direct Lending Investments founder Brendan Ross, in a statement. |
Xiaomi Confirms It Raised $1.1B At $45B Valuation | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 29 | , the fast-growing Chinese hardware company best known for its low-cost smartphones, that has raised $1.1 billion in new funding at a valuation of $45 billion. In a Facebook post, Xiaomi co-founder and president Bin Lin said the round was raised from investors including All-Stars Investment, DST, GIC, Hopu Fund, and Yunfeng Capital. Xiaomi’s latest round was . Its present valuation of $45 billion is a whopping increase over its previous valuation of $10 billion in August 2013, which Xiaomi director Hans Tung . The company will likely use the capital to increase sales of its smartphones in its key growth markets of India, Southeast Asia, Brazil, and Mexico. In 2013, Xiaomi said it sold about 19 million phones, a number it hopes will more than double to 40 million units by the end of this year. In October, the company by shipment volume, according to both Strategy Analytics and IDC. “This is an affirmation of Xiaomi’s stellar results in the four years, and heralds in a new phase for the company,” said Lin, adding that Xiaomi will unveil a new flagship device next month (reportedly ). |
Gmail Now Even More Inaccessible In China | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 29 | China has , including Gmail, this year. Now Gmail users are blocked from a workaround that allowed them to access their emails through third-party services. Previously, people could still download messages through apps like Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook, which use POP, SMAP, and IMAP. Now have also have been blocked by China’s Great Firewall. This means users in China will only be able to access Gmail through a VPN service. Google’s own Transparency Report shows a dramatic drop-off in traffic to Gmail from China that started on Friday. A Google spokesperson for Asia said “we’ve checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end.” While Google has been subject to censorship since launching Google.cn in 2006, China has recently imposed even stricter limitations on its services. In June, before the 25th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre, China . |
Chinese Search Engine Baidu Confirms Strategic Investment In Uber, Will Add Ride Requests | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 12 | 16 | It’s official: Chinese Internet giant Baidu has that it is Uber’s latest investor, as . Baidu’s mobile search and maps apps will also integrate Uber “request a ride” buttons. The companies did not disclose the amount of the investment. Bloomberg that Baidu had taken the entire $600 million surplus that Uber built into its most recent funding round, however a source at Baidu told TechCrunch that this is untrue. If there is further capacity in the round, which was earmarked towards developing Uber’s market position across Asia Pacific, then it stands to reason that other strategic investors from Asia may make similar deals with the U.S. company. We understand that the strategic partnership between Uber and Baidu is more significant than the investment, because Baidu Maps will be able to integrate Uber. This is similar to . Furthermore, Baidu’s mobile search app will be configured so that Uber is displayed prominently when users make travel- or venue-related queries. The deal will “enable users of Baidu Map and Mobile Baidu, Baidu’s flagship mobile search app, to connect easily with Uber driver-partners” the companies said. This is a major boon for Uber because Baidu operates China’s largest search engine and will help it compete against its rivals Didi Dache and rival Kuaidi Dache, which are backed by Baidu-competitors Tencent and Alibaba, respectively. The Baidu investment comes just a few weeks after Uber in funding at a $40 billion valuation, with a portion of the capital earmarked for expansion in the Asia-Pacific region. The deal was struck at a “signing ceremony” at Baidu HQ in Beijing, which Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick both attended. It's official: is investing in . Size/value of stake not yet disclosed — Edmond Lococo 罗孟德 (@EdmondLococo) The deal will also allow Uber to take advantage of Baidu’s app distribution channels, which include , which it purchased for $1.9 billion last year. This is important because Google Play isn’t available in China and 91 Wireless runs some of the largest alternative app stores in the country. Baidu claims it is currently China’s largest mobile app distribution platform, and distributed an average of 160 million apps per day. The company’s mobile search products currently have over 500 million monthly active users, while Baidu Map has over 240 million monthly active users, which has allowed it to , similar to Uber’s God View. Baidu is also currently tackling an expansion into Latin America via Brazil, which overlaps with Uber’s global aspirations. In a prepared statement, Kalanick said “This collaboration marks a milestone for Uber. We’re currently in 250 cities around the world, and the Asia-Pacific region has been a key area of growth for us. Our partnership with Baidu—a premier global brand—reflects our commitment to the region and the growing community of Uber riders and driver-partners here.” Uber is currently available in nine Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Hangzhou. For more information about how Baidu and Uber can work together, see our . |
Snapchat Plans Music Feature, Acquired QR Scan.me For $50M And Vergence Eyeglass Cam For $15M | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 16 | from the Sony Pictures hack have uncovered several acquisitions made by Snapchat, as well as plans for a music feature and meetings to discuss partnerships with Twitter. According to emails between Snapchat, Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, and Snapchat board member Mitch Lasky, Snapchat bought a QR scanning and iBeacon startup called for $14 million in cash, $3 million in restricted stock units and $33 million in Class B common Snapchat stock. It also acquired , makers of an eyeglass video camera, for $11 million in cash and $4 million in stock. Snapchat also apparently paid $10 million in cash and $20 million in stock and bonuses for , the startup to power its real-time video chat feature but didn’t have the price for. Other information contained in the emails includes that fact that Snapchat has recently been working on a music feature, and CEO Evan Spiegel has grand aspirations to promote artists through his app and capitalize on their success. Snapchat negotiated with Vevo for a feature that sounds like it would bring music video viewing inside Snapchat in August, but hit a snag over the revenue sharing on advertising. earlier today that emails indicate the acquisition deal from Facebook that Snapchat turned down was more than $3 billion. Snapchat’s Steve Hwang emailed Lasky and Lynton telling them the acquisition of Scan.me is “Super secret as usual (won’t be announced publicly),” that the company “specializes in QR scanning/creation as well as iBeacon tech,” and that “7 engineers from Utah, who will be moving out in the coming weeks.” Scan.me acquisition consent form sent to Snapchat board members Scan price details Scan.me acquisition confirmation , Snapchat paid “$15,000,000 in cash that will be paid to Buyer in two separate payments…” “$11,000,000 in cash” and “an amount equal to $4,000,000 in cash that will be…subject to monthly vesting over 24 months based on the continued employment of the stockholders.” The company, co-founded by UCLA grad student Erick Miller in 2011, saw coverage in the and before being secretly bought out. Vergence Labs’ core product is — glasses with a built-in video camera that sold at $299 for the 8 gig storage model, $399 for 16 gigs, and $499 for 32 gigs. Wearers could tap a button on the frame of the glasses to record a video, then upload it to their computers later so they could cut screenshots if they wanted photos. All three models are now sold out. Lynton starts emailing about Snapchat As far back as October 2013, Lynton was talking to talent agency William Morris Endeavors’ CEO Ari Emanual about the potential to work with Snapchat. The company has already prominently featured artists such as , and in its promo videos, helping to grow their fan bases and become darlings of the teen market. In some cases, after users watch the videos, they’ve been able to tap through to and buy the music from the videos. Spiegel met with Sony Music Entertainment’s President of Global Digital Business & US Sales in June and told him he was interested in bringing music to Snapchat. Kooker writes that Spiegel “thinks every music service in the market is shit and he wants to be a curator.” Snapchat’s CEO expressed interest in starting a record label and promoting the artists through Snapchat. Kooker said Spiegel wants to “participate in the upside he will create by promoting [artists] on the platform, but later “backed off a bit from being a record label.” Both Kooker and Lynton believe Snapchat should become a music promotion platform. Snapchat’s music aspirations Michael Lynton discussing his belief that Snapchat should be a music promotion platform Dennis Kooker’s response to Michael Lynton A few months later in August, the music feature seems to have been taking shape. Manny Adler, son of record producer and Roxy Theater owner Lou Adler, began visiting Snapchat “to discuss music and develop ways of integrating music into Snapchat.” Music business player Manny Adler discusses visiting Snapchat to help with its music feature In November, there was talk of Spiegel meeting with Sony imprint Epic Records’ bigshot CEO L.A. Reid. Later in August, Snapchat met with Vevo president Rio Caraeff to discuss a potential partnership for a “Vevo video integration” that likely would let Snapchat users watch music videos alongside Stories from fellow users. This set of negotiations fell through because Spiegel demanded “40% of gross which is just not workable for us” wrote Caraeff. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, though. Negotiations with Vevo or another music video provider could have progressed since then. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo met with Spiegel in January 2014 to discuss “a couple big ideas we have about working with SnapChat.” Twitter was also lending Snapchat some engineering help to Snapchat CTO Bobby Murphy, as Costolo wrote in an email to Lynton that “I’ve also asked my CTO to be as helpful as possible to Bobby about scaling the platform.” We haven’t seen any fruits of these “big ideas” linking Twitter and Snapchat, but the two companies could surely help each other. Twitter saves everything publicly and forever, while Snapchat’s content is more frequently private and always ephemeral. A music integration and partnership with Twitter both mesh with Snapchat’s plan to become a platform for third-party services, as reported by earlier this year. Snapchat recently made its first move in this direction with the launch of , a peer-to-peer payments feature powered by Square. At one point, Snapchat board member Mitch Lasky sent Lynton research from a hedge fund manager explaining how Asian messaging apps are becoming successful platforms for other services like shopping or taxi hailing, and how Snapchat has a big opportunity to do the same in the States. Overall, the emails show that Snapchat has been able to make big moves like acquisitions and negotiating big-wig partnerships in secret despite the press scrutiny. With the talent and tech from the buyouts and its platform aspirations, Snapchat could soon become much more than a photo and video-sharing service. |
Pay TV Disruption Doesn’t End With Unbundling | Albert Lai | 2,014 | 12 | 16 | Which would you rather do: pay for all available content or only the content you consume? At first blush, this would seem like a simple cost issue: why not cancel your cable subscription in favor of , or – or all three? Instead of spending $70 a month for content you don’t watch, you could spend under $10 on just the things you watch. Unbundling – whether as part of a pay TV or a digital over the top (OTT) offering – has been suggested as the Holy Grail for the “future” of television and video. In a simplistic generalization, unbundling would remove the subsidization of pay TV, banishing the requirement for every pay TV subscriber to bear the cost of content that only a portion of the subscriber base actually wants and consumes, e.g., sports content, typically the most expensive channels. Ostensibly, the logic makes sense. But when you follow it further, the reality for many households is that their broadband Internet access is provided by pay TV operators. Even if they decide to become cord cutters – or more accurately, pay TV cutters – their access to OTT content will still be dependent on the broadband pricing policies of the very same pay TV provider, who have incentives to “optimize” pricing, performance, and features around their offering, whether broadcast or digital. The issue is not just about paying for content, but the dependency in how content is accessed. Recently, redefining the term Multichannel Video Programming Distributor (MVPD) from its current meaning – which is limited to broadcast, cable and satellite-based TV providers – to be technology neutral, expanding to include Internet TV programmers. In an effort to make it easier for companies to offer new competitive broadband networks, the expanded definition would also “permit a new broadband competitor to offer customers the ability to reach a variety of OTT video packages without necessarily having to enter the video business itself.” If the race is between new, alternative broadband providers coming to market and existing pay TV operators accelerating their digital innovation and business models, the latter has a significant head start. Companies like have already executed on their strategy to hedge the future of television through investments in both traditional ( , ) and digital ( , X2, RDK, , FreeWheel) initiatives. But the underlying friction isn’t about lack of content restricting Internet access – it’s simply about access. Prior to its merger with AT&T, CEO Michael White stated its need to “ride on somebody else’s highway”, highlighting the dependency of premium content on digital access. While this recent proposal focused on the definition of the MVPD, the FCC’s assumption that this opens the door to broadband providers ignores the challenges with access. With the growth of digital options, increased consumption, and the trend to higher resolution content (i.e., 4K), more and more bits and bytes are filling the existing pipes and airwaves. President Obama also recently released a statement emphasizing that for the FCC The proposal stated that the FCC should “reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — while at the same time forbearing from rate regulation and other provisions less relevant to broadband services.” This would effectively treat the Internet as a utility. The proposal’s four stated rules emphasized the following tenets: no blocking, no throttling, increased transparency, and no paid prioritization. These are critical issues when viewed in context of Netflix’s recent paid peering arrangements with Comcast and Verizon. As traditional companies like , , and deploy their OTT services and as new entrants take shape, the focus on access and connectivity will only intensify. Even HBO’s announcement of their OTT service was not a full break from the pay TV ecosystem, as HBO CEO Richard Plepler stated its OTT service is less disruptive to the existing pay TV relationship and more about based on “their [pay TV’s] broadband. They’re going to make money. I think this is a great inflection point for all of our businesses.” Cord-cutting may be the most talked about disruptive trend, but what we need to be watching is the evolution of access. Consequently, the future of OTT is not just about content unbundling but about access to consumers, and that relationship is dependent on moving digital bits across pipes controlled in large part by the pay TV ecosystem. |
Google Takes Play Music’s Songza-Powered Playlists Abroad, First Stop UK | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 12 | 16 | With catalogues of unlimited music on streaming services so extensive these days that we never quite know what to listen to first, playlists have become one of the key ways that music fans use services like Soundcloud. So to compete better against the likes of Spotify, Rdio, Deezer and the rest, as well as lure more people to pay for the streaming service, Google is now stepping up its own playlist game. Today the company is announcing that it will start offering its “Concierge” playlists in the UK, powered by Songza, the music curation startup that Google . The playlist feature and Canada, using a mixture of real-person curation from DJs, musicians, music critics and ethnomusicologists, along with some machine learning that susses out particulars like what you like and what time of the day it is (or season — holiday music is apparently very big) to present you with the most fitting selection of music. This will be the first time that these lists are offered in an international market. As with the previous launch in the U.S., its available only to those who pay the £9.99/month fee for the Play Music and/or the YouTube Music Key beta that is bundled together with this. The service works on Android, iOS and the web, as well as offline if you select your lists in advance. Songza, notably, was itself was a U.S.-only service when it was still independent, and that presented a new challenge for the team led by Elias Roman, the former CEO and co-founder of Songza who now works on Google’s music curation technology. He says that while there may be some playlists carried over from the U.S., there will be others created for the UK market by localized editors. One collection that apparently was a must-have was a “Wallowing in self pity” music list. (Hmmm.) Roman says that one of the interesting things about coming to Google was that the search giant’s machine learning prowess has become an important component to how he and his team have evolved Songza’s technology. “We didn’t think there was any other place that could take things further and faster,” he says. Neither he nor Google are sharing any numbers around how popular the service has been so far so it’s hard to tell whether Songza has given Play Music the stickiness that it so wants to have. Before the acquisition, Songza had 5.5 million active users across its free and paid tiers. |
Twitch COO Kevin Lin On The Importance Of Live Stadium Events For E-Sports | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 12 | 16 | As TechCrunch went , we managed to snag a quick interview with COO Kevin Lin. We chatted about the importance of pro gaming events at large stadiums given the fact that Twitch’s League of Legends audience is competitive with major news networks. Lin says they’re something the players and fans both want: Players get to have their careers validated by seeing the industry’s scale grow around them, while fans get to see and hang out with the stars they follow on streams. We also touched on how Twitch helps promote these live events and the ways the company has expanded the ways it helps its paid partners monetize their channels beyond video ads. In addition to helping star players connect with sponsors, Twitch recently launched |
Employee Data Breach The Worst Part Of Sony Hack | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 12 | 16 | The . It’s taught us to send corporate email as if everyone is reading those emails. It’s taught us that people in Hollywood are as people in any other industry (and ). And it’s taught us that Channing Tatum . The one lesson that’s the hardest to stomach is that you may be doing to protect yourself online, but your employer may be laissez faire about the whole thing. This is the position that over 6,500 current (and many former) employees of Sony find themselves in today. As Gizmodo’s Brian Barnett : “The most painful stuff in the Sony cache is a doctor shopping for Ritalin. It’s an email about trying to get pregnant. It’s shit-talking coworkers behind their backs, and people’s credit card log-ins. It’s literally thousands of Social Security numbers laid bare. It’s even the harmless, mundane, trivial stuff that makes up any day’s email load that suddenly feels ugly and raw out in the open, a digital Babadook brought to life by a scorched earth cyberattack.” And now two of those employees have taken action — class action to be precise. Christina Mathis and Michael Corona have a federal court complaint against the movie studio, alleging that the company did not take enough precautions to keep employee and employee family data safe. The complaint references to note that Sony was aware of the insecurity on its network and took the risk. It takes Sony to task for using DDOS attacks to protect its leaked films and not its employee data. And it cites several instances of Sony failing to adequately inform former employees of the situation, referring to the free credit-card monitoring that Sony offered after the December 2 hack as insufficient. As Kashmir Hill reported, there on the Sony information security team at the time of the hack: “The real problem lies in the fact that there was no real investment in or real understanding of what information security is,” said the former employee. One issue made evident by the leak is that sensitive files on the Sony Pictures network were not encrypted internally or password-protected. Hackers a file with Sony usernames and passwords called “Usernames&Passwords.” Sony Director of Information Security Jason Spaltro whose whole point was to revel in Sony’s security loopholes: “it’s a valid business decision to accept the risk” of a security breach. “I will not invest $10 million to avoid a possible $1 million loss,” he said at the time. This hack is estimated after all is said and done. The last one cost the company a . The plaintiffs are looking to go to trial by jury. Perhaps a messy, expensive public trial will cause other obtuse companies to take infosec heed? And boom,
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Sony Hackers Threaten “9/11-Style” Attack On Movie Theaters | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 16 | A threatening message from the Guardians of Peace, the group responsible for hacking into and releasing more than a terabyte of Sony’s internal data so far, is alleging an attack on movie theaters that plan to screen Seth Rogen and James Franco’s movie “The Interview.” “The world will be full of fear,” the message, first , reads. “Remember the 11th of September 2001. We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time. (If your house is nearby, you’d better leave.).” Which theater will show what movie isn’t usually available until just days before a release. However, the Interview, a movie about an assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, is scheduled for a wide release this Christmas. This threat could affect thousands of theaters across the U.S. In a phone interview, the FBI told TechCrunch that it is aware of the threats and that an investigation is underway. FBI spokesperson Jennifer Shearer in a statement said: “The FBI continues to work collaboratively with our partners to investigate the Sony attack.” The hackers on Tuesday also leaked a “Christmas gift” of Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton’s emails. “We have already promised a Christmas gift to you,” reads the previous message from the group posted over the weekend. “This is the beginning of the gift.” The group claims to have the equivalent of over 12,000 CDs of data from Sony and has promised to leak more if the group doesn’t get what it wants. Lynton had apologized to staff about the attacks in two town hall meetings held for employees on Monday. Seth Rogen and James Franco have also canceled appearances, . Rogen appeared on The Colbert Report on Monday night but won’t be doing any interviews for a couple of days, according to his manager, Matt Labov. Here’s the full warning from the Guardians of Peace below: “Warning We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places “The Interview” be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to.
Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made.
The world will be full of fear.
Remember the 11th of September 2001.
We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time.
(If your house is nearby, you’d better leave.)
Whatever comes in the coming days is called by the greed of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
All the world will denounce the SONY |
Expect A Gentler Valleywag In 2015 | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 12 | 16 | “If I had my druthers, I’d write about AI, and supercomputers, and fusion energy. I don’t really care about who’s fucking whom,” new editor Dan Lyons tells me, signaling a tone shift for the tech tabloid. “Even when I did the fake Steve stuff, I had a rule that I never wanted to write about Steve’s family or his wife. It was just about the workplace.” Max Read, editor-in-chief of Valleywag parent company Gawker, tells me “nothing’s set in stone” when it comes to the future of Silicon Valley’s burn book, but that Lyons will have a long leash. “It’s always had a significant amount of editorial independence, so that won’t change,” says Read. But rather than a group effort like how Valleywag was run this last year with editors Nitasha Tiku and Sam Biddle at the helm, and writer Kevin Montgomery joining in June, “it’ll just be Lyons for now,” says Read. However, Read says the former Fake Steve Jobs turned Lyons will be “working more closely with Tommy Craggs (our executive editor) and especially John Cook (our new investigations editor) than his predecessors did.” Former Valleywaggers (from left): Nitasha Tiku, Sam Biddle, Kevin Montgomery The reboot comes after a rocky few months for Gawker and Valleywag, marked by widespread layoffs and restructuring that a source close to the company described as a bloodbath. . [Correction: Biddle says he voluntarily switched beats.] Tiku, Valleywag’s bastion of solid reporting, was poached by The Verge. And recent hire Montgomery is just six months after coming aboard. at the beginning of January. Until then, when asked on Twitter if Valleywag was on hiatus, “Yeah it’s being spun-off right now. Relaunching next year.” A source says former Gawker editorial director Joel Johnson was interested in slicing off Valleywag as its own website still owned by Gawker, rather than keeping it as a valleywag.gawker.com sub-site. That’s probably what Montgomery was tweeting about. But Johnson was fired by Gawker owner Nick Denton before he stepped down from his role as president, and Read now says “Valleywag will remain attached to Gawker’s domain, and shared to its front page.” New Valleywag editor Dan Lyons Still, Johnson’s exit adds a lot of question marks. Lyons explains that when he was mapping out the future of Valleywag, “a lot of those talks were with Joel Johnson and now he’s gone so I don’t even know. The guy who hired me is gone. I don’t really know what to expect. It’s going to be iterating and evolving as we go.” With any luck, Valleywag reborn will focus on holding tech companies accountable for and , rather than the continuing its slant. The latter saw it stumble into gaffes like trying to to score a playhouse for her kid. When I expressed my negative opinion on Valleywag’s class war-mongering and the Mayer charity story to Lyons, he replied “I know what you mean.” A more generalist approach could be in the cards. “I missed being a journalist and I missed writing about tech. I wanted a platform where I could write about tech everyday and make a living,” Lyons tells me. That could be a shock to people who liked the unapologetic snark of the old ‘wag. Lyons seems interested in a gentler voice. “I’ve had a couple [stories] at Daily Beast and Newsweek where I thought, ‘Should I write this story or should I not? It’s going to piss people off, and people I don’t want to piss off.’” There are plenty of wrongs to be righted in the Valley, though, especially if Valleywag is concerned with more than just stoking outrage for quick-hit page views. But Lyons isn’t coming from quite as jaded a perspective as his predecessors. “I still find basic technology very interesting aside from all the soap opera stuff.” |
A Wave Crests: Silicon Valley, Postsecondary Education And A Half-Trillion Dollars | Shawn Drost | 2,014 | 12 | 16 | It’s easy to forget that these are early days for the Internet. We still have different ideas on what it is or how it should work. The web is governed by an iterative improvement process that moves faster than any other invention in human history. Ed tech is no exception. I’d like to direct your attention to an interesting phenomenon: since 2012, most ed-tech companies have quietly rewritten their product promise from unbridled learning for learning’s sake to a path to a job or career goal — website copy now essentially says “jobs, jobs, careers, jobs.” That transition may be related to another 2012 development: the rise of accelerated learning programs (ALPs), including and . ALPs explicitly measure student employment outcomes, including placement rate and average salary, and they work. The ALP phenomenon has helped influence this product pivot in the ed-tech sector. When one of my students gets a job, I get a giant bear hug and the credit for getting them there, and other educational tools are sidelined. It’s not a coincidence that 2012 brought both the beginning of the end of the MOOC and the start of the ALP: the zeitgeist had latched on to the connection between jobs and education. Postsecondary education has been off-balance from decades of seismic change, and 2012 kicked off three back-to-back State of the Union addresses pushing universities to reduce student debt and take accountability for student employment outcomes. This chronology sets the stage for an interesting future. Postsecondary students have unambiguously stated their priorities: jobs, jobs, careers, jobs. But the incumbent university system is hesitant to adopt this new focus as paramount. Silicon Valley has cottoned on to this imbalance, and has its eye on the postsecondary education market — worth a half-trillion dollars every year. Read on for a sneak preview of the next few years, and an exploration of trends surrounding the 2012 transition. But first: a historical primer on college. It may not look like it, but it is also early days for our postsecondary education system. You might imagine that universities have been around about as long as democracy and indoor plumbing, but in fact, our higher education system has been completely redefined over the last 70 years. Around that timeframe, the proportion of high school graduates attending college went from a small minority (in 1940, only around had completed four years of college) to a majority ( are currently enrolled in colleges or universities). The source of college funding changed from family wealth to federal loans. Most importantly, the goal of attending college moved from holistic education and a future in academia and research to career development and jobs. If you ask students why they’re going to college, the include “to be able to get a better job” (No. 1), “to get training for a specific career” (No. 3), and “to be able to make more money” (No. 4). Opinions differ as to whether the higher education system is meeting those students’ career goals and achieving those outcomes. It’s settled science that a degree raises a student’s lifetime earnings. However, of business leaders think college graduates have the right skills for work — compared to 96 percent of chief academic officers who believe graduates are prepared for the job market. Ed tech efforts were diverse and accomplished by 2012, but that year brought about a major discovery: there was no institution in America dedicated to providing career education to the millions of vocal, potential customers. This central shift to recognize the demand for career education affected a diverse group of players in the space, and ultimately it pushed all edtech companies to adopt the below trends. When the tech industry began looking at the postsecondary market, they started from the existing model — flaws and all. MOOCs literally offered college classes on the internet. This seemed promising, and declared 2012 “ .” Indeed, it lasted almost exactly one year, and by 2013, Udacity’s CEO had declared the product “ .” This conclusion was almost entirely based on one fact: low completion rates. Measuring and delivering simple student outcomes seems obvious, but it drives intense attention to quality and becomes a primary force upon any product or program. In Udacity’s case, a hard completion requirement required that Udacity hire real human mentors, which drove a much higher price point and a number of other major product changes. In order for Udacity to support the higher price point required by their new quality bar, they had to offer a compelling ROI to students. As such, their tagline went from “ ” to “ .” Unlike colleges, ed tech adopted this new charter in a hurry and with no ambivalence. represents an example of this trend from another lineage in ed tech. Its founders had worked at startups like , not at universities, and you could tell that they were looking at coding education like a conversion optimization problem. Codecademy launched with a free product, but how would they make money from the millions of users that they taught? Pushed by the same forces as the rest of us, Codecademy recently revealed its first (tagline: “Transforming your job prospects in the process”) and a new resource portal to advertise it (tagline: “Start programming now, get hired in months”) alongside ALPs and other career education programs. Codecademy and Coursera are two web-based ed-tech entrants that have subsequently created physical learning environments. On the other side of the fence, ALPs began as brick-and-mortar schools, but some are moving into a hybrid format. Earlier this year, Hack Reactor launched the online version of its immersive curriculum, Remote Beta, a web-based ALP. Other companies in the ALP sector are following suit, like Dev Bootcamp’s , which recently launched. To recap, the postsecondary system has been asked to adopt the new charter of career education, but for very understandable reasons — it has resisted this mandate from students, business leaders, and the President of the United States. Against this backdrop, the market forces are so strong and clear that they have reshaped Codecademy, Hack Reactor, and Udacity — three deeply distinct products prior to 2012 — into educational programs that could be siblings. Expect to see some of the $500 billion a year currently spent on college tuition winding up in Silicon Valley, at institutions that offer career education, measure and ensure excellent student outcomes, and mix online and offline approaches. If you thought it was dramatic when taxis became tech companies, just wait until it happens to colleges. |
Zenefits Fires Back At Utah | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 12 | 16 | is taking the ruling to stop offering free services to task. Utah Insurance Commissioner issued a ruling last month that would from giving away its cloud-based HR software for free, claiming this was a violation of Utah law and unfair to local insurance brokers. Zenefits offers the management of hiring, firing, and all the details that need to be handled in-between such as benefits and the last paycheck. It makes its money on third-party services such as handling payroll and health insurance for current employees. Companies can choose to just use the free service without signing up for other offers. About 85 percent of customers do just that, according to Zenefits. But free is obviously difficult for insurance brokers to compete against. There seemed to be some confusion over whether or not Zenefits was still allowed to operate in the state after the ruling. Lt. Governor Spencer Cox had said he approved of the HR startup’s continued operations for the meantime. However, Zenefits that the last official communication they had was an order from the department to shut down services in Utah “or face massive fines equal to $5,000 per violation, plus confiscation of all the company’s Utah revenue, plus penalties of 3 or 4 times that amount.” Cox later told reporters that nothing had been decided, but that he understood Kiser’s ruling. “The interpretation taken by the commissioner is a logical interpretation — square peg in a round hole,” Cox said. Zenefits says in the letter that if it is in violation of the law then so is Zion’s Bank for offering free checking, Marriott for offering free travel insurance and Hertz rental cars for offering perks such as skipping lines, under Kiser’s interpretation of the law. Cox affirmed in a statement to Utah startup blog that the Utah legislature will have a chance to review before any final decisions are made. Utah, a red state controlled entirely by the GOP, holds a part-time, citizen legislature. Kiser, an insurance broker himself, spent five terms in the State Legislature before taking over the commission. Zenefits in a letter dated December 15 that this ruling could make the state of Utah seem technologically backwards. “Not only is this conclusion unsupported by the facts or law, it sets Utah apart from every other state in the Union, to the detriment of its business environment and its consumers. It sends the clear message that Utah insurance regulators are hostile to innovation,” the response reads. Utah Governor Gary Herbert has prided himself on making Utah a technology friendly state, courting bigger technology companies and encouraging innovation. Utah was named the Forbes Best State for Business again this year, a title it’s held for the last four years. It’s also now on the venture capital radar for being . Local business leaders like to refer to their state as the “Silicon Slopes.” Governor Herbert’s spokesman Marty Carpenter reaffirmed the governor’s willingness to work with both Zenefits and the State Insurance Department in an officially released statement, “As an administration, we understand Zenefits’ frustration and we are actively working toward a resolution in the upcoming legislative session. However, changing statute is something we strive to do with complete information. Ultimately, if we determine the law needs to be changed to benefit the people of our state, we are open to changing the law.” Zenefits has asked for an official green light before continuing operations in the state. It is working with current customers but not on-boarding any new ones at this time. “The Governor and Lieutenant Governor have expressed their desire to resolve this situation, and we appreciate that.” says Parker Conrad, Zenefits CEO. “But since last month when we received the Insurance Commissioner’s ruling shutting us down, we have gotten absolutely no official communication from the state of Utah saying that Zenefits is able to operate without incurring massive penalties. If the Governor is going to stand with innovation and competition and clear the way for Zenefits to compete in Utah, then we look forward to receiving that notice,” he says. Steve Gooch, spokesman for the State Insurance Department told TechCrunch that Zenefits is not officially banned from offering the free services at this time. “It’s just a ruling based on our interpretation of the law,” he says. Though he couldn’t confirm whether or not Zenefits may incur those aforementioned fees for doing so. For now it seems Zenefits’ further growth in the state all hangs on decisions in the next Utah Legislative session. |
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